There were two girls next door with whom we had a little bit of a schoolboy feel, but I wasn’t too keen because they had noses like rabbits. Worse still, they actually constantly twitched their noses like rabbits, it was very disconcerting for a little boy. Even now, when I think of them, I can’t remember what they actually looked like, I just remember thinking of them as rabbits. Proper rabbits.
Dukus and I would often throw darts the length of the playing field but one time I didn’t get out of the way quickly enough and it stuck in my rib. I went indoors and showed Mum. She just calmly pulled it out of me and said, ‘Go on then, carry on playing.’
We finally moved from Mitcham to a house in Herongate Road in Cheshunt, which Tony and Mum had managed to buy. Yet again Luke and I had to start another school, this time St Clement’s Church School. By then I enjoyed sports and particularly excelled at athletics, specifically the long jump, triple jump, high jump, javelin, discus, 800 m, 1500 m and the relay! I also played rugby (Luke and I were both second row) and a little bit of football. I went to gymnastics a couple of times but only to see the girls in their leotards. We both liked to trampoline into the pits but that was about the extent of our gymnastics career. I was very useful at rounders and that provided me with my biggest single sporting highlight of my schooldays. One sports day, my team was way behind when I came up to strike. I amazed myself and all my team by hitting eight consecutive rounders, one after the other. I just kept belting the ball for miles. As a result, we came from behind and won and the rest of the team carried me round the school playing field in celebration, chanting ‘Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? Matt!!!’ When you are just a kid, moments like that stay with you, it was really special.
They are particularly special when you are constantly struggling to lay down some foundations, to make friends and to settle in. St Clement’s was my third primary school so by then I was getting used to the stigma of being the ‘new boy’ all the time.
I think Mum has a bit of gypsy in her, she’s got that bug – her Granny Rampton was a Romany gypsy. I’ve never been one to complain to my parents, ‘Why did you do this? Why did you do that?’ I adore the ground my mum walks on. But I don’t think, given the choice, I would travel around so much if I had kids. Don’t get me wrong, we had an amazing upbringing, but I never had the chance to really connect anywhere, I never felt that anywhere was my home. I never felt particularly safe, there was an underlying sense of being afraid.
It wasn’t a physical fear of being bullied. Luke and I could look after ourselves in any schoolyard and we were never pushed about, it just didn’t happen. We both have that streak in us to be able to look after ourselves, and I am sure Luke felt that he looked out for me, and I felt that I did the same for him. I definitely had quite a few fights at school, but I also knew the law of the playground jungle and chose my fights with care, careful to realign my ‘rep’ every now and then with a choice new opponent! So, no, we were never bullied.
Yet I remember always being petrified walking into another new school. It was just so unsettling. I never had the same friends for very long, I would work at it and make some great friends and then we would move again – yet another new address. That was hard. It’s funny how you can crave what you don’t have. People often talk about travelling as the Holy Grail of a lifestyle. But for me, it’s really lovely when I hear people talk about their childhood home, the place where they grew up with a big garden and their friends round the corner. I can’t even fathom what that would be like as a kid, we just didn’t have that. It sounds idyllic.
Like millions of people who watched the hit TV show The Good Life, Mum and Tony wanted some of the same. It was very common where I was brought up in London for people to want to get out, to seek that cherished escape to the country. In addition to that impulse, Tony and Mum weren’t too happy with the schooling available to us in Cheshunt, so after a few months considering their options, they decided to up sticks and head for Cheddar in Somerset. They found a home with the delightful name of Jasmine Cottage in Tuttors Hill and that was where we set up home next. We would live there for one day short of a year, when we were eleven.
I hated it. Cheddar is not a great memory for me. We were both caught up in fighting a lot because we were from ‘The Smoke’. It was such a clash, us turning up with our Sta-Prest trousers, Doc Martens and waffle cardigans in this sleepy Somerset tourist destination; and it wasn’t just the kids down there who were worlds apart from us. I remember one day talking to the school games teacher:
‘Sir, you got any trainers, sir?’
‘Trainers?’ he replied. ‘What are trainers? We call ’em daps down ’ere.’
We might as well have been in a different country.
Starting Fairlands Middle School would have been difficult enough for any child, but having just moved to the area from a city exacerbated that ordeal a hundredfold. Much of the time, Luke, Adam and I hung out together, often nicking fudge from the local shop. I think it says a lot about a town that a shoplifter’s main bounty is fudge. One day we thought we’d up the ante a little bit so Adam nicked a Rubik’s cube, only to be caught almost immediately by Tony, who was distinctly not impressed. Tony marched Adam straight back to the shop and made him apologize on the spot. So now the outsiders had a serious lack of street cred. We still laugh about that today, although Carolyn was not very amused!
We did a bit of poaching for trout as well. We didn’t have proper fishing rods, just this solitary basic reel. We told our few mates to meet up one day and the five of us headed down to the river to take it in turns dangling the line over a bridge. The first boy quickly got a bite and began to pull the line out of the water when SNAP! it broke. The second guy stepped up to the plate and not ten minutes later the same happened again, he got a bite, he pulled on the line and SNAP! it broke. By now, being five young lads, we were thinking there was some kind of freshwater Jaws down there, we just had to catch it, the excitement was mounting. So I went and got the strongest fishing line I could find, thicker than a guitar string; I was thinking to myself, This stuff could lift a car, it is not going to snap on me. Sure enough, a few minutes after I gingerly dangled the line in the water, I got a bite. I am not joking when I say it was almost like cheese-wire cutting through my fingers. After a titanic struggle, I finally pulled this fish out of the water and it was a huge catch. To this pre-teen blond London boy, it looked like the mother of all trout. I was beside myself with pride and excitement and immediately started sprinting home – I knew that Tony loved trout and I was desperate for him to see it. On the way back, an American tourist stopped me in my tracks and said, ‘Hey man, I’ll give you fifty bucks for that,’ and I blurted out, ‘Oh no! I’m taking it back to Tony!’ and just carried on running without even breaking my stride.
It took at least ten minutes to run all the way back home. I burst into the kitchen and put this beast of a fish in the sink . . . and it was still alive! This thing just would not die. My grandad was there so he started smacking it over the head and still it wriggled around. I’m ashamed to say that in the end we just whacked it in the freezer. That did it. I still feel a bit guilty about that. We kind of murdered it, accidentally on purpose.
We had some bad luck with animals in Cheddar too. We had a goat called Mary. The back garden of Jasmine Cottage was about an acre, and was totally overgrown and covered in nettles and weeds. We brought in some electric ploughs and rotovators to remove it all but they just weren’t strong enough. Then we sent in Mary. Within a fortnight it was all gone. She would eat a mountain of nettles or weeds and look up as if to say, ‘Next!’
Tony loved Mary. Every morning he would go out to feed her, disappear for a good few minutes and he would have love in his eyes when he came back! I reckon