most of my clothes were handed down to me from Rupert, but back then he was a lot fatter than me so I spent most of the 90s in clothes that were ‘you’ll grow into them’ huge, and often had a massive ‘Gap’ logo on the front. Not very chic, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Rupert’s parents, Joanna and Charles, later discovered that he was hiding boxes of cereal in his bedroom to eat throughout the night, which sparked the weight issue. Rupert hit puberty alarmingly early, and had he not been caught with cereal and shed the pounds he would have resembled a young, bum-fluffed version of George Michael, which is never a good look. His mum made sure he got his upper lip sugared regularly for the next two years until he learned to shave. Sugaring is basically waxing, but camper – especially when you’re meant to be shaving.
There are 12 days between Rupert and I and we’ve been best friends ever since we were born. If it’s at all possible, his love life has been more disastrous than mine. We’ve basically grown up bonding over masturbation stories, and a series of crap relationships. He now works as a very serious doctor and is still useless in love.
I used to spend half my life at Rupert’s house when I was growing up and I always felt slightly inferior because his parents were still together and very much in love. They lived in a gorgeous house, had horses and money was never a problem. Rupert would always have the latest PlayStation games, whereas I would be a year or so behind because they always went down in price when their popularity waned. I would virtually live on his bedroom floor for weeks after the latest release. The day he was given a DVD player was momentous because they were so rare, and we were glued to his sofa for an entire summer as we made our way through a series of Jilly Cooper-esque, soft-porn, 80s rom-coms that his mother favoured.
Rupert’s house was stylish, always immaculate and smelt like you were walking into The White Company. It was a heady mix of fresh laundry and beautifully scented diffusers, candles and room sprays, whereas my house was more Martini and Air Wick plug-in. Mum went through a stage of putting vinegar everywhere because apparently it gets rid of the smell of smoke, but it just made everything smell very acidic and the saucers of light brown liquid looked terribly unsightly.
Joanna and Charles are the kind of parents that you dream of ultimately having as your mother- and father-in-law one day. Joanna is very glamorous and completely mad. On more than one occasion I’ve caught her hoovering at 7am completely naked, or walked into their bedroom to find her, again naked, frying under her personal sunbed with a cocktail.
I’ll never forget the time Rupert and I decided to go though her knicker drawer for some reason, and we discovered a collection of vibrators that could rival Cheska’s. I think Charles just accepts his wife’s eccentric ways after 40 years of marriage.
When I was a kid all I wanted to do was go out and play with Rupert, or sit in my room pretending I was a marine biologist. I’d spend a lot of time reading the notes the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society sent me about my adopted killer whale, Sharky.
I learned from the silent days I whiled away in my bedroom that being alone is my idea of hell. There is nothing I hate more than having to spend time in my own company – I have no one to laugh at my stupid jokes or listen to my woes. I need to bounce off other people.
Nowadays, if ever I do find myself on my own I make sure there are two bottles of red wine and 40 cigarettes to keep me company. I’ll watch Will and Grace or Sex and the City because they always talk about sex and relationships, so it feels just like being with Binky and Cheska.
If you speak to anyone who went to boarding school they will always say the worst thing about it was going back on a Sunday evening after a weekend at home. Especially during winter when it was raining and cold and you’d been pulled from the comfort of your bedroom following a warming Sunday roast and a David Attenborough special.
One particular Sunday Mum and I were returning home from taking Amelia back to her boarding school listening to the radio, as we always did. Elton John had just released ‘Candle in the Wind’ and I remember that it was playing on the car radio while we talked. I was thinking how lucky Amelia was that she was going to be spending all week staying with her friends in her dorm in a constant sleepover. Something clicked and I turned to Mum and told her that I wanted to go to boarding school like her.
My mum later told someone that was one of the saddest days of her life, because although she really didn’t want me to go, she couldn’t stop me. It was my choice and my decision and I had to make my own fate in life.
I’ve always followed my instincts and it felt like the right place for me to be. I wish I had understood back then what my mum must have been feeling. She had been through a divorce. She was living in a new house with no money, and spending her evenings with nothing but a bottle of Martini for company. It must have felt like the final straw when her youngest child decided he wanted to leave home, aged nine.
Later that month I started to board at the same school as Amelia: West Hill Park in Titchfield, Hampshire. Because I had already been a day pupil at the school I had friends, so I felt OK about being away from home and I thought I would be fine. I took my teddy (imaginatively called Teddy) with me, as well as Whaley (I think you can probably guess what he was). Teddy has long since retired and he now sits on Mum’s bed. I also took my Spice Girls Spice album with me, which was one of the first albums I ever had and still one of the greats. So with baggy clothes, my luxury items and a bowl haircut, I started boarding school.
My first day was like any other, but it came as quite a shock to not go home to my own bedroom when the end-of-school bell rang. Instead, I was going back to a room of 15 boys. I kept telling myself I would get used to it and I was going to have the time of my life. For the first months I found it quite scary and I remember crying a lot in the night, so I must have been terribly homesick.
The building was rumoured to be haunted and there was something called the midnight dash that new boys could do to prove their worth. You had to run through the dorms, past the headmaster’s room, then through a door that took you to the back of the stage in the main hall. That area was terrifying anyway, let alone in the dead of night. The idea was that you would get all the way to the dining hall, where you would grab a knife, fork and spoon to prove you’d been there, and then you had to run back upstairs, quietly slide past Matron’s office, and get back into your own dorm. If you could do that, you were really cool. I was never that cool. Instead, my friends and I took the other option and used to spend our spare time singing our favourite Disney songs in the dorm. Far less rock and roll, but I was never going to be one of the top boys who ruled the school, even when I was older.
I’m horrendously dyslexic and back then I had absolutely no passion for learning. I’m creative so I know what I want to say and how I want to say it, but it was hard for me to get things down on paper at that time. I would stare out of the window and think of things I would much rather be doing. As a result I was never top of the class, which upset me greatly as I am a total perfectionist.
I know it sounds very worthy, but to make myself feel better I started getting involved in anything to do with charity. I’ve always genuinely liked doing things for charity, and also it gave me a focus away from the academic side of things.
I used to win the Charity Shield every year because I was involved in every good cause going. To be completely honest, I knew that the teachers couldn’t get angry if I said I was spending time raising money for the homeless when I should have been doing my homework – a foolproof plan. It wasn’t that I wasn’t clever and capable, because I was. I just rather liked the idea of being an actor and had absolutely no interest in academia, especially in subjects that I knew would never be of use to me, like algebra, which is complete bollocks. If you really don’t understand it, move on, you’ll never need it.
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