or bearded ladies reading this, then you’ll know what I mean. I was actually born in Weymouth, Dorset, where Dad had made the leap from player to manager of Weymouth Football Club. To be exact I was born at the Portland Hospital on 14 June 1976. Six pounds ten. I was ‘a beautiful baby boy’. These are my words. I don’t know if anyone called me a beautiful baby boy, but I must have been beautiful at one stage, surely. I didn’t have my glasses or teeth back then, so the odds must be quite good.
I wonder if, as I lay there kicking my little legs in the air in my cot, Dad was imagining little football boots at the end of them and that my little wrinkled hands would be ideal for throw-ins. Mum once told me of when she was heavily pregnant with me and in bed with Dad one night I gave an almighty kick from inside the womb, so hard in Dad’s back that he woke up. It seems I had cruelly raised Dad’s hopes, and I wasn’t even born.
I’ve never been one of those people with a really great memory, and for someone as self-obsessed as me it’s a shame. All those wonderful times when I was the centre of attention gone forever – it’s enough to bring you to tears. In fact, I only have one memory of my first five years, and even that’s a bit shaky because I have been known to absorb stuff off the telly and pass it off as my own life. I remember telling Mum about the time I stopped a woman from having a diamond-encrusted necklace stolen and she said, ‘No, Alan, that was Poirot.’ Then there’s another time when I was with Dad at the seaside in Clacton, sitting on his lap as we slid down a helter-skelter. I remember the sky was blue and cloudless and the squawk of the seagulls made me jump and I cried. Even now I’m not sure whether we were down the tip on a sunny day or watching an episode of Holiday.
My early memories are all seaside-centric. When I try to recollect some of those days, I get little flashbulbs of a Punch and Judy show or the curve of a brightly coloured windbreaker or of myself sitting on the beach sipping a bottle of tea, which apparently was my favourite drink as a toddler.
What I do know is my favourite donkey on Weymouth beach was Pepper and my parents would have to take a detour around the amusements because I would run off into the arcade and lose them among the noise and crowds. They would find me each time in the same motor car clutching the steering wheel.
It can be lovely to hear relations talking about your early years, the sentimentalism tugging on your heart strings, just the act of remembering warming you up.
‘What do you remember about my childhood, Nan?’ I asked recently, all dewy-eyed and expectant.
‘You always jumped in shit!’ she cackled.
Dogshit, donkey shit – any kind of shit, I would just love to step in it. There was one time when my parents had just bought me some brand new shoes from Clark’s. I came out of the shop all excited. Then I spotted some dogshit and without any hesitation jumped in, both feet first. The shoes were so caked they had to be thrown in the bin, which still makes me feel guilty because I realise now how skint my parents were at the time and how they struggled to make ends meet. But why couldn’t Nan talk about my first word or the first time I walked – away from a piece of dogshit?
Other memories bustle for attention. Every morning when I was little, I would stand and look out of the window that overlooked Weymouth beach to watch my father go to work and wave at him as he got into his green Mazda. Sometimes, Dad would say that I would become distracted by the beach, and he would drive round again and again to try to get my attention. My eyes would finally leave what was happening on the beach and reconnect to my father in his car and I would carry on with my waving and he would drive off to work.
For someone who swore that they could never do Dad’s job, our lives have eerily mirrored each other’s. The ridiculous amount of travelling we both do is testament to that. I find it strangely comforting to know that if I’m in some weird village hall performing on the other side of the Pennines, he’ll be somewhere twice as obscure up a mountain watching a football team in the Dordogne.
Funnily enough it was this incessant travel that bonded us: sitting around the dining table we would often discuss in great detail the benefits of the M40 or ask, ‘Have you been on that new flyover yet?’ while Mum’s eyes would slowly glaze over and she’d try to stick her head in the oven. It also took me a while to recognise back then that the moodiness and sharp exchanges we’d get every Friday night weren’t Dad being grumpy, but merely his anxiety about the game the next day. This is pretty similar to me now as anyone who’s had the misfortune to approach me before I go on stage can testify, receiving a glare or a curt ‘leave me alone’ for their troubles.
* * *
Dad was away quite a bit when I was a kid, but that did mean I could spend a lot of time with my mother. Before my brother Gary was born it was often just us two in the house and the bond that usually connects mother and son became that little bit stronger. People say I look more like my mother than my father. Stop! Get that image of Olive from On the Buses out of your head – my mother is an attractive woman, I’ll have you know. One thing that we share is our sense of humour, and growing up I remember the house just being full of laughter. My mother is very much like me when telling a story; she will get to her feet and start mimicking the person, taking on the different characters and voices.
I remember when my father was away at a match, asking my mother how she met him. She says she was sitting in the stands at Dartford Football Club watching a match where Dad was playing. When Dad scored a goal, he ran over to the stand and pulled a moonie at the supporters.
‘What did you think about that?’ I asked her.
‘I thought, “What an idiot!”’
Well, I guess that’s an icebreaker in anyone’s book. Most romances start with a furtive glance across a crowded room, not by exposing yourself to your loved one. Anyway, my mother not only fell in love with that idiot, she married him.
Dad must have been doing something right at Weymouth, because he was asked to become manager of Dartford, so not for the last time in our lives we were on the move. Now when you’re poor, having a beach on your doorstep and bright, delicious sunshine for what felt like 24 hours a day can take the edge off having empty pockets. Dartford sadly didn’t have any of these things going for it; the tunnel is a wonderful man-made phenomenon, admittedly, and the Thames can be a majestic thing up by the Houses of Parliament, but down near Dartford it looked as grey and weary as the people.
As it happens, we weren’t there for long because Dad became manager of Nuneaton Town Football Club, so yet again we were on the move. Dad, Mum and I journeyed up the M1 in the Mazda. We stayed in Northampton instead of Nuneaton due to the fact Dad had played there in the Sixties and thought it would be a nice place to live.
He was right, it was nice, just nice. Not a little bit naughty, just nice. We moved onto the Moulton Leys estate and lived in a house in a cul-de-sac that overlooked a cornfield. The cul-de-sac was a perfect example of suburbia: young families, pets, people washing their cars every Sunday. We even had our own peeping Tom. He would walk his dog at night and throw a ball up the drives, go to get it and then try to catch a glimpse of a woman through the parted curtains. We knew this because we saw him most nights.
In fact, Mum and the woman across the road, Sue, tried to catch him out one night. Sue left her curtains open and her lights on to lure the pervert while Mum kept our house in darkness and looked out of the window to catch him red-eyed. After a few seductive curtain twitches from Sue had proved fruitless, Mum peered out a bit more closely, but it was only when she looked down that she realised he was actually peeping through her own window. She screamed and he ran off, which left us terrified but strangely excited. Mum quickly rang up Sue and they laughed about it together nervously, feeling triumphant and yet a little bit dirty.
Those
