have put a bat to shame.
Despite the penny pinching, we did have a lovely time together. Mum and Dad would hit the campsite club and me, Nan and Gary would all sit and try and listen to the television over the noise of the rain pelting down the corrugated-iron roof.
If you were in an even-numbered caravan you were a royal and if you were in an odd-numbered caravan you were a rebel. Whenever you walked around the campsite and came across a redcoat he’d ask, ‘What are you?’
‘Rebel!’ we’d all shout the first year, because we were in caravan 181.
The next year we found ourselves royals. ‘What are you?’
‘Royal!’
Honestly, who needs Disneyland when you can have this much fun?
Those holidays in Devon and eventually Cornwall were so idyllic. The sun always seemed to be shining and there was a lovely sense of peace about the place. Gary was getting older and becoming more fun and we were able to do things together.
For all the picture-perfect innocence, it soon became clear that something ominous was shifting inside me, as I discovered one afternoon whilst walking along the beach with my parents.
‘Alan! Stop that. Stop doing that!’ shouted my mother, pointing at me.
‘What?’
I was subconsciously mincing along with my bucket in the crook of my arm like a handbag and twirling the spade around my fingers like a majorette.
‘Hold it properly!’ she insisted.
I personally thought I looked fabulous but I relented and held it ‘properly’. Boring!
I often wonder whether my parents took it as an omen or whether it even registered, but looking back now I realise it was the thin end of the wedge.
The only argument I remember between my parents took place on holiday, though. It was quite serious. Dad had used Mum’s really expensive shampoo and she was horrified.
‘It’s a waste on your head,’ she retorted. ‘You’re bloody bald!’
It seems it was all right for Mohammed Ali to take the piss out of my father’s lack of hair, but not my mother. He opened the caravan door and flung Mum’s shampoo out so far that it cleared the enormous conifers adjacent to our caravan.
Mum cried out, ‘Alan! Alan! Go and find my shampoo!’
Like a sniffer dog I was released onto the campsite in my pyjamas and slippers, searching for this bloody shampoo. I eventually found it outside the camp shop. It was lying in the car park next to two pensioners staring up at the sky, hoping that God would deliver them some expensive hair products too.
* * *
Dad’s star was on the rise again. After keeping Nuneaton top of the League for a couple of seasons, he was spotted by Northampton Town Football club and he decided to leave the non-League and join a club that was actually in a division even if they were at the foot of that division, and basically bankrupt.
When your dad is manager of the football team of the town you are growing up in and the team are enjoying a particularly good season, even if you don’t have the slightest interest in football, people presume you are good at it simply for sharing a surname. I didn’t expect to jump over buildings and lasso criminals because I had a Carter in the family tree now, did I?
Simply being called Carr meant that I was genetically modified to be a world-class striker. So whenever I joined a new school and word got round that Alan Carr (‘What? The really camp one with glasses and buck teeth?’ – ‘Yes that’s him’) was the son of Graham Carr, all the lads, even the tough ones, started hanging around me, inviting me round their houses for tea, asking if I wanted to share a cigarette, offering me a backie on their Grifters. My diary was fit to burst. For once in my life, I was in the midst of a social whirl. Well, let’s just say, this was before they saw me on the pitch.
It didn’t get me off to a good start. On Monday morning the PE teacher Jenko – he was Mr Jenkinson, but we could call him Jenko, and I would end up calling him a lot worse by the time I’d left that playing field, I can tell you – said, ‘We have a celebrity’s son with us today,’ and then went and appointed me captain.
‘Oh no, please, there’s been a terrible mistake,’ I wailed. ‘I’d rather just be here on the sub bench.’
‘I’m sure we’ll all be pleasantly surprised,’ boomed Jenko. They were surprised all right, just not in the way they intended. I lost it, whenever I did get the ball, I couldn’t control it, I forgot which end I was meant to be shooting at, and instead of an almighty kick all I could muster was a toe-punt.
Dizzy, I turned round to face them, and they looked at me as if to say, ‘This isn’t what I ordered.’ It was true; instead of being this athletic dynamo nutmegging the opposition, weaving with ease and scoring with flair, I was flailing up and down like Goldie Hawn in Bird on a Wire. I lasted five minutes and as punishment was made to collect the ball from the other side of the dual carriageway – which admittedly I had kicked over there, but not all the way over there, to be fair, it had ricocheted off a woman walking her dog.
I admit sometimes I brought the humiliation on myself, but more often than not it was induced by the PE teachers themselves. Jenko was all right, I suppose. I mean, he wasn’t malicious, he just couldn’t understand why some people were good at sports and others weren’t. Jenko was the final one in a long line of unimpressed PE teachers.
I can cope with unimpressed, but it’s the sadistic ones I find repulsive. It was during my years at the Middle School that I encountered the worst one of the lot. She was Mrs O’Flaherty. God, I hated that woman, and I still do. She hated me, too. There was no love lost when I finally left. She covered for Science, and I remember getting one of my first ever migraines during her lesson. She refused to let me out and I had to sit through a lesson on poly-photosynthesis with a paralysed face and what felt like a tsunami of pain flooding around my brain. I hate it when people say migraines are just ‘headaches but a bit worse’, it really is like saying tuberculosis is a chesty cough – they bloody hurt.
Ooh! I detested that Mrs O’Flaherty. I can still remember those piggy eyes and her bowl haircut: she looked like Joan of Arc – after the fire. Every tennis lesson she partnered me with Matthew, who had learning difficulties, yes learning difficulties, so how was I supposed to improve? Oh, and don’t think I didn’t notice that everyone else had proper professional tennis rackets and proper professional tennis balls, while Matthew and I were given these rackets so large that I swear if we waved them about in the air enough we could have landed a Boeing 747.
To add insult to injury, our balls were made of sponge. All the other lads got to play outside, apart from us. Apparently, according to Mrs O’Flaherty, if she let Matthew and me play outside, our balls would blow away. So we had to stand in the school hall watching the other kids outside, listening enviously to the ‘thwock’ of professional rackets hitting professional balls over professional nets.
Poor old Matthew was simple, bless him. I know you can’t say that nowadays but he was simple, he didn’t know what was going on. But I did! That’s what made it so frustrating. I tried to show him the difference between the others’ tennis balls and our sponge balls, mainly by throwing them at his head – which is wrong, I know, but I get frustrated too,
