David Mitchell: Back Story (3 page)

This will be grist to the mill of people who think I’m a posh twat. ‘Listen to him, nasty little snob,’ they will be thinking. They will also probably be wondering why they’ve bought a copy of his book. Or maybe not. Perhaps there’s a constituency of people – the most rabid online commenters, for example – who actually seek out the work of people they loathe. They may be skimming each page with a sneer before wiping their arse on it and flushing it down the loo. Or attempting to post it to me. If so, I’d like to say to those people: ‘Welcome! Your money is as good as anyone else’s.’

But of course being a snob and being posh are different things. Being a snob, a conventional snob, involves wanting to be posh whether you are or not, and thinking less of people who aren’t. Wanting to be posher, usually – which is why the very poshest people are seldom snobs: they know they can’t be any posher so it’s no good wishing for it.

I plead guilty to being a snob when I was a child. I definitely valued poshness, jealously guarded it to the extent that I felt I possessed it, and wanted more. My instinct was not to despise the social hierarchy but to want to climb it. So maybe it serves me right that I now get called posh all the time, when I’m not really and I’ve long since realised that it’s a worthless commodity. In fact, career-wise, it would have been more fashionable to aspire in the other direction. But I didn’t have the nous to realise that there would be any advantage in playing the ‘ordinary background’ card – or that, as a child of underpaid polytechnic lecturers, albeit one sent to minor independent schools thanks to massive financial sacrifices on those parents’ part, I completely qualified for playing it.

Had I guarded my t’s less jealously and embraced the glottal stop, I could have styled myself a person ‘with an ordinary background who nevertheless got to Cambridge and became a comedian’ rather than ‘an ex-Cambridge ex-public schoolboy doing well in comedy like you’d expect’. Both descriptions are sort of true, but people like to polarise and these days I might have been better off touting the former.

Still, I’d have been giving a hostage to fortune. The estuary-accent-affecting middle classters always get hoist by their own petard in the end, when it turns out that Ben Elton is the nephew of a knight or Guy Ritchie was brought up in the ancestral home of his baronet stepfather.

The thing is, I find the idea that my life has followed an unremarkable path of privilege rather comforting. I wanted to think I was posh because I felt, not entirely without justification, that bad things didn’t happen to posh people. If other people thought I’d be all right – even in a resentful way – I could believe it too.

So, in the binary world of popular opinion, I got dumped on the posh side of the fence – which is sometimes annoying as it denies me the credit for any dragging myself up by my bootstraps that I might have done (it’s not much but, you know, we never had a Sodastream). It also leaves me worrying that people will think I’m claiming to be properly posh – when proper posh people know I’m not. My blood is red and unremarkable. (Although I always remark when I see it, as my scant knowledge of medicine leads me to believe that it’s not really supposed to come out.)

This is a roundabout way of saying that my background was neither that of a Little Lord Fauntleroy, as the people who write the links for
Would I Lie to You?
would have it; nor was it the opposite.

But who, in the public eye, is really the opposite? Very few people who come to prominence, other than through lucrative and talent-hungry sports, genuinely come from the most disadvantaged sections of society – we just don’t live in a country with that amount of social mobility. Which is why famous people who went to a comprehensive and can sustain a regional accent do themselves a lot of favours by letting those facts come to the fore, so that journalists can infer a tin bath in front of the fire and an outside loo rather than civil servant parents who were enthusiastic theatre-goers.

Perhaps you think I’m thinking of Lee Mack. Well, I am now, obviously. But I don’t think his parents were civil servants and I wouldn’t say Lee has ever seriously pretended to be anything he’s not, any more than I have (which is quite an indictment of both our acting powers). That said, on
Would I Lie to You?
we’re very happy to milk comedy from people’s assumptions that he keeps whippets and I’ve got a beagle pack. And we’re both amused by the underlying truth that, in terms of our values and attitude, we’re incredibly similar. We’re middle class. We’re property owners who would gravitate towards a Carluccio’s over a Pizza Hut. I bet he’s got a pension. I know he’s got a conservatory. He used to have a boat on the bloody Thames! I live in an ex-council flat, for fuck’s sake!

But he’s got a regional accent, so the audience makes certain assumptions and I’ll happily play to them. If he doesn’t claim to be working class, I’ll do it for him. So – in spite of everything I’ve said about people’s instinct to polarise, and worrying about appearing to be something I’m really not – I’m also quite happy to accept a cheque for telling Lee not to get coal dust all over the studio while he wonders whether I shouldn’t offer a glass of water to the footman he claims I’m sitting on.

It’s a lot easier than going on TV with the premise that you’re basically normal.

- 2 -

Inventing Fleet Street

I’m not taking a direct route because I want the walk to last over an hour. It’s the brisk continuous walking that seems to be the best back medicine. So I turn left down Quex Road. Some of the road names round here are brilliant: just off Quex are Mutrix Road and Mazenod Avenue. Quex, Mutrix and Mazenod! They sound like robots. I wish I’d ever written anything that needed three names for robots so I could have used those. In fact, what am I doing writing this? It should be a sci-fi epic about Quex, Mutrix and Mazenod, three evil cyborgs blasting their way around the galaxy and seeing who can destroy the most planets.

I think the main reason I associate those names with robots is that I’ve always had a feeling that ‘x’ and ‘z’ are the most futuristic letters. I don’t really think they are. In fact I’m pretty sure ‘x’ in particular is about as ancient as a letter can be – it’s just two lines, after all. Anything less than that and it’s not really writing. It’s just a mark. But, because they’re not very useful letters, they somehow feel like the alphabetical equivalent of shiny silver jumpsuits.

Sadly those three street names have nothing to do with space or the future and everything to do with places in Kent. The family who owned the estate on which that bit of Kilburn was built also owned a Quex House in Kent. Mutrix and Mazenod are nearby villages. It’s a bit of a dull explanation for the names, really. Of course I’ve no idea why those villages are called that. I expect it’s because some space robots once attacked Kent. Yawn.

The first street name I was aware of was Staunton Road, which is where we moved to in Oxford. The second was Fleet Street. That’s because my parents were constantly being hassled by paps. Not really. I became aware of Fleet Street at the point when I thought it was a phrase I’d invented. It was a road name I came up with for my toy cars to drive along. I was so sure it had originated in my brain that when I came across it again, in a story about Gumdrop the vintage car (I was terribly interested in cars at the time but managed to get it out of my system a decade before everyone else got a driving licence), as a name for an ancient and famous London thoroughfare, I was furious.

I was convinced that I’d thought of it entirely separately and it seemed so unfair to me that, having displayed the genius to come up with such a demonstrably successful name for a street (I think I assumed that Fleet Street’s prominence and centuries of prosperity were somehow
because
of its name), I should go unrewarded. I felt like a victim of history. I could so easily have been born hundreds of years earlier and been the one to come up with the name in the first place. Surely this would have brought me great fame and fortune, I thought. I didn’t seem to realise that the identity of the inventor of the name ‘Fleet Street’ is lost in the mists of the past and that whoever it was probably went to his or her grave unlauded and unremunerated for having named a street after the nearby Fleet river.

I don’t know whether this means I was an imaginative child. I think that’s how I thought of myself, though. I was an only child for the first seven and a half years of life and so I spent quite a lot of time on my own, inventing games and pretending to be other people. I loved dressing up but at the same time it made me ashamed – very much like masturbation a few years later.

In my special costume trunk (box of old clothes) I had a highly patterned lime green and brown jumper which was too small for me but was my outfit for being someone to do with
Star Trek
(not actually Captain Kirk – I think I styled myself his boss). In truth there was nothing remotely Star Trekky about it, but the way it clung to my arms reminded me very much of the way the shirts in
Star Trek
clung to people’s arms. I also had an old pocket calculator which I could flip open in a way that was satisfyingly reminiscent of a communicator.

And then there was a black mac. I got tremendous use out of that black mac. It spent a while as the coat I wore as one of the versions of Doctor Who I pretended to be – I think I was essaying a slightly more rainproof version of the Peter Davidson incarnation. I definitely remember putting some foliage into the buttonhole at one point to represent the stick of celery he always had pinned to his. My mother was reluctant to provide actual celery for such trivial use, which is a shame because, as it turned out, that moment of asking was the only point in my life when I was ever going to see any point in celery.

But the mac’s starring role was as the – what I now realise is called – ‘frock coat’ of an eighteenth-century king. At the time I didn’t know he was eighteenth-century, but I’ve since worked out that this was the era of historical dress I was trying to emulate when I tucked my trousers into my socks and tied a bit of string round the tails of the coat.

This is the costume I most associate with shame. I remember one Saturday, when I was wearing this costume, some older children from next door rang the doorbell because they’d hit a ball into our garden and, as my parents let them in, I was immediately and forcibly struck with shame and humiliation at my appearance and ridiculous inner life. I couldn’t have felt worse if I’d been caught wearing lipstick and a dress.

I don’t think the ball-searchers noticed at all, but I remember going off to search for the ball at the opposite end of the garden to everyone else – in a place where it couldn’t possibly have landed – just to be able to hide from them. Everyone was saying, ‘It won’t be there – what are you doing? Come and look over here!’ while I mumbled that I was just going to check here down behind the garage where no one could see me. I could sense that, more than the costume, this behaviour was making me seem like a weirdo.

That feeling of being a weirdo oppressed me. Conventional to the core, I was keenly aware that my dressing-up-and-pretending-to-be-other-people games weren’t as wholesome as climbing trees or playing football. I had a sense that there was something effeminate about dressing up – and certainly there was no worse accusation that could be levelled at me as a small child than that I was like a girl.

Maybe it was a forerunner of my early teenage fear that I might turn out to be gay. I don’t mean that to sound homophobic, although I probably was homophobic at the age of thirteen – God knows my school was a homophobic environment – but there’s no doubt that I didn’t want to be gay. I thought that would be awful and would lead to a life of mockery and self-loathing. And, as a natural pessimist, I was quite sure that my eagerness not to be gay meant I definitely would be.

I’m not. As you must have guessed by now. I mean, they’d have put that on the cover. I think I had the odd crush on girlish-looking boys in my early teens but never to the extent that I’d do anything about it or in a way that registered on the same level as my feelings when I met real girls. I hope that doesn’t disappoint anyone, by the way. Some people have speculated on the internet that I might be gay, which troubles me only in the implication that, if I were, I’d think there was something wrong with that or try to hide it.

In many ways, I think I might have been happier in my later teens if I had been gay. Certainly it would have been a difficult thing to come to terms with during puberty but, having done so, I would have had a justified sense of achievement at being brave enough to come out. Also my all-male educational history wouldn’t have thrown up such a barrier to flirting. I was basically a bit afraid of girls and women for a long time, in a way I don’t think I would have been about men even if those were the sort of human I had turned out to fancy.

Anyway these fears, doubts and thoughts were a long way ahead of me as I searched for a tennis ball where I knew there wouldn’t be one, with my trousers tucked into my socks, a bit of string tied around the mac I was wearing in the sweltering sun and plastic sword at my side. The fact that I was not a king was never more bitterly apparent than at that moment. I was just a small boy and not quite as normal as I’d have liked.

I felt I should be more into Lego. I was conscious that I wasn’t a keen reader – I much preferred television. I wanted to like porridge. It bothered me that I wasn’t more focused on the acquisition of sweets and chocolate. I’ve never been a healthy eater – my palate perversely favours fats and alcohols while sending troubled if not protesting messages to the brain when confronted with vegetation or roughage – but I’ve never much liked sweets. I like puddings, but sweets – sweet-shop sweets, cola bottles, refreshers, stuff to do with sherbet – have never really been to my taste. Which presents a bit of a problem if you aspire to be a normal boy. It’s like being a socialist on Wall Street: you find yourself not wanting the currency.