David Mitchell: Back Story (6 page)

The second problem is that a proper meritocracy would be a heartless place. In such a society, those at the bottom of the heap not only have to cope with poverty, boring jobs or no jobs, they are also denied the solace of considering it unfair. This is such a hapless state of affairs to contemplate, it’s actually funny. History has a recurrent theme of the down-trodden rising up and overthrowing their oppressors (or in Britain, gradually extracting concessions over hundreds of years), and of injustices which had kept people in penury being swept aside. In this scenario, people aren’t kept in penury by injustice, but by justice. The poor sods deserve it – like Baldrick in
Blackadder
. And their chances of overthrowing their oppressors would be pretty slim because presumably they’d cock everything up. Their betters would run rings round them because – well, the clue’s in the name. Those unhappy Baldricks would just have to hope that merit and kindness go hand in hand, just like aristocracy and kindness seem to in Julian Fellowes’s vision of early twentieth-century England.

As a child, I was much of Fellowes’s mind. I simply thought that servants were good because they came from ‘the olden days’ – and everything from the olden days was better and more glamorous than my own time.

I liked the thought of kings and emperors, kingdoms and empires; people in old-fashioned clothes being in charge of lots of other people. A mixed-up world of treasure and swords, steam engines and suits of armour, castles and wing collars – as cheesy and incoherent as a historically themed Las Vegas casino.

Cars used to be better, I thought, with shiny round headlamps on either side of the bonnet like eyes. Trains were better too: how could drab diesel boxes ever have been considered preferable to those brightly polished steaming metal tubes with massive and magnificent wheels?

The only thing that matched the olden days for style and excitement was the future, by which I basically meant space. If I were to trade in my hopes of crowns, castles, steam engines and servants, it would be for a spaceship – preferably a massive one like the
Starship Enterprise
, which must surely have had as many rooms as a palace – and a laser, a communicator and an opportunity to visit other planets.

Somehow my own time had managed to fall between those two glittering stools. We had neither penny-farthings nor matter transporters. NASA’s rockets and shuttles were pitiful objects that could barely go as far as the moon. They didn’t even have gravity inside them, for God’s sake. The astronauts spent the whole time floating around in their pyjamas, eating disgusting liquidised food. In order to leave the ship, they seemed to have to don motorcycle helmets. It all looked extremely undignified.

Two school subjects, history and science, were poisoning my enjoyment of the universe by lacing it with regret. History made it seem as if the magical world of kingdoms and castles, although admittedly not dragons and wizards, had once existed and had only been eclipsed because humanity had collectively lost its sense of the aesthetic. Similarly, the word ‘science’ in science fiction made me consider that world to be attainable if only humankind got its shit together. I quietly blamed the people of my own era for its stolid, unmagical mediocrity.

I don’t remember any of my friends sharing this frustration. I can’t recall much of what I did when friends came round. I think there was an afternoon when Adam Bryant and I pretended to be Superman and Batman who’d teamed up to fight crime, with a comparable disparity of actual capabilities to Angel-Summoner and the BMX Bandit.

Laurence Noble must have had a stronger personality than me because he managed to make me play ‘The Professionals’. Laurence lived in a bungalow with a swimming pool. This was an unusual type of dwelling for a suburb of Oxford, but then his dad was a builder. I had no idea what ‘The Professionals’ was, but hoped that it was to do with space. Did the Professionals have a ship? I asked. No, they just had a car. Well, two of them did while the third stayed in the office. Did they have a transporter? Only the car. Did they have lasers even? No, even better, they had guns. Normal guns? Yes, normal guns.

This was not ‘even better’ in my view. Laurence was also a fan of James Bond who, as far as I could tell, had no superpowers at all and just drove around in a car trying to cuddle women. Soppy, if you asked me. Laurence would occasionally make noises like ‘Berecca’, ‘Walkakeekeepay’ or ‘Smithywesso’ which he explained were the names of guns.

‘Normal guns, with bullets?’

‘Yeah,’ he’d say making shooting noises.

‘Hmm.’ Hardly phazers, were they?

But we played The Professionals. He had a poster in his room with ‘CI5’ written on it, as well as ‘The Professionals’. CI5, it seemed, was where the Professionals worked instead of space. The silhouettes of three normal men were also on the poster and I was informed, to my suppressed distaste, that I was to be ‘Bodie’.

‘Bogie?’

‘No, Bodie. I’m Doyle.’

Laurence favoured Doyle, which was fine by me as he seemed to be the one with a girl’s hairdo.

Playing The Professionals involved hurling ourselves around the living room, on and behind sofas, pointing pretend normal guns at people, while Laurence attempted a spittle-spraying version of The Professionals’ signature tune, the accuracy of which, as I’d never seen the programme, I was unable to vouch for.

Pretending to be a glorified policeman who was unable to go five minutes without hurling himself to the ground failed to capture my imagination. But I was somehow embarrassed to suggest games based on my own TV preferences –
Star Trek
(which involved sitting in chairs, occasionally spasming around to demonstrate heavy Klingon fire, or standing on specific tiles on the kitchen floor in order to beam to places) or, my absolute favourite at the time,
Monkey
.

Monkey
was a bizarre programme, dubbed into English from the Japanese, and based, I suspect, on some ancient and brutal Far Eastern myths. It featured a sort of half-human, half-simian superhero called Monkey, who travelled around on a magic cloud beating up bad guys. For me, it was the perfect mixture of the sci-fi, the mythical, the historical and the comic book. The BBC brought out a record of the signature tune called ‘Monkey Magic’ (this was in the age before videos or DVDs, so books and records were the limit of merchandising’s reach), which my parents bought me. I would run round and round the dining-room table, swinging the extender pole to one of those dusters designed to get into the top corners of high rooms, which I considered to be uncannily similar to Monkey’s magic staff.

The trouble with playing Monkey, though, was that only one person could be Monkey. Monkey’s companion, Pigsy, who fought with a large garden rake, was less flattering casting even than Bogie, although he did have pointy ears a bit like Spock. So I was stuck with The Professionals: falling over and endlessly miming getting in and out of a Ford Capri. The kind of boring car that could only have existed in the rubbish present.

I wonder now if my sense of 1970s Britain as a second-rate or unexciting environment was partly a response to my parents’ attitude. It wasn’t a great time for British self-esteem, I’ve since realised. Mum and Dad must have had a sense of political or economic decline. Maybe I picked up on that. Maybe my instinctive attraction to a grandiose past was something they found hard to completely refute. I’m pretty sure they voted for Thatcher.

I don’t remember the strikes but I do remember power cuts. It only occurred to me about six years ago, during a power cut, that you don’t get power cuts any more. That might sound like a ridiculous thing to think as I blundered around in the dark. But I was thinking about it because I didn’t have any candles. The absence of candles was much more compelling evidence of the absence of power cuts than any one power cut can be of their presence, if you see what I mean. I didn’t have them in stock, like loo roll and bin liners, because power cuts used to be a thing and they’ve stopped being a thing.

Eventually, moving around by the light of my laptop screen and wondering how long the battery would last, I tripped over a goody bag and found a scented candle inside it. I’m in showbusiness, you know: an infantilised profession where, at the end of some awards dos, you get goody bags like after children’s parties, except instead of a balloon and a slice of cake, there’s different crap you don’t want: moisturiser, expensive soap – or it would be expensive if it weren’t free – and, in this case, a scented candle.

I know that doesn’t sound great. This might be a good point to admit that I’m not the sort of man who owns a tool kit. I’m too feeble and disorganised to own hammers and drills, whereas I get issued with moisturiser and scented candles at work. It’s not fair. I never had the chance to be a real man. I hope there aren’t many like me or the country’s fucked. If the French invade, all I’ll do is stand on the box that my widescreen TV came in and pelt them with cherry liqueurs.

Incidentally I don’t in general approve of scented candles. They strike me as a pointless fire hazard. My mother often leaves unattended scented candles on top of the television which has, in my view, nearly caused a fire on dozens of occasions. My use of the word ‘nearly’ is open to criticism here because it has never
actually
caused a fire and I’ve never had to visit my parents at the I Told You So Burns and Smoke Inhalation Clinic.

But I reckon our modern, non-power-cut-associated use of candles for fun, atmosphere, smell and a general aura of romantic pampering is a pretty shabby way to remember the countless thousands from history who died in candle-related house fires or lived their lives having to choose between darkness and a small but constant risk of conflagration. The idea that, when there’s a much less risky way of lighting houses, we’d carry on using candles
for fun
would, I’m sure, make them turn in their barbecuey graves.

The candles I associate with childhood were much more utilitarian plain white emergency ones. In those days power cuts were, like thunderstorms, not things that happened every day but a constant possibility. They were certainly more common than trips to restaurants. Now, for my parents as well as me, it’s the other way round. That shows how Britain’s changed.

I’d say it’s also quite a good way of judging the context in which you’re living: if your life involves more meals out than power cuts, you can justifiably feel smug or grateful, according to your nature. The young middle-class family I grew up in during the late ’70s and early ’80s did not have that satisfaction.

I don’t think the power cuts I remember were to do with strikes. The three-day week was before I was born, although not long enough before it to account for my conception, which is a shame. I’d like to think I was a product of industrial action.

The power cuts frightened me because I was unoriginal enough to be scared of the dark – and particularly scared of the sudden dark. One of my earliest memories is of eating bread and strawberry jam (bread, I assume, because, in a power cut, the toaster doesn’t work) while sobbing. These weren’t distressed sobs but the after-shock sobs that, when you’re little, continue for minutes after you’ve been comforted. The shock of darkness had passed, candles had been lit, I’d been given a cuddle and now it was time for some bread and jam while we waited for the power to come back so we could make tea. It’s a happy memory, of security and love. I know I’m very lucky to have childhood memories like that.

Back to the horrors of modern life: I’ve reached the corner of Abbey Road and Belsize Road, where there’s a horrible example of 1960s architecture – all the more unsettling for the fact that it was probably well meant. Two huge and hideous tower blocks are joined by a bridge, so that the Londoners of the twenty-first century (the planners must have thought) would, like Ewoks, only have to touch the ground on special occasions. And, in the ground floor of one is a pub, the Lillie Langtry.

My guess is that there was always a pub on this corner and, when the area was bulldozed for redevelopment, they decided to incorporate it into the new estate – still on the corner but now with a dozen concrete floors on top of it. The old Victorian gin palace, or even Elizabethan alehouse, was recreated in utilitarian breezeblocks.

It’s horrible and inhuman – they might as well have installed a vending machine for alcohol injections. It’s a grim, doomed pub, architecturally immune to the gentrification of the area, incapable of going gastro. It looks dated in the way only the naïve prognostications of people in the past can. It’s like watching an episode of
Space 1999
, a show made in 1975 which predicted habitable moonbases before the end of the millennium but showed no sign of expecting its star, Martin Landau, to win an Oscar five years earlier.

- 5 -

The Pianist and the Fisherman

I don’t know whether the architects who designed this crossroads, their heads full of moonbases and a new, three-dimensional London where people travelled back from work by flying car, which they parked on top of their skyscrapers before going downstairs to bed, would have approved of the two shops in the ground floor of their monstrosity, next to the stricken pub. One sells fireworks and the other pianos. The most creative party planners go shopping round here.

I turn left up Belsize Road and walk towards Swiss Cottage, thinking of fireworks and pianos. Those are two things I became aware of as early as servants. Fireworks are the ultimate form of all-round family entertainment. They really are fun for everyone except the blind – and even some blind people probably like the noise. For most people the noise is the downside. Some, especially children, find it frightening. But the noise is like the cholesterol in a bacon sandwich. There’s got to be a nasty or dangerous side to anything enjoyable or there’s something wrong, something suspicious and hidden. If everything seems perfect, it means you’re one of the Eloi and a Morlock is watching you with a napkin tucked under its chin. I always thought Disneyland might be like that but people tell me there are long queues so that’s okay.