Life and Laughing: My Story (12 page)

Grandma preparing me for my audition to play Damien in
The Omen
.

We were the poor relations, and Grandma revelled in it. When she visited, she would bring us food from her fridge that had passed its use-by date as a gift. Whenever she found loose change on our floor or behind the sofa, she would accuse my mother of wasting money and would preach her mantra: ‘Look avter ze pennies and ze pounds vill take care of themselves’, forgetting that marrying a millionaire also helps. So the decision was taken to keep the new car a secret. When we visited her, we would drive our old 3-Series and when she visited us we would hide our new 6-Series up the road. It simply wasn’t worth the trouble. Grandma would much rather her daughter was eating out-of-date dinner surrounded by jars of 1ps and 2ps, than cruising around in a new set of wheels.

The first time my mum dropped Lucy and me off at our dad’s rented cottage in her light blue 633i BMW, parking it alongside his silver 635 CSI, all hell broke loose. He accused her of purposefully undermining him by buying the same car as him, the car Lucy and I loved so much. It was horrific. The ‘grapefruit’ row was nothing compared to the ‘BMW 6-Series’ row. Steve and Holly were both present and embarrassed. They peeled off to one side and chatted awkwardly. ‘I gather you brought a lot of Jiffy Pop over from the States, the kids really love it,’ Steve said, searching for conversation.

‘Are you Patrick Swayze?’ replied Holly.

Meanwhile, my parents were screaming at each other in the drive between their respective shiny new BMWs, like an episode of
Top Gear
gone wrong. He was accusing her of buying the car to spite him, and she was adamantly denying it. At the end of the argument, my mum and Steve were ordered off my dad’s rented accommodation. ‘Come on, Steve, we’re leaving,’ cried my mother.

To add insult to injury, Steve then got into my dad’s BMW by mistake. ‘I can’t fucking believe this,’ commented my dad to Holly.

‘Is that Patrick Swayze?’ she replied.

Steve and my mum then leapt into the correct car and sped off at an impressive 0–60 in 6.8 seconds. The result of this ugly scene was that my mum was banned from my dad’s house. In future, Lucy and I were to be dropped off at a neutral location, the Swan Pub near Hemel Hempstead, to be bundled from one BMW 6-Series to another.

Jewish architect David Rosenberg was another proud new car owner in Golders Green. He had infuriated his neighbours by buying a Mercedes 500SL, a German car. He was a chancer who began selling ice creams in the City before convincing a Japanese customer to let him redesign his offices. He made money wherever the opportunity presented itself. He once shut his own fingers in the door of Barclays Bank and sued them for a small fortune.

He was cunning and crafty, the kind of guy who does well on
The Apprentice
with Lord Alan Sugar, doesn’t win, and then gets booed on
The Apprentice – You’re Fired
with Adrian Chiles. He was also a terrible driver and had so many accidents he was considering shutting his fingers in another bank door to pay the astronomical insurance premium on his new sporty motor. Steve, my mum, Lucy and I met David in a head-on collision on Redington Road, in Hampstead. Our short and disruptive romance with our seven-grand sports saloon ended just weeks after it had begun.

Lucy and I were in the back, Mum was in the passenger seat, and Steve was driving. Redington Road is a residential road, home to the rich and famous. We had friends living there, the married actors John Alderton and Pauline Collins. John and Pauline’s youngest son, Richard, was at school with Lucy and me, and they had hit it off with our mum at the school gates. By sheer coincidence, David Rosenberg’s Mercedes and our BMW crashed directly outside the home of the
Forever Green
stars. They both heard the impact and rushed outside. The scene they found was not pleasant. Both cars were written-off, or ‘totalled’, as Holly would have said. I had managed to cling on to the seat in front of me, Lucy injured her leg and my mother’s head smashed through the windscreen.

Because David Rosenberg had been involved in so many car accidents, his only concern was liability. He jumped out of his broken car, camera in hand, photographing the crash site. He was collecting evidence. Hilariously, these photos were self-incriminating because his car was clearly on the wrong side of the road. So while the stars of
Please, Sir
and
Shirley Valentine
were recovering us from the wreckage, David Rosenberg was busy proving beyond all reasonable doubt that the accident was his fault.

Distraught and slightly concussed, my mother telephoned my grandmother and told her about the accident. Thank God, everyone had escaped with only minor injuries. The car, however, was unsalvageable. She totally forgot that Grandma was unaware we owned the car involved. It still hadn’t dawned on her when Grandma and Jim came round the following day with a bag full of goodies past their use-by date, to console us. They were twenty minutes late so I peeked out of the window to find them in our driveway, circling the 3-Series inspecting the non-existent damage. I ran downstairs. ‘Grandma and Grandpa are outside.’

‘Why don’t you let them in?’ Steve said.

‘They’re inspecting the 3-Series. Why did you leave it in the drive?’

‘Shiiiiiit,’ my mum screamed. At that moment the doorbell went. ‘What am I going to say?’ They had put themselves in the awkward position of having to explain how their unsalvageable car had been miraculously restored to its former state in less than twenty-four hours. They briefly considered climbing over the garden fence and making a run for it, but Lucy’s bruised leg wasn’t up to it. The doorbell sounded again. My mother finally opened the door.

‘Helloo, daaarling, ze car it is fine. Vot is going on?’ My mother began lying through her teeth. She explained how the crash wasn’t as bad as she first thought.

Steve chipped in with the classic line, ‘The damage was mainly internal.’

Grandma and Jim didn’t believe a word of it and pretty soon the truth came out. ‘You vucking liars, I’m cutting you out of my vill,’ she yelled as she sped off.

Grandma wasn’t speaking to us, the car only had third-party insurance so was lost, and Steve was struggling to find a job to support his new family. The BMW 633i had caused nothing but trouble. But then, out of the light blue, the 6-Series saga had a happy ending. David Rosenberg had perused his photos of the crash and realized he was the guilty party and his insurers would punish him for this. He regretted taking the photos, but treasured the one of him and John Alderton, one of his favourite actors. David popped over to our house to discuss the situation.

He was charming and very keen to strike a deal with my mum and Steve. Making polite conversation, they found themselves discussing David’s new business venture. He had recently founded a new architectural company and purchased a snazzy new computer design system and was looking for somebody to operate it. ‘What a coincidence,’ lied the job-hunting Steve, ‘I can do that.’ A visit to WHSmith and a few days and nights cramming later, Steve landed himself a job at David’s company. He worked there for the next ten years.

8

Some time during my domestic turmoil, I started ‘big boy’ school. I went to a lovely school called Arnold House in St John’s Wood, London. I wore a bright red blazer with dark trim. It looked like a ladybird costume. Unlike Steve’s first day, when he was beaten and locked in a cupboard for wearing shorts, everybody in the Arnold House Junior School obeyed the rules and wore tiny little shorts, like the ones worn by footballers in the seventies. At break-time there were more goose pimples in the playground than on a battery farm in the Arctic. Matters were made even worse for me as my mum put my shorts in the wrong wash, not only shrinking them but also giving them a slightly golden sheen after they shared the machine with one of her
Dynasty
-inspired trouser suits. I was going to school in hot pants looking a bit like
Kylie Minogue
in the ‘Spinning Around’ video.

Arnold House is a private all-boys school and cost my father a fortune. It was oddly formal. I remember referring to all my friends by their second names. My best friend, Sam Geddes, was known as Geddes, and I was McIntyre. The school register in the morning sounded like a list of advertising agencies. Teachers had no names at all and were called ‘sir’ or ‘miss’. When the teacher walked into the classroom, all the boys would stand up until ‘sir’ told them to ‘Be seated.’ What’s that all about? It’s the wrong way around. I’m paying a fortune for this school; shouldn’t the teacher call me ‘sir’ and stand up when I walk in?

The school was also a bit religious. Every morning we gathered in the gym for assembly and recited the Lord’s Prayer. The headmaster, Mr Clegg, would lead and the teachers and whole school would mumble along: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name … Give us this day our daily bread … And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us … For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever …’

At the end, we’d all very loudly say, ‘Amen.’ Every day I said this, for six years. I didn’t have a clue what it meant and nobody explained it. I remember thinking, ‘What daily bread? I had cereal this morning’, ‘Does this mean I’m allowed to trespass?’, ‘Why should I forgive people who trespass against me?’ There was a grassed area in front of the junior school that had a ‘No Trespassing’ sign. I used to walk across it safe in the knowledge that God would forgive me.

Academically I was unpredictable. One year I was literally bottom of the class in every subject. I got 4 per cent in French, 7 per cent in History and got lost on the way to the Geography exam. My Maths was so bad that I didn’t actually know what per cent meant. My poor grades may have been due to my problems at home, or simply because I already knew I was going to be wildly successful thanks to the Tarot cards. My mum didn’t seem to mind at all.

My end-of-year report was a collection of slips of paper written by the teacher of each subject. It was so awful that I threw most of it in the bin and only gave her PE (Physical Education) and RE (Religious Education). She didn’t notice and was thrilled that I had ‘a keen interest in Sport’ and was ‘Very attentive during Bible readings’. It didn’t seem to concern her that I was only learning two subjects or that I was all set to be the next David Icke.

My dad, on the other hand, did notice. ‘Where’s the rest of your report?’ He was livid and lectured me for hours on the importance of school, not to mention the astronomical school fees he was paying to keep me there. Something he said to me registered and I became determined to succeed at school. I became a ‘swot’ overnight. I found out what per cent meant and then gave it one hundred.

I remember the teachers thinking I was stupid, in particular Mrs Orton, the French teacher. She had good reason after my 4 per cent in the exam. Mrs Orton was one of those teachers who was never totally in control of the class. It didn’t help that her English was limited and when she wanted us to ‘be quiet’, she would shout ‘Shoot’ and then smack the blackboard with the blackboard rubber. I presume she was trying to say ‘Shut up’, but for some reason it came out of her mouth as ‘Shoot!’ Every time she said ‘Shoot!’, the class would giggle, which would only make her repeat ‘Shoot!’, and again smash the blackboard. For most of the forty-five-minute lesson, she would be shouting, ‘Shoot!’ and banging the blackboard with its rubber.

Before and after lessons, my friends and I would impersonate Mrs Orton to each other with much hysteria. It was during one of these muckabouts that one of us noticed there was a gap behind the blackboard. The blackboard was positioned against the corner leaving a little space behind it. After a little encouragement, we convinced the smallest kid in the class, Watson, to try and squeeze in. We must have lost track of time because just as he jammed himself between the wall and the blackboard, Mrs Orton entered to begin her French lesson.

Watson ducked down and the rest of us scrambled to our seats. Mrs Orton addressed the class, oblivious to the hiding Watson. We tried to contain ourselves but the situation was too much to bear. Pockets of sniggering broke out. Then Mrs Orton, true to form, smacked her rubber on the blackboard and shouted ‘Shoot!’ This was probably the first time in my life I properly got the giggles. The whole class fell into total hysterics as she continued to shout ‘Shoot!’ louder and louder and hit the board harder and harder with Watson wedged behind it. As far as I remember he was in there for the whole lesson.

Even though Mrs Orton never knew why we were laughing, she was always looking at me and singling me out as the culprit of whatever shenanigans were occurring. She saw me as a waster, a loser and an idiot. My 4 per cent just proved her suspicions. But now I was on a mission. I concentrated, I learned. I studied in the school library at break-time, I read my textbooks in the car on the school run, I got my mum and my sister to test me constantly, I played Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ as I did my homework.