Читать книгу Becoming Johnny Vegas - Johnny Vegas - Страница 10

There were some pretty rich lay-students at our school, and some quite amazing cars would glide up the driveway on those days: one or two even had those dignitaries’ mini flags on the front. Which is what made my family’s entrance all the more spectacular in our turd-brown Mk II Ford Cortina estate that someone had given my dad because it was cheaper than paying to have it towed away as scrap.

The clutch was knackered, and the handbrake was well on its way out, so Dad had to plan his routes carefully in order to avoid any hill stops. The car was burning oil and would let out big, black clouds through the exhaust as it jerked its way into parking spots like a geriatric clown car.

I never felt any embarrassment over it, though: I was always just too damn pleased to see my folks. It was the most precious few hours in my fortnight. And as decrepit as the car might’ve looked, nothing was cooler than watching my brother Mark climb out of the back dressed in full ‘fuck you’ Mod uniform.

Eat your heart out Harry Potter. Although on closer inspection there was little magic at work behind those imposing stone walls.

At this particular moment, he was my Ace Face. He lifted his shades and gave the building a brilliantly disapproving once-over. He wanted onlookers to be in no doubt about his immediate disdain for the place. After big hugs and hellos with Mum and Dad, I took Mark for a tour of the seminary, knowing he was dead keen on sorting out our bit of business.

‘Right, where’s this gobshite who’s been giving you grief?’

There were a couple of likely places he’d be. We checked there, but no joy. Then, as we walked through the double doors near the refectory, I saw him walking towards us from the far end of the corridor.

He stopped, I pointed. ‘That’s him!’

The gobshite realised immediately what was going on, because I’d told him my brother was going to come down and paste him. He’d scoffed and made naff threats, but had at least not made to hit me again after that day in Sammy’s office. Now, he bolted and our Mark went after him like a whippet.

I gave chase, mad keen to see the carnage for myself, but I couldn’t keep pace. Our Mark was a fast scrum-half, and Moulin Rouge-chops was running like he had the devil on his tail.

Mark came back about twenty minutes later. He’d lost him up in the woods by the golf course. He told me how he’d shouted at the top of his lungs exactly what he was going to do once he did get hold of him. Rag Dolly Anna must’ve heard him, because he never came near me again.

I suppose it was for the best that Mark had to leave it at verbal threats. He was lean and wiry and could punch his weight painfully well. I might’ve been expelled had he actually caught up with his quarry that day (maybe that’s what I was inadvertently after).

Afterwards, we had a smoke around the back of the big trees on the far side of the lake. I didn’t feel the need to put on a brave face in front of our Mark. He was at an age where he felt it absolutely necessary to be anti-Establishment. He was listening to Quadrophenia and brawling every other night, whereas playing Wham’s ‘Bad Boys’ in the common room was my revolutionary highlight. One lad even got carried away enough to smash his mug of hot Bovril off a wall.

We couldn’t hope to compete with the kind of riot enjoyed by the inmates of HMP Strangeways, but it was still a gesture that suggested I was not the only Underlow aggrieved with the regime – not quite a dirty protest, more a meaty liquid remonstration in tribute to George Michael’s determination to say enough was enough. How far short I was falling of my brother’s example was clear evidence of how institutionalised I was becoming.

It wasn’t just Mark who was putting me to shame in rebelliousness terms, either. There was also a fellow inmate’s mum, who was a living legend as far as we were all concerned.

‘Where’s that fucking Father Sammy? I wanna word!’ We could hear her screaming from a mile away. She was the only person who used our private nickname as an official title. Well, she added the ‘fucking’ bit, but we all thought that a bold stroke of genius. Sammy hated the banshee, you could tell. He couldn’t intimidate her, and he certainly couldn’t reason with her. And she wasn’t deterred by the dog collar. She’d call him all sorts.

‘You’re a bully, you poisoned little dwarf, you!’ You could’ve sold tickets for the spectacle, had anyone been brave enough to stand and watch – most students hid around corners but still within earshot. And you were basically within earshot anywhere within the seminary walls. Eventually, Sammy started finding things to do away from his office on those Saturdays.

You had to find fun where you could at Upholland. And we did. It was a survival technique. Plus we were eleven, for God’s sake. I used to try and get all the other lads in my year to meet up after lights out. There were these huge linen cabinets in the centre of the dorm, and two cupboards at either end could easily accommodate six or more of us.

I know it all sounds a bit Dead Poets Society, but without access to a mate’s house whose dad kept a poorly concealed stash of porno films back home, this was the only alternative. We didn’t play Wank on a Biscuit or anything like that – all we had was a baking apple. We’d just sit up whispering – breaking rules and dodging the dorm monitor.

To the rest of the lads this was just a bit of fun, but to me it was essential. I couldn’t sleep at Upholland; I could never just climb into bed and nod off. There was too much time put aside there for contemplation, and it was hard to stop my mind racing at the end of the day.

Insomnia wasn’t recognised as a genuine affliction, and I certainly didn’t understand it as a condition back then. I was merely labelled as disruptive because I wanted everyone to be awake when I was: like Bagpuss, they could only go to sleep once I had. I envied tiredness in others. Sitting up late in that cupboard, even on nights when nobody else was up for messing, was always preferable to lying in my bed thinking sad or scary thoughts.

I tried reading, which I loved. Had they allowed me a lamp I’d have happily read throughout the night, but ‘lights out’ meant lights out. I was eleven at the time, and getting to grips with George Orwell’s 1984. Now, I can understand why that book might have been considered subversive in a seminary setting – in there the anti-regime rhetoric felt like a true God-send – but nobody ever bothered to ask me what it was that was holding my attention so successfully. Their only concern was the fact that I was reading when I shouldn’t be.

Deprived of light and the relative sanity of gifted authors, my head would embark on an evening of relentless self-interrogation. 1984 had been light relief in contrast to the tortures my own mind would concoct. Orwell’s words were my silent lullaby, with thoughts of rats gnawing through a victim’s cheek providing sweet relief and the chance to dupe my wired brain to sleep.

I’ve heard people use the phrase a lot since, but that was the only time in my life that I actually devoured books. I read Animal Farm in the same year that I heard whoops and hollers from the quad because FUCKING MARGARET THATCHER had got back into power. I knew that my dad would be knackered for another four years as a result, and we were stuck with the clown-mobile for the foreseeable future.

As spring dragged into summer, I made the most of the natural light. I read The Road to Wigan Pier; Orwell’s sense of social injustice struck a real chord with me. And although much of the book might’ve gone over my head, I still felt this overwhelming frustration. Why did things at that place – much like in this bloke’s books – have to still be the way they were, just because someone, at some point, had said so?

Christ never mentioned telephones in the Bible. So why were we not allowed to call home and talk to the people we loved? Why? Because God needed anguish to prove that we loved him? How could it be that they had misinterpreted his message so badly? Where was the love? Had they just flicked through the Bible and missed the bits concerning compassion?

By claiming it was all about God and his will, ‘they’ had squeezed him out of the moral equation altogether. The desire for free speech, the notion of debate, was treated like a sickness, and the place felt more like a Victorian asylum for the ‘treatment’ of emotional and spiritual awareness. It was all about stripping away your individuality to make you unthinkingly accept a regime that entirely contradicted my upbringing (my Catholic upbringing! That was the irony of it).

What Upholland tried to drum into us was that it wasn’t our place to question such fundamental issues. They wanted blind obedience, and that flew hard in the face of my natural inquisitiveness. In so many sermons I’d heard of awakenings, of folks’ eyes being opened to the wonder and glory of the Lord. So why, in training to become his representatives here on earth, were we being taught to close our eyes tight shut and ignore these nagging doubts?

I got quite pally with some of the sixth-formers, partly to see how they were dealing with these tricky issues, but mainly because one of them was a St Helens lad, Mousey, who knew my family back home. They soon realised that I was up for the craic and didn’t blub, so they rolled me down four flights of stairs in a bin one day, just to see if I’d puke. Trust me, it wasn’t bullying. They dunked me in a bath and threw me into choir practice sopping wet, but I was laughing as they did it. I remember enjoying the notoriety of getting a detention for dampness.

Detention? It was pointless! We did two hours of forced silent study in the prep hall every weekday anyway! I’d finish my ‘not-at-homework’ in twenty minutes and doodle. Nothing they made us do made much sense. I didn’t need to study under duress: I was up there in the top two of our year, grade-wise. It was like they were punishing you with further silence for being bright. I missed comics, so I drew my own. It was mainly sci-fi stuff, inspired by 2000 AD – a comic I had maintained a healthy obsession with since an early age.

The sixth-form block was a no-go area. But they had a payphone: telecommunications and a private room were their privileges for sticking it out that long. I would go without my weekly chocolate fix and use the money to call home instead. Now, if you got caught, you were knackered. Some of the sixth-formers took a sadistic pleasure in policing it, but that just involved a slap. The greatest threat was a passing priest.

Still, I’d sneak in there and ring my mum. For the most part nobody bothered with me. I’d call and tell lies about how everything was fine. I just wanted any news regarding home life. The trick was being able to cry instantly if a priest came striding down the corridor.

I soon learnt to sob on demand. It wasn’t hard: as soon as I heard my mum’s voice I’d have a huge lump in my throat, anyway. I was bloody convincing. I would start blubbing and pretend that I was unaware of the priest’s presence. Ordinarily they’d put this down to homesickness and yank you off the phone. The trick was the delivery of the line, ‘I can’t believe she’s dead!’ Cue more fake sobs.

Mum was used to these random outbursts as she was in on the scam. She’d talk about how bingo had gone while I put in an Oscar-winning performance on the other end of the phone. The priest would think better of interrupting me, and walk away. The amount of imaginary relatives I lost during my time there, you’d think the Black Death had struck St Helens.

They were just daft ways of bucking the system, but they were still important to me. They helped me deal with my growing discontentment. Like an escape committee in a POW camp, I felt that any disruption to the routine was worthwhile.

It was only my jam-butty hips that stopped me digging a tunnel.