Читать книгу Little Me - Matt Lucas - Страница 9

B – Baldy!

One of my earliest memories is of being three and a half years old at nursery, watching the other little boys and girls skip out of the classroom and noting how the folds in the backs of their legs were unblemished. My own legs, like my arms and neck, were already riddled with scratches. I had been told repeatedly not to scratch – but if I didn’t scratch then there was nothing to do but wheeze. And, oh, how I wheezed. Dr David said I had eczema and asthma and hay fever and gave me some special cream and a blue-and-white Ventolin inhaler, which I was to use every morning and every night and in between if necessary.

When the summer came, my eyes got red and puffy and I sneezed and coughed even more. In the winter I caught every cold going. From a young age I felt at odds with my body. This blotchy, dumpy vessel betrayed my boisterous, carefree spirit. I wanted to run, jump, climb – and I did – but within seconds I was bent double at the kerb, gasping for air.

And yet I remained funny cheeky Matthew. Inquisitive, outgoing, playful, I had many friends, who I entertained with songs and jokes and silly voices aplenty. Even on the sidelines, while the others played football, I would pretend to be a TV commentator. My asthma and eczema were an inconvenience but they didn’t define me.

However, an event would soon occur that would shape my childhood.

In 1978, when I was four, Mum and Dad took my older brother Howard and me to Portugal on a family holiday. Our grandmothers – both widowed – joined us.

I was struck with wonder at the otherness of everything and was easily distracted. I was always lagging a few steps behind, and my poor parents were constantly having to remind me not to wander off on my own.

One day, while we were walking along the street, I got separated from my family. I looked up and they were nowhere to be seen. I cast my eyes up and down and across the road. There were several people around and from a distance quite a lot of them looked like my mum and dad.

Eventually, I spotted them, on the other side, waving anxiously at me. I stepped off the kerb, into the road, and was knocked down by a car.

A small crowd gathered. My distraught father ran over, picked me up off the ground, swore at the driver, kicked the car and carried me off.

At school I recounted the story to friends and teachers. I enjoyed the drama of it. My father, coming to my rescue. Me, the survivor.

Two years later, in 1980, aged six, I woke up one morning to find several hairs on my pillow. The next day the same thing happened, only this time there were a lot more. By the end of the summer all of my hair had fallen out.

I wasn’t initially all that concerned. At four my hair had been blond and curly, but at five it was a big brown pudding bowl and I loathed it. Why couldn’t I have nice short hair like the other boys? I hated having it cut, because it made my neck and back all itchy. Worse, when Mum washed it in the bath I always got soap in my eyes.

In the changing room at Aylward First and Middle School – a ten-minute walk from our home in the north-west London suburb of Stanmore – I could do nothing but laugh as I easily pulled out the last two or three remaining strands in front of my friends. It didn’t feel real.

But it was.

The doctors – and we saw an endless stream of them – concluded that it must have been a delayed response to the shock of being knocked down by the car in Portugal two years earlier.

And so I was the first six-year-old in my class to learn the word ‘alopecia’.

Suddenly everything and anything else that I was at that age was eclipsed by the fact that I was the little boy in the town with absolutely no hair. And that is how it was, from the age of six for the remainder of my youth. Right up until I became famous, my lack of hair was considered the most – perhaps even the only – notable thing about me.

I was never allowed to forget for one moment that I was bald. If I went swimming or to the cinema or got the bus or went to a shop or simply walked down the street, adults and children stared at me.

‘You got no hair,’ said the younger kids, pointing.

Others who had previously called me Matthew now yelled ‘Baldy!’ as I passed by.

Or ‘Skinhead’ or ‘Slaphead’ – but mainly ‘Baldy’.

Apart from my parents’ friend Melvyn, who used to call me ‘Curly’, though I never got it.

My baldness was a source of amusement, sympathy and revulsion for everyone.

Some people chose to inform me that I had something called leukaemia. ‘You’re dying,’ said one of the older girls in lunch break one day, matter-of-factly, as she tossed an apple core, missing the bin.

I pondered if maybe she was right, that perhaps there was something that my parents had thought not to tell me. I accepted I might be dying and I hoped that I had been a good enough boy to go to heaven.

Initially it was speculated – almost assured – that this was temporary, that my hair would grow back almost as quickly as it had fallen out.

And it did. A year after it disappeared, it started to return, thinner than before, yes, but this was definitely progress.

Then it fell out again.

The search for a cure began in earnest. I was taken out of school here and there and we’d traipse down to central London on the Tube to meet various specialists. Everyone had an opinion; no one had a solution.

Mum and Dad always did their best to turn the trips into some kind of treat. I’d be taken to tea in a department store or allowed to look around Hamleys. When we went to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, we would pop in afterwards to Alan Alan’s Magic Spot nearby and I’d choose a Paul Daniels magic trick to take home.

I was prodded and poked and gazed at with curiosity, but with few conventional medicinal treatments available to us, we started to go down the homeopathic route. A Nigerian family had moved into our road and my brother had become friendly with one of their kids, Azubike (or ‘A-Zed’ for short). His father, having been a doctor in their homeland, was sure he could help and administered some small white pills, which did nothing. Then we bought a few bottles of an elixir made from seaweed, which arrived in the post, and which my dad would rub vigorously into my scalp every evening. After a few weeks we gave up – he had developed a nasty rash on his hands and my hair was still nowhere to be seen.

On Saturday mornings I started to see a friendly acupuncturist. My dad would sit with me while the acupuncturist stuck needles into me, but that didn’t seem to do anything either. I don’t know anybody who enjoys having needles stuck into them and I was quite relieved when we stopped going.

I thought little of it at the time, until I was at a party twenty years later, speaking with the wife of another comedian, who was also an acupuncturist. I asked her how business was going and if she had any male clients or just treated women. She explained she worked with both men and women.

‘But it’s so intimate,’ I said. ‘Don’t you get embarrassed when you work with the men?’

She looked at me, puzzled. ‘All therapy has a degree of intimacy, but why would I feel embarrassed?’

‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I mean, there you are, sticking needles in someone’s genitalia. That must be weird.’

‘Um, that’s . . . not part of acupuncture,’ she said. ‘No, no, of course it’s not.

No. Ha.’ I changed the subject as swiftly as I could.

Now, I suspect that’s perhaps not what you were expecting to read. I mean, it’s clearly alarming. Feel free to swear out loud, if you like.

I’ve tried to process this a little over the years and I’ve come to the conclusion that I simply don’t know whether the therapist was behaving inappropriately or whether he was genuinely trying to find areas on my body that could stimulate hair growth. Like I say in the Preface, life is sometimes about living without the answers.

What I will say is that I don’t carry any baggage from the experience with the acupuncturist. I know a comedy producer who once told me that he went to a boys’ only public school and had a swimming teacher who would make all the boys stand in a line in the showers with their legs wide open while he slid through them on the ground.

I asked him if he was traumatised by the incident.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I just thought it was a bit odd.’

Well, that’s what I think of the acupuncture. It was a bit odd. Shall we move on?

In 1981, I was seven years old. And – apart from that brief period when the hair grew back – I had been bald for a year. It became clear – to me, at least – that nothing had worked because nothing was going to work. My dad said he thought ‘the roots might be dead by now’. And that was that.

I put my efforts into building a collection of caps, which I would proudly show to anyone who came to the house. Whenever a friend or relative went on holiday they were encouraged to bring me back a cap, as a souvenir. At school, other kids would pull my cap off and run away. Sometimes the wind would blow it off – but that didn’t stop me collecting as many as I could find. I had a box full of them.

Nowadays if you lose your hair as a child – as a boy, at least – you might not care as much. That’s not to diminish the devastation that childhood (or even adulthood) alopecia can wreak on the individual, but there are lots of bald people you can look up to.

There’s the Mitchell brothers in EastEnders. You wouldn’t mess with them, especially Phil. He’s properly hard and you can tell this because he speaks really quietly. In drama, the quieter you are, the harder you are. This makes Phil Mitchell a British Don Corleone, and he doesn’t even need to put grapes in his cheeks either. Sorry, Marlon.

You’ve got Vin Diesel, who is in those Fast & Furious films, and probably lots of other films with explosions in them, but I’ve never actually seen young Vincent in anything, so I’m not the one to ask. But anyway – him.

Bruce Willis.

And Demi Moore too, come to think of it (G.I. Jane).

The Rock. Who isn’t actually a real rock. Although real rocks don’t tend to have hair either, so he is aptly named.

Gail Porter.

Me.

Dara O’Briaiaian.

Ian Wright Wright Wright.

And Homer Simpson (virtually).

There will be more. Go and look on Wikipedia. But don’t forget to come back and read the rest of this book. I tend to get trapped in a Wiki hole when I go there. I was reading about a disaster in a colliery for an hour yesterday.

Anyway, back when I was lickle, there were FOUR BALD PEOPLE.

Kojak, the TV detective. I’ve never seen the show. I was too young to watch it. But I know he was bald and he had a lollipop. People used to call me Kojak all the time and say ‘Who loves ya, baby?’

Yul Brynner from The King and I.

The bald guy in The Benny Hill Show (whose head Benny used to pat and who was the reason for people constantly patting mine).

And Duncan Goodhew, who was a swimmer.

You’d see Duncan on telly all the time. If he wasn’t actually competing in an event, he was being interviewed on Saturday Superstore, or appearing in an advert, or sticking his head through a hole on Game for a Laugh while a blindfolded contestant felt it and had to identify what it was, with hilarious consequences.

Duncan Goodhew was wonderful. And, encouraged by my parents, I wrote him a letter and sent a photo of my little bald self.

It wasn’t long before a handwritten reply from Duncan himself arrived on the doormat. ‘Hi Matt! You look great in your photo!’ he told me. Also in the envelope were some badges. My favourite was a bright blue one, with a drawing of Duncan’s grinning face and the caption ‘Bald Is Beautiful’. I wore it every day.

Whenever my friend Duncan was on TV, someone would ask him how he lost his hair. He had been climbing a tree, he said, and fell out of it. The shock had made his hair fall out. I used to joke that it was my head he landed on, and that’s how I’d lost mine.

Duncan would talk about how he believed not having hair actually helped him when competing, because it meant he had less resistance in the water.

Duncan was a winner.

I’ve never met you, but I love you, Duncan Goodhew. You taught me that being bald was something you could actually use to your advantage. Thank you.

Being bald has helped me in my career. Would I have had my big break as a baby in Shooting Stars if I had had a full head of hair? My baldness has made me distinctive, yet also allowed me to transform myself. Stick a wig on and I’m someone else. Swap the wig and I’m now another person. Perfect.

My childhood was tough, yes. No one wants to feel eternally self-conscious, constantly stared at, teased, mocked and bullied. But also it’s important to get things into perspective.

When I was seven it was announced that a new ‘handicapped’ boy called Michael would be joining our class. Miss Robbins told me that I was to look after him.

Michael had – has – cerebral palsy. Tottering in with a winning smile on his first day, none of us found it easy to understand what he was saying. But in time, we learned his patterns and rhythms, knew to wait patiently because it took him longer to speak.

Michael was smart, funny, sweet and never complained about anything. He found writing a challenge so he did his work on a special computer. Michael was a marvel.

Maybe a generation or two earlier he would have gone to a special school, or not even gone to school at all, but I’m so glad he came to ours.

The truth is, it put things into perspective. Having no hair was unfortunate, but spending time with someone who had to face significantly greater challenges showed me that if nothing stopped him living his life to the full, why should my situation set me back?

I should point out that, when we were seventeen, Michael took me out for a spin in his specially adapted shiny red car. I’ve failed my test twice and still can’t drive.

Meanwhile my ever-growing cap collection was coming in useful. My oldest friend Jeremy can scarcely recount the number of times he got into trouble at school for something we both did, while I bowed my head, smirk hidden beneath the huge brim of my cap. Before long, tears of laughter would be rolling down my face. If you were taller than me, you’d never know.

My favourite piece of headwear was different from the others, a small-peaked sailor’s hat that my grandmother had bought for me. I fell in love with it after watching Ghostbusters in the cinema (twice in one week) as it resembled the one worn by the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. I wore it for months and months, until it became filthy. Then one day, spurred on by my brother, I wrote ‘STAY PUFT’ on the front in thick black marker pen, which was great until it rained and the hat was ruined.

Though we would fight like cat and dog at home, my brother Howard was the first to stand up for me if anyone gave me any aggravation. Sure, he’d badger me mercilessly about my steadily increasing weight, but he never ever teased me about having no hair.

Quite the opposite. He loved my bald head so much that one day, as he sat in the back of the car, with me in front of him, and our mum outside chatting to a friend, Howard offered to draw a Pac-Man on my head. I thought it a terrific idea. First, I would have a Pac-Man on my head and who didn’t like Pac-Man? And second, I knew he would get into trouble.

Howard whipped out one of the marker pens he habitually stole from school (for graffiti purposes) and started to draw. On Mum’s return I gave a beautiful performance.

‘Waaaah! Look what he’s done now!’

Mum was furious with him. I was delighted. What I hadn’t bargained for was that the Pac-Man wouldn’t come off. Howard was instructed to scrub until my head was clean, but the traces were still visible three weeks later.

Joking around with my brother was one thing, but my baldness could also attract a more mean-spirited attention. Around the age of twelve or thirteen, I was deemed old enough to go out with a friend, rather than with a parent, so Jeremy and I would often get the bus to Copthall swimming pool or Harrow Leisure Centre.

I remember one time we were upstairs on a double-decker when we were joined by a couple of rough boys who seemed younger than us and were keen to stamp their authority. Without provocation, they pushed us around and took great pleasure in repeatedly slapping my head. I was petrified. This wasn’t the usual teasing – there was something ungovernable about them. I doubt they even went to school.

I encountered them a few times in my youth. Once, one of them spotted me in Edgware when I was out with my mum and walked behind us in the street, kicking me in the rear at regular intervals. I didn’t say a word.

On another occasion I was sat in the front passenger seat of the car, with my mum driving, when we stopped at some traffic lights. I was minding my own business when a biker in black leather pulled up next to us and repeatedly shouted ‘Baldy’ in a mocking voice. My mum and I sat in silence. When the lights changed to amber, I watched him zoom off laughing in the distance. I hoped he might crash.

The truth is, there was always some kind of incident whenever I went out – a confrontation, name-calling, sniggering. The dark side of young people, the lack of empathy, might feel like a new phenomenon, thanks to the camera-phone videos you see online of kids humiliating each other. It isn’t new. Kids are inherently cruel. Kindness doesn’t come for a while – not naturally, at least.

While children could be cruel, the younger ones were just confused. It didn’t make sense to them. I understand why a three- or four-year-old would simply point at a bald kid. When I was that age my brother and I used to tease our father and tell him he wore a wig. It seemed such a fantastical notion to me, because of course he didn’t. We were just having fun.

But then, one Sunday morning when I was maybe ten, as I was getting ready to go to Hebrew classes, Dad beckoned me into the bathroom. He shut the door and told me that he had actually lost his hair at thirteen years old and that he wore a toupee.

He then proceeded to slowly and carefully peel it back, until it came all the way off. He had hair round the back and sides, but otherwise, like me, he was bald, I was gobsmacked. He made me promise not to tell a soul and I swore blindly that I definitely wouldn’t and then went straight to Hebrew classes and told EVERYONE.

‘You’ll never guess what! My dad . . . wears . . . a WIG!’

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Darren Swabel, rolling his eyes. ‘It’s pretty obvious.’

And then I remembered one evening a few months earlier, when he had come home and Mum had looked at him, unimpressed.

‘I’m not sure about that at all,’ she said.

Dad had been defensive. ‘I think it looks nice.’

I have to admit his hair did look pretty different that day, kind of flatter, darker and shinier. A bit like a Brillo Pad or a small, flat hat.

It was a different time, I guess. In those days, not having hair was seen as socially unacceptable. People actually thought that it was preferable to wear a squirrel on their head than be bald.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been entirely surprised when my parents suggested to me that I might want to wear a wig at secondary school. Certainly I didn’t question it.

At this moment, as I type away, I do question it. I really question it.

What the hell was everyone thinking?

It was 1985, a full five years after my hair had fallen out. Five years. I had already done my best to somehow assimilate my baldness into my personality, if that makes sense. I had figured out jokey responses to the same old questions if I was in a good mood and withering retorts if I wasn’t. I had mastered the art of staring back fearlessly at people when I caught them sneaking a look at me. I had figured out, in my own way, how to live with being bald.

This was survival, turning a disadvantage into something I could own – but in my heart I still wanted to be just like everyone else. Maybe the wig could do that for me.

I was assessed again by a doctor and then told that, yes, I could have a wig on the National Health Service, so off I went with my mum and grandma to a wig store in central London, where the offending item was waiting for me.

I don’t know if they make wigs for children nowadays, but they certainly didn’t in 1985. A large brown human-hair wig – intended for a woman – was placed on my little head and cut down to size. Unsurprisingly, it was still far too big for me, but Mum and Grandma and the lady in the wig shop all said it looked marvellous and so we left the shop with the wig in a bag.

Back at home I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t like it, but I also didn’t really feel – having come this far – that I could or should just give up on it. The fact that I didn’t have any eyebrows made the giant hairpiece look even more unconvincing, but I don’t think it occurred to anybody to teach me how to draw them in.

For a few days I wore the wig around the house to get used to it. The lining scratched my head so my lovely Aunty Denny kindly sewed a handkerchief into it.

And then one morning I tottered up the road to the primary school where I had been going every day for six years – but now with a colossal bloody wig on my head and even more self-conscious than I had been without it.

Head down, I walked across the playground. Suddenly, without saying a word, one of the tough boys in the year above me ran past, whipped it off and threw it on the ground. I picked it up in tears and hurried off to seek the comfort of a teacher.

I persisted with the wig for a few more days, but summer was approaching and it was just too hot and uncomfortable. I would slip it on and take it off as if it were a hat. Before long I was passing it round the class, letting everyone have a go.

Matt 1 Wig 0.

Poor Wiggy. It was only trying to help. Instead it found itself unceremoniously tossed into a cupboard, where it stayed until I could find a better use for it.

Years later, well into adulthood, I was speaking to a doctor who asked me how I had lost my hair. I told him the story about being knocked down by the car and how it had been assumed that it was the shock that had made it fall out two years later. It was a story I had recounted so many times that it was gospel to me now. I no longer questioned it.

But he did.

He asked me if I had asthma, eczema, hay fever or allergies. I said yes, funnily enough, the lot – chronically.

He said that my hair loss was most likely the consequence of my having an over-active immune system, one that was constantly fighting, even when it had nothing specific to beat. No one could say exactly what had made it ‘reject’ the hair but it wasn’t necessarily anything as dramatic as being knocked down by a car.

I asked him what the significance of having this over-active immune system was and how it was likely to affect me.

‘Um, well, you’ll probably never get cancer, actually.’

For a brief moment I felt like a superhero. Then he added, ‘But there’s about fifty-five other things that might well get you, I’m afraid.’

I took a deep breath. ‘So it’s a shorter life?’

He shrugged. ‘You could get hit by a bus tomorrow.’

‘Wouldn’t be the end of the world,’ I replied. ‘Maybe the shock would make my hair grow back.’