It's Not What You Think
Chris Evans

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

© Chris Evans 2009

Chris Evans asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780007327218

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2009 ISBN: 9780007327256

Version: 2017-05-04

To everyone that’s ever helped me, tolerated me, loved me, laughed with me, cried with me, created with me and forgiven me at any time, anywhere. Thank you.

Note to Reader

Dear Reader,

For the purposes of bespoke compartmentalisation during the course of this book, where Dickens went for episodes, Shakespeare went for stanzas and the Good Lord himself for chapter and verse, being a DJ I have gone for Top 10s.

If it was good enough for Moses and his Commandments, it should be good enough for my book.

CE

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Note to Reader

Preface

Prologue

Part One Mum, Dad and a Girl Called Tina

Top 10 Basic Facts about Christopher Evans

Top 10 Things I Remember about My Dad

Top 10 Best Things about Mrs Evans Senior

Top 10 Double Acts

Top 10 Resounding Memories of Primary-school Life

Top 10 Tastes, C. Evans, 1966-86

Top 10 First Memories of Going to School

Top 10 Weird Things about Teachers from a Kid’s Point of View

Top 10 Deaths

Top 10 Favourite Jobs (Other than Showbiz)

Top 10 Bosses I’ve Worked For

Top 10 Treats

Top 10 Girls—Actually Women—I Thought about Before I Had My First Girlfriend

Top 10 Schoolboy Errors

Top 10 Things I’m Rubbish at

Top 10 Things that Freak Me Out

Top 10 Things I Remember from School Lessons

Part Two The Piccadilly Years

Top 10 Best DJs I Have Ever Heard

Top 10 First Commercial Radio Stations in the UK

Top 10 Most Significant Cars in My Life

Top 10 Items of Technology in the Evans Household, circa 1983

Top 10 Things to Consider When Attempting to Make a Move in Your Career

Top 10 Things a Boss Should Never Do

Top 10 Things to Do When the Cards Are Stacked Against You

Top 10 Business Names I Have Been Involved in

Top 10 Dance Floor Fillers for Mobile DJ C. Evans circa 1985

Top 10 Memories of the great Piccadilly Radio exponential learning curve

Top 10 Things that Will Happen to You and that You Will Have to Accept

Top 10 Genuine Names of 80s Nightclubs in the North West of England

Top 10 Stars Recognised by a Single Name

Top 10 Records I remember from My Piccadilly Radio Days

Top 10 Things Never to Joke about on the Air

Top 10 Christmas Presents

Part Three Fame, Shame and Automobiles

Top 10 Things No One Tells You about London

Top 10 Legends I Have Worked With

Top 10 Books that Have Inspired Me and at Times Kept Me Sane

Top 10 Jobs at a Radio Station—in My Very Biased Opinion

Top 10 Pivotal Moments in My Career

Top 10 Things that Make a Successful Radio Show (the type of shows I do, that is)

Top 10 Seminal Items of Technology that Had the World Aghast

Top 10 Pads

Top 10 Things to Take to a Meeting if You Think You are Going to get Shafted

Top 10 Memories of The Big Breakfast

Top 10 Female Pop Stars

Top 10 Things to Consider When You Split Up with Someone

Top 10 Songs Regularly Murdered at Karaoke

Top 10 TV Shows

Top 10 Expletives

Top 10 Great Questions to be Asked

Top 10 Reasons to Stay Friends with Your Ex

Top 10 Memories of Radio 1

Top 10 Bands on Radio 1 During Our Watch

Top 10 TFI Moments

Top 10 Things that are True about Showbiz

Top 10 Signs You Are Losing the Plot

Top 10 Things a Celeb Should Never Do

Top 10 Things I Think About—Other than My Wife and Family

Top 10 Offers I Have Declined

Top 10 Best Bits of Advice

Top 10 Most Useless States of Mind

Top 10 Things that Help Get a Deal Done

Top 10 Mantras

Top 10 Things People Put Off

Top 10 Reasons Why I Presume Capital Never Took Us Seriously

Top 10 Human Responses I Experienced Leading up to the Deal

Top 10 Houses I Have Found Myself In For One Reason Or Another

Keep Reading

Appendix it is what you think…notes from the cast

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Preface

Top 10 Tabloid Newspaper Descriptions of Me

10 GENIUS

9 WHIZZ KID

8 MOGUL

7 MOTORMOUTH

6 UGLY

5 MEGLOMANIAC

4 DRUNKARD

3 TYRANT

2 LIAR

1 TOSSER

As you can see there have been countless occasions when I have done myself few favours in the public eye. After some deep thought and consideration on the road back to the real world, I can only conclude that this was because I reached the top of a mountain I never even expected to climb. Once there it’s obvious to me now that I didn’t have the first clue what to do next—so I jumped off.

‘Far more fun than merely walking back down and having a rest before setting off in search of the next one,’ I thought.

Wrong!

As a thirteen-year-old paperboy I never for a second imagined the tabloids I was then delivering would one day take me into their beloved bosom and splash me on their front covers with such regularity and for such varying reasons. Some good, some bad, some true, some fittingly published, but that’s all part of the deal. Anyone that complains about it—famous people that is—have to realise they can’t have their cake and eat it. The fatal mistake is to moan—if you don’t like the bright lights and everything that comes with them, get off the stage.

For years, as the song went, I did it my way; for years I thought I was bomb-proof; for years I was just plain lucky when I thought I was being a wise guy. Of course I got things wrong from time to time, but I put that down to being part of life’s rich tapestry—after all, few of us set out to get things wrong on purpose.

In the first half of my life—at least I hope it’s only been the first half of my life—I achieved everything I ever aspired to. I performed a job that I loved, I punched way above my weight when it came to dating the opposite sex, I worked with and met some of the most talented and exciting people on the planet, I bought cars and houses that were to die for and at one time I was co-owner of a company that was worth over a billion pounds. Yet here I am, sat back in front of the keyboard with a cup of tea, wondering just how on earth any of this happened.

Was there a plan? Not that I’m aware of, but then again I suppose there must have been—surely a story like this couldn’t occur by chance? Or maybe that’s what life is: just one big accident from start to finish and what comes round the corner to hit us depends on which road we’re on at the time.

Ultimately I look back and see a minefield of huge risks and high stakes in all aspects of my life, some of which went my way, some of which did not, but most of which I didn’t have to take in the first place, yet I still felt compelled to do so. Barring physical, mental and social disadvantages, I think this is the single most common theme that links people who might be more likely to exceed their so-called ‘expectations’ as opposed to those who don’t.

I am constantly intrigued by this existence of ours and why we are here at all in the first place and therefore, as a result, I am fascinated as to just how far we can take things before we are asked to leave. I also don’t want to leave; I love being alive and here and breathing and laughing and crying and loving and feeling, and so I have tried to grab every day by the scruff of the neck and wring it out for all it is worth. (Often to the detriment of my own well-being as well as to the exasperation of those around me.) But I’m sorry, I just can’t help it: that’s the way I am. Anyone who has a half- decent life and doesn’t wonder on a daily basis about the magnificence and irony of being a human being I simply cannot comprehend. Life is too fantastic to ignore.

Along this path of frustration and wonderment I have been lucky enough to achieve what many consider to be a reasonable level of success in my professional life (if not in my personal life)—or at least that’s what I thought. I have since come to realise that real success is about the long term. There is no better way to prove yourself than to get better at what you do every day you do it.

There is no question I have made at least as many bad decisions as good ones, probably many more, and there’s plenty of evidence to prove it—losing a bunch of money for a start—£67 million pounds at the last count (not that I had much to start with, so let’s not dwell on that). But I have also learnt that it only takes one good break to turn your life around and launch you into a stratosphere you never even dared dream of.

If I had to sum up the difference between the good times and the bad, the bottom line is that when I have put the effort in I have reaped the rewards, and when I have failed to do so my life has stalled—on several occasions going into a complete flat spin. It really is as simple as that.

As far as I can see, life is one big bank account and the best philosophy is just to keep on making deposits whenever you can; be they financial, emotional, occupational, or otherwise. This is the absolute number one way to reduce the risk of disappointment, unhappiness, poverty and loneliness. By rights, I’m not at all sure I should even still be here to tell my tale, but by the grace of God I am, so here goes.

Prologue
Top 10 Stories Still
to Come…

10 How much is that chat-show host in the window?

9 How not to buy a national newspaper

8 The management have walked out—what do I do now?

7 Let’s give away a million pounds—hey, I’ve got an even better idea: let’s give away two

6 Macca and the maddest TFI moment of all

5 The £30,000 carrier bag

4 Gazza, the tour bus and a ‘convenient’ substitution

3 Quick, wake up—you’re 300 and something in the Sunday Times rich list

2 The £24-million cappuccino

1 Billie, the Doctor and a golfer named Natasha

Part One Mum, Dad and a Girl Called Tina

Top 10 Basic Facts about Christopher Evans

10 Born 1 April 1966

9 In Warrington in the north-west of England

8 Mother Minnie (nurse)

7 Father Martin (wages clerk, former bookie)

6 Brother David (twelve years older—nursing professional)

5 Sister Diane (four years older—teaching professional)

4 Very bright

3 Reluctant student

2 Needed glasses but nobody knew for the first seven years of his life, which meant I couldn’t see a bloody thing at school (presuming this is what the world actually looked like)

1 Had fantastically red hair

Life for me growing up was no great shakes one way or the other. We were an average working-class family with an average working-class life. We weren’t poor but, looking back, we were much less well off than I had realised.

I was nought to start off with, but I quickly began to age and lived with my loving mum and dad, Minnie and Martin, and my elder brother and sister, David and Diane. Our house at the time was both a home and a business. We had a proper old-fashioned corner shop like the ones you see on the end of a terraced row of houses, just like in Coronation Street, some of which had those over-shiny red bricks that looked more like indoor tiles. This is my first memory of one-upmanship: we never had those bricks but what we did have was a thriving retail outlet. Our shop sold almost everything—at least that’s what my mum says—not like Harrods sell almost everything, like elephants and tigers and miniature Ferraris, but like a general store might sell almost everything, like chickens, shoelaces, cigarettes and liquorice.

I don’t remember the shop at all, to be honest, but I do remember the tin bath that we all shared on a Sunday night in the living room behind where the shop was. It was a heavy, old, silvery grey thing, rusty in parts, which was ceremonially plonked in front of the fire (for heat retention

purposes, I assume) before being filled by hand with scalding-hot water from the kettle boiled on the stove. This was then topped up with cold water via a big white jug, after which we took our turns bathing en famille.

I remember the outside toilet, the coal shed, Mr Simpson the greengrocer, and the rag and bone man—who I was a bit scared of—but if I’m honest that’s just about it, apart from how upset my mum was when the Council made a compulsory purchase, not only on our house and our shop, but on our whole street, not to mention hundreds of other houses around where we lived, to make way for something so instantly forgettable I’ve actually forgotten what it was.

As a result of this compulsory order we were forced to move to council housing and another part of town some three miles away, which for a working-class family was tantamount to emigrating to Australia. Although many years later my brother did emigrate to Australia and he assured me it was not the same at all.

For my part I wanted to break out of the council estate which we were forced to call home and where I was brought up mostly. From day one I felt compelled to escape those grey concrete clouds of depression.

The house we lived in was of no particular design, in fact it was of no particular anything. It was more nothing than something. In short, it was not the product of passion. Council estates don’t do passion, they just do numbers.

The estate I lived on didn’t even do bricks. Huge great slabs of pebble-dashed prison walls had been slotted together in rows of mediocrity as an excuse for housing. Housing for people with more pride in the tip of their little finger than the whole of the town planners’ hearts put together. People like my mum, who had survived the war as a young girl whilst simultaneously being robbed of her youth by having to work in a munitions factory. People like my dad and my uncle who had fought overseas to protect us from other kinds of Nazis.

How dare they ‘home’ these fine people in such an unnecessary hell?

It was waking up to this backdrop of pessimism and injustice every day that made my childhood blood boil. It was like the whole place had been designed to make you want to kill yourself. A curtain of gloom against a drama of doom. I hated the unfairness of it all.

Why did some people, for example, who lived not more than half a mile away, have a detached or semi-detached house that looked like someone may have actually cared about how it turned out? How come they had nice drives and nice cars and a pretty garden at the front and the back?

Not that I begrudged the owners of such places, or rather palaces as they appeared to me, on the contrary—good for them. I just thought things should be the same for my family.

The apathy of it all also drove me crazy. Why did people who lived on these estates all over Great Britain accept this as their lot? Why did mums and dads bother going to work each day to be able to pay the rent for these shitholes? The authorities should have been paying them to live there, with a bonus if they managed to make it all the way through to death.

So there you have it, that’s where my initial drive came from. It wasn’t that I was bullied at school or the early death of my dad, or any of the other predictable psychobabble reasons often wheeled out to explain success. It was purely and simply that I wanted a better life.

Top 10 Things I Remember about My Dad

10 The back of his neck creasing up on the top of his shirt collar

9 The fact that he never took me to a football match

8 His belly, which went all the way in if I pressed it with my finger

7 His vest-and-braces look

6 The smell of Brylcreem

5 His snooker-cue case

4 His handwriting (which was beautiful)

3 His smile

2 His voice

1 How much my mum loved him

Dad is, sadly, a faint and distant memory for me.

Although he was around for the first thirteen years of my life, I only have a few vivid recollections of him as a personality. I remember him mostly as being just a great dad. What else does a dad need to be?

He was, however, relatively old for a dad, especially in those days, and to be honest I wish he had been a bit younger. Having said that, I’m only a couple of years ahead of him now where my own son is concerned and if my wife and I are lucky enough to pop out another little sprog or sprogette any time soon, I will more likely than not be almost exactly the same age to our second child as my dad was to me.

But Dad was also older in his ways. He was a proud guy from a proud time who met my mum at a dance. Dancing was the speed-dating of its era, something we might want to learn from today.

Mum still says, ‘You can tell all you need to know about a man if you dance with him—proper dancing that is.’ And as the dance halls have disappeared while divorce rates have gone up, it looks like she may well have a point—she usually does.

Whatever Dad did on the dance floor that night, he obviously did it very much to my mum’s liking, as from that day onwards, right up until now, some thirty years after he passed away, my mum’s heart is still the sole property of one Mr Martin Joseph Evans.

My sister and I were once stupid enough to ask Mum if she had ever considered remarrying. She looked at us as if we had lost our minds—brilliant, beautiful and hilarious all at the same time.

Martin Joseph was a straight up and down suit-and-tie man for the majority of his waking hours. He was also a handsome bugger with a permanent tan which Mum insisted he received as a reward for serving with the RAF in Egypt during the war. I believed her—it was a cool story.

Dad worked hard every day except Sunday, leaving at the same time every morning and always arriving home at the same time every evening—a quarter past five, more than a minute or two after that and Mum would start getting worried whilst Dad’s tea would start getting cold.

He played snooker once a week, where he apparently enjoyed a pint and a half of bitter, but other than that, unless he had a secret life none of us knew about, that was him.

Except, of course, for the gee-gees.

Ah, now, there you have him. Dad loved the horses.

There’s a famous phrase that goes something like: when you want to know who wins on the horses you need to bear something in mind: the bookmakers have several paying-in windows but only one paying-out window. That should tell you all you need to know about where most of the money goes.

Not that this should have concerned Dad as he was indeed a bookie; he was the enemy and his betting story is the strangest I’ve ever heard. My dad’s entire bookmaking career both started and finished before I was born.

He set up his ‘bookies’ shop in the fifties with a pal of his, and by all accounts, particularly their own, they did pretty swift business—as most bookmakers do.

Warrington was a typical working-class town in those days, and many an honest man’s one and only indulgence was a flutter on the nags once or twice a week. Dad and his partner were happy to facilitate such flights of fancy—until, that is, one day when the frost came down.

This was no normal frost, however, but an almighty frost—a frost that would last not for days or weeks but for months. Four months, to be precise. All racing came to a halt and consequently all wagering. It was the steeplechase season, the favoured genre of the northern man, but the race courses fell silent, the jumps remained unchallenged, the stands stood empty.

Every morning, day in day out, bookies and punters alike, would wake up and draw back the curtains, hoping and praying for a break in the weather, but for weeks on end to no avail.

Eventually, when the break did come, the respective members of both parties could not wait to get back to the business of backing. With news of a change in the weather rumoured the night before, there was a palpable excitement in the air. The horses would soon be free to commence battle once again—as would the punters and the bookies.

Dad, eager to return to business, was up and out the next morning way before dawn; his shop would be the first in town to open that day. The early bird catches the worm, as they say, but little did Dad know this worm had ideas of his own.

There was a man, you see, a man who liked to bet, an honest man, a working-class man, the type of man of whom I have already made mention. This particular man used to walk the three miles or so to work every day. He worked in a factory making soap powder. It wasn’t the greatest job in the world, but since the war it was all he’d ever known; it was a wage and for him that was enough.

He would pass Dad’s betting shop every morning on his way to work, but it would never be open as it was too early and although he bet with Dad at the weekends, during the week he always placed his bets at the next betting shop on his journey, just before his work.

However, this morning, Dad’s shop, as I said, was the first to open in town that day.

The man, not unlike the horses, was chomping at the bit to get back into the action, so when he saw Dad’s shop with the blinds up and the open sign hung on the door, he had no hesitation in entering.

‘Morning, Martin.’

‘Morning, Fred.’

‘Am I the first?’

‘You are indeed and a pleasure to do some midweek business with you at last.’

‘Well, what an honour. Let’s have a look then, shall we?’

‘Please go ahead.’

And with that, good old Fred started to study the form from racing pages Dad had pinned to the walls of his establishment half an hour previously.

Fred mused for a while, casting his eye over the various ‘opportunities’, before finally plumping for a choice. He placed his usual style of bet. It was a forecast—that’s the way Fred always betted, and lots of people used to bet that way. The chances of winning were next to nothing but it was a lot of excitement for very little risk, not dissimilar from how the lottery is today. However, if a forecast did come in, there would be no need for any more shifts at the soap factory, that’s for sure.

And that is exactly what happened. The frost had thawed, the horses had been saddled, Britain was racing again and Fred went and picked a string of winners.

The bet wiped Dad out. He was the only bookie I have ever heard of that was taken to the cleaners by a punter.

The win was so huge, he couldn’t afford to pay Fred straight off, but he was a man of his word and vowed to return him every penny that was owed. Unlike his partner, who would have nothing to do with the whole affair. He reasoned that Dad should never have taken on such a bet without first laying it off, something he himself would have insisted upon doing.

Why hadn’t Dad done this? In truth, who knows?

Maybe it was because he didn’t have the time to do so with business being so brisk and all—on the first day back after the longest forced break in jump racing since the war. Maybe he was too excited and had simply forgotten. But maybe it was also because he took a chance.

Maybe he took a chance that the odds were massively stacked in his favour and massively stacked against Fred, and as a man who knew his maths well and his racing odds even better, he thought it was a risk worth taking—a safe bet, if you like. But as we all know, there is no such thing.

From that day onwards Dad’s wealth would never be financial, but that doesn’t mean to say he would never be rich. He had a woman he adored and who adored him back and he was the head of a loving family. ‘It’s not what you’ve got in your life, it’s who you’ve got in your life,’ he used to say. Now there’s a wise man. A very wise man indeed.

Top 10 Best Things about Mrs Evans Senior

10 Her name, Minnie. She was named after a horse but it suits her perfectly

9 Her obsession with death and anything or anyone dying

8 Her art for telling stories for hours on end and hardly ever repeating herself

7 Her magic hotpot from the war recipe, hardly any meat but oh so meaty*!

6 Her directness—second only to her vivid imagination

5 Her vivid imagination

4 Her rapier wit

3 Her wicked laugh

2 Her selflessness

1 Her love for my dad

My mum is a formidable piece of work, simple as.

When she had her cataracts done on her eyes, for example, she was well into her sixties and she requested only a local anaesthetic—this was so she could stay awake during the operation and see what was going on. Not an easy thing generally, but especially as this particular operation involves the popping out of the eyeball and the resting of it on one’s cheek, while the back is then duly sawn off ready for a new, artificially improved lens to be attached.

Upon hearing a patient had requested such a thing and for such reasons, the consultant surgeon was at first a little shocked before becoming aware of the prospect of a rare opportunity. He wondered if he could also make the most of the situation with a request of his own. He asked my mum if it would be alright for him to invite some students in to watch the procedure and, if she could bring herself to bear it, would it be permissible for them to ask her questions as it took place? Mum was over the moon, she couldn’t get enough—apparently she had the students in stitches the whole time she was being operated on.

Before we were born Mum was many things, but for most of my childhood, she was a state-registered nurse.

Mum was one of the original night nurses. She started off working in psychiatric care at a place called Winwick Hospital, notorious in the area for being the local nuthouse. Looming large off the A49, it was set back in glorious green parkland and looked exactly like a Victorian prison, though it never had been. This was a proper insane asylum, designed and built solely for that purpose. At one time my dad, my brother and my mum all worked there. As a consequence of this I had been through the infamous heavy black iron gates many times. I even had the pleasure of wheeling the odd harmless ‘patient’ down some of its eight miles of corridors.

After several years of diligent service with the loonies (she said it was exactly like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, still her favourite film) Mum went on to work at Warrington General Hospital. She always worked nights so she could be with us, her children and her husband, to whom she always referred as Dad, in the day. Her hours were shiftwork, always 10—6, usually, three nights on, four nights off, alternating with four nights on, three nights off.

Now of course this was all well and good, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out this meant she would be getting very little sleep. Here’s one of Mum’s work days:

Finish at 6 a.m., picked up by Dad, home soon after, where she would grab a quick half-hour’s shut-eye ‘in the chair’. She would then make Dad his breckie, get my sister and I up and ready for school, feed us and then see us out of the house just before nine. Next she would start on the housework and go to bed just before lunchtime where she would languish until three o’clock before having to get up to prepare for the family’s return. After making our tea and washing up, she would have another quick half-hour’s shut-eye ‘in the chair’ before getting herself washed and dressed for work and ready for Dad to run her back to the hospital for her next night shift. By my reckoning that’s no more than three hours’ sleep a day!

During all the years she did this, I never heard her complain once. In fact she only ever laughed about the crazy episodes her and her colleagues came across while the rest of us were in the land of nod. Like the Christmas Eve that Mr Jolly died whilst on the loo: she thought this was hilarious and seeing as it was she and her pals who had to get his trousers back up around his bottom and hump him back to his bed, they felt a little laughter was the least they were allowed.

After Dad passed away Mum was forced to take on the one remaining role she’d been spared thus far.

Never the greatest at maths; my mum now had to handle the family accounts.

I remember distinctly her sitting us down and telling us the score. She told us she’d sold Dad’s car for eighty pounds and that was it.

‘That was what?’ we wondered.

‘That was it,’ she repeated, ‘that’s what we, as a family, are now worth.’

Our house was rented from the council and we didn’t own anything else. Mum had resisting selling Dad’s car before he died as a mark of respect and so the neighbours wouldn’t talk, but now he was gone, so was the Vauxhall.

‘OK, fine,’ we thought nonchalantly. We didn’t really understand what a big deal it was to have so little money and as far as we were concerned things had always been alright anyway. Until Dad became bedridden we’d always had days out and a week away in the summer and nice Christmas presents and sweets at the weekend.

My mum went back to work immediately, although probably as a magician rather than a nurse, as a few years later we had a family bank account with some proper ‘rainy day’ money in it, added to which somehow she’d managed to buy our house! Alright, it was only a couple of thousand pounds, but nevertheless.

Maybe there was something Dad hadn’t been telling us. Mum was a fox with the finances.

*I asked my mum for this recipe on countless occasions for the book. She kept fobbing me off for weeks until I informed her the deadline was imminent and it was now or never, at which point she merely replied: ‘Time and patience!’

Top 10 Double Acts

10 Little and Large (I don’t care, I loved them)

9 Abbott and Costello (Saturday mornings, there was little else on television)

8 Bodie and Doyle (the kings of cool)

7 Pixie and Dixie (left-field, and nowhere near as predictable as Tom & Jerry)

6 Ernie and Bert (I wanted to be Ernie but fear I will end up becoming Bert)

5 Morecambe and Wise (of course)

4 Zig and Zag (…more later)

3 Lennon and McCartney (they wrote the only songs I really know)

2 Tom and Max (my cousins, both international rugby players and top boys all round)

1 Mum and Dad (a loving but lethal combination)

Dad never once hit me—he didn’t have to, I was scared enough of him as it was, not all the time, just when he wanted me to be. Is that what good parenting is all about? Scaring your kids half to death at precisely the right point for precisely the right amount of time—selective scaremongering at will, if you like? Is this how parents get their kids to behave? With the threat, tacit or otherwise, of physical violence? It definitely worked in our house.

In Dad’s case the simple raising of his voice or the odd glare in my direction was enough to instil the fear of God into me—I don’t know what I feared, I just did. I wasn’t scared of my mum at all but I didn’t have to be, she had figured out the genius and infallible Mum and Dad combo threat. How about this…

Mum (If I had done something wrong sometime in the afternoon):

‘You mark my words (another one of those phrases I’ve never really understood) your father is going to want to hear about this when he gets home.’

My goodness me, those words still send shivers down my spine even today. The Mum and Dad dreaded combo—just the threat of the man who never hit me was enough to make me conform.

I remember waiting and listening when Dad arrived home after such an episode to see if Mum would carry out her threat and tell him. More often than not it looked like she hadn’t, as the evening would continue as normal, first around the dinner table and then another relatively uneventful family night around the telly. With each passing minute I would become slightly more relaxed about the fact that I was probably in the clear. The thing was, though, I never knew for sure, not even the next day, whether I was definitely off the hook or not. This was the master stroke.

Had Mum told Dad? Had Mum told Dad and Dad had decided to let it go? Had Mum told Dad so he knew what had happened and then Dad told Mum that he would pretend he didn’t know what had happened; making her look more compassionate in the process?

Whatever the scenario, it worked like a dream. I remember Mum would often sit there for the rest of the night and every time I glanced her way she would give me one of those motherly knowing looks, the count-yourselflucky look. She would then also go on to benefit from several days of me loving her even more for not grassing me up to the big guy.

Our dinner, or tea as we referred to it, was often prefixed with the phrase, ‘Your tea’s on the table!’

And it would be, literally. We would join the dinner table at the last possible minute where we would remain for not a second longer than it took to wolf our food down. We were not a family who sat and chatted, at least not over tea, not much over anything to be honest. My poor mum would make a proper full-on meal every night and we would all reward her by sitting down for no more than seven or eight minutes before leaving her as quickly as we’d arrived with the ingratitude of a huge heap of dirty plates and pans to wash up. No wonder she’s never been that impressed when I cook her a meal!

I don’t know when Mum and Dad did their chatting—if they ever chatted at all. I’m guessing they did, but maybe not—my sister and I were pretty much around all day, every day, and I can never remember them having any private time whatsoever to speak of. I never heard them argue, that’s for sure—not the once. Maybe there wasn’t that much to discuss or argue about. We were a simple family unit with simple family needs. Maybe they really were the happiest couple in the world or maybe Dad did have a secret life and thought the less he said about anything the better.

When it came to ‘S-E-X’, for example, the mere suggestion of any of our family talking to each other about such a subject would have caused us all to flee the house screaming. Most families that I knew were the same.

All of my friends and I, without exception, had absolutely no formal training in the science or art of anything to do with what goes on between a boy and a girl down below from any of our parents. Now, I really loved Mum and Dad, but come on guys, you have to tell your kids about the thrills, the spills and ultimately the pills that surround the desires of the flesh.

I didn’t get the information from my parents, I didn’t get it from my elder sister or brother and I didn’t get even get it from school—well, not really. I had to fumble around and figure the whole tawdry affair out for myself. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun or exciting, but a guiding hand would not have gone amiss. If you’ll forgive the expression.

Top 10 Resounding Memories of Primary-school Life

10 Mr Warburton, the school caretaker, who looked like he’d been cast from Grange Hill. He was perfect: brown overall, flat cap, pipe, black plastic specs, the works

9 Mr Antrobus, our headmaster saying, ‘If you can’t say anything good about a person don’t say anything at all’

8 Going swimming once a week on a big red Routemaster bus, never having enough time to get dried properly afterwards and wondering how come the other kids didn’t seem to have this problem—did they have special quick drying skin?

7 The hot chocolate from the vending machine after swimming

6 The first day I told my dad it would probably be a good idea if he stopped kissing me goodbye outside the school gates when he dropped me off

5 Making plasticine puppets that took me ages to produce and then performing a play with them on a stage constructed out of a crisp box (they’d fall to pieces before the end of the first page of dialogue)

4 The kid who thought it was hilarious to defecate anywhere but in the toilet cubicles—his tour de force was to do it in the pool when we were swimming

3 Competitions to see who could keep their hand on the hot radiators longest

2 Amanda, my first kiss

1 My packed lunch

School is in many ways the beginning of those shark-infested waters we call real life—when people, young innocent children in this instance, are hauled out of the utopia that is the family unit, hopefully full of love and warmth and protection, to be thrust instead into a whole other world where they are instantly told what they are and are not good at, who’s better than them and why they need to change immediately.

What a particularly stupid idea. Within days, the humiliation begins. There are sports team selections that you do or don’t make, the latter always being the case where I was concerned. Immediately you’re made to

feel like a loser and maybe, like me, then start to consider the rounders team as an option as long as it means you might get picked.

Then there’s the endless giving out of gold and silver stars and house points and merits and the ticks and the crosses and all manner of other things that start suddenly coming at you. All designed to let you know whether you are currently a chump or a champ—so many things that can cause a kid to become paralysed as the first pangs of the fear of failure begin to set in. How many self-help books have been written on the selfsame subject? Yet it’s something that’s bred into us almost from the word go. And how about the poor kids who never get a mention?

How often do we hear of a professional sportsman who suffers career-threatening dips in confidence because of a run of poor results? Think about the poor little kiddies peeing their pants waiting for the humiliation of another set of spelling test results.

Then there’s the social aspect of the pecking order, evident nowhere more than at lunchtime.

 There’s the kids that go home for lunch—does this mean their parents love them more than yours love you?

 The kids that bring packed lunches—does this mean their folks can’t afford school dinners?

 The kids who receive free school dinners—surely this should be kept a secret?!

 The kids who go back for seconds—is this the only meal of the day they’re getting?

 The kids whose mum is a dinner lady and get extra chips as a result. (Not that we ever had chips at our school, not once—we had scooped mash that tasted strange, nothing resembling any other mash I’ve tasted before or since!)

For the record I was a packed-lunch child, not for any other reason than that I didn’t like school dinners. My packed lunch was without doubt the pinnacle of my school day, it truly was manna from heaven and the thought of it was one of the few things that kept me going through the interminable hours that made up my morning lessons. Cold toast was included for break, an item of fruit, a choccie bar, usually a Breakaway but sometimes a Kit-Kat, a Blue Riband or a Penguin, a flask of soup* and the unquestionable stars of the show: two pasties for lunch that Mum had cooked from frozen in the morning and then opened up so she could fill them with ketchup before resealing them again. Absolutely mouthwatering.

*My flask was always under great threat as we used our bags for goalposts when playing footy at break or lunchtime—during which, if the ball happened to hit the post (i.e. pile of bags) hard enough, this would be heralded with the sound of several flasks simultaneously smashing from within. The only thing left to do with a flask after such a catastrophe was use it as a maraca for the rest of the day before getting shouted at when you arrived home.

Top 10 Tastes, C. Evans, 1966-86

10 Chips and Tyne-brand tinned stewed steak with heaps of mint sauce and tinned peas

9 Bovril crisps dipped in tea or tomato soup

8 Ham on over-buttered floured baps from Greggs the bakers

7 Tinned toms and bacon with as many rounds of white bread and butter as it will stretch to—minimum five

6 Soggy tinned salmon sandwiches on white bread with white pepper and too much vinegar, hence the ‘soggy’

5 Meat and potato pie sandwiches with ketchup—making my mouth water now as I think about them

4 Beans on toast, plain and simple, no poncey Worcestershire sauce or anything lke that

3 Fish, chips and gravy—gravy on chips (it’s a Northern thing)

2 Dad’s gravy dip chip butties—sublime

1 Mum’s hotpot from the war, again, with added miracle margarine pastry*—there is no better thing to put in your mouth on planet Earth

When you’re a kid, there are hierarchies and lowerarchies (a word that doesn’t exist but common sense says it should) springing up everywhere you look. Who’s hanging out with whom in the sandpit? Who’s always at the top of the climbing frame? Who’s on their own in the corner of the playground?

The argument that all this is a good idea, I suppose, is that these are the situations that will help prepare children for similar environments they may encounter when they are re-released into the free world. Well, how about the fact that the future adult environments may only exist because of the creation of former childhood ones? Sure, it may have always been thus in the past, in caveman times, but shouldn’t we be doing something to change that now instead of perpetuating them—at least honour the worst kids with something if only to stop the tears. Awards for one, awards for all, that’s what I say. We’re all good at something; it’s up to the schools to prise out of us what that may be.

My infant/junior school was St Margaret’s—absolutely run of the mill. Old Victorian classrooms complete with ornate, rain-echoing verandas somehow linked clumsily to a new unimaginative square concrete building that looked like it had fallen out of the sky and landed there by mistake.

From the off we had the good teachers and the bad teachers as most schools do, those that could and those that could not when it came to communicating. There was Mrs Clark, the old Ena Sharples battleaxe type who would scare the living daylights out of us—although I can’t remember exactly how. There was the glamorous Mrs Johnson who looked like she should have been on one of those ever so slightly risqué Top of The Pops album covers and there was Mrs Smith who always reminded me of Virginia Wade for some reason. But my favourite was a supply teacher we had called Mr Hillditch. He was born to teach and took us to the Robinson’s bread factory one afternoon where he used to work. When his two weeks of deputising came to an end I remember being genuinely sad that he was leaving. I even wrote him a song and stood up in class to sing it to him.

Mr Hilditch we think that thee Is no good at being referee.

The only thing you’re good at is baking bread Also we’d like to thank you For giving us such a lot to do Mr Hillditch we love you And good bye.

(I was also pretty pleased with the tune I came up with for this ditty—on the audio book I will give it plenty, don’t you worry.)

During breaks it was conkers, the climbing frame, a game of footy, or British bulldog, or you could, if you wanted, while away the hours clinging to the school fence, pretending to be a prisoner, dreaming of freedom and rueing the crime that put you inside. I did this quite a lot.

Prizegiving was one of the few highlights, as was sports day, mostly because it meant no lessons. Rarely did I feature in either of these annual events—from the first year it was obvious which three or four kids would rule the roost in both categories and after that the rest of us were demoted to mere bit-part players in the predictable soap opera of typical primary school education.

*This is a magic pastry that takes 15 minutes from bagged to baked, all brown and crusty. None of this resting it in the fridge for four hours wrapped in cellophane nonsense. Again, any attempt by me to get the recipe for this fell on conveniently deaf ears.

Top 10 First Memories of Going to School

10 First desk

9 First school friend

8 First sports team not selected for

7 First hardest kid

6 First sportiest kid

5 First weird kid

4 First smelly kid

3 First mean teacher

2 First test

1 First exam

One of the unavoidable dividers in school (there are many, most of them unfair and upsetting) is the school test—you know, marks out of twenty. I always did OK in these but imagine if you were one of the kids who couldn’t get out of single figures—poor souls. And then the teacher reads out all the results, just in case anyone might not quite have grasped just how dense you are.

Tests were bad enough but then along came another phenomenon—the ‘exam’. Exactly when does a test become an exam? They must be different, I suppose, because they have different names. The thing is, for the first few years nobody tells you—or even gives you warning of their existence. You spend years having tests, spelling tests, maths tests, all sorts of tests and then one day the teacher says, ‘And in a few weeks’ time you will be having your first exam.’

Exam! Hang on a minute, what are you talking about exam? What the blinkin’ bloomin’ whatsit is an exam? Whatever it is, it sounds scary and it must be—otherwise why are we being warned about it several ‘weeks’ in advance like the potential of a nuclear strike? Kids don’t do several weeks in advance. I remember thinking, ‘Crikey, this must be really something.’

Even the word exam sounds big and dangerous. Test is a far more flighty word, a far more friendly word—test is light and trips off the tongue. Whereas exam is a deep and heavy word, its gravitas forcing your voice to go down when you say it: EX—AM.

It’s a word that resonates in your head, like the hammer clanging in a bell—E X A M A A M A M A M A M.

‘This is not a test, it’s an exam!’

This phrase brought on another first for me—nerves. Early childhood is relatively free of nerves. What is there to be nervous about? Your job is to be a kid, no problem there, all you have to do is get up every morning, be fairly well behaved and go to bed again the next night. Nerves, I have deduced, all have one thing in common, they are generally brought on by ‘expectation’.

Ah now, expectation, a dreaded thing if ever there was one. Expectation—similar to exams—suddenly turns up on the scene out of nowhere, coming into play and throwing up a whole host of other factors that previously did not exist. Expectation for me was a direct result of the past performances of my elder brother and sister—David and Diane. They were both pretty much top of the class, especially my big sis; I was from the same family and therefore I would be ‘expected’ to continue this tradition of achievement.

All the above could be encapsulated in the ominous…

ELEVEN PLUS ENTRANCE EXAM (dramatic music here)

Fortunately I passed my Eleven Plus with flying colours, which meant for now at least I had fulfilled my expectations: I had overcome my peer pressure, avoided any kind of judgement that might have befallen me and in the process unknowingly scratched the first hairs on the back of those troublesome beasts that go by the names of pride and ego.

As a result of my recent success I was now qualified and officially brainy enough to attend the grandest of all grammar schools for the duration of the next five long years—or at least that’s what was supposed to happen.

I was happy to accept the fact that it was now time to hop on the bus with the big boys, but not before Karen with the big boobies had taken me and a few other pals over to the park for a final farewell and a benevolent insight into why those big boys from the senior schools were already knocking on her door.

Why is it some people are just set apart right from the start? Karen was in a different class to the rest of the girls—not literally, of course, but generally, she was the first girl of my age to show any signs of sexiness and everyone knew it. All the girls wanted to be in her gang and all the boys just wanted to be…well, you know. But Karen didn’t have a gang—she was a one-woman show and the only audience she was interested in was that of the male species. She was confidence personified. Even those girls who claimed not to be intrigued by Karen’s ‘powers’ had to admit they wanted to know what it was like to be her and to know what she knew, which, compared to the rest of us, was pretty much everything.

I remember seeing Karen a few years later when she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. She looked like a bloody supermodel. I have no idea what’s happened to her since but I hope she’s happy. She certainly deserves to be—goodness knows she spread enough happiness around herself.

Top 10 Weird Things about Teachers from a Kid’s Point of View

10 Their names

9 Their hair

8 Their clothes

7 Their shoes

6 Their moustaches

5 Their cars

4 Their bags

3 The way they walk

2 The way they breathe

1 Their obsession with punishment

My grammar school was a boys-only, stand-up-when-a-teacher-comes-in-the-class, kind of establishment with all pupils having to pass the aforementioned Eleven Plus entry examination to get in.

Though now a subject of much controversy, the streaming system did undoubtedly work—for the clever kids at least. As a result no one in any of our classes was really that ‘thick’; consequently learning was relatively swift and even.

While most of the teachers at my last school had been grey by comparison, most of the teachers at this new school were ‘colourful’, to say the least. This was an old-style school with old-style values and as excellent as the standard of education and learning was—the standard of discipline was formidable.

Good order was kept almost exclusively by the use of fear and violence; and boy did it work. Almost all the teachers were happy, actually more than happy, to dish out physical punishment. At the time it was the norm, but looking back now, it was highly questionable behaviour at best, more likely criminal. It’s hard to believe that in all the time I was there not a single dad turned up to give one of the masters a good thump.

Almost all the teachers took great pride in their choice of weapon to beat us with, all feeling a perverted need to continue their academic theme.

Our chemistry teacher would beat us with a length of Bunsen burner rubber tubing, Normally brown, his length had blackened with age—apparently he’d had it for years. At first we didn’t believe it was real: we thought it was just a ruse told to us by the older boys to frighten the life out of us freshers, but one day we pushed our teacher too far and discovered we were wrong, the notorious whip did indeed exist.

This particular master was nicknamed after a cartoon character. We even had a song about him, sung to the juggling tune they use at circuses:

Here comes Sir with his Bunsen burner, Better watch out ’cos he’s a learner.

Our chemistry teacher hid his terror at the bottom of his battered old brown briefcase and when he decided to use it he would physically start shaking with a worrying mixture of anger and excitement. This would cause him to scatter the contents of his briefcase all over the place in the frenzy to dig out his whip. Even his comb-over came to life.

The offending malcontent would hear his name called out, followed by the instruction to come to the master’s desk—or bench as it was in the chemistry lab. By the time the poor quivering pupil had arrived, ‘Sir’ was armed, winding up and getting ready to let rip.

He would first tell you to hold your non-writing hand out and then proceed to lash you on your outstretched palm. If the required degree of remorse was not forthcoming he would next make you bend over across his bench before ceremoniously lifting the flap of your school blazer up and over your buttocks and giving you a good few thrashes across your pert young arse.

Some of the tougher boys would not let him see their pain; for them it was a game, a game that often made ‘the master’ cry before they did. This was most humorous for the rest of us as he would continue to hit them bleating, ‘Why are you making me do this, this is wrong, I don’t want to hit you [now sobbing but still of course thrashing away] I don’t…want…to…hit…you.’

Needless to say, he was a confirmed bachelor.

The sports teacher hit us with a plimsoll, the maths teacher with a yardstick. There was one teacher who ran the chess team, so he decided to bring an extra-curricular theme into his choice of weapon of mini destruction; he used to thrash us with a folded-up chessboard. This guy was seriously warped: he used to suck in the air on the back swing of his stroke and exhale triumphantly on the follow through. He was a truly evil man.

He was also king of the board-duster throwers. This was a sport several masters indulged in and one rumoured to have its own league table pasted on the wall of the staff room. The basic premise was: if you weren’t paying attention in class, i.e. you were looking out of the window and wondering why most of your teachers weren’t in jail, you were considered fair game to have a great heavy wooden blackboard duster hurled at your head. Not only would this scare the shit out of you but it could also cause serious injury—blood and concussion, to name just two.

The really unfair thing was when a master missed their intended target and hit someone else who was innocent instead. This used to happen all the time, especially if they went for someone at the back of the class.

To overcompensate for their obvious embarrassment and evident lack of skill, with the kid who’d done nothing wrong now on the floor screaming in agony, the master would often call out the original offender and give him an almighty whack, much harder than they would have normally, as if it was his fault somehow that they had missed in the first place.

Meanwhile, ‘Get yourself off to the nurse lad, it’s only a bump on the head,’ would be the only sympathy offered to the half-dead boy still writhing around on the floor.

Absolute wankers, the lot of them.

I think I experienced almost all these various methods of sadism during my days at the grammar school—with maybe the exception of the yardstick and the strap, both of which looked too menacing to risk any misbehaviour. No thank you. Another reason I escaped their wrath perhaps was simply because I didn’t stick around at the school long enough—we ended up parting company before my fourth year.

One afternoon we were attempting to survive a physics lesson. It was a sunny pleasant day outside and we were stuck in a classroom which looked out over the school playing fields, past the cricket pavilion and on to the railway line in the distance.

I hated school generally but I really hated physics, I was sure I would have absolutely no use for it at any point ever again in my life. I was permanently angry that my time was being wasted learning something I would have no use for. I also thought my physics teacher was a serious nut job.

He was an old, wizened, twisted and bitter man who had forgotten how to smile; all he could do nowadays was contort. I often wondered what might have happened to him in the past to cause him to turn out this way. It was almost impossible to imagine he’d ever been young at all and somewhere along the line he’d turned into the kind of person who gives old people a bad name.

I had long since drifted off far away from whatever it was we were supposed to be studying that day and had taken instead to writing on my desk. I know this is wrong and I shouldn’t have been doing it, but as wrong as it was I didn’t deserve what was about to happen next.

Unbeknownst to me, the physics master had been stood behind me silently for the last few minutes, for the duration of my ‘vandalism’, watching me scrape and scratch away at the wooden lid of my desk. He waited for a while before choosing the moment to begin his attack.

He then proceeded with a slow and determined diatribe of disgust at what the hell I thought I was playing at.

He began calmly—certainly.

‘Evans, what-are-you-doing?’

It was one of those annoying questions when it was obvious what I was doing; he knew it and I knew it, he just wanted me to say it out loud, all perverts want you to say it out loud.

‘What does it look like I’m doing? I’m bored out of my brains because you are a useless teacher and I hate physics anyway and I want to kill you but I know that is against the law, so now I am considering suicide which is also against the law but it means I’ll be the only one dead, so that’s alright in my book and at least I’ll be out of here and away from you and your warped idea of existence—you miserable old…’

Of course this is what I wanted to say and this is what all my classmates wanted me to say, but as it happened I didn’t say anything.

He repeated his question, this time so perplexed and through such gritted teeth I could barely understand what he was saying. The veins in his neck were standing out like a penis with an erection, his mouth foaming at the sides.

‘Evans…what…are…you…doing?’

This time I did manage to utter something, albeit very reluctantly. ‘Writing on the desk, sir.’

This reply immediately had my classmates in fits: they were clasping their hands over their mouths to suppress the laughter. It was obvious I was for the chop and when you’re at school, as long as it’s not you, that’s the funniest thing ever.

The sniggering and snorting was doing nothing to help my cause. It only added to making a mockery of the whole situation, something that thrust old Nutjob into hyper rage. He was furious by now, his ire consuming him. But what he hadn’t yet seen was exactly what I was writing on the desk, I was praying to God he wouldn’t.

‘And…what…are you writing?’

Well now, here’s the thing, you see, I was writing his name and my impression of his preferred sexuality.

‘Oh fuck,’ I thought.

‘Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.’

‘Fucking hell.’

‘Fuck me.’

‘I’m fucked.’

And I was.

‘Come on Evans, WHAT DOES IT SAY?’ he screamed.

Now he still hadn’t seen what it said and was waiting for me to read it out, something I wasn’t prepared to do because whatever he thought it said, I bet he didn’t think it said what it did.

He asked me three more times but I just sat there. He couldn’t understand why I was being so defiant. The rest of the class couldn’t understand why either. Their sniggering had stopped, the room was now filled with an overwhelming air of tension, as if they were just urging me to get it over with. It was obvious I was going to get the whacks anyway. Why didn’t I just say whatever it was that was written on the bloody desk?

Some of them even began to mouth: ‘J U S T—T E L L—H I M.’

But I couldn’t, I had decided that the only thing worse than writing those words was then to vocalise them in front of a class of thirty-odd boys and a man who was now the most insane man on Planet Earth.

‘Alright Evans, then I will read it out. What does it say?’

‘Shit a fucking brick,’ I thought, ‘here it comes…’

And with that, his eyes widened as his brain engaged with the four simple single-syllable words that lay before him. There was a rumbling, like a volcano about to erupt, and then he screamed, ‘SIR…IS…A…QUEER!’

That was it, that’s what I had written, the fact that, in my ill-informed schoolboy brain, he was indeed a queer. The rest of the lads were immediately back in hysterics.

This was bad, very bad, and made worse by the fact that I had declared that he was a queer in front of a class of boys who all had supposed he might well be for some time now.

He ordered me to stand up. I was reluctant to do so. He ordered me again. Petrified, I slowly rose to my feet.

He looked at me as if he wanted to kill me.

He then punched me as hard as he could, not in the face but in the chest.

There was shock all around the room. My classmates sat open-mouthed in amazement as I was thrown backwards down the aisle where I hit the wall before slumping to the ground, completely winded.

What in Christ’s name did this psycho think he was doing?

I was a thirteen-year-old boy and, yes, I had been naughty, very naughty, but you don’t punch a kid, no matter what he’s done. My own father had never once raised a hand to me over anything and now here was a man whom I barely knew striking me with the full force of his adult strength.

I will never forget what I did next. There is a difference between bravery and fearlessness; I think bravery is more contemplated whereas fearlessness is more of reaction to a situation, the consequences of which are not an issue. This is exactly how I was feeling.

Incredulous as to what had happened, I raised myself up off the floor, scrambled back to my desk, picked up my chair and smashed it over his head as hard as I could—at least I think I did, that’s how it felt at the time anyway. It probably wasn’t quite as dramatic as that but I was so angry.

I do remember for sure him looking up at me and visibly cowering; suddenly his whole demeanour had changed: he looked like he was scared to death. The coward had shown himself for what he really was—a sorry and pathetic bully who had been stripped of his so-called might. I threw down the chair and walked out.

As the big heavy classroom door thud shut behind me with the help of one of those big brass cantilever arms that no one ever knows the name of, I found myself transported from chaos and calamity to calmness and serenity. I was suddenly alone. The corridors, often so busy during changeover and break times were now deathly quiet.

It was all very poignant.

I took one last look inside the classroom at the scene of bewilderment.

You can have that, I thought.

I was by no means a model student, but nor was I one of the bad lads and I certainly didn’t deserve what had just happened to me.

I turned and started to walk, the hollow sound of my own footsteps reminding me to keep on going. I can still picture it now, like a perfectly framed shot from a Luc Besson movie—the long, highly polished expanse of dark parquet flooring stretching out into the infinite distance, leading to a white light of hope, in my case the two huge main school doors which I was about to exit for the very last time, never to return.

When I woke up that morning I had no idea that by the end of the day, something would have taken place that would change my life for ever.

I would now need to find a new school, and the next school in question would have the added bonus of having girls—and one girl in particular.

But first let’s get death out of the way.

Top 10 Deaths

10 Elvis Presley

9 Princess Diana (sorry, but it’s true*)

8 My dog Max

7 My friend Ronnie

6 Uncle Harry

5 John Lennon

4 My friend James

3 My dog Rita

2 My dog Enzo

1 My dad

And so to the early death of my father—Martin Joseph Evans.

First of all let me I apologise for using the term ‘early death’ as I’m not quite sure whether that’s right, it’s just something we’ve always said about Dad. None of us know when we are supposed to die in the first place; therefore how can anyone’s passing really be declared ‘early’. Surely we are all meant to die when we do die and that’s why it happens when it does. The reason I suppose we refer to Dad’s death as being early is because he was relatively young, still in his fifties, when he was plucked out for promotion to that higher office in the sky.

Dad, like Mum, smoked twenty cigarettes a day—at least. Woodbines, evil non-tipped things. I often had a go on his dog-ends when he wasn’t looking. Enough to put anyone off smoking for life—not that it did. Martin J was also marginally overweight, maybe a tad more than marginally if I’m brutally honest. He had a marvellous squishy belly that my finger used to disappear into whenever I would check it out. (I have one of those bellies now.) My inspection of Dad’s belly would usually take place while I was draped over him on the sofa, using it as a pillow. Another feature of this experience is that I would be able to hear his breathing loudly up against my ear. He always had a whistling wheeze at the end of each breath, like the last puffs of air faintly draining from a set of bagpipes.

When it came to Dad’s diet, it wasn’t the best in the world but by no means was it the worst either. He did, however, lead what was for the majority of his days a sedentary lifestyle, which couldn’t have been good for him. He was either sat in his car driving to and from work, sat at home in his favourite chair or sat at work doing his sums as a wages clerk for the local health authority.

On the face of it, maybe not such a healthy existence, but then again he didn’t drink, he went to bed at 10.30 every night, he led a nine to five existence which seemed pretty stress-free, and he enjoyed a steadfastly sound and happy marriage.

In short, I think the things he did do that were bad for him were counteracted by countless other things that he didn’t do that could have been bad for him. I’m guessing he might have expected to make his early seventies at least.

Smoking is obviously the main suspect when it comes to the demise of people like Dad and can be merciless, but when my father died the docs said he had the lungs of a non-smoker—a fact Mum loves to reel out to anyone who will listen. She has a library of such facts from her life that she never wants us to forget, but this is perhaps her favourite.

Dad was hardly ever ill. In fact I only ever recall him being ill twice. Once with the thing that eventually killed him and the other time when he had earache.

I remember the occasion when he had earache as if it were yesterday. I was attending the grammar school when out of nowhere one morning, Dad said he would be able to give me a lift, something he had not been able to do since my leaving the juniors. I usually took the bus.

He had taken the morning off work to go to the doctors and found himself with half an hour to spare. This was another one of those all-round cool situations—a total win-win, it meant I got to be with Dad for an extra fifteen minutes, plus it spared me the bus fare, which gave me extra sweet purchasing power—whoopee!

Dad drove us both proudly on our journey in our usual car mode of near silence. We didn’t talk much. For my part I didn’t feel we needed to. I have no idea of Dad’s thoughts on the matter. Was I the quiet one or was I quiet because he was quiet? Dad didn’t do car radios either—‘They only attract attention,’ he would say—hilarious!

Three miles later and there we were pulling up outside the main gates of the grammar school in our big, old, navy blue Vauxhall Victor. What a fine motor car that was—there’s nothing like the smell of vinyl in the morning.

After bidding each other farewell, Dad drove off to his doctor’s appointment while my mind turned to focusing on the far more important task of sweet selection with the spare cash I now had in my pocket.

The doctor duly examined both Dad and his ear but to no avail, he could find nothing wrong with either. Consequently he did what most doctors do in such circumstances and ordered a series of ‘tests’, a phrase I learnt to dread. It was the same doctor who would fail to spot Dad’s bowel cancer.

Mum had noticed Dad was acting a little strangely, especially when it came to his private business. She confronted him one day, at first he was embarrassed, but being a nurse she persisted and discovered that things were not at all as they should be.

Dad said he’d been to see his doctor, something that Mum was furious about as he had not told her this until now. They were a couple that had few, if any, secrets and this revelation did not go down well. Dad went on to tell Mum that he had been sent for more tests but the results had proved inconclusive. His doctor’s prognosis therefore was simply that Dad had an irritable stomach and so was prescribed Epsom salts.

This last piece of news sent my mum into apoplexy. She was more than aware of how easily things could go wrong as the result of a misdiagnosis, having seen such episodes at work. She ordered Dad to go and see her doctor immediately.

Mum and Dad had always had different doctors. It was the one thing I never understood about them. All us kids went to Mum’s doctor as in her opinion he was the best in town; now it was Dad’s turn.

Our doctor referred Dad straight away. As a result he was admitted to hospital. Upon further examination it transpired that Dad was riddled with cancer and there was nothing anyone could do to help him.

Had he been diagnosed in time, there was a good chance he could have been saved.

Mum was absolutely livid. She was told in no uncertain terms that within six to eight weeks, the man she had loved for her entire adult life would no longer be alive.

She is still justifiably very angry about it to this day.

Dad was a good man, a saint in her eyes. He had never wronged anyone, he had always put his family first and now here he was lying in a hospital bed unaware that he was dying.

Mum wanted him home. She wanted him home and she wanted him home now. The first night Dad had been admitted to the hospital the man in the next bed had died. As they wheeled away his body one of the porters gestured to Dad, who he thought was asleep, and whispered, ‘He’ll be next.’

This broke Mum’s heart, she could see that for the first time since she had known him, her husband was frightened.

Dad did come home and somehow Mum managed to turn those six to eight weeks into eighteen months, that’s how long Dad lasted with her tender love and care.

The irony of it all was that Mum and Dad never discussed the seriousness of his condition. Mum thinks Dad knew it was terminal but she can’t be certain. She says that the only time he ever alluded to the fact that he might not be around for much longer was when he once told her, ‘If anything happens to either of us, we will always be there for the other in the eyes of our children.’ Still one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.

As much as Mum didn’t discuss the inevitability of his condition with Dad, nor did she discuss it with either my sister or brother and I. As far as we knew Dad was very sick, of that there was little doubt, but we had no idea he was so sick he was going to die.

Dad had been ill for over a year when one evening Mum, who had just finished attending to him, came down to the kitchen which I was currently using as a workshop for my bike. It was a dark night and cold and wet outside so Mum said I could tinker indoors. My bike now upside down, I was busy cleaning the spokes, oiling the chain, and carrying out other vital maintenance when she came in.

‘Oh hi, Mum,’ I said, still focused on what I was doing.

‘Hello luv.’ She sounded down, really down. I looked up to see she was absolutely shattered. Not only that but there was something else wrong. She closed the door behind her, leant against it and looked up towards the ceiling, half as if to plead for some kind of intervention and half to stop the tears, which were now clearly visible welling up in her eyes.

Immediately I began to feel both panic and fear. I had never seen Mum even come close to crying before.

‘What’s up?’ I asked in that kind of uncertain, nervous way a kid asks when he hopes the answer is going to be ‘nothing’.

‘It’s your dad.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s just so ill, love.’

Well, we knew he was so ill, very very ill, but ill people get better—that’s something we also knew, that’s what had always been the case. Other less fortunate people died but they weren’t ill, they were dying—our dad was not one of those.

‘I know he’s ill, Mum, but he’s going to get better, don’t worry.’ I said.

The tears were now streaming down Mum’s cheeks as if trying to speak on her behalf. There was something she was going to have to tell me, something she had been dreading. She walked over to where I was kneeling down, still next to my bike. She put her hand on my head and started to stroke my hair before whispering.

‘He’s not going to get better luv. He’s never going to get better.’

At this point she completely broke down.

This was the worst moment of my life. Nothing since has come even close to it. When I first heard those words come out of Mum’s mouth, I couldn’t compute what she meant, it had sounded for all the world as if she had said Dad was no longer going to get better and then of course I began to realise that’s exactly what she had said.

Dad was now in that other category of very sick people: he was no longer ill, he was dying.

Life over the next few months or so—up until Dad’s final passing—was much as it had been before, except now we were all much sadder and everything seemed to become much quieter. Dad’s disease and everything that came with it continued to happen but now with more frequency and for longer.

The sooner any human being is spared the indignity of such a living hell the better—I don’t care what anyone says.

In our minds, now that we knew there was no longer hope, it became more and more evident that our dad—once a big, burly, jolly, intelligent man—had long since left us. The frail old gentleman upstairs was little more than a stranger.

In many ways this made things easier, of course the old gentleman was still a welcome guest and to my mum a worthy patient, but our dad, as we knew him, had now very much gone. My sister, brother and I continued to visit the upstairs room to see the old gentleman every day, chatting about what we were up to at school, but we had already laid my real dad to rest. Secretly we had said our goodbyes, our pillows long since dry from the tears.

The old gentleman battled on but the slope was becoming ever steeper. I hope you never have to experience the silent killer, but as cancer grows everything else diminishes. It’s truly awful. We prayed he would be free soon.

The crazy thing is, even when someone is dying, the rest of life has to go on and so it was with us during those last few weeks. We carried on doing the things we were expected to do. You can’t have time off just because your dad’s dying—a bizarre state of affairs. Besides, to be honest, no one outside the immediate family knew Dad was so gravely ill. Mum had asked us to keep it between ourselves. I never told any of my friends and they were never interested enough to ask. Kids don’t care about illness unless it’s their own.

The night Dad died I was cycling home from school. Taking my bike to school instead of the bus was something I had begun to do more recently of late. I had around a quarter of a mile left to go when I came to the last roundabout just before you turned into our road. There was an ambulance coming the other way. Its lights were flashing but there was no siren. I knew it was him.

As the ambulance passed me on my right-hand side, I felt peace more than anything.

There were no tears, just relief. It was over.

*Danny Baker phoned me up on the Sunday morning: ‘Have you heard about Diana?’ ‘No,’ I replied, still half asleep. ‘She’s been killed along with Dodi.’ I immediately jumped out of bed and went downstairs to put the telly on. Fifteen minutes later I was outside the gates of Kensington Palace on my motorbike. When I arrived there was only a single bunch of flowers at the gate, later to become the famous sea of flowers, of course. I don’t know why I went there that morning, I’d never even met Diana. I just felt drawn to go.

Top 10 Favourite Jobs (Other than Showbiz)

10 Windscreen fitter

9 Hi-fi salesman

8 Seafood salesman

7 Golf shop assistant (for about a week)

6 Supermarket assistant (trolley boy)

5 Tarzanagram

4 Private detective

3 Market stallholder

2 Mobile DJ

1 Newsagent

I would begin work as soon as life allowed me to, although ironically it was death that gave me the green light to start work in the first place.

My father’s death when I was thirteen—although obviously devastating for a young boy who loved and respected his dad—did mean that I could, for the first time in my life, take on a paper round. Had my dad still been alive he would never have allowed such a thing.

‘Slave labour! No child of mine is working for a pittance like that,’ I can hear him saying it now. What Dad failed to realise was the fact that a paper round would elevate a kid of my current financial standing, i.e. almost zero (except for my pocket money), to relatively millionaire status.

My first job was for a newsagent called Ralph. He had an innate talent for impatience and was the sternest man I had come across thus far in my life, much more so than Mum or Dad or any of my teachers.

Ralph had just the one shop but if you ran it like he did, one shop was all you needed. It yielded enough for him to have one of the swellest houses in town—pretty damn large.

Chez Ralph and Mrs Ralph, whom I never met in all the years I knew him, was located in a place called Grappenhall, which is an area close to Warrington on the other side of the Manchester Ship Canal. To get there you have to cross one of two mighty bridges, the first being a huge clumping swing bridge, the second a towering cantilever bridge, both breathtakingly impressive for their time.

Grappenhall was generally accepted as the posh part of town, probably because they had their own cricket team and something akin to a village green, as well as lots of houses like Ralph’s, of course. Ralph’s grand pile, a testament to Victorian splendour, had both a drive in as well as out plus a vast stepped lawn at the rear.

One newsagent shop equals one very big, nice house, I made a mental note.

Ralph was firm but fair, something I have never had a problem with, but he could also be a real old grump—a ‘misery guts’ as they might say, usually at the expense of his own happiness. Don’t grumpy people realise it’s mostly them who lose out as a result of their moodiness?

And why would anyone do grumpy in the first place? Is it because they think it means the rest of us will take them more seriously, be less likely to try and take them for a ride perhaps? I have no idea why a person would choose to adopt such a posture. Surely it can’t be worth it, no matter what the upside. Surely they don’t enjoy being grumpy every day. It must be such a draining way to exist. I have never understood such grumps.

I still know people like Ralph today and it still bemuses me. What’s wrong with these guys? Have they never read A Christmas Carol and thought to do something about themselves before it’s all too late and the grim reaper comes a-knocking? Have they never watched It’s A Wonderful Life and realised we all want to be George Bailey because he’s a good guy and everyone loves him and we all want to be loved because it feels great?

Ralph’s emotional misgivings, however, although observed, were of little matter to me. Ralph had a paper round up for grabs and I was very much up for grabbing a paper round. He needed someone like me and I needed someone like him.

Alright, so having a paper round would mean having to get out of bed while most of the rest of the country was still asleep, but I was only lying in bed waiting to grow up anyway. I might as well grow up on the move and get paid for it into the bargain, then come the weekend I would be able to afford things! I would be able to buy almost anything I wanted, pasties from the pie shop, sweets and pop, tickets to the pictures, space invaders from the arcade—my mind began reeling with the endless possibilities.

I was still only a kid but as far as I could see I would soon be almost completely financially independent. Although I suppose in a way I was already financially independent—it was just that I didn’t have any money to be independent with.

All things considered I couldn’t wait to step up to the employment plate for the first time.

Ralph’s shop was the model of efficiency. A huge glass window at the front was full of children’s toys, most of which had been there so long they had faded in the sunlight. As you entered his hallowed premises, to the left there were four substantial greetings card stands, whilst to the right was a beaten up old ice-cream freezer which flanked the sweet counter. The sweet counter itself was myriad plate-glass shelves laden with sixty or seventy jars of loose sweets. There were crisp boxes stacked high in the corner, chocolate bars and penny mix items at the front. Next to a simple wooden drawer which was used as a till were the weighing scales and numerous different-sized white paper bags tied together with string, hung from a series of hooks.

There were two further counters Ralph had managed to pack into his tiny square footage, each a little goldmine of its own. Opposite the sweet counter was a full-time post office, consisting of two teller positions safeguarded behind double-thick glass screens, which were busy for most of the day. Finally there was Ralph’s stage: the mighty newspaper and cigarette counter. This is where the serious money was taken, buoyed by the additional revenue stream of the legendary football pools.

It was in front of Ralph’s counter that I would ask for my first ever job.

‘I’ve come about the paper round.’

Ralph looked down at me, I looked up at him; that’s when I first noticed how miserable he was. My natural reaction was to smile, but this instantly made him feel uncomfortable. He quickly looked to the side before grumbling, ‘Come in seven o’clock sharp tomorrow. Don’t be late, one week’s trial without pay.’

‘Ah, I see,’ a miserable man, a tough man and now most probably a mean man—often the three go together, Dickens had it right. Surely one day of delivering papers would be trial enough. If I couldn’t do it after that, what difference would another several days of ‘trial’ make?

Of course this was simply Ralph’s way of getting a free week out of a new boy but, as I suspected then and as I know for sure now, one should never allow the terms of a small contract to get in the way of a much bigger one down the line—without the rungs at the bottom of the ladder you’ll never reach those that lead to the top.

Besides, if you feel like you’re really being stung, there’s always the potential for renegotiation in the future but not until after you’ve proved your worth. This is when you will have something to bargain with. At the beginning of such situations all the Ralphs of this world hold all the cards, but if you’re any good, from day one, this balance immediately begins to shift your way.

My ‘trial’ week duly came and went, and I presumed I passed as nobody thought to tell me otherwise or asked me to leave. This, I surmised, meant I had got the job and poor old Ralph would now have to revert to his rather reluctant stance of paying another small boy very little, to make a grown man quite a lot.

I took to the world of employment like a duck to water and I especially enjoyed the quiet of the early morning, the stillness of the air which allowed sounds to carry much further than they did during the day. I marvelled at the absolute calm of everything before the rest of the neighbourhood decided to wake up. I realised for the first time what creatures of ridiculous habit we human beings are. I wondered why more people didn’t seize the day earlier and set about their business when there was no one to get in the way or put them off.

In the summer I would have the sunrises all to myself; in the winter the snow was mine to step in first. I would often witness the best weather of the day. It’s spooky how the elements often started off favourably and then grew a little more disgruntled the more people they had to deal with. ‘The world only likes people who like the world,’ I thought.

Back at the shop, I soon discovered that the earlier you turned up in the morning, the more quickly you were likely to get your paper round made up and hence be out of the door and on the road. This was because most of the boys were still in love with their sleep and left it till the last possible moment before they arrived. In their minds this also meant that they could go straight on to school afterwards without having to go home, if they wore their school uniform that is.

Potentially this may have seemed like a good plan, but apart from having to wear stinky, sweaty clothes for the rest of the day, as delivering papers was no walk in the park, these boys often ended up having to wait for their rounds because they all showed up at the same time—a complete false economy as far as I could see. If, on the other hand, you told the manager you would be in early he would try to make sure your round was ready for you. Bosses like employees who turn up on time, even better if they’re early, they also like employees who make their lives easier.

It wasn’t long before I was finishing my round before most of the rest of the boys had even started theirs and it wasn’t long before I was promoted to the heady heights of ‘spare boy’.

The role of spare boy was to be both my first promotion and the first position for which I would be retained. Spare boy was paid an additional weekly fee for coming back after his round every morning in case someone hadn’t turned up. If this happened to be the case, spare boy would rush to the rescue like a paper boy superhero to save the day, all for a bonus payment of course.

There were occasions when I would end up doing not one extra round but two or three in all. If a boy was a no show, I would take on his round and see if I could do it quicker than him. I would sometimes run my rounds—the quicker I delivered, the lighter my bag would be; the lighter my bag, the quicker still I could go. It all made perfect sense to me. I would see other boys trudging their rounds, hating every second, where was their logic? If you don’t like something, either don’t do it in the first place, or get it over with as soon as possible, don’t drag it out, for heaven’s sake.

When old paper boys left, new paper boys replaced them and they in turn would have to be taught their rounds. This was another aspect of the spare boy’s role. In time, I came to know all sixteen of our rounds, something that would stand me in great stead for the future.

The next step up the employment ladder was to get a collecting round. Not only were some people too lazy to get their own newspapers in the morning but some of them, it transpired, couldn’t even be bothered to go and pay their bill once a week.

I found this incredible, I could hardly believe such goofballs existed but more fool them and more money for me. Their lethargy was my lolly.

Being given a collecting round was the first outstretched finger of trust from Ralph to one of his boys. The boys who held the lofty position of collector were considered very much senior to those who did not. Every Friday, after school, the collecting cognoscenti would chase down the same paper rounds as we did in the mornings but this time free of our bulging bags and armed instead with book, biro and a pocket full of jangling coins.

We were each given a two-pound float to take with us in case any customers needed change. Upon our return, we then had to add up our receipts, count out our money, subtract our float from the total and hence, hopefully, balance our books. This was my first encounter with simple but highly effective early business practice. This is how business worked. What could be more straightforward?

The pay for collecting was 10 per cent of whatever you collected, which often turned out to be more than you would get for a whole week of delivering. This was easy street in comparison to the delivery rounds, but you had to deliver to get to collect and the better you delivered the better collecting round you were rewarded with. Ralph was a disaster at social intercourse but he sure knew how to get the best out of his boys. He was like a cross between Scrooge and Fagin.

So, what with my morning round, the hallowed position of spare boy, the collecting round, plus additional evening and the Saturday Pink Final rounds (the Pink Finals were sport result sheets, prepared to arrive half an hour after the final scores had come in), I was bringing home easily over a tenner, more towards fifteen quid a week!

Doing the maths, I figured this meant in six weeks I would have close to a hundred pounds. A hundred pounds to my mind was a small fortune—it was enough to buy a brand new bike and still have fifty quid left. It took my mum a whole year to buy my last bike. On this kind of money I could even afford a secondhand motorcycle, or even, at a stretch…an old car! Not that I had any use for one as I was still three years away from being eligible to drive.

This was simply amazing to me, the concrete of the council estate where I lived was still all around but its greyness was beginning to fade. As I had suspected, working worked.

Some of the houses where I collected from on a Friday were also the ‘nice’ houses. I could see into their living rooms as I stood by the door waiting for someone to come and pay. These houses had a different smell, they had a different energy, there was more going on. The women who answered the doors seemed to smile more, they were prettier, kinder, they even looked younger. What was it with these people? They had something else going on.

Then one day I realised. They were happier.

I made another mental note, bigger, nicer house, equals happier—usually unless you were Ralph or one of the other grumblies.

Top 10 Bosses I’ve Worked For

10 Richard Branson (Virgin Radio)

9 Michael Grade (Channel 4)

8 Andrea Wonfor (Channel 4)

7 Don Atyeo (The Power Station)

6 Timmy Mallett (Piccadilly Radio)

5 Charlie Parsons (The Big Breakfast)

4 Waheed Alli (The Big Breakfast)

3 Matthew Bannister (Greater London Radio)

2 Lesley Douglas (Radio 2)

1 Mike Hibbett (Ralph’s Newsagents)

My newsagency career continued to blossom and with it my bank account. It wasn’t long before I saw my next promotion. Forget the army, there are more ranks to the hierarchical structure of a newsagents than most international organisations.

My next stripe on the arm was a biggy: I was to be elevated to the much-envied post of ‘marker-up’.

The marker-up was the boy who arrived at the same time as Mike the manager. Mike was dead cool, he was forty, which I thought was pretty old at the time but not that old—not in his case at least. To my mind there are young forty year olds and there are old forty year olds, and Mike was definitely one of the former. He loved to play squash, had been a pretty handy footballer in his day and still kept himself fit by going for a run three or four times a week. He was also one of life’s good guys.

Mike is still in the top three bosses I’ve ever had. He was the type of guy that you just did things for, he was always really kind to me. I remember he had a son who I thought was so lucky to have a dad like him.

Mike worked hard and always had a smile on his face, especially when the two girls from the chemist came in for their fags. The girls from the chemist were hot—and I mean really hot. I can still picture them perfectly today. They had huge big smiles, the kind that can take you away to another place. Both of them were brunettes, with bunches of gorgeous shiny hair cascading down over their shoulders and they always came in wearing their white coats, almost always giggling.

Please don’t tell me—anyone who’s reading this—that they ever got any older. Girls like that should be preserved for ever, just as you remember them. One was called Jill, the small one, she was the one I really fancied, but I never found out the name of the other one—I just called them Jill and Thrill.

Obviously I was far too young to stand a chance with either—they were in their twenties and I was only thirteen—but I could fantasise. Boy, could I fantasise.

Meeting and talking to women that I would never otherwise have come into contact with was another big bonus of working in the shop. I could see what made them laugh, what made them sad, how they were so different to the men that came in. Experience that undoubtedly helped me in the rest of my life when it came to getting on with the opposite sex.

If you think about it, boys of a certain age usually only get to talk to girls roughly the same age—their only other female interaction being with members of their family and their mum’s mates or maybe their mates’ mums. This is why so many young boys end up fancying such ladies, it’s a question of needs must. These women are often the only other ‘real women’ young boys come into contact with.

Perhaps this is also why so many mums also fancy their sons’ mates or their mates’ sons. Both parties have an equally limited circle of opportunity; both sides are vulnerable and there is a common thirst to be quenched. Drink up everyone!

My job as marker-up meant I had to arrive at the shop just before 5 a.m. The newspapers having already been delivered in their bundles in the doorway, it was my first task of the day to haul them in off the step, cut them open and count them all out to make sure there was none missing—twenty-five to a quire, eight quires to a bundle, if you were any copies short, you’d make a note and then call and ask for the van to come back later to drop off replacements.

Next we would dress the counter, stacking each brand of paper in order of their popularity, the most popular nearest to hand for efficiency. In our shop it was the Daily Mirror first, the Sun second, then the Daily Mail, the Star and the Express; we hardly sold any broadsheets, maybe ten each of the Telegraph and The Times—and no Guardians at all! Once this was done we would be set to start, both Mike and I now barely visible surrounded by mini skyscrapers of newspapers.

It was always a competition as to who could finish marking up their rounds first, pistols at dawn, Bic biros at the ready. Each paper round had a corresponding marking up book. The marking up books were handwritten elaborate affairs, not unlike a cricket scorebook in their intricacy and precise beauty. The drawing up of these books was a delicate and painstaking process and one which Ralph had reputedly evolved over the years. No one was particularly clear exactly how or why his system worked but work it did. If there had been a fire there is little doubt the stack of marking up books would have been the thing that Ralph would risk his life to save, certainly way ahead of any of us paperboys.

Mike and I would split the books, eight rounds each and then get to work. The key to speed was getting used to where each brand of paper was without having to look up from the book and losing your place, like a drummer with a drumkit. Once a paper had been slid from the top of its pile, a fast firm fold was then required to make it behave as it was stacked on top of the round having been marked somewhere in the right-hand margin of the front page with the number of the house to which it was destined. The first paper for each new street also bore the street name.

It sounds like a laborious process—and I suppose it was—but it could be carried out with relative alacrity. Once a rhythm was achieved you could really get into the swing, I loved it. You could almost make the papers crack if you folded them sharply.

My workstation was based behind the infamous post office counter while Mike would work from the main cigarette counter. He was so fast, the fastest, he would almost always beat me hands down, finishing his half of the rounds a good round or two before me. This was even more impressive considering he was serving customers as well as joking and laughing with them at the same time.

The best thing about getting the job of marker up was that you then didn’t have to do a paper round at all. Sure you had to get up even earlier than before, which some of the lads just couldn’t comprehend, but then again you got paid so much more. The financial gain curve was exponential.

Marking up was also an officially recognised shop job which therefore meant it carried a compulsory hourly rate. This translated into me now being paid more an hour for working in a nice warm shop than the paper boys were being paid for a whole week of delivering newspapers, whatever the weather. Again, it baffled me why on earth they couldn’t see the bigger picture.

Working behind the counter was the real deal for me: it was recognition, it was respect, it was civilised and with the marking up complete, it was a cup of coffee for Mike and tea for me. We would take turns brewing up before I took over the shop and Mike went ‘in the back’. I never really knew what Mike did when he went ‘in the back’—he was probably thinking about Jill and Thrill and the countdown to their fag run, not that I cared, I was out front performing my first ever breakfast show.

‘Good morning, how are you today, what can I do you for?’

Real adults handing over hard cash. I used to pride myself on knowing the customers’ different orders. Some would leave their car engines running outside while they popped in to pick up their paper and a half an ounce of tobacco. Others would announce their arrival with a glorious exhibition of uncontrollable coughing and spluttering.

Once these guys started to cough and splutter there was no telling how long it might last, it could go on for minutes and the noises that they used to make were extraordinary—exclusive only to the serious early morning smoker: chesty rumblings, throats sounding like they were gargling with broken glass, coughing so hard their faces would turn a violent shade of purple. Often they would have to excuse themselves as they found the need to go back out of the shop ‘mid-order’ to spit out a huge pavement cracking greeny. A typical order would be:

‘Daily Mirror please, sixty Senior Service and a box of Swan Vestas.’

Sixty cigarettes! And non-filtered Senior Service! A day!

Shit, man, that was serious, these guys were hard core. Do you have any idea what just one of these cigarettes would do to the average human lung? Maybe with the exception of Capstan full strength, which were just insane, Senior Service were the strongest cigarettes known to mankind. They would make the ‘Lights’ of today seem like fresh mountain air in comparison. It was incredible the men who smoked these coffin nails were still breathing, let alone going to work every day and asking for more.

Then there were the ‘silents’, a strange breed who only ever pointed to what they wanted and always had exactly the right money so they didn’t have to speak to you. What was all that about?

As the morning developed, the shop would go through peaks and troughs of patronage with the clientele changing according to the schedule of the day. The shift workers would cough their way into the shop either side of six o’clock, depending on whether they were just starting or just finishing.

There would then be a bit of a lull between 6.30 and 7.30 when we’d try to get most of the boys loaded and on their way—if they had turned up by then that is—and then the school kids would start to come in at around a quarter to eight.

Eight till nine would see a procession of younger pupils stocking up on their daily supply of sweets and snacks and as the big hand headed towards nine, in would come the young mums with their little bundles of joy off to playschool. Finally, the pensioners would begin to assemble on parade ready to descend upon the post office for their various benefits and other requirements.

The OAPs often arrived much earlier than they needed to. They used to meet their pals for a chinwag but Ralph made them queue up outside so as not to clog up the shop—even in the rain, even in the snow in the middle of winter. I suppose he had a point but it just seemed so wrong. These people were elderly, often infirm, and most of them had served in one if not both of the wars so we could still have a bloody post office in the first place.

I vowed that, whatever else I did in my life, I had to make enough money never to have to queue up in the rain for my pension. That’s the least well off I ever wanted to be.

As my time behind the counter progressed I would stay on at the shop for as long as I could until the last possible minute before I had to leave to go to school. The shop was now my life, whereas school was quickly becoming the villain of the piece, a place I attended just because I had to, a mere interruption to my busy working day.

As far as I was concerned I was learning more of what I needed to know about life and how to get on at the shop every weekday morning and evening, all day Saturday as well as Sunday up until lunchtime, than I ever could from my lessons. If I could have left school there and then I would have done. School had taught me all it could by now and in my opinion had taken up far too much of my time in the process.

Top 10 Treats *

10 Mint cracknel

9 Ice Breaker

8 Cough candy

7 Cola cubes

6 Refreshers

5 Black Jacks/Fruit Salad mix

4 Texan

3 Merry Maids chocolate caramels

2 Lyons midget gems

1 Curlywurly

After walking out of the grammar school that day, after my altercation with Nutjob the physics teacher, I just carried on walking, I walked all the way home.

For the first mile or so, I was still shaking with adrenaline, I felt no anger or fear, I was satisfied that my actions were justified. I kept going over in my mind what had happened and how crazy it was that one’s circumstances could change so quickly. Soon it was like it had happened to someone else, and as my journey continued, my mind began to clear and it wasn’t long before I found myself thinking about other things.

I had undertaken this three-and-a-bit-mile journey on foot several times before but usually in the summer when I had chosen to spend my bus fare on a bag of fizz bombs or a can of Lilt instead. I had a feeling this might be the last time I might have to consider such a dilemma instead of paying for the bus purchase.

When I arrived home, much earlier than expected, another Curlywurly had bitten the dust. (Who came up with the Curlywurly, by the way? Not only the concept of the funky lattice-shaped bar but the name Curlywurly—it has to be the coolest name in the world of confectionary.)

‘How come you’re home so early, love, has something happened?’ Mum asked, naturally surprised to see me.

I managed to explain as honestly as I could what had taken place at school that day and that I knew I’d done wrong but that I didn’t think a grown man should be allowed to hit a child in such a way. She listened intently, without saying a word. After she’d heard what I had to say, she congratulated me on my decisive action and said she would enquire about a new school the very next day. Her exact words were: ‘You’re not going back there, over my dead body.’

Mum is a very no-nonsense person and once a chapter is closed that’s it—it’s time to move on. Though she has never admitted it, I believe she went back to the grammar school soon after to give the headmaster a piece of her mind and to set the record straight.

Her enquiries as to a new school resulted in my being much nearer to home, albeit at a comprehensive school. Not that I had a problem with comprehensives, but they were generally considered inferior to the much grander grammar schools. Comprehensive schools were where you went if you couldn’t get in anywhere else.

This school was a bit special though. It was a brand new school, where my year, the fourth year, were the eldest—there was no fifth form or sixth form yet. The school was so new that in fact half of it was still being built—hence its reduced capacity and the additional need for Portakabins as classrooms.

This new school was also an altogether much more civilised affair. The classrooms were much brighter, the teachers called you by your first name and their teaching methods were far less draconian, with not a cane nor a slipper in sight—and there were girls!

*Most of them courtesy of Dad on Saturday afternoons.

Top 10 Girls—Actually Women—I Thought about Before I Had My First Girlfriend

10 Sabrina from Charlie’s Angels

9 Debbie Harry

8 Sally James

7 Both girls from Man About the House

6 Jill from the chemists

5 Mrs Johnson (teacher)

4 Mrs Tranter (neighbour)

3 Miss Leavesley (French teacher)

2 Kim Wilde

1 Karen with the big boobies

Padgate County High School was the school attended by the incredible Tina Yardley. Tina was to be my first love, deep and genuine and proper and innocent. I still love her now, I always will.

I met her when I was partnered with her as part of the school production of Oliver!. She was the girl I would have to link arms with for the opening few lines of the song, ‘Let’s All Go Down The Strand’, one of those annoying cockney songs that not even cockneys like.

Tina was an experienced performer and a general all-round star pupil. She was so confident and smiley—the kind of smile only genuinely good people are allowed to have. She was also vibrant, full of life and, even though she was in the year below me, she was easily as tall as any of the girls in my year—and she smelt amazing.

What is it about girls and their smells? You can’t be with someone you don’t like the smell of. I don’t mean if they stink of B.O. (although in the right circumstances I even find this a turn-on), or unfortunately if they have bad breath. What I’m talking about is their own smell, the smell that is them. I have loved everything about some girls I’ve met, the way they move, what they talk about, their hair, their eyes and then, wham bam, one whiff of their natural scent and it’s ‘No Way José’—this is never going to work. Sometimes you don’t get down to their real smell until the morning after the night before, that is the worst-case scenario.

I have a friend, now blissfully happily married, who, in a similar vein, says she used to be able to tell when she was falling out of love with someone because she would begin to start to hate the way they used to eat—so much so it would begin to make her want to throw up.

I think this emotion comes from the same source—inexplicable but un-ignorable.

Suffice to say I immediately fell in love with Tina’s smell, soon after which I fell in love with Tina herself.

I had seen Tina many times before, not only at school but because she also lived directly opposite my best mate in one of those big houses in the nicer parts of town with a drive and a nice garden at the front and the back. My best mate lived in a similar although slightly smaller house right over the road. He also lived two doors down from Tina’s boyfriend!

Not that I knew about this until a couple of days before the opening night of our production when I was riding home on my bike from my best mate’s house. I pulled out of his drive and, having pedalled no more than a few yards, I was punched full in the face by a very hard fist which seemed to appear out of nowhere.

The force of the blow, a superb direct hit, knocked me clean off my bike, smashed my glasses and bloodied my nose—a pretty comprehensive result all in all. I didn’t have a blinkin’ clue what was going on, nor did I know the identity of my assailant, let alone any likely motive behind such an unprovoked attack.

There is nothing like the ‘bang’ of a punch to shock a kid into bewilderment. Our heads weren’t designed to be punched. I suppose that’s why it hurts so much and this punch hurt as much as any I’d ever felt before—even the one from Loony Tunes back at the grammar school.

It turned out that this latest fist belonged to Tina’s boyfriend. He was eighteen, three years older than me and four years older than Tina.

‘That’s what you get for messing around with another bloke’s girl, you specky four-eyed ginger twat,’ he said, as I scrabbled around on the floor looking for what might be left of my glasses.

‘Not very nice,’ I thought, but who was I to argue? If he was nearly able to decapitate me with one punch, what might he have done if I’d riled him into dishing out a few more?

May I also point out here that I had not ‘messed around with another bloke’s girlfriend’—I had merely linked Tina’s arm several times in rehearsal as the script instructed me to. As far as I was aware she had no idea that I even liked her.

Several minutes later I was back at my mate’s house where his mum, who I fancied by the way, was tending my wounds while my mate was trying not to laugh. Not that this bothered me, I would have thought the same if it had happened to him and besides I was privately getting my own back by imagining me and his mum getting married one day and him having to call me Dad.

His mum was livid and insisted on going over the road to tell Tina and her parents what had happened and ask her what such a wonderful girl like her was doing with an animal like ‘Shit for Brains’.

My mate’s dad—not my biggest fan; perhaps he knew about me and his wife—ended up ‘having’ to give me a lift home after being convinced that I really couldn’t see anything without my specs.

He reluctantly went to get his keys and coat, but before he did so he looked at the state of me and audibly laughed.

‘Thanks for that,’ I thought. ‘Please die soon.’

The next day at school I had to wear my old specs again, a far cry from the Reactolite Rapides that had said farewell the night before—these were altogether much more NHS. The weird kid with ginger hair from the grammar school had just got a little weirder.

We had rehearsals for Oliver! scheduled again later that day and all I could think about was what was going to happen when I saw Tina. I couldn’t concentrate on my first lesson, I felt like such a loser. The only thing I knew for sure was that I must learn to fight—but first I had to endure breaktime.

I wandered off into a corner of the playground and was in that frame of mind where nothing matters, nothing that has gone before, nothing that exists now and nothing that may exist in the future. I was numb to the core and also really confused. I had done nothing wrong, had been nearly half killed by an idiot and his big knuckles, yet it was me who felt like the schmuck.

My poor old swollen nose was an inch away from the school wall. I was staring at a brick now, hoping breaktime would never end. If I had to stare at this wall for the rest of eternity I wouldn’t mind as long as I didn’t have to face Tina again.

It was one of those moments like when you climb into a bath and can put life on hold until you decide to climb out again. I recognised I was both at peace and yet totally fucked at the same time, but as long as I didn’t move from the exact position I was in—ever—I would be fine. For anything else I would need a miracle. Which was, in fact, what was about to happen.

‘Er, Chris…hi.’

It couldn’t be.

‘Are you alright?’

It was—it was Tina’s voice.

Slowly I turned around and sure enough the rest of the world was still there and in the middle of it all, larger than life with the sweetest, most benevolent expression on her face, framed perfectly, was Tina.

‘Yeah, I’m OK thanks—just checking out the wall.’

‘I know, I’ve been watching you for the last few minutes. I’d been trying to find you since break started and then I saw you over here.’

‘Oh…’ (Brilliant reply, Chris, simply brilliant. That’s how you get your girl, with a weak and pathetic ‘Oh.’)

‘I heard what happened last night and I’m really sorry, he’s such an idiot.’

‘Oh…’ (I was getting good at this ‘oh’ business.)

‘He’s not my boyfriend, you know, at least definitely not now. I was sort of seeing him but not really, I mean, we hadn’t ever done anything.’

‘Er…I see.’ (Hey, look at that, I was evolving, like prehistoric man—only slower.)

She was still smiling, she really did have the greatest smile and she had more to say.

‘So now he’s not my boyfriend, that means we could go out together…if you liked?’

If—I—liked?

IF I LIKED?

Of course I liked. Tina, I was in love with you.

‘But…’

Here’s a little tip, whenever anyone gives you or offers you something you want, something you have longed for, something you have only ever been able to dream about before—do not—whatever you do—start your next sentence with the word…but.

It’s pointless, there is no need, it’s not heroic or grateful sounding. To be meek at these times serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever. It just sounds wet and feeble, it introduces tedium into the proceedings and, above all, it’s completely and altogether stupid.

‘…but…’ (Aggggghhhhh!!! Shut up, you cock.)

‘But what?’

But nothing, you prick. Say—‘But nothing.’

(The only word that should ever really follow ‘but’ is the word ‘nothing’, then the world would be a better place and we would all get more things done and there would be less wars.) Tell her you love her and you love her smell and you always have and you always will and that you would walk over hot coals just to be able to get her back her rough book.

‘But…’ and then it came, the most ridiculous self-pitying, crap line of all time, ‘…why would you want to go out with me?’

Genius.

‘I always have, ever since we first met. I think you’re really nice and funny. I was going to ask you anyway. I just had to sort out the thing with Shit For Brains.’

‘Ha ha, that’s what I call him.’

‘Ha ha—see, we already have something in common…So what do you think?’

‘I think yeah, absolutely.’ This was more like it. Acceptance is everything in most occasions.

‘Brill, so I’ll wait for you at home time by the gates then. You can walk me back to ours.’

Wow bloody wee. She was amazing, different class, she had sealed the deal—almost.

‘Alright,’ I said, ‘I would love to do that.’

‘I would love you to do that.’

‘Great,’ I said.

‘Fab,’ she said.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Well…’ she said.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Aren’t you going to kiss your new girlfriend?’

Oh my goodness, this girl was the tops, the nuts, it didn’t get any better than this and if it did I didn’t want it.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I would love to do that.’

‘I would love you to do that.’

And then we kissed—briefly but softly and beautifully. We pulled apart and smiled.

‘Should we do it again?’ I asked.

‘Yehhhh,’ said Tina enthusiastically.

This time we went for it, a full-on playground snog and it was earth-shattering. Tina was totally into it, I was totally into it. Unfortunately the teacher on duty at the time was not so much into it.

‘Can you please stop that kissing, you two?’ said the master in question.

When we pulled apart I remember him being visibly shocked to see who it was. As I said before, Tina was a model pupil.

‘And Tina, you should know better.’

Without missing a beat, she replied, ‘Sorry sir, we weren’t really kissing, we were practising for later.’

And with that, the coolest girl ever to walk Planet Earth grabbed me by the tie and said, ‘Come on Chrissy, this way.’

Shit the bed, I had a girlfriend and she was the greatest woman in the world.

Top 10 Schoolboy Errors

10 Setting my pyjamas on fire whilst playing with matches. I was still in them at the time

9 Not being grateful for my first big bike one Christmas morning (I went on to love it)

8 Not going to see Queen at the Liverpool Empire (big big big mistake)

7 Smashing my toy garage up with a hammer in a make-believe bombing raid

6 Playing willy guitar and getting caught by my mum

5 Lending my Scalextric to Andy next door and never asking for it back

4 Thinking Mrs Tranter wanted to go out with me even though she was married with two children and I was only twelve

3 Thinking Jill from the chemist ever even noticed me at all

2 Listening to Mandy S. in the playground that day

1 Succumbing to the allure of the dreaded netball skirt

Tina and I were to enjoy the most idyllic of teenage courtships—sexless but beautiful. Maybe it was beautiful because it was sexless, I don’t know. Sure we messed around a bit but no more than that. What we did do, however, was love each other madly—twenty-four hours a day madly, seven days a week madly. Madly, madly, madly.

What is it about ‘first love’ that makes it so incredibly special? It should be bottleable. (And while we’re at it—why doesn’t the word bottleable exist? We need to be able to bottle more good things in life, what with all the terrible things that are going on. But how do we stand a chance, when the word that defines its very possibility is not even in our language? If things that can be negotiated are negotiable and things that can be done are doable, why can’t things that can be bottled be bottleable.)

Anyway I digress—I used to see Tina all the time. Before school, during all breaks and lunchtime, after school, every evening—usually at hers, and then every weekend. And when I wasn’t seeing her I was thinking about her. She consumed my mind, my heart, my soul, my very spirit, my whole being. I couldn’t get enough of her and she couldn’t get enough of me. We did everything together—except the rude stuff, as I’ve just mentioned but for some reason felt the need to mention again. And we kissed, boy did we kiss, we kissed all the time. We couldn’t imagine ever not kissing and ever being without each other. We were going to die together and we didn’t care if that day was tomorrow or the next, as long as we were side by side.

I remember one night Tina had to go off to Manchester to watch a play with her class as part of her English literature coursework. As I walked her to the coach, we were both in floods of tears at the thought of being parted for even just a few hours. It was as if one of us was going off to war never to return. We were inseparable yet we were being separated. Who had dared dream up this cruel fate?

Who had thought to deny us our usual evening round at ‘hers’ snogging furiously on the bean bag in her parents’ spare room, listening to Queen’s Greatest Hits and Meat Loaf ’s Bat Out of Hell as well as, for some strange reason, an old King’s Singers album! These three vinyl wonders were the soundtrack to our very own love story.

Tina was so sophisticated and clever and funny and energetic; her completeness was her beauty. And again that smile, so big and warm and welcoming. Her joy and abandon was infectious, she was naughty, too, cheeky and fruity in a way. I was sure this naughty side of her was only ever revealed to me—I used to think about that a lot, especially when we were at school and she was being the darling of the classroom. Little did they know what could also make Tina tick. They thought they knew but they didn’t—that was our secret. God, I loved her.

I loved her so much that I went above and beyond the requirements of a normal teenage romance by bestowing upon her the lofty position of becoming the subject of my first ever padded greetings card purchase.

Padded greetings cards were a mysterious but wonderful phenomenon. They could always be found sat majestically on the top shelves of the greetings cards sections in most newsagents or stationers. Maybe they still can, I don’t know. I have long since stopped looking for them. By the time I left school I was all padded out.

Ridiculously big—even the small ones—they were made of shimmery silk-like material, usually consisting of a garish floral design, though what they were actually padded with I never found out—I suspect it was highly flammable. I wonder how many house fires in the late Seventies and early Eighties were down to the accidental setting alight of a massive padded card during some kind of revelry or other. ‘Here darling, here’s a magnificent padded card, cost me an arm and a leg it did. Happy birthday and make the most of it. It could be your last if Auntie May’s fag ash gets too close to it later on.’

These great padded cards came in big flat white boxes instead of envelopes and they were expensive, like, really expensive—maybe a fiver or more! But Tina was worth it, every penny. I bought her several of the monstrosities—I wonder if she still has them. I have a feeling she might, along with a smoke alarm, I hope.

So how does such a perfect, unblemished relationship come to an end? We’d never argued, we’d never stopped wanting to be together, we were the bestest of friendly friends and we still hadn’t done the real rude stuff.

It’s simple and predictable and the answer is…

Temptation.

The Bible may be dodgy in all sorts of other areas but it’s pretty much bang on the money when it comes to explaining the evil that is temptation and the devastation it can cause.

The destruction of peoples, nations and in this case, as far as I was concerned, the most beautiful love affair the world had ever seen.

The apple is there—don’t eat the apple. But more importantly don’t even think about eating the apple. Basically, just forget apples exist and preferably as quickly as possible.

The infection with temptation is perpetuated by the dreaded ‘thought’. One spends far too much time in this life of ours thinking about what we haven’t got as opposed to enjoying what we have got. What’s that about? I’ve been doing it for years, I still do! It’s like a disease.

Temptation for me came in the form of the netball captain. Her name was Karen. Not the Karen from the junior school that took us to the park but another, more sporty, Karen—out of nowhere came Karen II.

Here’s what happened.

Tina and I were happily insulated in our bubble full of love and loveliness and then one breaktime I was left on my own in the playground as Tina had some extra work to catch up on—I was alone, I was vulnerable and as far as temptation was concerned I was the ripest cherry on the tree. The netball captain and her ridiculously short netball skirt were waiting to pounce.

One of Karen’s ‘friends’ approached me.

‘Where’s Tina?’ she said.

‘Oh she’s doing some extra work,’ I replied.

‘Oh right, so you’re still with her then?’

‘Yes.’

‘Only…you know Karen fancies you.’

‘What?’

‘Karen, captain of the netball team, she fancies you. None of us get why but she says she thinks you’re cute and if anything ever happened to you and Tina, she would definitely go out with you.’

And with that she was off.

Little did I know what had just happened: the wind of change had visited me, silently and deftly.

I was both rocked and shocked. The Karen in question—Karen II—although captain of the netball team, was actually quite modest and quiet in comparison to the rest of the female jocks in the main gang. They liked her because she was good at sport, by far and away better than anyone else. Sport was her ticket to the back seat of the bus and the big girls were more than glad to have her on board. She also had the most spectacular thighs.

This was the first sign of foreboding, I should have known. I hadn’t thought about Karen’s thighs ever before, but now the mere mention of her name instantly conjured up a snapshot of those muscly and impressive haunches, so adept at springing her forth, up and high to net another victorious goal.

I started to notice her and her thighs around more, like when you buy a car and suddenly you see them everywhere. I would smile at her and she would smile back. What was I doing? To smile at the enemy is to sleep with the enemy, you fool. And although Karen II wasn’t a bad person, she was the enemy. She threatened everything I loved, everything that brought me joy—Tina, her smell, her mouth, her mum and dad’s spare room—her mum and dad themselves, our beloved bean bag, Queen’s Greatest Hits, Bat Out of Hell and even The King’s Singers.

I was infected—the sickness had taken hold. All the symptoms I now recognise started to fall into place, lining up obediently, one behind the other, like a well-organised army getting ready to attack. I was surrounded by my inevitable doom. It was only a matter of time before I committed my first true act of betrayal—I began to compare!

I began to compare my beautiful Tina with the imposter that was Karen II, skipper of the netball team. What a lowly and despicable thing to do.

And even worse, I began to look for areas where Tina might be weak and Karen might be strong—rarely was it the other way round. When I was with Tina, I would almost wait for her to do something that suggested a chink in her armour, all the while looking for future reasons for us to split up, all the time comparing her against countless shiny images of Karen II gliding through the air in that damned navy-blue pleated PE skirt. Thinking about it now makes my stomach churn. This is not the behaviour of a decent person, a loving boyfriend, a doting partner. What a total loser! What were you thinking? Be grateful for what you’ve got, you fool. In fact, more than that, get down on your knees and thank God you’ve got the greatest girlfriend a boy could wish for. But it was not to be. I had become blind to the perfection that was our love and I was hellbent on tearing it apart.

Tina’s heart was pure and true. She had given me everything and I had never been happier, but I was completely infatuated with the thighs of another. And this is what people do: especially blokes, they see a new nest and start to create an agenda that will justify them leaving their current one, even though if they were to stop for a second, they would realise there’s no better place in the universe than where they are now.

The final act of the whole sorry tale began with a secret note and talk of, ‘If you don’t tell anyone I won’t.’ Karen II wasn’t as backwards at coming forwards as I had first imagined. Her mum and dad were going away for the weekend and she had invited me to come round and check out their living room carpet in their absence. After a whole night of rolling around on some of the finest shagpile, there was no going back.

I was now with Karen II.

I had moved on and my first true love was over.

You only get one mum and you only get one first love and the passing of the relationship I had with Tina is a thing of gargantuan sadness. What can I say? I broke her heart and to this day I wish I never had.

Tina and Chris: The Epilogue

Two days later, Karen II dumped me.

Not five, or four, or three but two! Two days!!

I suppose it could have been worse, like one or none. (I wonder if anyone has ever dumped anyone in no days.) Karen II said she’d made a dreadful mistake and that she was sorry and that she thought I should try to get back with Tina.

‘Well, thanks for that astute piece of advice, Karen, but I think you may just have ruined my life!’

For the record, I think the real reason she dumped me was more because she found me a terrible kisser.

I’m not bragging but the thing was, I knew I wasn’t. I couldn’t have been because Tina and myself had been getting off and on each other’s lips with great success for the best part of the last twelve months. I think it was more the case that Karen and I together were terrible kissers, dreadful in fact—just awful.

It takes two to tango and it takes two to play tonsil tennis, but preferably two tongues on the same wavelength.

I heard a great story about wavelength once from a man sat by a swimming pool in a hotel in Los Angeles. He claimed that we are all basically electric and that we operate on varying frequencies. He said it was completely natural for someone to literally be operating on a similar or very different wavelength to someone else, and that often when we meet others and feel an instant attraction to them it’s because their wavelength is similar to, or maybe even sometimes exactly the same as, our own. Adversely, when we feel an instant uneasiness towards someone and often for no apparent reason, the opposite may be true. It’s nothing either person may have done particularly, it’s simply that we are each operating on different frequencies too far apart to gel.

Well, whatever it was, Karen II and I were never going to get it together on any front, least of all when it came to kissing. I didn’t understand her method and she didn’t understand mine. Whereas Tina had teased and nibbled and tugged her way around my face, ears and eyes for the last year, Karen II kissed in a much more industrial manner. There was no journey, there was no gear change, it was foot down, full throttle and off we go.

Overnight, I had gone from a beautiful, perfectly balanced open-topped tourer on the Côte d’Azur straight to a stripped-down dragster at the Santapod raceway, exhausts flaring, tyres smoking, just desperate to get over the finish line.

I suppose that’s the difference between the darling of the drama group and the captain of the netball team. I had gone against type, always a mistake—opposites attract, my arse.

For the first time in my life, I felt like a total dick. During the last twelve months I had been walking on air and living the kind of life that good people live, the kind of life when you know deep down inside that what you’re doing is wholesome, the very foundation of decency. The kind of life all mums and dads wish for their children. The kind of life that makes you feel like you don’t need to do the lottery.

Tina and I were never going to set the world alight but that’s probably because we would have been too busy looking after and loving each other. How many great scientists, artists, musicians and writers have been lost to such happiness? And more power to them. The most deserving audience is always at home; anyone who saves their best performance for strangers is the most suspicious of characters.

So there I was, left feeling like the man who built his own private Idaho and then in a moment of typical male ego-fuelled madness, took a match to it and razed it to the ground.

Of course I made overtures to try to win back my lost love but Tina was having none of it—her mum even less. Mrs Y. even tracked me down to tell me what an idiot I had been for throwing away the chance to be with her wonderful daughter. She was entirely right.

Tina did agree to see me several weeks later and expressed her genuine desire to get back together, but in the end she decided ultimately for her own sake that this was not the most sensible approach to take in life towards the first man she had given her heart to. She had done so sincerely and fully and I had repayed her by scarpering at the mere sniff of a new testosterone-filled adventure. Oh if only all the girls of the world were half as wise. Tina was never going to be a loser and nor was she going to allow herself to be with one. She was made of far stronger stuff than her now ex boyfriend. She owed him nothing. He had told her that he would love her for ever and yet he had not been able to love her for little more than a year. He had lied, plain and simple.

From this moment school was still school but no longer as I’d known it: it was now Tina-less, the biggest reason yet to get it over and done with once and for all.

Top 10 Things I’m Rubbish at

10 Skiing (I have been over thirty times, had lessons, the lot: complete waste of time)

9 Snowboarding (even worse—if that’s possible)

8 Football (even though I have played at Wembley 12 times—a crime for such a bad footballer)*

7 Rugby (truly awful)

6 Motor mechanics (I don’t have the finger strength required)

5 Looking after money (more about that later)

4 Staying away from the wrong kind of people

3 Sleeping

2 Crying

1 Fighting

I have never been good at fighting but for years I was happy to get stuck in regardless. That is, until over time, I gradually came to realise that fighting was not a prerequisite for either getting on in life or being a man particularly—in short, it was neither big nor clever. It was also becoming patently obvious, due to the number of pastings I continually found myself on the receiving end of, that I was in fact rubbish at it.

Fighting is just one of the many things I am not cut out to do. I have little strength, never have had, my bones are thin and brittle and I also bruise easily.

So let’s face it, if you hit me I’m pretty much guaranteed to break and if I do manage to hit you back—well, don’t worry about having to call the medic as I was also at the back of the queue on the day God was dishing out the manly hands.

My hands are ridiculously little for a guy of my height, stature and weight. It’s almost as if The Lord was trying to tell me not to fight. I would have had no problem with this if he’d thought to make up for his ‘handy’ oversight in other areas of my physicality but alas no, there’s little to get excited about anywhere else either, I regret to say. Little hands mean little…knuckles and in my case they also meant smooth and round knuckles—almost completely useless for fighting with. Put them next to a half-decent man-sized set of ugly, gnarled, knobbly destroyers and it’s the equivalent of putting your grandma in the ring with Mike Tyson.

But fights were going to come and fights were going to go so I had to have a plan, which I did. It was a plan that basically consisted of me getting the first punch in hard and fast after which I would whip my glasses off, close my eyes and hope for the best.

This is what had happened on the morning of the launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia. I had become involved in a playground altercation with another kid. Having received the aforementioned Evans first and only punch, he had to my astonishment gone down as a result—also with such apparent force it didn’t look like he would be getting up any time soon! I was more shocked than he was. My plans thus far had not allowed for any such an occurrence. I had to revise my strategy and quickly. Having already opened my eyes, I decided to replace my glasses and make a run for it, which is exactly what I did.

I was safe, for now at least. However, when my adversary did come round, I was more than aware he was bound to want revenge. I was reliably informed he had been declaring as much shortly after coming to. To put it more precisely, he had vowed that come home-time he was going to kill me outside the school gates.

Suffice to say, upon hearing this I had been peeing my pants ever since.

The news of my forthcoming assassination had been eagerly telegrammed to me several times—more than I needed to hear but of course this was the usual guaranteed scenario. There was never a shortage of gleeful messengers around when there was an after-school duel to be advertised and the more likely you were to lose, the more desperate the messengers were to let you know the exact details of when and where you were going to get your head kicked in.

These messenger kids are the worst. Destined to become wasters of perfectly good oxygen as they grow older, they are the child apprentices of the kind of adults that take pleasure in the art of spreading bad news, the kind of people who need bad news to use as a currency to make themselves briefly more interesting. You know, the kind of people who take part in and watch those terrible daytime talk shows and trash each other live on national television.

My opponent meanwhile was odds-on favourite to have me over in any discernable ‘proper’ fight and by all accounts he was now fuming—angry as a wasp in a jar apparently. The weird kid had knocked him to the ground in full view of his contemporaries and he had lost face; not only that but that face was now a little bent and he owed me—something he would have to put right at the first available opportunity. He was in no mood to delay the process for a second longer than was required. Home-time it was to be: cometh the hour—cometh the beating. I was left feeling in no uncertain terms that when the school bell went for the final time that day I was going to get it and I was going to get it good.

I was able to think of little else. I felt sick, I wanted to go to the toilet, I wanted to cry and I wanted to die. All four of which were likely to happen before the day was over.

So, as you can probably imagine, the Space Shuttle launch was a much welcome diversion—especially seeing as we were going to be allowed to watch it on television. I even considered it might be the type of event to make the angry kid realise the bigger picture for the human race as a whole and that killing another thirteen year old in cold blood may not be in the spirit of the day.

The television room, not unlike my bottom that day, was packed and full of apprehension, so much so, that some of us were forced to sit on the floor—not that we minded, we were spellbound by what was going on, plus it meant we didn’t have to do our normal lessons as they’d been put on hold until after the launch.

This was an all-round cool situation, and it was getting cooler by the minute as NASA was suffering technical problems giving rise to an ongoing delay.

‘Please, let the launch be delayed for several years,’ I thought to myself, long enough for the angry boy to meet the girl of his dreams, have a small family and retire to Southport. Long enough for him to realise the ultimate futility of inane hand-to-hand combat between fellow men…and more importantly, fellow schoolboys.

But alas it was not to be. Before long the Columbia countdown over in Houston had restarted along with the impending ‘death by fight’ countdown that was currently taking place in my head.

This situation had now officially morphed into becoming another one of those moments in my life that I wished would never end, for the second it did my intended fate would surely befall me and in front of all the world to see. Like my brick wall moment with Tina, it was now that I pleaded for the planets and the solar system to pull together and show mercy upon this young and needy soul by miraculously and cosmically bringing time to a grinding halt and in so doing, save this shaking, quaking juvenile wreck of a child from pissing himself into oblivion. I swear, if Discovery were still waiting to take off here and now that would have been fine by me.

I decided it was time for a prayer.

‘Dear God, please let time stop here for ever. Sure I know it would mean I’ll never realise my potential as a human being past this point, I will never know what it feels like to take my first trip to the seaside behind the wheel of my own car, to buy my first home, to have a child, to witness another Labour government, to truly become acquainted with the ways of a woman, to stare on in wonder at the simplicity yet effectiveness of the format of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (a game show currently over fifteen years away from even being conceived), but frankly I don’t care because it would also mean that I’m never going to have to face the school gates pummelling that’s most definitely coming my way in what’s now just a couple of hours. Please God, out of the two options I am more than happy to sacrifice all of the former for even the slightest chance of the latter.

Amen.’

Time may sometimes seem like it stands still but the clouds and the clocks tell us it doesn’t. Perhaps a moment is as close as we ever get. Maybe a moment is the stillness between the ticking of time, the bridge over the river, if you like, the halfway house between the now and the then.

For me this stillness is usually enough and I have learnt to enjoy such ‘moments’, diving into them and pushing them apart to make them last as long as possible, but back then, in the early Eighties, sat in front of that television, in that classroom, there was no such pleasure to be had, time was very much against me.

Acceptance though is often liberation. ‘Let go, let go, let, go,’ I said to myself and as I did so miraculously my prayers were answered.

Unconsciously, as I was sat on the floor, I began to stroke the carpet tiles—partly I suppose for some kind of self-soothing, contemplative comfort, like a wise man might stroke his chin or a dog might lick his private parts, and partly I suppose out of resignation, my resignation to the fact that, whichever way I looked at it, my goose was cooked—I was a dead man walking.

I continued to brush my right hand, palm down, across the carpet in a thoughtful arcing motion, half contemplating the wonder of what was taking place across the Atlantic, half wondering whether the mad kid was going to start killing me by punching me in the stomach or in the face first and whether I would bother trying to defend myself or just let him get it over and done with. But, as these thoughts danced around my consciousness, I found myself becoming distracted, distracted by something on the floor, something under my right hand. There was a bump in the carpet.

It felt like there was something running under the texture of the weave. I ceased my stroking and lifted my hand so I could see what it was, but there was nothing there.

‘Strange,’ I thought. I checked again—the carpet tile was dark brown and quite hard to see so I leant down this time to get a little closer but, nope, there was definitely nothing to report.

I resumed my self soothing, running my hand across the carpet but again I felt the bump, almost immediately this time. Again I looked to see what it was, but again nothing. Was I going mad? It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, I was under a great deal of schoolboy stress at the time—maybe my mind had had enough of me and wanted out.

I went to stroke the carpet a third time and whatever it was, blow me it was still there; it may have been invisible but it was definitely still there. What on earth was it? And then I noticed my hand, the hand that had been doing the stroking—the three outer fingers looked like they were swollen and quite severely—not only this but they appeared to be slightly blue.

I became confused and felt the vague undertones of blind panic begin to set in. Upon further inspection, I turned my hand over and there, revealed, was the source of the mystery, a lump in my palm, the size of a golf ball.

This time, I had broken myself.

My one punch to the chin of the angry kid had been too much for my soft, little round knuckles to take, they really did hate fighting and this was the last straw, they had chosen to defend themselves instead of me and to show their disdain for such a pastime they had physically retreated into the palm of my hand.

‘Ouch,’ I thought as I realised it was now hurting, ‘that looks awful.’ ‘Brilliant,’ I thought next. ‘This is my passport out of here. The angry kid will be fighting his own shadow at home-time if this is half as bad as it looks. My fingers are obviously broken. There must be a hospital trip in this. It might even be an ambulance job. Hurrah, thank you God, let me know how much I owe you.’

Of course I waited for Columbia to launch before approaching the teacher. My hand had now begun to throb and no doubt was becoming less salvageable by the minute but there was no way I wanted to miss the launch. Besides, now that I knew I was off the hook with the angry kid, my hand may have been hurting like hell but my heart was singing—to the high heavens. With Columbia safely on her way it was time for me to disclose the nature of my injury and get the heck out of there.

There’s nothing like presenting a teacher with a genuine injury, is there?

Teachers are so ready for lesson-dodging excuses that when one is able to confront them with the real deal, one is flushed with a swell of satisfaction as the expression on their face gradually makes the journey from scepticism, all the way through to concern—stopping off somewhere in between to register a mixture of disappointment and guilt when they realise they might have to actually do something about the situation.

And so out came the trowel as I prepared to lay on the thick stuff. I took great pleasure in informing my class mistress of the obvious pain and anguish I was experiencing while offering up my increasingly ballooning right paw as evidence to such truths. I had to admit, it did look pretty dramatic, I also let her know, in no uncertain terms, that I had heroically postponed the reporting of my serious injury so as not to interrupt such momentous an event as the Space Shuttle ‘take-off ’ with such a trifling matter as my hand, which was about to ‘drop off ’.

Twenty minutes later I was home and free—well, I was actually in the hospital and free and boy, did it feel good. I had gone from condemned zero to resilient hero in less than half an hour. My initial sense of relief was quickly developing into a wave of unbearable ecstasy. Life felt mighty sweet, I can tell you. I was out of the woods and would soon be scampering down into the valley. I might have to go back to school the next day but there was no way the angry kid could pick a fight with me if I had a plaster on my arm. It wouldn’t be worth the bad ‘rep’. He would have to hold on to his anger for at least six weeks and anything could happen in that time—there could even be a war!

But, as we know, the karma police are never far away and they were about to rain on my parade, big time. One hour later I would be screaming with agony.

*Amongst many other requests, ‘celebs’ get asked to play football—a lot. As well as being fun, especially for someone who never got picked for the school teams like me, it’s a novel way of gauging your popularity from how big a cheer you get when the teams are announced to the crowd. In my Big Breakfast and Toothbrush days, I was more than happy with the volume of my welcomes. I was playing at Wembley once and Les Ferdinand, the ex-England international, was watching on the touchline. ‘How many times you played here?’ he asked. ‘I think this’ll be my seventh,’ I replied. ‘That’s more than me!’ he exclaimed. Not everything is always right in this world of ours.

Top 10 Things that Freak Me Out

10 Walking through crunchy snow

9 Anything that dangles

8 Trinkets

7 The lighting in department stores—it makes my eyes sting

6 The recurring dream where my head keeps falling off

5 People who don’t like animals

4 My friend who doesn’t ‘get’ music

3 My own heartbeat

2 Anyone else’s heartbeat

1 Hospitals

I was screaming and begging for the surgeon to stop what he was doing, pleading with him to relent. I had been transferred to the operating theatre where I was now being worked upon. Things are never as simple as you want them to be, are they?

It transpired that as a result of my injury my fingers needed to be rebroken as they had originally been broken ‘the wrong way’. I was informed of this shocking development soon after I was admitted to the accident and emergency department. I was told it would be impossible for my fingers to be set in their current state, not an uncommon occurrence apparently. Maybe not uncommon to the medical profession but it was ‘news just in’ to me—as was the local anaesthetic that had since been hastily administered.

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