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Life on Mars

I have never smoked tobacco, except in the odd joint when I was aged 19 to 21, which we’ll address a bit later on. I say this because, in fact, I probably smoked a pack a day just by being around my parents. My God, could they puff away. Aged 16, they tried to enlist me in the filthy weed society, but it was my greatest act of rebellion to evade their yellow-stained clutches.

Drink was frequent, and frequently reckless. My father was violently anti-seatbelts on the grounds that they might strangle you, and I lost count of the number of times he drove home blind drunk.

Nothing in childhood is ever wasted, except occasionally parents.

So now I really don’t recommend drinking anything alcoholic at all and then driving, not even one. Of course, youth and indestructibility means I am guilty of hypocrisy of the first order, but fortunately I grew up a little bit before I killed myself, or, more importantly, killed an innocent somebody else.

But we have fast-forwarded way too far in our time machine. The button to push for the cassette recorder did not even exist as I joined my new school in what was supposedly a rough area of Sheffield, Manor Top.

Actually, I thought it was okay. I learnt to extrude mashed potato, fish and peas (it was Friday, after all) through pursed lips, forming a crinkly curtain with which you could compete with your fellow diners for longevity before it fell from your mouth.

I think Gary Larson must have attended this school too, because the scary horn-rimmed glasses on the female staff gave them that designer concentration-camp-guard look beloved of seventies sexploitation films. Better still were the Hannibal Lecter types who administered the punishment beatings. Abusing mashed potato and peas was a beatable offence, and a stick was laid heavily into your outstretched palm. To be quite honest I don’t even remember if it hurt that much. It just seemed a bizarre thing to do, witnessed and solemnly entered in the punishment book. I felt as though I should have been wearing striped pyjamas on Devil’s Island.

I didn’t stay at that school for long because we moved. Moving was to become a feature of my life forever, but as a family our stock in trade was moving house, mainly to make money. My new abode was a basement, which I shared with my new sister, Helena, who was by now a sentient being capable of actual words.

There was a window the size of an iPad, which opened into a gutter full of dead leaves. There was a refrigerator with an enjoyable electrical fault. I would hang on to it with a damp cloth and see how much electricity I could take before my teeth started rattling. Up the stone steps was the rest of humanity. And oh … what humanity. I was living in a hotel. A guest house. My parents ran it. My father had bought it. He sold second-hand cars from the front of it.

Dramatically, the house next door was purchased. Suddenly, the empire struck back and built an extension linking the two properties. Dad rolled out his blueprints, which he’d drawn and designed himself. I found a piece of wallpaper and tried to design a spaceship with life-support systems to go to Mars.

Builders appeared and they seemed to be working for him as well. As for me, I gained useful, if poorly paid employment. I didn’t put up buildings but it was bloody good fun knocking them down. Demolishing toilets was my speciality. When I was at university later on I could never take seriously the exhortation to ‘smash the system’; I knew much more about smashing cisterns than they ever would. It was all very impressive.

Next, the hotel, the Lindrick, had a bar constructed to Dad’s own design. As far as I could tell, the Lindrick never really closed at weekends, especially with Dad behind the bar. I would hear the tales on Monday from Lily.

‘Ooh, that Mr So and So headbutted Mr Rigby … and then that other fellow was dancing on the table and fell over. Ooh, he broke the table in half, you know. It was teak as well. I think it was his head what did it …’

It was all bed-hopping among the travelling salesmen, and some of the people who stayed were just plain odd. One creepy individual stayed for two weeks and gave me a card and whispered, ‘Ay up, I practise Karma Yoga.’ He would then leave at 7 p.m. and walk the streets till dawn. And no, he didn’t have a dog to walk.

Other people came, and some never left. A few dropped dead in bed. If it was a horrible death, everyone was kept informed by Grandma Lily: ‘She were burnt to death in her car …’

One evening, two gentlemen surprised each other in the dark, each of them assuming they had been fondling a female guest. That took quite some sorting out in the morning. It was like living in a permanent state of farce.

More bits were being added to the hotel all the time, and more of the family moved up to Sheffield. My paternal grandparents, Ethel and Morris, sold up their seaside boarding house and moved in down the road. Grandad Dickinson was a dead ringer for rascally actor Wilfrid Hyde-White, only with a broadish Norfolk accent. A roll-up behind one ear, a pencil behind the other and the racing paper in hand, he set about what would now be called ‘repurposing’ buildings. In practice that meant knocking them down, but using the dressed stone to put them up somewhere else.

Grandma Dickinson was a formidable woman. Six foot tall, with intense, black curly hair and a gaze that would fell a tree at 20 paces, she’d worked as a servant girl, and had been purchased from the railway carriage where she lived with 18 other girls on the land. She was fleet of foot and might have had an athletic career, but she couldn’t afford shoes: 200 metres barefoot was no match for the opposition in spikes. She never forgot that humiliation till the day she died.

While Ethel baked cakes, Morris would emerge from the toilet with a half-smoked roll-up and lots of boxes ticked for the horses. ‘Here you are, sonny – don’t let on,’ he’d say, and he would slip me half a crown from his hand, clawed from years of laying bricks and handling trowels.

At a family summit spent drinking all afternoon in our hotel bar, my uncle Rod did me several favours, one of which was to persuade me never to have a tattoo. Uncle Rod (who was actually my uncle – my dad’s brother) was charismatic to say the least, and frankly looked a bit like one of these roguish gangsters who might be surrounded by women of easy virtue. Right now, though, I sat on his knee aged 10 as he explained the British film-certification system to me: ‘Now, yer ’ave yer X films and, basically, yer have your sex X and yer horror X …’

Whatever he said next faded into the background as I stared at the scars on the back of both of his hands. Uncle Rod had a habit in his youth of misplacing other people’s motorcars. Despite the family’s best efforts, he was so prolific that he was sent to a horrific young offender’s institution known as borstal. Self-tattooing with brick dust and ink was the thing in borstal, and it marked you for life as a product of that institution. Uncle Rod had spent what then would have been a considerable amount of money to get them removed. It was early skin-graft surgery, and these days it would qualify as a special effect in a low-budget horror movie. I just thought, I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got. That really doesn’t look like much fun.

Then Uncle Rod reverted to talking about war films. I had seen loads of them with Grandfather Austin: 633 Squadron, The Dam Busters, Battle of Britain, The Charge of the Light Brigade.

‘And what about Ice Station Zebra?’ I piped up.

‘’Aven’t seen that one,’ he grunted, and he went back to his pint.

Ice Station Zebra was the movie that introduced me to my first rock ’n’ roll band. Yes, with a truck, electric guitars and gigs. The band were called the Casuals. They’d had a hit with a track called ‘Jesamine’ and were now playing residencies at clubs for a week or so at a time. They stayed in the hotel, and during the daytime – which for them, being creatures of the night, didn’t start till midday – they would surface, bleary-eyed and longhaired, in stack-heeled boots and white trousers, for a late breakfast of tea and toast provided by Lily, who was all of a twitter.

I am sure I must have appeared precocious with my questions about rockets and submarines, and it was probably a way of levelling the playing field that the guitarist brought down his electric guitar. I held it. It was surprisingly heavy. He explained carefully how it worked, and I just stared at the round steel discs under the strings and tried to imagine how sound really worked, produced from such tiny fragments with the tinniest-sounding twanging strings.

Like most bands, they were bored silly during the day, and they decided to go to the cinema. Ice Station Zebra was on at the Sheffield Gaumont. Popcorn in hand, aged 10, sitting in a cinema with a rock ’n’ roll band watching a war movie about nuclear submarines and rockets: I thought, This is living.

Dad expanded his empire and purchased a bankrupt petrol station. It was a huge property, an old tram garage with four ancient petrol pumps, no canopy, and workshops full of caked oil and dirt half an inch thick adhering to 50-year-old bricks. The motor trade started to dominate our lives. I pumped petrol in between falling off scaffolding (repurposing buildings), and polished cars and scrubbed wheels with wire wool until my fingers turned blue in winter. I washed windscreens, checked tyres and watched the growing number of cars coming and going as sales picked up.

Dad was an encyclopaedia of motor-car components. He was a natural engineer and would go straight to the heart of the problem. His diagnosis was seldom wrong. He could recount the provenance of the exhaust system of the Fiat whatever-it-was, and why it was superior to the gizmo of the Ford, but anyway, both of them were actually designed by an unknown Hungarian genius. That sort of thing. Get him started, it could go on for hours.

We sold up the hotel as he acquired the dealership for Lancia motor cars, and did rather well until they produced one that rusted faster than you could drive it. I expect money must have been made on the house transactions because there was a property boom, and a house was still an achievable objective for a working family. At one point we made the mistake of selling before we had anywhere else to live. It must have been a very good deal.

In the end we moved back into a terraced house only a hundred yards up from the hotel we’d vacated a year or so earlier. Some people are addicted to crack. We were addicted to moving house.

If You Want Skool, You Got It

In the midst of all this I was relocated to a hothouse environment. I was being spirited away from the evil influence of mashed potato, spit and being straight-armed by the locals.

I was on my way to a private school: Birkdale preparatory school, alma mater of, among others, Michael Palin of Monty Python fame. It was one of the strangest, most eccentric educational institutions I have ever encountered and actually, in the end, I quite enjoyed it. I say in the end because in the beginning the bullying was fairly intense. I use the term ‘fairly intense’ only in comparison with what came later, at boarding school.

Bullying happens because weak people need to prop up their ego by beating up or humiliating others. Of course, if you are a new arrival, or just different, you become a prime target. I ticked all the boxes. Break time was the worst, up against the dustbins with 12 kids hitting you, watched over by a female teacher, whom I assume must have got some kind of power trip from not stopping it. In remembrance of both grandfathers I always refused to submit. The odds were ridiculous, but I still fought back. I wasn’t going away.

After a year or so it calmed down, and a year after that it was as if nothing had happened and my very own self was assimilated into the group mind – or so they thought.

I took refuge in books, the library, writing and drama. The angelic wings of yore came back to haunt me, and I got my first namecheck in a review of a school play in the Sheffield Star, no less.

‘Mole, besmudged of face, played by Paul Dickinson.’ (Bruce, of course, is my middle name, but then you knew that.)

I was a bit disappointed that they omitted to mention that I got a good, proper laugh from the audience. Early lessons in comic timing during our school production of The Wind in the Willows also included dropping my wooden sword during a pregnant pause, which corpsed the stalls, and delivering the correct line ‘I say Ratty, this chicken is delicious’ while clearly eating a lemon tart.

Further productions followed and I was sold on the stage, though, truthfully, actors seemed to take it awfully seriously.

Lessons proceeded normally. In other words, I don’t remember a thing, except that the Merino sheep has a spectacular coat, and a rather splendid view of Tolkien from my history teacher, Mr Quiney: ‘One bloody feast after another, a long dreary walk, a battle and some rubbish songs.’ I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was 12. Entertaining, but he had a point.

For those wishing to learn French there was Mr White. But Mr White was only interested in playing with his vast train set, which occupied half of the top floor. French lessons consisted of watching the OO-gauge Flying Scotsman whizzing round for 20 minutes.

Classes were streamed in sets A, B, C or D, from the most brilliant to the severely challenged or just plain bored. I yo-yoed from one set to another. I was always just plain bored, but was bribed to do well by the promise of a bike with racing handlebars should I leap up the pecking order.

Towards the end of my time I found myself in a class with only eight people, and we didn’t have lessons as such. We sat around, talked, argued, discussed, wrote things because we wanted to, and played practical jokes that tried to be interesting rather than just cruel. Teachers came and we spoke as equals. It was extraordinary. It felt like my brain was popping with ideas, like popcorn in a pan. Delightful.

Of course, there was a reason. The aim of this whole process was to take a fairly stiff set of exams that took a whole week in order to get into the highly competitive boarding-school system from age 12 or 13 to 18.

Big boys’ stuff.

School wasn’t the only place to get an education, however. I learnt to ride a bike, and hurtled around the neighbourhood. I had a chemistry set, which stubbornly refused to make anything of any entertainment value, and my dad taught me to play chess. We played frequently, until one day I beat him, and then we stopped.

On holidays in Great Yarmouth I spent my time surrounded by zinc buckets full of pennies. The expression ‘bucketloads of money’ was simply work in progress for an amusement arcade on the sea front. It was owned by my cousin Russell’s parents.

Every trip to Great Yarmouth ended up in the flat above the amusement arcade. It was furnished with questionable coffee tables supported by Nubian-slave statues, and a carpet that was more like a white hairy sea of synthetic tendrils that looked like it would eat you if it didn’t like your shoes. There was small talk, and then I was presented with the cast-offs from my cousins: hideous suede-fronted cardigans and other monstrosities designed to make a 10-year-old look like 50 years old.

Buoyancy was a family trait. In order to learn not to drown, my father had simply been thrown in the Norfolk Broads. I learnt to swim under his supervision, but in not quite as abusive a fashion. Somewhere, lurking in the bottom of a mouldy suitcase, is my certificate from Heeley Baths, Sheffield, listing that I, on that day, swam 10 yards in approved style. After ingesting enough chlorine to blind a First World War battalion, I squinted pink-eyed from the sunlight, relieved that the ordeal was over. My dad swam like a fish. He would swim three miles in the ocean as a boy. I, on the other hand, have always regarded swimming as thoroughly hazardous. It is merely preventative drowning. I am one of nature’s sinkers. ‘Relax,’ cry the floaters, but sadly my feet go the way of gravity and the rest follows suit.

Before we venture through the hallowed portals of an English public school, there are a few more pieces of the jigsaw to throw on the table.

I was reasonably solitary. I wasn’t interested in sport. I spent long afternoons at the weekend in the public library, browsing and daydreaming. I had discovered wargaming, and my evenings were spent researching the accuracy of the Brown Bess musket and the tactics of the infantry square, and painting my white-metal Scots Highlanders, shortly to be unleashed on an unsuspecting Napoleon.

My uncle Stewart, a teacher, had been a county table-tennis champion, so, for Christmas, a rather fine table-tennis table appeared. Dad and his brothers batted away and argued over who had won, then went off to the pub. I immediately organised the Battle of Waterloo to be refought on it the next day. It was green and it was flat – perfect. It was one of many small events that caused my father to regard me somewhat strangely, as if subverting a table-tennis table was somehow unmanly.

I had developed a wonderful set of spots as I approached the day I would leave home and take up residence for the next four years at Oundle School in Northamptonshire. Not great, but seeing as there were no girls anywhere on the horizon, not a showstopper. What made them break out into suppurating sores was the application of engine oil, burnt rubber and grime-encrusted fingernails. Just before semi-leaving home, I’d been introduced to motor racing.

Tim, a friend at school, and his elder brother Nick had a very enthusiastic father. He drove a massive Cadillac and had a huge trailer, in which was a miniature racing team for his sons. As far as I could gather, he owned a nightclub and drank a great deal of barley wine.

The karts were 100cc rotary valve, and they were very fast. I had never even turned a wheel before, but I just got in the seat, got my bump start and hurtled off towards the first corner down the long straight at Lindholme, the former RAF base.

I turned the wheel, did a 360-degree spin and stalled the engine. I did the same thing at just about every corner round the circuit before I got back to the trailer, followed by two very sweaty brothers gasping their last after chasing me round the circuit and restarting me half-a-dozen times.

We debriefed. Clearly I needed more information as to what was going on.

By the end of the day I thought I was flying: foot flat to the floor, down the straight, braking as hard and as late as I dared, the adrenalin shooting through my hands and heart. The truth is, I probably just about made it round without spinning off, but bugger that, steam engine driver, fighter pilot and astronaut – add racing-car driver to the list.

Angelic Upstart

Before we go to boarding school, with all that entails, can I just have a word about religion? Something I experienced, and experimented with and had experimented upon me at four, too early an age. The outcome, though, was totally unexpected, and if God ever moved in a mysterious way, here was proof positive.

I don’t recall my baptism, but apparently I somehow managed to ingest quite a quantity of holy water. I could have drowned in the font. I am not sure that swallowing God’s special sauce caused any sort of aura to appear, but it might have been an influence on my early interest in angel wings.

School had the usual harvest festival and a bit of dreary carol singing, but it was only when I arrived at Birkdale that I was exposed to evangelical religion, bible black and fighting Satan on all fronts.

There was a cabal of zealous teachers and, by chance or design, they were the same teachers that ran school expeditions, including one to Fort William in Scotland. It consisted of 10 days’ camping, playing robust semi-military games, climbing mountains, bridging rivers, leaping from tree to tree (‘The Lumberjack Song’, anyone?) and religious brainwashing. Think Bear Grylls with no possibility of escape.

There were prayers and lectures, and every evening there was a group assembly in which 10-year-olds were encouraged to stand up and identify sins, and would be rewarded for their folly by rapturous praise, hugs and applause. I stood up and identified a fly on the wall, which was clearly a servant of Satan, because it had been distracting me from the balderdash being spouted by the part-time messiahs and full-time school teachers.

With no sense of irony at the age of 10, I was welcomed into the fold, and told that I was now evangelised. My purpose in life was to go and convert people to Christ.

Well, being a mission-oriented sort of chap, I sallied forth into the town and set about converting a couple of Highland girls by handing them a leaflet and inviting them to the campsite for a fun evangelical evening of happy-clappy hymns accompanied by bad guitar-playing and Aran sweaters.