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  On our return from holiday, we discovered a poor desperate Torty had obviously pulled so hard at his string that it had broken and flipped him over, and there he was on his back, legs waggling frantically in the air. I suppose he’d not been like that for long or he would not have been waggling in any sense.

  My early schooldays are a bit of a blur apart from a couple of stand-out incidents. On my first day at St Mary’s Platt Primary, I was understandably full of trepidation, and when we all arrived at our allocated desks in the classroom and were told to sit down, I duly obeyed, only to find myself sitting on the floor, much to the amusement of my new acquaintances. A boy had pulled my chair away as an extremely funny joke and made me look utterly ridiculous at the age of five. I suspect I stored that up and let some poor hapless heckler have it at some point during my early stand-up days. They liked their jokes at St Mary’s Platt. One morning we were all told to undress down to our vest and pants and troop into the school hall for a medical examination. On arrival, arranged in rows before a group of teachers, we were informed that this was an April Fool. About half the kids didn’t seem to know what they were on about, and the rest of us were just pleased we’d got off spelling for ten minutes.

  I do remember, very vaguely, a broken heart at the age of six. A boy I liked very much indeed, called Andrew, emigrated to Australia and I felt bereft. He was blond, had a nice face and was very sweet-tempered and un-oafish, unlike a lot of the boys, who pushed each other around and seemed to have a mental age several years below the girls. Andrew wrote me a charming letter in his childish hand, saying he would miss me, and we even managed one of those chaste, childish kisses that last 0.03 of a second. As far as I remember, the letter was very matter-of-fact and stated the bald facts. When you’re six, you don’t really write long heartfelt epistles. I think it said something like:

  ‘I’m going to Australia. I will miss you. I love you. A x’

  The letter, of course, has disappeared, but my memory of the kiss hasn’t.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DONKEY DAYS

  If you are blessed enough to have happy memories of your childhood, you probably remember one particular place above all others as representational of those faraway days, and Benenden in Kent is the scene that I constantly rewind to in moments of contemplation about my childhood. We moved there when I was about seven or eight, and it was pretty much the perfect Kent village. Life seemed to revolve around the green to some extent: church at the top, primary school on one side, vicarage on the other and post office and sweet shop at the bottom, with a pub either side for good measure.

  Initially, we lived outside the village, down a country lane flanked by woods and fields, in a converted old house which stood next to a large and wealthy looking country pile occupied by a mother and daughter aged approximately seventy and fifty. They were posh, and we knew they were because they said ‘dunkey’ instead of ‘donkey’.

  Our house had a massive garden leading down to some woods with a stream running through it and Enid Blyton (or to contemporise it a bit, JK Rowling) could have constructed a decent story round the myriad opportunities for adventure contained in it.

  I think at this point in time my mum wasn’t too happy. The house was isolated, and with two posh old girls next door, there weren’t many opportunities for socialising nearby. The house was a long way from any social centre, so my mum was stuck on her own in the house all day. I know I would have gone slowly mad and I assume she did too.

  It’s strange when you’re a child because your parents tend to look older than Old Father Time himself. I think at this time my mum was only thirty, but in my eyes she looked about sixty-five. Also, in the sixties, older women tended to wear what I consider ‘adult’ clothes and the gulf between them and younger people was very visible. So I remember my mum in a selection of tailored dresses and skirts: in the summer pale, checked dresses with a white collar and in the winter sensible jumpers and skirts. She had short dark hair cut in a utilitarian style, didn’t wear make-up unless she was going out and had sensible country-type, lace-up shoes. Lots of the other mothers were a bit more decorative. The perm was king, but thankfully my mum didn’t cave in because I’ve always thought they add at least ten years on, as well as making you look like a poodle.

  My mother may have been unhappy, but my brothers and I were only too happy to dive headfirst into this glorious rural playground, consisting as it did of trees to climb, water to fall into, grass to run around on, animals to spot, ropes to swing on and long days during which we would disappear, only returning to the house for meals.

  We attended the village school on the green, and it was there I first encountered teachers I did not like, who I thought were unkind and didn’t really seem to like children. It’s always hard as a child to get your head around bad adults. The rigid teaching method of some of the teachers was manifested in a number of ways—with sarcasm and cruel comments, and the threat of and occasionally actual violence. There was a sporadic atmosphere of menace which kept our excessive behaviour in check, apart from the odd deviation by the more daring kids.

  I remember one child who had a reputation for naughtiness once being told to go and get his shoe bag from the cloakroom and the rest of us watched in fascinated horror as it was swung high in the air several times before making contact with various parts of his body, the net result being more humiliation than pain, carried out as it was in full view of the class. My older brother Bill’s class were all lined up outside one day and caned one by one, because one child would not own up to some minor misdemeanour. Once I asked twice in the same lesson to go to the toilet and was informed by the teacher that I would have to bring a potty into school. With the laughter of the class resounding in my ears, I seethed with shame and hated this teacher from that day forward. It was a more effective punishment than a slap round the legs with my own shoe bag.

  But, all in all, I think I was pretty well-behaved and a good pupil. I was very rarely in trouble. Not because I was afraid of the teachers particularly, but I was terrified of doing something wrong and it getting back to my parents, who would have come down on me like a ton of bricks. I had lots of friends, felt confident and happy and was very keen on sport. We played sports on the village green and I remember rounders being my favourite. There was nothing quite as satisfying as giving that hard red ball a resounding thwack and making it all the way round the posts while some hapless child legged it out to the edge of the green to try to retrieve the ball.

  We played lots of different games in the playground, skipping being a favourite of most of the girls, and skipping games became quite complex, involving running in and out of the rope while two girls chanted some rhyme or other which I now can’t bring to mind. Hopscotch was another one and I’m surprised that we never got bored with the endless routine of chucking a stone and hopping up and down the grid, but we didn’t.

  When I was a kid we had proper weather too, of a non-global-warming variety, and I can remember struggling into school in deep snow to find crates of school milk warming gently on the radiator. They were such sweet little miniature bottles, they looked as though elves had delivered them. In the winter, if the bottles froze, the tops would be forced up, so the bottles looked like they had little hats on. I’m just warning all my family and friends that this is the kind of crap I’m going to refer to endlessly when I’m old and trapped in some residential home, so you may not want to come and visit me.

  School consisted of a fair bit of rote learning, punctuated by playtime. I must be one of the few kids who never really came across any bullies in the playground. On the whole, we all got on very well. It was some of the teachers I wasn’t so keen on. Perhaps the most dramatic incident I witnessed in the playground involved my brother Bill, who one day during the winter slipped on some ice and banged his face badly (in those days Health and Safety only extended to not allowing sawn-offs to be brought into school). The result of Bill’s contact with the ice was that he went into some sort
of shock and began to vomit, very impressively, through his nose. He was the talk of the school for days. I just wish that impressing one’s peers was that easy when you’re grown up, although at a certain age, when group holidays to cheap European destinations are what you crave, vomiting through any orifice comes fairly high on the How To Impress Your Friends list.

  School dinners were always a source of physical pain back then. Choice was a much derided concept, as were vegetables cooked in under four weeks. Stews and meat pies seemed to consist of all the bits of an animal it makes one shudder to think of. They were always hidden within a glutinous mass of what was laughingly called gravy and so the satisfaction (or otherwise) of seeing what you were about to consume was denied you.

  My mother, revolutionary that she was, once told me that her school meals were so appalling that one day the girls all decided to refuse their meal. By the end of the afternoon the weaker ones had peeled off, caved in and eaten their cold dinners, just leaving my mum sitting alone in glorious ignominy.

  My mum went to school in south London, a Catholic girls’ school, strict and regimented by the sound of it. I think she always challenged the blind authority that the nuns imposed and resented the slightly sadistic nature of the nuns who taught her. It’s a cliché to say it, but why do the vast majority of the women who choose to get married to God end up being frustrated, evil old bags who seem to take a delight in putting the boot in? Their behaviour isn’t Christian by any stretch of the imagination, and the many Catholics I’ve spoken to who ended up working on the comedy circuit all say the same thing—that their lives were blighted by the cruelty of the nuns/monks teaching them. My mum rejected Catholicism while she was a schoolgirl because of what she observed first hand, and so we were not brought up to be Catholic, which I am grateful for. In order to become a comic I had to create my own emotional disturbance rather than have it imposed upon me.

  We never refused the appallingly badly cooked first course at school for fear we would be denied pudding. I loved most puddings. They were possibly about 12,000 calories a throw, but they compensated for the cow’s perineum under a blanket of pastry you had just forced down. My three top puddings were:

  Gypsy tart

  Gypsy tart was sublime. It was a kind of sticky, light-brown goo in a pastry case, and I have often searched for the recipe in order to recreate it. I think it was made out of brown sugar and condensed milk which had been boiled and reduced down until it became almost solid. I have done some rather meagre research on whether other people I know had gypsy tart at school and although I’ve come across a handful, it seems it was only served to children who went to school in Kent. You could feel your arteries clogging up while you were eating it.

  Jam roly-poly

  What can I say? The name is enough to make you fall in love with this pudding, a kind of superannuated Swiss roll, made with suet to give it a heavy, lardy feel, which would sit in the bottom of your stomach and make you feel sleepy and apathetic all afternoon. Tasted bloody marvellous though.

  Apple crumble

  A very difficult pudding to mess up. The crumble was always a bit thicker than the fruit contained underneath, just the way I like it!

  Unfortunately these spongy puddings were always served with that standard school accompaniment, lumpy custard, which all but ruined them for me. So I developed a painstaking way of raking the custard over the pudding so that it was thin enough to identify the lumps, which I would then remove and dispose of, sometimes into a handy tissue, if I had one, which I didn’t very often, or I would just smear them under the table. Yum.

  Similar to custard in some ways, and a horror for me, was pink blancmange. I never knew what it was supposed to be—strawberry, raspberry or what. It could have been beetroot for all the flavour it had. The worst thing about it was the thick layer of skin on top. It would have been fine if it could have been lifted up, like a blancmange blanket, and deposited somewhere, but the cooks always seemed to make sure it was broken up and stirred in, so every mouthful had a little or big lump in it. It still makes me feel slightly sick when I think of it.

  Despite it being the major part of my day, I remember school as a tiny element in my life as an eight-year-old.

  There was so much to do out of school, and a typical weekend day would find my brothers and me out in the woods with our wellies on, hitting each other with sticks, building a precarious bridge over the stream or chasing each other wildly through the woods. One day either Bill or Matt trod in a wasps’ nest, resulting in an extreme temper-tantrum by the wasps therein. Out they came, like cartoon wasps, buzzing wildly and looking for revenge. At this point immediate decisions had to be made and I ran one way and the boys the other. Thankfully for me, the wasps decided they wanted male flesh and as I ran I could see the swarm chasing them. But as many of you will concur I’m sure, the pain of one’s siblings when you are a child is a source of great delight on the whole, and when I arrived home, having hidden in a big tree just to check they weren’t after me, I found Bill and Matt stung pretty badly, bemoaning their fate, which gave me a great deal of pleasure. I’m sure my mum must have despaired that she was raising a psycho daughter at that point and, of course, with hindsight, I realise it is shocking to revel in your brothers’ pain. It just goes to show that the cauldron of sibling rivalry and the intense hate it engenders at that age is something alien to adult analysis. Bill and Matt were constantly taunting me, pinching me, whipping me with bendy sticks, pushing me off gates, and so when they got it in the neck … enormous pleasure for me.

  My dad rented a field up the lane while we lived at this house, which added another layer of joy for us. In the middle was a pond with fish and the field itself was surrounded by woods. It seemed huge to me, being seven acres, the size of about eight football pitches.

  At one point during our childhood we were given for an hour or so a baby to look after who belonged to my mum’s friend Margie. I’ve no idea why on earth that baby was put in the charge of three children between the ages of six and ten, but she was, and we were allowed to take her off up to the field for a walk, wrapped in her charming, downy white blanket. We took turns holding her and I have to say we took liberties with that poor child, occasionally stopping to play catch with her along the way. She loved it, however, and giggled her head off as she was propelled a short distance through the air into the arms of a waiting child. When we got to the field, we thought we’d show her the pond. It was slap-bang in the middle of the field, surrounded by trees, and had a small jetty poking out into the water. Bill used to fish off it.

  I think our original idea was to dangle her feet into the pond, another attempt at trying to make her laugh. So we went out along the little jetty, as the banks were a bit muddy and tended to give way. One of us, I can’t remember who, held her off the end of the jetty and attempted to dangle her down into the water. But it was quite difficult to hold her, the grip loosened and she sploshed into the pond. She was immediately grabbed and pulled out before she could float off or sink and we carried her back home in a right state, smelling of pond water. I can’t remember how we explained it, but I know we didn’t actually confess to the fact that we’d dropped her—that would have been no sweets for a couple of years. Not my finest moment of childcare, and it’s a good job I didn’t include that on my CV when I applied for a job at Barnardo’s later in my life.

  As if having our own field and pond wasn’t enough, a local woman asked my dad if she could put her three donkeys in the field for a while. They were a mother and two sons, rather inappropriately named Rag, Tag and Bobtail. They were not particularly tame, and we spent hours playing Wild West-type games trying to lasso them with my mum’s washing line. We accidentally discovered that if you touched the top of their tails, it sent them slightly mad. Cue invitations to all the local kids, who would gingerly haul themselves on and then find themselves haring down the field, clinging on for dear life, once the ‘touch tail’ method was employed. Their journey would normall
y end when whichever donkey it was bucked them off into a big patch of mud. Superb entertainment.

  My brothers and I continued to challenge each other at every possible opportunity, and on one occasion I was sitting on a half-open five-bar gate at the top of the field when, for a laugh, they pushed the gate, sending me toppling backwards and ripping open the underside of my arm as I descended, on so me handy rusty barbed wire. As you can imagine, it really, really, really hurt, but something inside me prevented me from crying in front of my brothers. Once they saw tears falling, they saw that as some sort of victory. So I did anger and swearing instead, the sort of swearing you do when you’re eight, which is normally something along the lines of ‘You buggering fuck!’ because you’re not quite sure how to put the words together for maximum shock effect. It all ends up being slightly humorous. I went off home on my own, saying I could manage, and once out of sight of my brothers, I cried my eyes out. Not only was there pain, but the sight of half of the inside of my arm hanging out, most of which appeared to be made of yellow marmalade, made me cry even more. A visit to the local casualty department ensued and I still have a charming scar to remind me of that day.

  Despite the fact that the house next door was inhabited by two old ladies, it was of great interest to us, because we’d heard it was haunted by a ghost called Kitty Fisher (yes, the very same one from the nursery rhyme ‘Lucy Locket Lost Her Pocket’). A lapse in manners occurred again, much to my mother’s embarrassment, when we cornered the younger of the two ladies and asked if we could stay the night and see the ghost. Weirdly, she agreed, so despite my mother’s attempts to reverse the invitation, we set off one evening in our pyjamas to the haunted house. We’d all been put in the same bedroom and I don’t mind admitting I was shit scared. I think my brothers were displaying a bit more macho bravado than me and eventually, after much giggling and ghost noises, we dropped off to sleep.