Life and Laughing: My Story (20 page)

I look quite good here with Lucy. I’m thin, I have a tan, but of course I have to ruin it with those glasses and that ‘I’m on my gap year’ necklace.

Unbeknownst to me, my days at Merchant Taylors’ were numbered. I was in my first year of A-Levels and, despite my failure to connect socially with anybody there, I was settled. I had worked hard and done well in my GCSEs (five As and four Bs) and was studying Biology, Chemistry and Geography for my A-Levels. I didn’t particularly enjoy these subjects, but I was pretty good at them. They weren’t vocational; I didn’t plan on becoming a doctor or a weatherman. I opened the batting for the cricket team and was top scorer in the hockey team. I had less than two years remaining, and then I suppose I planned on going to university like everyone else. But then, totally out of the blue, in the middle of term, in the middle of the week, my father telephoned. We normally spoke on Sundays, so his phoning was irregular.

‘Hi, Dad, what’s up?’

‘Are you sitting down?’ my dad said, seriously.

It seemed like such an odd question. Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. He was going to tell me something that could potentially make me fall over. What could this collapse-worthy news be? Anyway, I wasn’t sitting down.

‘No, I’m not, I’m not sitting down. Shall I sit down?’ I was intrigued by this whole sitting-down thing.

‘I think you should,’ my dad confirmed, keeping the same serious tone.

I was speaking on the frog phone in the hall. There was nowhere to sit.

‘There’s no chair here. Shall I sit on the floor?’ This conversation was getting weirder and weirder.

‘If you want, Michael, sit on the floor,’ my dad agreed.

I sat cross-legged on the carpet.

‘OK, I’m on the floor now, Dad, I’m sitting on the floor. What is it?’

‘Michael, I’m very sorry but you have to leave your school. I’m in serious financial trouble, and I simply can’t afford to pay the fees any longer. I’m so very sorry, I know you’re happy there. I’ve tried very hard to find a solution, but I can’t.’

When my parents split up my father had agreed to pay school fees for Lucy and me. Lucy went to Henrietta Barnet, one of the best state schools in the country that was conveniently located less than a mile from our home, but my dad still had to fork out a small fortune to send me to a school nowhere near my home so that I could be surrounded by characterless, suburban twats and one suspected paedophile.

At this point my dad had been in America for about five years. His explanation for things not working out was that in England he was a big fish in a small pond but in the States he was a small fish in a big pond. When you also consider he had to cross the pond to get there, you can see the kind of nightmare he was having. He had been ripped off by one of his partners at his video production company in LA and Holly’s shop, Lemonade Lake, hadn’t been as profitable as hoped. They had downsized in LA before moving north to the breathtakingly beautiful state of Vermont. There they had opened another Lemonade Lake, this time selling toys, and lived a much simpler life. So there was little income. The Range Rovers, BMWs, Jaguars, swimming pools, tennis courts, farm animals and trampolines were over. Showbusiness is tough and unforgiving and my dad was now in his early fifties. If only he had stayed in London and been a comedy exec at the BBC – but he chased a dream in America and it backfired.

I wasn’t devastated at all. I needn’t have sat on the floor. In fact I wished I hadn’t, as I got quite bad pins and needles and when I moved I cried out in pain. My father misinterpreted this and thought I was taking the news very badly. The only thing that did upset me was that his paying my fees was one of the few links I had to him. I had an argument with him the previous year when he suggested that I went to a state sixth-form college. ‘You’d have to give me the money for the fees,’ I said. He was unbelievably upset by this remark, but it was not born out of greed. I didn’t want his money; I wanted to feel like he was giving me something.

I hated my school, and the prospect of taking my brown face and white neck out of there seemed quite exciting. My mum and dad had apparently been in cahoots over this for a while. This wasn’t a maybe, it was happening, now. Merchant Taylors’ were aware of the situation, and I had an interview the following day at a local state sixth-form college in Finchley. I was moving to state school. I wish it had been filmed, as it would have made for a hilarious Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary.

Let me tell you a bit about the school life I was accustomed to. I wore a uniform with a tie representing my ‘house’ called Hilles. There were school ‘houses’ who played each other at sport and had meetings and such. When the teacher entered, we had to stand up and say, ‘Good morning, sir’ or ‘Good afternoon, sir.’ The teachers wore black cloaks that wafted behind them as they walked. The headmaster wore all the gear. He had several cloaks and a big hat, so his authority was in no doubt.

I had no idea what was appropriate to wear to the interview at Woodhouse College. I suggested to my mum that I wear my Merchant Taylors’ uniform without the tie. She told me to look smart, so I donned my elephant T-shirt, cords and loafers. My brother Nicholas was at nursery, but Thomas was still a baby so he had to come with us. Our appointment with the headmaster was at 11 a.m. We arrived in good time with Thomas conveniently sleeping in his pushchair.

The college was a lateral, not unpleasant Georgian building. Inside, it was much like you would expect, modern, sterile, functional, cheap. My mum and I sat on seats not designed for comfort outside the headmaster’s office. I was nervous. Waiting outside any headmaster’s office is nerve-wracking.

At five minutes to eleven, the headmaster’s door opened. My heart skipped a beat. False alarm, it was a man in a tracksuit top. It must be the gym teacher.

‘Hello? Michael, is it? If you’re early, then we might as well start,’ he said, kindly.

Good Lord, it was the headmaster. In a tracksuit top. What kind of a place was this?

My mother and I stood up to the shared relief of our bottoms. Thomas was still soundly asleep in his pushchair. I decided to break the atmosphere with a joke. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ I said to the headmaster, ‘but I brought my wife and child along.’

This, I repeat, was a joke. I thought that was obvious. Apparently not for the headmaster of a state school that teaches sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds.

‘That’s absolutely fine, Michael,’ said the headmaster, ‘many of our students have kids here.’

Unbelievable. Where was I?

The interview went so well that at the end he said he was not just happy to accept me into the college, but also offered me the position of English teacher.

So within days of taking my father’s phone call while sitting cross-legged on the carpet, I was starting at a new school. This time nervousness did not make me posh, it made me mute. Everybody else had started at the college about six weeks earlier, they had made friends and formed cliques. I was a late entrant, the new guy. I took the same number bus I used to take, but this time in the opposite direction. When I arrived for my first day, the scene was a far cry from the samey Merchant Taylors’ pupils. The major difference was that the lack of school uniform meant the students could express themselves at a time in life when they were extremely keen to express themselves. Every fashion statement ever made was being made by someone, and every race, creed and colour was represented. When I got inside the main building, it resembled the departures lounge of an international airport.

I kept my head down and kept quiet. I was terrified, but already enjoying it more than Merchant Taylors’. The exciting difference from what I was used to was girls. Girls, girls, girls, everywhere. Small ones, big ones, white ones, black ones, brown ones, tall ones, short ones, blonde ones, brunette ones, ginger (strawberry blonde) ones, a bald one (what’s going on there?), too-much-make-up-wearing ones, not-enough-make-up-wearing ones, and one with the biggest breasts I had seen in my life. Wow. I was mesmerized by them. These were knockout knockers. They were attached to a long dark frizzy-haired beauty. I was lost. Asking directions is an ice-breaker. It could lead to something.

I opened my mouth to speak, but as I hadn’t spoken for so long my throat was dry and no words came out, just this bizarre croak. She looked at me, bemused. I cleared my throat and tried again.

‘Hi, I’m looking for room 42,’ I said finally with the clarity I’d initially hoped for.

‘Room 42?’ she said with a voice that seemed to perfectly match her tits. ‘Just down the hall and I think it’s the second left.’

Our exchange did lead to something. It led to room 42. I’d hoped for more, but, hey, I had plenty of time. I went to school here, with hundreds of girls. This knowledge suddenly gave me a rush of confidence, and I decided to take our relationship to the next level.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

‘Tina,’ she said.

I stood there for a few moments waiting for her to ask mine. She didn’t. I headed to room 42.

I found room 42. My classroom. When I entered, the scene was so rowdy that nobody noticed the new boy. It was a large class of about thirty-odd. People were laughing, play-fighting, chewing gum, throwing bits of paper, smoking, breastfeeding. I took a vacant seat right at the back next to a stocky bloke with two gold earrings in one ear and a shaven head.

‘All right, mate?’ he said in a voice that seemed to perfectly match his hair and earrings.

‘Yes, mate, I’m fine, dandy.’ I had never used the word ‘dandy’ before in my life. What a time for it to make its debut.

‘You’re posh, innit?’ he asked.

There’s really no answer to this question. So I decided to ask one of my own.

‘What “house” are you in?’ I asked, referring to the school ‘house’ system at public schools.

He just stared at me, trying to make sense of my question before saying, ‘Yeah, I like a bit of house, but mainly hip-hop and ragga.’

At that moment, the teacher walked in. I had met him briefly when I came in for my interview. I immediately bolted to my feet and exclaimed at the top of my voice, ‘GOOD MORNING, SIR!’

Nobody else in the class reacted when the teacher walked in. But they certainly reacted to me. They all stopped laughing, play-fighting, chewing gum, throwing bits of paper, smoking, breastfeeding and turned to stare at me.

I was baffled why they weren’t standing to attention and presumed they hadn’t noticed the teacher had entered.

‘Sir’s here,’ I whispered to my new classmates.

‘Who?’ a few of them mumbled.

‘Sir!’ I repeated, motioning towards the teacher. At this point, even the teacher looked behind him, wondering who I was referring to.

So this tremendously embarrassing misunderstanding is how I introduced myself to the class. People were confused by me, as if I was an alien from the Planet Posh. That didn’t really change much as people got to know me. Woodhouse was all about cliques. The mass of differences I witnessed arriving on my first day soon turned into groups. There were probably more, but the ones I remember are: ‘The Goths’, ‘The Asians’, ‘The Jews’, ‘The Rockers’, ‘The Greeks’, ‘The Geeks’ and me. Initially I joined ‘The Asians’ (maybe it was my Clarins fake tan).

They auditioned me for their clique by inviting me out to lunch. At lunch, most people went to North Finchley High Road. I suggested PizzaExpress. They laughed. We went to the kebab shop and bonded over doners. A week previously I was at a school like Hogwarts but without the magic, and now here I was eating kebabs with Dilip, Chirag, Ammet and Jeet on North Finchley High Road. I felt out of place in both settings. I always felt out of place, but at least I was in a new place, and the kebabs were amazing.

Not long after I started at Woodhouse, it was Valentine’s Day, the day for lovers and for wannabe lovers to make their intentions known. Valentine’s cards are traditionally sent anonymously, signed with a question mark. Great lot of use that is – you have no idea who fancies you; for all you know it’s the Riddler from
Batman
. My new college was filled with posturing boys and blushing girls waiting to make a move on each other. This was the perfect opportunity.

An internal post bag was set up for students to send each other cards. I wasn’t particularly hopeful of receiving any, but when the bag arrived for my class on Valentine’s morning, it was so overflowing I thought I might be in with a shout. As it turned out, every single card, and there must have been close to a hundred, was addressed to the same guy. The school stud, Karim Adel. He accepted his teen heartthrob status with nonchalance and even handed out some of the cards for his fellow classmates to open on his behalf. I opened a few and they didn’t just contain question marks, they were shockingly graphic essays of desire.

I didn’t understand it. I looked closely at Karim; I needed to be like him. What did he have that I didn’t? Well, for a start, he was Iranian. There was nothing I could do about my heritage. We were of similar height, similar build, I definitely had better teeth, but the main difference was his shoulder length hair. In fact, one of the saucier cards I read made several references to Karim’s hair. So I decided to grow my hair and imagined myself one year on when the next Valentine’s postbag was delivered. Karim and I would be sitting next to each other with our long hair intertwining and bathing in a sea of Valentine’s cards addressed to us.