A Young Man's Passage (2 page)

When I got to the studio from where the bash was being broadcast live, I forced a smile and found my manager, Addison Cresswell, milling around the champagne reception. ‘All right, mush? Our table’s over ’ere.’ He seemed happy and excited; maybe because two of his other clients, Jack Dee and Lee Evans, were nominated for awards. ‘Should be a good night for the stable,’ he said, talking out the corner of his mouth, as if he were a drug dealer discreetly offering a sale. His company, Off The Kerb, was hugely successful, and when he’d had a few drinks he would state his worth in no uncertain terms. Poking himself vigorously in the chest, he’d say, ‘I’m a multi-fucking-millionaire, mate!’ He was proud of the comedians he looked after, and viewed us a bit like racehorses. When he signed Jo Brand he said to me: ‘It’s good to have a female in the stable,’ as if she might be serviced by Jeff Green and produce a mini comic genius.

I was presenting the penultimate award so I was free to watch the show for a while and think about what I was going to say. Before you read the nominations and opened the envelope to announce the winner, you had time for a bit of banter with the host, Jonathan Ross, and one quick joke. I hadn’t thought of my joke yet, but there was plenty of time. I had some champagne and nibbled my Valium. I looked round the room. The set that year was an imaginative rural display of greenery, sprouting branches and scattered autumn leaves. A veritable Who’s Who of British Comedy sat in the audience along with other television stars of the day. Near the front I spotted the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont. Fancy inviting him, I thought. How inappropriate.

ONE

Mother, I love you so.

Said the child, I love you more than I know.

She laid her head on her mother’s arm,

And the love between them kept them warm.

‘HUMAN AFFECTION’ BY STEVIE SMITH

WHENEVER FRIENDS ANNOUNCE
a pregnancy, I feel a sense of bereavement, and by the time they’ve finished the sentence they’ve begun to disappear, as if walking backwards into the mist.

I know why. I feel displaced. As a bachelor of a certain age, one wants one’s friends forever available for evenings of white wine and general bonding. Boyfriends and girlfriends are unlikely to be welcomed into the fold. I don’t want to know about their nesting or their breeding. I am the star of the show. All eyes and all attention must be upon me.

When you’re the host to such gross narcissistic tendencies, it’s not easy to pretend you’re interested in a world before your time. How on earth did they manage? I shake my head in sorrow, but perk up when I consider my parents and the generations before them, the chance meetings, the fateful couplings, the mysterious but unstoppable life force, genetic combinations and cellular activity that culminated in what I modestly refer to as ‘me’.

I feel a connection, more imagined than real, with my great-grandfather, Michael McDonald, who came to London from Nenagh in Ireland in the 1880s, with his two brothers Dan and Tom. Escaping from hunger, poverty and famine, the whole family was bailing out. Three other brothers went to America and were never heard of again. ‘I always like to think they went on to create the McDonald’s burger chain,’ says Tess, Michael’s only surviving daughter, aged 92. Michael and his brothers, meanwhile, opened a grocer’s store in Brentford High Street, west London. Dan minded the shop while Michael and Tom took the horse and cart around the posh streets of Notting Hill to sell their wares.

Around that time, in my wistful imagination like a heroine in a Thomas Hardy novel, Louisa Watts set forth from her home on a farm in Chipping Norton to work as a housemaid in Brentford. Louisa had a fine singing voice and had joined the Catholic Church some years before because they had the best choir in Oxfordshire. It might be that Louisa’s mistress fancied an omelette for her tea one day and sent her maid to the grocer’s, where Michael, as he handed over the symbols of fertility, caught Louisa’s eye.

Their son, Hector, was my maternal grandfather. My paternal grandfather, John Clary, worked in a tobacco factory and met my grandmother, Elizabeth, in a pub. Perhaps she was drinking a snowball at the time, but there is no official record.

But let’s talk about me.

‘It was surprisingly one morning, and that’s as far as I’m prepared to go,’ said my mother when I asked about my conception. I already knew the deed was done at Clacton-on-Sea, and working backwards from May 1959, when I was born, I could see it was evidently during a late summer break at Auntie Flossie’s bungalow. Now I knew the time of day!

I was 44, and I wanted to know. How was I . . . ?

I had always assumed, it being the 1950s and all, that the miracle of life occurred after dark with the lights off, but no. Morning. Brazen as you please. Anyone could have walked in. Where were my sisters? Frances and Beverley would have been three and one at the time. Had Auntie Flossie taken them down to the beach to give my parents some time alone? How thrilling to think of my parents overcome by passion, intoxicated by the sea air, writhing and cavorting in the kitchen as the morning sun filtered through the net curtains.

I really wanted to know the details of that particular sexual act but as always my mother knew what my game was, and her ‘that’s as far as I’m prepared to go’ had rather put me in my place.

The truth is my mother always knew within hours if she was pregnant. This being her third such experience, she was in no doubt. A vague nausea and a tenderness in the nipple region.

Somewhat chagrined at the prospect of bottling her own potential for a few more years as another life took over, but simultaneously overcome with those glorious, earthy feelings only hormones and heterosexual liaisons can produce, she soon got used to the idea of another child.

The blood pressure that had escalated during her previous pregnancies was now a serious problem. At eight months, a routine visit to her GP brought bad news. She would have to go to hospital at once. She refused. Frances and Beverley were so small. They needed her. If she had to go home, the doctor told her, then she must stay in bed and do nothing. It was vital for the well-being of the baby. She cried. Quite stressful, I should imagine. The next day there was a knock at the door. It was Auntie Flossie. Four foot nine and 62 years old, all the way from Clacton.

‘I’ve come for your girls,’ she said, and so she did. My mother’s confinement, released from the responsibilities of motherhood, continued as prescribed. She stayed in bed, nursing the foetus within. She watched a lot of boxing matches on the television.

MY MOTHER HAD
met my father six years earlier when they both worked for the Met Office in Dunstable, near Luton. (Fifty years later they’re both still prone to glancing up at the sky and announcing to bemused visitors: ‘Cumulonimbus coming in from the west, I see.’) They were both 18 and away from home for the first time. My father had a motorbike. One thing led to another. You can quite understand it. ‘Shotgun Boogie’ and Frank Sinatra were all the rage. They didn’t mean any harm, your honour.

Office life was some kind of big open-plan arrangement full of lots of young people who were good at geography. My mother made a name for herself by refusing to sit on a seat if it was still warm from the previous occupant. Apparently she would stand over the offending chair and fan it with a cotton handkerchief to encourage the cooling process. My father, with his film-star looks and easy-going manner, was quite a catch. No doubt they were all sniffing around each other like dogs on a council estate. Soon Peter and Brenda were an item.

During their engagement my father had joined the Metropolitan Police and was, it has to be said, a bobby on the beat. At the coronation of Queen Elizabeth the Second he was on duty, standing in the middle of Cambridge Circus directing traffic. My mother was with some friends who, along with thousands of others, were sleeping on the pavement in order to secure their spot to watch the great spectacle. Rumour has it she legged it over the barrier, ran to the roundabout where my father was doing his police constable duties, and kissed him to the applause of the assembled throng.

As you drive over the M4 flyover in Brentford, it curves disdainfully round the unpretentious spire of St John’s Catholic Church. It was here in 1953 that Peter Clary married Brenda McDonald. They look remarkably happy together in photographs taken then. My mother seems positively coquettish and my father looks full of laughter. Clearly enthralled with each other, it is alleged they managed to keep themselves nice till their wedding night, which is something I suppose. Their sense of decorum had obviously evaporated by the time I was conceived. One might have hoped for a romantic weekend in Paris or even the grounds of a minor stately home, but it wasn’t to be. I’m not bitter.

My father sold his motorbike to pay for their honeymoon in Guernsey. The entire hotel was full of honeymoon couples and there was a lot of giggling over breakfast.

Then they lived in Acton for a while, in a small flat on the top floor of a relative’s converted house. Proper teas served on a proper table, napkins, fruit bowl on the sideboard, feeling very grown-up I dare say . . . By the time I was born they had moved into police flats: 1 Meadow Bank, Surbiton, Surrey. Brand new as well. Low rise, red brick, substantial lawns. Proper brick sheds for the rubbish bins and no smell of wee on the stairs.

The day before each of us was born, a nesting instinct possessed my mother and she went into spring-cleaning mode, emptying cupboards, cleaning windows and polishing floors. I was born at home. Brown paper under the sheets to save the mattress and brown paper up the walls, too, apparently, in case of who knows what. An enema had been performed to prevent Baby being born covered in unsightly faecal matter, and for that, at least, I’m grateful. Gas and air were administered to ease the pain of each contraction, so intoxicating my mother that she made unflattering remarks about Dr Pretzel. Given that he was delivering her baby there and then, the midwife thought it best to silence her. This she did by more or less sitting on my mother’s face. A tough woman, the midwife, by all accounts. ‘Very good, but didn’t like children,’ my mother recalled. ‘Referring to your sisters, she said, “When are the two brats coming back, then?”’

Twenty-five years later, I went on a rebirthing course in Hampstead. A particular type of breathing is taught to you and a misty-eyed woman of a certain age gazes down at you. Soon an altered state was upon me. I struggled down the birth canal. I felt the warmth of an open fire, saw the tiles that surrounded it, stared up at the white knobbly ceiling, and heard my mother groaning as she expelled the afterbirth. I wanted attention. I cried.

I think it cost about £20.

I WAS NAMED
Julian after a Benedictine monk.

My mother had grown up in the village of Stoke Ferry, Norfolk. The McDonalds occupied the Manor House, and although they weren’t lord and lady, the prestige that came with their residence didn’t escape them. They had moved to the countryside when my grandfather took a job as accountant in a local sugar beet factory. During the war their substantial dining room was turned into a place of worship, and Father Julian Stoner gave mass there each Sunday. Local prisoners of war would come and fulfil their obligations alongside the villagers. I imagine swarthy Italians winking at veiled shop girls, sideways glances and shy blushes, but then I am a homosexual.

Father Julian was six foot six and the son of Lord and Lady Fermoy of Stoner Castle in Oxfordshire. He gave my mother her first holy communion and obviously made an impression. ‘I decided to name you after him because he was the kindest man I knew,’ my mother recalled.

When I was a few months old, my mother wheeled me to the shops. Prams in those days were big, metal affairs with massive spoked wheels, the size of a street cleaner’s trolley. To transport her children about my mother wanted the top of the range. ‘We saved up for ages when I was expecting Frances. We had no stair carpet but the pram was a priority. It cost £28 and your father got £6 a week. It was a London Baby Coach, the same as the Queen had. The most expensive. Grey colour. All coach-built. Too big, really.’

She parked me outside the butcher’s, went in to buy some chops and went home. For several hours she quite forgot she’d even given birth to me. It was only the sight of the nappies fluttering on the line that reminded her. She raced back to the butcher’s and I was still there, asleep in my pram. I could have been wheeled off by any old Loopy Lou, sold abroad into a life of slavery, made into sausages.