I, Partridge (2 page)

And as the memories swirled around like the trainers I mentioned in the previous paragraph, all that could be heard was the pitter-patter of blood – my nose was still
piddling
the stuff – as it dripped from my nose and chin and on to my shoes. Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, pitter-patter …

Pitter-patter goes the rain on the window. Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, and outside cars zoom up and down the road, some of them dropping down to second to turn right into Gayton Road. On the pavement, people hurry and scurry, both to and fro. A clap of thunder – BAM! – and some really gusty wind. Everyone agrees it’s a pretty dramatic evening all round.

Pan right. It’s a hospital room. A clammy pregnant woman lies spread-eagled on the bed and is about to produce pitter-patter of her own. She’s not going to wet herself – although that’s often a distressing side effect of childbirth. I’m referring to the pitter-patter of children’s feet. ‘Stand back,’ says the midwife. ‘Her contraptions are
massive
. Get ready!’

‘Looks like Anthony Eden’s about to be named Prime Minister,’ mutters a nurse as she strolls past the door. ‘And Chelsea are about to win the First Division title!’ replies an orderly, almost certainly not educated enough to follow politics. In the corner of the room, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley blasts from the radio quietly.

You see, this wasn’t now. It’s then. The present tense used in this passage is just a literary device so that this next bit comes as a surprise. The scene is actually unfurling in 1955! The hospital? The Queen Elizabeth Hospital in King’s Lynn. The sweaty woman? Mrs Dorothy Partridge, my mother. And the child’s head slithering from her legs? It belongs to me. The child was I, Partridge.

‘You’ve done it! Brilliant pushing!’ says the midwife. She holds the newborn aloft like a captain lifting a fleshy World Cup. And then the child throws his head back and roars the roar of freedom. The noise is relatively nonsensical but no less intelligent than most babies would produce. In fact, probably a bit more switched on than average.

In many ways, the proud wail that burst from my lungs was my first broadcast. Delivered to an audience of no more than eight, that still equated to an audience share – in the delivery room at least – of a cool 100%. Not bad, I probably thought. Not bad at all.

As I write these words I’m noisily chomping away on not one, but two Murray Mints. I’ve a powerful suck and soon they’ll be whittled away to nothing. But for the time being at least they have each other. For the time being, they are brothers. Which is more than could be said for me, for I was an only child. I will now talk more about being an only child.
⁸

Why my parents never had more kids I don’t know, though as a youngster I’d often lie in bed wondering. Maybe it was financial reasons. Maybe I’d bust Mum’s cervix. Maybe Dad had just perfected the withdrawal method.

But I would have loved a little brother to play football with or bully. I’d rush downstairs every Christmas morning and rip open my presents, hoping against hope that one of the boxes contained a human baby. It rarely did. In fact it never did.

The sad fact was, my parents (although
not
Communists) were unconsciously adhering to the same one-child-only policy espoused by the People’s Republic of China. And, like billions of Chinese children, I consequently had to endure a home life of intense loneliness.

This meant there was extra pressure on me to be sociable. I didn’t have a motto growing up, but had I done it would almost certainly have been ‘I’d love some friends, please’. But maybe in Latin.

I’d look on with longing as I saw my fellow children greedily enjoying their friendships. I remember being especially jealous of a lad called Graham Rigg. Graham was too cool for school (though he did still attend). He’d not only been the winner of the sports day slow bicycle race for three straight years, he was also the first boy in our class to properly kiss a girl. There’d been cheek pecks before, not to mention inter-sex handshakes, but he was the first kid in the playground to ‘go French’. None of the rest of us could figure out where he’d learnt to do this, but the general consensus was ‘from porno films’.

Eight-year-old Jennie Lancashire was the cock-a-hoop recipient, and she was rightly grateful.
⁹
But when I look back I often think how fortunate it was that Graham was the same age as her, because if he’d been 20 years older he would have been up in Crown Court. And quite right too!

I bumped into him for the first time in decades the other week. It was at the returns desk in my local Homebase. We were both taking back kettles (him – faulty filament; me – didn’t like colour).

‘Still French-kissing eight-year-olds?’ I said, pointing an accusing finger at his potentially paedophilic mouth.

‘No,’ he replied.

‘Good,’ I said. Then for extra emphasis I said it again, but slightly more slowly. ‘Gooood.’

I’d made my point. Anyway, after that, talk naturally turned to motor vehicles and I was bowled over to learn that Graham had been the first person in Norwich to own a car with a catalytic converter. From playground lothario to environmental trailblazer in under 50 years. It quickly dawned on me that here was a man whose number I needed to take, but before I had the chance he’d collected his refund, mimed taking his hat off to me and disappeared off into the sunset/down the paint aisle.

Without love (parental or matey) to sustain me, I turned to myself, Alan Partridge, for comfort. Eager to keep myself occupied, I was from a young age deeply inquisitive. Learning was my friend; knowledge, my bosom buddy. Indeed, in my quest for self-education, I once put a bumblebee in the freezer. It was to see if I could freeze it and then bring it back to life. I couldn’t. Of course I couldn’t, it was dead.
¹⁰
(I put it in a matchbox, like a biodegradable bee casket. Then just chucked it in the bin. I never told my mother.)

And so, this young, neglected but resourceful young man would guzzle down knowledge like other kids would guzzle down fizzy pop. Or full-cream milk. Either works. For a time, I was fixated with butterflies – an interest that my father did much to encourage. We’d go into the garden on a summer’s evening and when we saw the gentle flitter-flutter of a butterfly, he’d smash it to the ground with his tennis racket.

‘Fifteen love!’ he’d roar. Either that or some other tennis-related phrase. (‘Advantage, Dad’ was my favourite.) ‘You know what you need to do now, Alan,’ he’d continue.

‘Yes, father. I’m to collect the remains, piece them back together and do my utmost to identify the genus.’

Sometimes I could actually do it too, but more often than not (particularly when Dad used his textbook backhand slice), you would have needed dental records to identify the dead. Still, world-class interactive learning.

But don’t be deceived by this seemingly intimate tale of fatherliness. (In fact, I probably shouldn’t even have put that bit in.) No, above all else, overriding everything, was the dark heart at the core of my parents’ parenting which meant that, as I think I’ve said, my home life was one of neglect and sadness.

Mother was cold, distant. After school, between the ages of 13 and 14, I would routinely have to let myself into the house, where I’d be on my own, unfended for, for a minimum of 45 minutes, before she came home from working in a shoe shop. She’d console me by gifting me the latest shoe-cleaning merchandise, and to this day I’ve always had an affection for shoe trees and shoe horns.
¹¹

And then there was Father. Like most men of his generation he’d returned from war a changed man. He signed up on the day of his 17th birthday. ‘Mum,’ he’d said chirpily, ‘I’m off to save a Jew or two.’

It was April 1943 and he’d had quite enough of the idiots with the swastikas (and they
were
idiots). I remember asking him once over breakfast what it had been like. But his eyes glazed over and he just took another bite of his boiled egg. It was a bite that seemed to say, ‘Son, I don’t want to talk about war, because I’ve seen soldiers decapitated like in
Saving Private Ryan
.’

‘The only soldiers I want to talk about are the ones I dip in my boiled egg, which coincidentally has also been decapitated!’ his next bite seemed to add. This was typical of my dad – or would have been if he’d said it – because he’d often have dark thoughts rounded off with a little joke.

He wasn’t an easy man, though. Mum said he came back from the war with a rage that never went away. She said he was still just very angry with Mr Hitler. Yet it was me that suffered the consequences. Let’s just say Poppa had a hand like a leather shovel.

What made it all the more galling was that it wasn’t even me that had carried out the Final Solution. The closest I’d ever got to the extermination of the Jewish race was teasing Jon Malick about his big nose. But (a) I didn’t even know he was Jewish. And (b) it was pretty massive. You could have hung your washing off it. They say your nose is one of the few things that keeps growing throughout your life. Jon will now be 56. Good god.

The only thing that softened the blow (metaphor) was that I was at least being beaten with a degree of excellence. My father was a naturally gifted corporal punisher. The quality of the blows was always the same, whether administering them with his right hand or his left, whether he was alone or had Mum screaming at him to stop, whether we were in the privacy of the home or out at a charity treasure hunt organised by Round Table.

I couldn’t wait for the day when I was big enough to turn round and thump him in the tummy or set fire to an Airfix Messerschmitt and put it behind his bedroom door so he’d be intoxicated by the burning plastic.

You see, it wasn’t just physical abuse. The torment was sometimes psychological. I still bear mental scars from him trimming our privet hedge and then making me go and collect the cuttings in the rain. Well, I’ve got a saying: ‘Be careful what you do, because some day something similar might happen to you.’

And you know what? It did, because financial difficulties in later life meant he ended up as a casual labourer in his 60s. I allowed myself a wry smile at that. You may think it’s cold of me to be glad of his occupational misfortune just because he had me collecting privets, but let me tell you this: he made me do it
four times
, in as many years. On another occasion, he made me clear out the garage on a sunny day.

But I never have turned round and thumped him in the tummy or set fire to an Airfix Messerschmitt before putting it behind his bedroom door so he’d be intoxicated by the burning plastic. Why? Well, I guess resentment fades with time. Also he’s now dead. And the last thing I’ve got time to do is exhume, and subsequently duff up, the cadaver of a loved one. There’d be a heck of a lot of paperwork, for one. Plus I really need to take the car in for a service. Must do that next week.
¹²

‘Ah, but at least your parents didn’t split up,’ you might be crowing. ‘You’re lucky in that respect, Alan!’

I shake my head slowly and smile. You see, my parents’ marriage wasn’t as stable as their long list of wedding anniversaries might suggest. And that in itself was unusual and upsetting.

Of course, these days the institution of marriage is in crisis. It’s crumbling like an Oxo cube. I don’t have the exact figures to hand,
¹³
but it’s probably correct to say that half of all marriages end in separation. Take the royal family. Elizabeth and Phillip – solid as a rock; Charles and Diana – crumbled like an Oxo cube. Charles and Camilla – rock; Andrew and Fergie – Oxo. Edward and his wife
¹⁴
– rock; Anne and Mark Phillips – Oxo. You see, exactly one in two.

‘Marriage is dead!’ I shouted to the listeners of
Mid-Morning Matters
, not six weeks ago.
¹⁵
Then I paused for dramatic effect and to finish my mouthful of sandwich. ‘Someone inform the relatives. Time of death: 2011. Cause of death … well, why don’t you play Quincy? Get in touch and let us know why
you
think marriage passed away.’

It turned out to be a really insightful phone-in. Dealing with unemployed listeners five days a week, I’m still sometimes pleasantly surprised that they can be brainy. Regular caller Ralph laid the blame at the door of the Mormons. Other less angry listeners put it down to the rise of contraception, E-numbers giving us attention deficit, and tax law, while my assistant texted in to say it was a symptom of terrible ungodliness.
¹⁶

Me? I put it down to a combination of all these factors. Apart from the one about ungodliness. And the one about Mormons. Whatever your view, in the last hundred years there must have been more divorces than marriages.

Fifty years ago things were kinda different though. It was as rare to see a divorce as it was to see a four-leaf clover or a black chap in a position of authority. If only things had stayed that way.
¹⁷

Now, I’d thought my parents’ union was in the rock-solid camp. But I was wrong. Because one night something happened that threatened to turn my world upside down like one of those paperweights with fake snow inside. It was an incident that made me have a terrible, terrible thought. What if the rock of their marriage was actually a rock made … of Oxo?

I woke with a start. At first I assumed I’d trumped myself awake again – it was summer time so there were lots of fresh vegetables in our diet. But as I listened through the darkness, I realised that something far worse was going on. My mother and father were having the row to end all rows.

A sudden shot of fear ripped through my pre-pubic body. And now I did do a trump. The noise fizzed out of my back passage like a child calling for help. That child was me. I cupped my hands behind my ears creating a sort of makeshift amplifier.
Look and Learn Magazine
was right – it really did work.
¹⁸
But still I couldn’t quite hear everything. I shut my eyes in the hope it might make me hear better, like they say it does for blind people.