3.

Having been to Paris in the spring of 1985, we didn’t take a holiday in the summer, and so the months between the end of 2 Whites and joining 3 Ling haven’t left much of a definite impression in my mind. It was, of course, the summer during which the future of Doctor Who seemed more uncertain than ever, but at the time the Blackpool exhibition was still open and we made what turned out to be our final trips that summer- one in the high season, where I remember gleefully persuading my assorted relatives to fork out £5.99 for the latest hardback novel, and one during what would turn out to be the exhibition’s last Illuminations season, mainly to keep me quiet as Mum and Grandma explored what seemed to be the resort’s innumerable cheap shoe shops.

Returning to school, my third year turns out in retrospect to be quite a significant one in terms of the influences on me. Most people can point to one or two teachers who taught not only their subject, but important lessons in how to live, and in my case these two individuals entered my life in late 1985- my form master, Mr Gilliland, and my English teacher Mr Stevens. The first thing to be said about Mr Gilliland was that he was extremely fat- in fact, his size almost increases in hindsight, but fat he was. He was also equally eccentric and by example taught a valuable lesson in how to be an individual within a system. His passion was transport; he was the proud owner of at least two VW Beetles, at least one of which he owned because he felt that the registration LCM1 was particularly appropriate to his calling as a mathematician. He also ran the School printing press, which ran off the school diary and Chapel calendar, and organised the annual school trip to the Blackpool Illuminations. This was no mean undertaking, and involved the hire of a vintage bus from Chester Corporation to take us to Blackpool, where we would pick up a tram of even greater vintage for the trip up and down the illuminated seafront; getting back on the bus a couple of hours later, we would stop off south of Preston for fish and chips before arriving back in Birkenhead sometime around midnight. One particular year, the vintage bus resolutely declined to leave first gear, left school about 45 minutes late and, taking us back to Chester to change into a modern bus, ensured that our return to Birkenhead took place in the small hours of the Saturday morning, to be greeted by no small crowd of anxious parents. His other legendary exploits included regular trips to Edinburgh to see his barber, having his hair cut there the week before the start of each term, and there was a tale that many years before, as a young man he had sailed on the Queen Mary from Southampton to Cherbourg and ordered sandwiches brought to his cabin at four in the morning just to show that it could be done.

Mr Stevens’s influence was perhaps both more obvious and more enduring. A highly demanding teacher with a short temper at times (on the receiving end of which I found myself at least once), he was also a highly qualified and cultured man with a First from Cambridge. It was under his supervision that I read my first Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen, but it was also clear that he saw the English curriculum as a fraction of what we could and should be experiencing. In the lessons at the end of our third year, when there was nothing left on his lesson plans to teach us, he gave a slideshow history of art over two or three periods, which he followed up at the end of the fifth year with a potted history of English literature for those of us taking English A-level. One of my great regrets is that I never obtained a copy of his infamous A-level reading list; this was not a list of the course texts, but two pages of typed A4 detailing the other books we ought to be reading, both from English and other literatures, to give us a full picture of how the world’s literature had developed, the great writers and movements and their influences on each other. He was not just a teacher, then, but an educator and a guide to the wonders to be discovered outside the set curriculum.

Otherwise, the start of the third year was a time of fairly substantial change. There seemed to be a particularly noticeable number of boys who left at the end of the second year or joined at the beginning of the third- in particular, three joined us in the Ling form from a local prep school which continued to teach boys up to age 12/13. We also had one boy who was repeating the third year due to various misdeeds (repeating a year being rather more serious an issue in a fee-paying school). As far as the curriculum was concerned, from the third year onwards we took Physics (with the diminutive but enthusiastic Mr Hanson) and Chemistry (with the lavishly-sideboarded Dr Reynolds, known to one and all as Doc Sidies and whose growling Scouse accent was often imitated) as separate subjects, added Greek or German and now had not only two Games afternoons a week instead of one, but a greater choice of activities as instead of being obliged to play rugby, we could opt for cross-country running (which, as the slowest runner in my year group, I avoided so as to spare the school the embarrassment of having to send out search parties twice a week) or try out for the hockey team. Being predominantly a rugby-playing school, there was only room for about sixteen hockey players in each year group- basically a team plus a few reserves- so over three games afternoons I tried out. Although I’d decided to try with the idea of avoiding rugby uppermost in my mind, I discovered that I enjoyed it; I was a courageous defender and unafraid to take on full-fledged members of the hockey squad who were supposedly better than me. Unfortunately, when the cut came to be made, I’d had a bad game on the crucial afternoon when my performance was being judged by Mr Jones rather than Mr Prescott, who coached the squad. So I was condemned to another three years of hating rugby football, which was unfair both to me and to rugby, a sport I now enjoy watching as much as any other. It was a harsh and early lesson both in disappointment and in disillusionment, as my parents, blind to the depth of my feelings and not for the first time, brushed it off as unimportant and refused to do anything about it; there was in any case simply no way of pursuing my interest outside of school as there was no local hockey club and we simply couldn’t have afforded the equipment. The tragedy, as I sit here all of my seventeen stone in weight, is that on the one occasion that I found a sport which I could have enjoyed playing, the opportunity to do it was taken away from me and I was forced to do something I loathed instead. I’m not sure that at any point after this I ever had any real confidence in my parents’ ability to support me in my dreams- at least while I had them.

The transition was difficult for me, and ultimately it showed in my academic perfromance- at the end of the first month of term, after the first mark order I found myself 32nd out of 32, a far cry from finishing top of 2 Whites’ exam order. I think the additional workload overbalanced me to an extent, while the transition back to being at the bottom of a very large pile also overwhelmed me. It was also the point in life where hormones start to come seriously into play, and in an all-boys school they can do very strange things. I’ve gone into my own experiences and feelings elsewhere, but the culture of such an all-male environment leads to a lot of odd behaviour- the simulation of homosexuality for one, and over-emphasised male braggadocio for another and, as it took me a very long time to process any of my own responses and I was also very conscious of my body in terms of fatness, the normal teenage tendency to awkwardness and discomfort was exaggerated tenfold. The kleptomania continued with gleeful abandon, although in one near brush I was caught stealing from a comic shop in Liverpool and subsequently banned; fortunately I was able to cover up the incident by pretending to my family that I’d simply grown out of the comics (which, on balance, I probably would have done within a couple of years in any case) and so never had to go back there again. Instead I simply concentrated on Doctor Who, helped by the continuing stream of books and, from 1985 onwards, a slow but growing trickle of videos. From the perspective of 2006, it’s amazing to believe that an edited version of the story ‘Pyramids of Mars’ retailed for £25 in 1985, when the same story, complete and with additional material, can now be found on the technically superior DVD format for less than £10 online. I was always something of a magpie- to the point where my parents just used to give me cardboard boxes and I would fill them with unspecified stuff- but the amount of junk, comics and papers with which I must have surrounded myself in my teens must have been incalculable.

My shoplifting career was, however, brought to an abrupt end just before the Christmas of 1985, at W H Smith in Birkenhead. I’d had a brush with them earlier that year when I’d nearly been caught trying to steal a diary- the staff member concerned just told me to put it back and leave as it was shortly before Christmas and the shop was packed solid with people- but in that December I’d gone in after school, bought a football wallchart (it was the kind based on the FA Cup, with stickers for each team) and then hung around looking for something to steal. Having had a fascination with languages, I settled on a Swedish dictionary and put it (as far as I can remember) in my inside blazer pocket. Leaving the shop, I turned down a side street to make for the bus stop, only to find myself seized by the arm by the store detective and warned not to struggle. In retrospect, struggling would probably have been the best thing I could have done- I was nearly six feet tall, solidly built and with a briefcase in hand, and if I’d known my own strength I probably could have freed myself or knocked her to the floor and made a run for it. But my passive nature came to the fore, and I was dragged through the shop to a stock room at the back to await the police, in the company of the sour, hatchet-faced woman who caught me and a fat, greying woman who seemed to be the manager. They were proof against every plea and offer never to come back again. It must have been an hour until the police came and formally arrested me (but not after an accompanied trip to the toilet), taking me off to Birkenhead Police Station (ironically, I’d never know where it was until then), taking my possessions, shoes and tie and calling my parents. I’ve never seen the point of taking somebody’s tie in case they kill themselves in custody- surely from the police’s point of view it’s tantamount to a confession and saves the state the bother of processing criminals- but calling my parents in front of me was harsh and uncalled-for.

The order of events is muddy from then on- I’m not sure whether I was let out of the cell when they arrived and then taken off to be questioned, or it was the other way around. Possibly as I was only 13, they may have had to give permission for me to be questioned without another adult present. I remember being interrogated by a young constable, who probably on balance saw it as an irritation at the beginning of what was no doubt a busy Friday night on the run up to Christmas, and my case not something he needed when in a couple of hours he’d be processing the first drunks and brawlers. In any case, some time towards 9pm we left the police station and went home- for some reason I can see us on the wrong platform at Hamilton Square station, but that must have been the confusion of the night. It was Mum and Grandma who came to fetch me- in retrospect it seems strange that Dad still went to the pub that night as his Friday ritual demanded- and I was met with such looks of disappointment and demands to explain what I couldn’t. I didn’t know why I’d done it- a fascination with facts and the world outside Birkenhead which couldn’t be satisfied with the resources available to me, the constant competition of my better-off contemporaries, common-or-garden teenage angst- any or all of those could have been to blame.