David Mitchell: Back Story

- 3 - (#u04b57298-596e-5838-a99b-cfab9a8c8d06)

Light-houses, My Boy! (#u04b57298-596e-5838-a99b-cfab9a8c8d06)

I cross Quex Road to avoid a small crowd of people around the bus shelter. It’s too cramped a bit of pavement to have a bus shelter really, and weaving through all the people standing there feels intimate and inappropriate, like stomping through a cocktail party with a bag of tools.

It’s also quite a likely and awkward place to get recognised. I get recognised from the television quite a bit these days. It’s increased gradually over the years from the very occasional occurrence, when I first did a TV show called Bruiser and then the first series of Peep Show, to the point where now it happens most times I leave the house. So I’ve been able to get used to it gradually, which I’m grateful for. It must be very difficult for people who have to cope with suddenly becoming famous, like Big Brother contestants or people the tabloids decide have done a murder.

I’m not complaining, by the way. I’m well aware that people knowing who I am helps me get work and God knows I’m grateful for that, so the loss of my ability to potter around unobserved is a side effect of a good thing. My feelings about it are complicated. In lots of ways, I like it. Most people who approach me say something nice or, at worst, neutral. The feeling that a stranger might be pleased to see you is a warming one. Also, like most performers, I have an unhealthy streak of megalomania and being recognised makes me feel important. Even at times when I’m embarrassed or annoyed about being spotted, there’s still a nasty spiky joy underneath which a dark and hungry part of my soul is feasting on.

And there are times when it’s not so nice. Places like this bus stop or a Tube train, where there are other people standing or sitting around observing the encounter – and, I always feel, resenting it – are among the worst. I can’t escape the feeling that these observers think I’ve actively done something to make a stir or scene. It’s as if they think that recognition in others’ eyes is something that emanates from me, that I’m deliberately beaming it out. Essentially that, just by being there, I’m showing off.

I was once walking back down my road from the supermarket, carrying several heavy bags of shopping and therefore feeling slightly exposed – like a squirrel looking for somewhere to bury a huge nut. There’s definitely something about carrying food that, on a deep evolutionary level, makes me feel defensive. I’m sure I’m not alone. Try catching the eye of someone returning from a buffet with a heaped plate: you’ll see the shade of a Neanderthal, furtively dragging a mammoth carcass into his cave.

There was a small group of blokes on a corner. I think maybe they were builders or decorators, or perhaps they were planning a robbery. I’d be surprised to discover they were opposing counsel in a fraud case having a discreet chat during a recess, but who knows. Anyway, one of them said something like:

‘Oi, there’s that bloke off the telly!’

They all turned to look at me and I turned to look at them. We weren’t that close to each other but I smiled and, as far as was possible with an arm weighed down by beer and ready meals, I waved. A beat passed.

‘Twat!’ one of them shouted.

I carried on walking home, feeling very much like a twat. Look at the twat who eats! There’s that twat off the telly all weighed down with groceries – what a lame bastard!

Now, that was a very atypical encounter in one way – people are seldom rude. But typical in another. It made me feel very exposed and visible. It reminded me that all the things people normally do anonymously in a big city, in my case might have to be done while being observed and made to represent the innate twattiness of all mankind.

But even when strangers are very pleasant, I find it impossible to respond unselfconsciously. From the moment someone says ‘Excuse me’, I’m thinking about how I’m coming across. Do I seem like a nice person? Or do I seem annoyed? Or do I seem like a nice person who’s rightly annoyed at being asked for a photo/autograph/to say hi to their friend’s voicemail under these awkward circumstances? Or do I seem like a nice person who’s rightly thrilled? Or a horrible person who’s wrongly thrilled? Or a horrible person who’s wrongly annoyed? Or a nice normal person who’s understandably surprised but the reality of whose goodwill shines through?

Sometimes I walk away buoyed up by the enthusiasm of someone who’s said I’m funny. Other times I’m fretting about the embarrassing awkwardness of the encounter. But I almost always wish I’d been nicer or ‘more genuine’ – that the warmth I attempt to display didn’t feel so forced. I can’t avoid the conclusion that really nice people don’t keep asking themselves if they seem nice. Smug bastards.

So I cross the road and walk north-east up the south-west side of Quex Road, past the junction with Mutrix and past a school on the corner with Abbey Road. I don’t like the look of this school. It looks like a primary school. I don’t like primary schools. It’s also a modern building and, if we must have primary schools, I’d rather they weren’t in modern buildings.

There’s a bit in a Sherlock Holmes story where Holmes and Watson are coming back into London past Clapham Junction and Holmes says: ‘It’s a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this.’

I agree with Holmes, it is. Watson didn’t, as he tells the reader: ‘I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough’ – I suppose the Battersea area wasn’t so gentrified in those days.

But Holmes is admiring something specific: ‘Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea.’

‘The board-schools.’

‘Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.’

When you travel into London on any of those raised lines, you can still see exactly what Holmes meant. At that time (this story was published in 1893) London itself was a fairly new phenomenon, the modern metropolis, the largest city there had ever been, Ripper London, a terrifying, blackened, smog-ridden, lawless place, a horrific vision of humanity’s future lit by the guttering flames of coal gas: teeming, impoverished, disease-ridden millions crammed into a place of crime and death.

Until well into the second half of the nineteenth century, the life expectancy of those in urban areas was vastly lower than that of country-dwellers. Cities were very fertile breeding grounds for disease. But they were just as welcoming to business and industry as they were to bacteria. So people were drawn to the cities to get jobs, and went in the knowledge that they might consequently die. The commercial draw of the capital more than compensated for the deaths it caused, so London’s population rose despite them. It was a bath with the plug out that was nevertheless filling up.

We rightly associate Victorian times with that sort of chaotic urban squalor. But we should also credit the people of that era with solving the problem. In the middle of the century, everything seemed to be getting worse: larger, more crowded, more inhabited yet less inhabitable. And, basically, they sorted it out. With sewers, epidemiology and schools. They coped with London’s uncontrollable growth and they found magnificence in it. They taught the world that urban living could work; they showed it how. Frightening though the giant city must still have seemed – much more so than even my Cagney and Lacey-inspired vision of 1980s New York – Holmes, or rather Conan Doyle, spotted that by the 1890s things were moving decisively in the right direction and celebrated the fact.

However irrelevant, discredited or penurious Britain becomes, London will always have been the first modern city, the place where the method of life now favoured by most of mankind was devised. And the Victorian schools, the old board schools, are a symbol of that – a symbol of hope and pragmatism delivered in brick. It’s inspiring that there are so many of them and that lots of them are still schools. (I get a bit depressed when I see one that’s been converted into flats.) That’s why I’m so proud to live here. London, more than any other city on earth, is the new Rome – so much so that Rome is in some ways just the old London.

So I make an exception for primary schools in Victorian buildings but, in general, I view them with distaste.

It’s just a feeling. I don’t want anything to be done about it. I know we need to have primary schools. I know some of them will have to be in modern buildings and that, broadly, that’s a good sign as it suggests that money is being invested in education. So I’m not against this school I’m walking past, any more than I’m against sewage plants. And by making that comparison, I don’t mean to liken children to sewage. But, as with a sewage plant, when I pass a primary school I acknowledge that it’s an important facility without being particularly pleased to see it.

I wonder why. Is it because, despite the jolly colourful classrooms, the evidence of fun projects and well-motivated teachers, we all know what they really are: the means by which we introduce infants to the idea that their time is no longer their own? For your whole life, primary school is teaching them, you will have to go somewhere every day and obey other people’s instructions. Today, painting or nature table, to lure you in. In twenty years’ time: the company accounts, a Cornish pasty production line or an OHP presentation on ‘Corporate Goals Going Forward’.

Or is it just because I hated primary school? I absolutely did. At the age of four I started to attend Napier House, the primary day school section of Headington School, a private girls’ school in Oxford. They took boys only until they were six. Up to that age, they must have been convinced, there was little or no chance of a boy instigating any sort of sex incident. So, whether I’d have gone sex-crazy at eight if I hadn’t been segregated from the girls for their own safety, we’ll never know.

Now, this place wasn’t Dotheboys Hall. The staff were probably trying their best. I’m sure many, if not most, of my contemporaries were perfectly happy. Also, the place improved markedly in the five years between my leaving and my brother starting there, because Dan seemed to have a very happy time and he’s just as neurotic as I am. So, you know, perhaps it was a lovely school.

That said, I found Napier House a vicious, bitter, judgemental, cold, cruel, jealous and mediocre institution presided over by thoughtless, self-important, misandrist crones. It is one of my tragedies not to have known the word ‘cunt’ (as an expression for a very unpleasant person rather than a woman’s genitals, you understand) at the time in my life when I would have had most use for it. I’m sure those cunts would have expelled me and it would have been a relief.

The key issue I had with them was over food. At lunch they had a rule, not uncommonly for the time, that you had to eat everything that was put in front of you. You were also not allowed to refuse anything that was on offer. Now, for most adults, eating something you don’t like is easy – and far preferable to social awkwardness, on occasions when someone’s well-meaning dinner party preparations have led to a plateful of soap-flavoured gravel. You just swallow it politely and say it’s delicious. Any bishops or actresses reading will know what I mean.

But it’s different for children. Their palates are more sensitive, their feelings of discomfort keener. When I had to eat one of the four things I found utterly disgusting from the school’s rotation of dishes – macaroni cheese, gooseberry pie, rhubarb crumble and croquette potatoes – I found it horrific and I would always be sick.

That’s not a disaster and you wouldn’t think primary school teachers would be fazed by seeing pupils throw up after meals – particularly since this one was attached to an all-girls’ secondary school. I wasn’t fazed by it either. It had happened to me many times before, admittedly only when ill, but still: once it’s over and the period of stomach-lightened commiseration begins, then all is well.

So it really came as a horrible shock to me that they were so angry about it. They thought I’d been sick on purpose, as an act of insolence. They weren’t standing for it, let alone allowing me to change my clothes. I would spend the rest of the day in a state of disgrace – and caked in my own vomit.

Now, if that’s the worst thing that ever happens to you, you’re a lucky person. But you could say the same thing about being kicked in the balls by a sommelier and you’d still ask to see the manager. It just seems so unnecessarily unkind, such a failure in empathy on the part of those teachers. They made me so unhappy, and all they had to do to fix it was excuse me from eating things that made me throw up or (even if they couldn’t bring themselves to so lower their standards) to be nice to me if I did throw up. My whole life, I have always been nice to people when they throw up.

And the thing that makes me even crosser and more uncomprehending is that I know I wasn’t a difficult child to keep under discipline. I have always responded with slightly lamentable obedience in the face of authority. I am no rebel – I will do what I’m told when my gag reflex permits it. If I was to be unhappy at school, it should have been because of bullying from my peers, not because I came to blows, or rather heaves, with authority.

Neither am I, nor have I ever been, a fussy eater. There were just a few things I couldn’t stand when I was tiny. I think that’s normal. I don’t know how the other children coped with this rule. Maybe some of them hid food they didn’t like – which I would have been afraid to do because it was against the rules – and maybe some others threw up as well.

So, for my first three years at school, I thought I was one of the naughty children – it was something that I couldn’t help. My stomach had ordained it. At school, it seemed, I was destined to spend a certain amount of time standing in the corner facing the wall, despite my sincere desire to do exactly as I was told. And I spent every day dreading the lunch hour and was only ever able to relax afterwards, if I’d been lucky enough to be given food I could keep down.

I moaned about all this to my parents, of course – and on several occasions, when they collected me, I’d be caked in sick. They complained too, but the school’s response was very firm. I could be specifically excused certain foods in advance, but that was as far as they were willing to bend from their policy. But I wanted to be excused more things than my parents felt able to specify without embarrassment, so the problem continued.

I think they were swayed by the school’s argument that this rigid approach to lunchtime discipline was important to a child’s development. This was a fee-paying school, which was a stretch for my parents – I think my grandfather helped them out – and they probably felt that they should respect the educational judgements of the professionals they were paying, however counter-intuitive that must seem when your five-year-old son is stinking of his own stomach lining. To ignore the educational specialists would be like throwing away a doctor’s prescription.

There’s a dutiful middle-class approach for you! – laced with the Protestant notion that you have to be cruel to be kind. It’s very different from the approach taken by those parents in the Jamie Oliver series about school food who protested at the school gates against fresh vegetables and passed bags of chips through the railings. The exact opposite, really. But my parents just didn’t feel that sense of entitlement – they were paying too much money.

The school I went on to when I was seven – New College School, a small prep school originally established for the choristers of New College – was, by most standards, strict and old-fashioned. But their take on lunch was that, while you had to eat everything on your plate, you didn’t have to put anything on your plate that you didn’t want to eat. There were stricter lessons, lots of homework and regular exams at that school, but to me, thanks to their liberal lunch policy, it was like escaping to the free West. I never had to stand in a corner again.

- 4 - (#ulink_e02c0ac5-7ec2-5c9a-ac83-e0482f395288)

Summoning Servants (#ulink_e02c0ac5-7ec2-5c9a-ac83-e0482f395288)

The houses round here don’t contain enough servants for my liking. I’ve turned off Quex Road onto West End Lane, which is lined with large houses that have been converted into flats. The life that was lived in them when they were built would seem bizarre to us today – when every one of the hundreds of thousands of buildings like that, all over London, had a version of Upstairs, Downstairs going on inside. Not quite as grand as that perhaps, but along the same lines, with the presiding family on the middle floors and servants cooking in the basement and sleeping in the attics. Each building probably accommodated about the same number of people then as one household as it does now all divided up. In a way, it’s a nice metaphor for how society has become comparatively more egalitarian – certainly the country’s property is divided between many more people now.

That’s not how I saw it as a child. I was aware of the concept of servants from an early age. In fact I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know what servants were, which is odd because I can remember when I didn’t know what a tumble-dryer was. And we had a tumble-dryer while I’ve never even met a servant. Nobody is a servant these days – apart from a few anachronistically trained ‘butlers’ who wear fancy dress and work for Texans. Rich people might have cleaners, gardeners, nannies and au pairs, maybe the occasional housekeeper. But no one has maids, valets or footmen any more. The profession of servant has pretty much totally disappeared and it wasn’t much more prevalent in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was a small child.

Yet I was very servant-aware. I was growing up not long after the era of bells and butlers. Millions of Britons spent their lives ‘in service’ until the Second World War – and it must have remained a significant profession for much of the 1950s (I’m largely basing that assumption on what I gleaned from episodes of Miss Marple), which is only twenty or so years before I was running around Staunton Road pretending to be a king.

Perhaps it’s Miss Marple’s fault. Not just Miss Marple, but Upstairs, Downstairs and Brideshead Revisited and Dynasty and the dozens of other things on TV that seemed to be full of uniformed and obedient domestic staff. They definitely caught my imagination; I was disappointed that people with the twin dignities of wealth and ‘being from the olden days’ had servants while we did not. It didn’t occur to me that a damned sight more people were servants than had them.

Don’t get me wrong – I think if I’d actually lived in a house where you rang a bell and an adult employed by my parents appeared to do my bidding, I would have found that weird. (Although there was a time, at my grandparents’ house in Swansea, when I did have a little bell which I’d ring if I wanted to be given more orange squash. This was humiliatingly revealed on Would I Lie to You? and, I must stress, was a temporary arrangement and basically just a game linked to all my dressing up and pretending to be other people. So I hope that goes some way to expunging the image you’re forming in your head of me as a spoilt and snobbish little brat. That’s what I hope, not what I expect.) I wasn’t thinking about servants as individual people but about the overall concept, which seemed so smart, so grand, so posh.