Driving Jarvis Ham

Not really. I didn’t. God knows where the plaque went. It has nothing to do with this story.

By the way, when Jarvis wrote about his birth and glued the newspaper cutting about Tutankhamun into the scrapbook I imagine it wasn’t done at the actual time. The language he uses is pretty childish – it’s a writing style that Jarvis will stick with for most of his life – his writing may come across at times like it’s being dictated by a child who’s just learning to read out loud in front of the rest of the class. Expect quite a lot of And there was a man. And his name was Roy. And Roy had a dog. And it was called Rover. And Roy had a stick. And Roy threw the stick. And Rover fetched the stick. That kind of thing. Sorry. Don’t shoot the messenger.

Anyhow, the way Jarvis has written about his birth may be childish but the cutting out and the gluing is beyond the abilities of a nought year old. The same goes for the bit about his first acting job.

The Diana poem, however, happened live. Jarvis wrote it when he was fourteen. And the drawing. He showed me them both at the time. I remember lying about how good they were.

It was the same day that Jarvis had come out to Ugly Park with me to talk to my evil stepfather Kenneth about him perhaps getting a job or doing the washing up once in a while, or better still, getting out of town so me and my mother could return to the single parent/only child domestic bliss that we’d been perfectly happy with before he’d shown up.

Ugly Park – okay, Ugbury Park – was a small council housing estate on the outskirts of Mini Addledford, the village where Jarvis and his parents lived. It was like a theme park – its themes being urban decay and inner city depravation. At weekends and on Bank Holidays people from the surrounding villages would drive out to Ugly Park to ooh and aah at the dogfights and the graffiti and to film the boy racers on their camcorders as they bombed around the estate in their stolen cars before crashing them into a wall and torching them.

That’s not true. I’m exaggerating. But for the six months that my mother’s boyfriend Kenneth moved in that’s what it felt like. It felt like this:

And what I really wanted it to feel like was this:

I would have loved to have had a mother who made costumes for me and a father who baked cakes and wasn’t drunk in an armchair all day long, burning holes into the upholstery while he fell asleep watching the horse racing with a fag on.

And then there was the bullying.

I’ve compiled a typical week’s worth of Kenneth bullying episodes into one fun-packed omnibus edition to illustrate.

It was a Tuesday. I came home from school, mum was at work and Kenneth was in the front room, drunk, sitting in his armchair – that used to be my armchair – and shouting abuse at Basil Brush. I went into the kitchen and made an elaborate sandwich from the ingredients I’d bought on the way home from school (there was never any food in the cupboards at Ugly Park). I took my sandwich into the front room and as I made my way past Kenneth towards the sofa he leant over and took the sandwich off my plate and stuffed it into his mouth. When I complained Kenneth raised his hand, showing me the back of it in a way that was supposed to tell me he’d hit me with it if I didn’t shut up. He’d never catch me I thought. It would probably take him half an hour to get himself out of the armchair. But I couldn’t be sure. And even if the backhanded slap didn’t hurt, the nicotine stains on Kenneth’s fingers would probably give me cancer.

I sat down on the sofa and opened my bag of crisps and can of Coke. Kenneth leant over again and snatched the crisps from me and crushed them into a bag of Cheese and Onion crumbs before handing them back. He then launched himself out of the armchair with the aid of a massive fart and walked off to the toilet to piss all over the toilet seat and floor, putting his cigarette out in my can of Coke along the way.

Kenneth would never bully me in front of my mother and when I tried telling her about it she thought I was making it all up because I was missing my real father. I wasn’t. He was no Atticus Finch or Doctor Huxtable either.

You know how when you’re young there are people you call your aunt or your uncle even though they aren’t related to you? Jarvis’s parents were like a mum and dad version of that. Which would have made Jarvis my brother I suppose. Okay, bad analogy. But while Kenneth was living with us at Ugly Park I spent more time with the Hams than I did at home. I liked the pots of tea, the biscuits and the cakes. I liked the family board games, the Charades and the I Spy. There was an open fire in the living room and food in the kitchen cupboards. Jarvis’s house always smelled of freshly baked bread and flowers. Ugly Park smelled of ugly.

Sometimes I’d go to the Ham and Hams with Jarvis after school and I’d feel so at home that I’d forget to go home.

One day I went back to Ugly Park after sleeping the night in the spare room at Jarvis’s house and there was a fire engine outside my house. Kenneth had set fire to the kitchen. The fire brigade had found him asleep in the armchair, fifteen feet of ash hanging from a cigarette on his bottom lip and children’s TV on.

He had to go.

So Jarvis and me bunked off school one afternoon and went to Ugly Park to talk to Kenneth. I was too scared to confront him on my own and taking Jarvis with me seemed like a good idea (the only idea) at the time.

I knew my mother would be out at work and Kenneth would be drunk and half asleep on the sofa when Jarvis and I walked into the front room. When Kenneth woke up and saw us both standing above him, all menacing and purposeful, he’d be terrified. I imagined this is what Kenneth would see:

In reality, it was more like this:

Kenneth woke and he stood up – faster than I’d ever seen him move before – and perhaps it caught Jarvis unawares, because I doubt he really meant to slash Kenneth across the arm with the cake slice that he pulled out from inside his jacket. There was a bit of blackcurrant jam on the cake slice; it was made of stainless steel, a bit like this:

I don’t know why Jarvis had come tooled up. Or cutlery-d up, and I don’t know what he was expecting to do with the cake slice. It didn’t even have a pointed end. What was he going to do? Ice Kenneth?

Which shows what I know about cutlery.

The cake slice cut into Kenneth’s arm like it was a blancmange and Kenneth’s blood sprayed onto both Jarvis and me.

We were blood brothers now.

We ran away from Ugly Park, all the way back to the Ham and Hams – throwing the bloody cake slice into the river on the way, like we were in a gangster movie. We washed the blood off in the bathroom at Jarvis’s house and Jarvis’s dad cooked us dinner. We didn’t talk about what had happened with Kenneth, although we were both expecting the police to knock on the door at any moment. They never came.

After dinner we played Monopoly with Jarvis’s mum and dad and I let Jarvis buy Mayfair and Park Lane because they were his favourites. I stayed the night in the spare room but didn’t sleep.

When I went home the next day my mother was alone. Kenneth had left Ugly Park – via Accident and Emergency – saying to my mother that her son and his friends were all mental.

Ugly Park didn’t seem quite so ugly any more.

None of that was in the scrapbook or the shoebox.

In fact, other than Jarvis’s birth, his first acting job and meeting Princess Diana outside the Wimpy there was no record of any other event in the shoebox or the suitcase for the first eighteen years of Jarvis’s life.

I could fill in some of the gaps for him of course. There are a lot of gaps. I could tell you Jarvis was picked on a bit at school. That might be important, I don’t know. He was called Piggy and Pork Ham and Fathead, and that was just by the teachers. I’m joking of course. The other kids did take the Mickey out of Jarvis but it didn’t seem to bother him all that much.

What else? Jarvis was neither an underachiever or an overachiever at school. Academically at least, he was average. He wet himself in the classroom twice that I’m aware of, but that had more to do with bad teachers on a power trip putting the fear of God into schoolchildren if they ever dared ask to be excused for five minutes to go to the toilet.

He loved drama at school. From the day that Miss whatever-her-name had chosen him to play Tutankhamun he wanted more. He didn’t get picked for any further lead roles though and he had to be content with being a king carrier like the rest of us, but he loved it anyway. Jarvis liked dressing up in the ludicrous costumes his mother made and talking in even more ludicrous accents and voices.

At secondary school there were fewer opportunities for his acting skills. There was no proper drama department and Jarvis always said his English teacher didn’t like him and so never picked him for any of the end of term productions.

In his last year of school he took a lot of days off with made up illnesses and on the final day of the last term he went home early before all the tears, shirt signing and flour and egg fights. He said that people had been throwing eggs and flour at him at school for the last five years so why would he choose to stay around for another afternoon of it voluntarily?

Jarvis had no brothers or sisters but he did have two parents – one of each – and when he left school he started working full time with them in the Ham and Hams Teahouse.

At weekends Jarvis used to put on little shows for his parents in their front room. He had a magic set, with a top hat and a wand and a collapsible card table that he’d cover with black cloth to put all his tricks on. He was a shit magician if that helps the story.

Jarvis also did impressions of people from TV and had a terrifying looking ventriloquist’s dummy called Ronnie that his dad eventually had to get rid of as it gave Jarvis’s mother nightmares. There’s an old photograph of Jarvis with Ronnie on the mantelpiece in the Hams’ living room, and if I was cruel – which I’m afraid I am – I’d say that when I looked at the photograph, I found it difficult to tell which one was the ventriloquist and which one was the dummy.

On Jarvis’s sixteenth birthday his mother was rushed to hospital with breathing difficulties. After two weeks in hospital she was in a wheelchair for a while. I hilariously used to refer to her as A Mum Called Ironside. Jarvis always laughed, so that was okay.

Perhaps by being reticent with the diary action for the first eighteen years of his life Jarvis has actually done us all a favour. Nobody really likes that opening twenty or thirty tedious pages of a too big celebrity autobiography when the author bangs on about their childhood and about what their grandparents did in the war, when all we really want to read about is the up to date juicy stuff with all the famous people and the sex and the drugs and the fighting.

If the gaps in Jarvis’s adult life really do annoy you though, why not fill them in yourself. People are mad for audience interaction these days. It might even be fun. In those months in 1992 for example, when not much happened because Jarvis was busy reading this book:

Why not imagine he was playing football for England instead.

Or on the unfilled diary pages of 1993 and 2002 you could pretend he was building an ark because God had told him in a dream that a big flood was going to wash Devon into the sea, or you could pretend he was baking a massive cake for the Queen or something. Seriously, go ahead. Make it up. I wish I had.

But perhaps you honestly can’t be bothered to do that and you’d just prefer the truth, no matter how dull.

In the first half of 1993 Jarvis was flying model helicopters and blowing up balloons at a toyshop and for nearly all of 2001 to 2010 he was depressed. There. It’s this year’s Bridget Jones. Call Hollywood.

Right. Let’s get on with the sex, the drugs and the fighting.

I turned up the in-car radio to drown out the in-car snoring, adjusting the volume knob like I was cracking a safe. Turning it up loud enough to drown out Jarvis’s snoring but not loud enough to wake him up.

If a fast song came on I’d put my foot down and accelerate with it. I knew these narrow B roads like the back of my hand. I knew the high hedges and the telegraph poles. The farmhouses, the churches and derelict barns converted into open plan holiday homes. I knew the village post offices and which farm shops sold fresh eggs and cheese, and which sold honey and strawberries. I knew where the trees on either side of the road would appear to bend over to touch each other’s fingertips, creating a tunnel over the road. I knew when we were coming up to a red telephone box or wooden bus shelter. Cows. Horses. Sheep. Potholes and pigsties. That’s what the back of my hand looks like.