NATIVITIES

The QI twitter account said that kids allotted the roles of Mary and Joseph in school nativity productions tended to be more successful in later life. Here’s a chapter from my unfinished and unwanted autobiography called Nativity.

1976. I am sat on the sofa in our front room. The record player is playing A Night at the Opera and I am reading along with the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody. It makes me scared. Why is this man singing about dying? Who is going to get him? It upsets me and thrills me at once. I am fascinated by my parents little record collection. Aladdin Sane is terrifying because the man on the inside cover is wearing makeup and has no genitals. I ask my mum what wanking means when reading the lyrics. My mum hides that record. A trip to school to find out what it is like. School not wanking. It is a cold day, the grey of an empty playground.

My Mum, still only 23 or so has a conversation with the headmaster, a Mr O. Mr O is not impressed that I can already read and write and says to my mum – “What are we supposed to do with him for the next two years?”

After the Easter holiday I am taken to school for my first day proper. I fall apart in terror. I beg my mother not to go. I am eventually separated from her by a teacher and gently dragged to the front of the infant’s assembly where I sit cross legged in fear and tears. On the wall an overhead projection of the words to a hymn called “God made the Sun and God made me.” – to my left a battered old piano kicks into action, played by some unseen hand. Everyone sings, I just sit there and cry. I don’t know anyone here. Our house is on one side of the school grounds, the vast majority of these kids seem to live on the shiny new estate that is the other side. I haven’t made any friends yet. I don’t think I’m going to.

Day one of the 2,500 odd days that will make up school does not go well. Our teacher is Mrs M, a kind old lady. She sits me next to Martin Bond (Not his real name, the poor sod might have a much better life now and doesn’t deserve to be remembered in this way). I soon find out why no one else is sitting next to him. He smells. He is visibly dirty and a bit odd. At playtime there is more horror. Kids running around, falling over on the concrete, screaming, telling, forming gangs, playing games. I am Walter the Softy in the corner. I don’t understand any of this stuff. My childhood has been books and television and none of this. There is British Bulldog, there is kiss chase. There is mainly this thing of kids forming a huge chain of hands saying “Who Wants To Play (name of game) – All join hands” – children would stop their own activity of marbles or hopscotch or whatever and join this long line of kids until they had enough kids to play the game. Invariably about 30 seconds before a teacher rang the bell to stop playing.

The boys’ games were always a variation of “War”. “War” was just boys running about making machine gun noises and saying you were dead to arbitrary others. Being Germans was the worst thing you could be. Nobody ever said Nazi. Maybe that was some kind of higher truth about who we were, still clearly are as a people. Beating the Nazis wasn’t as important as beating the Germans. Semantically speaking, there wasn’t a great deal of difference but on some subconscious level maybe we didn’t mind the Nazi bit. Either that or these were just five year old boys not yet fully up to speed on the finer points of World War 2. Anyway, the niceties of playing War aside, Me and Martin Bond are not welcome in any of these games. It is the summer of 76, a ridiculously hot one, the air is thick with punk rock. The independent streak that saw anyone able to form a band had not passed down to all of us Maidstone based five years old, and so me and Smelly Martin Bond are not able to do our own thing. We are Genesis, the enemy. The other kids are the Sex Pistols and the Clash.

There will always be bullying in school. And well, me and SMB were sitting ducks. I’m not proud to say it was two six year old girls who first saw their chance. I don’t recall their names or faces. Just that sense of powerlessness as I handed over my lunchbox. Eventually my Mum worked out what was going on and went up the school and these kids were spoken to and it stopped. A few days later, it started again. Two boys in my year, Lee and Ian. They lived for this shit. Ian, in particular, was clearly someone looking for trouble. Again my Mum came up the school and this time Mr O decided to catch them in the act.

When he did, he grabbed the school bell and shook it violently. Everybody was told to line up. He told these boys to come forward. They did so, crying. Now I don’t know if he hit them in front of us with this plimsoll or if he dragged them away to do so. I just remember them crying and the bullying stopped. At least that sort did. Now I was about to enter a whole new world of hell. Name calling.

My mum had given up on the whole sandwich thing and I was school dinners, presumably in the hope that I might get through that without handing over a plate of hot food to some terrifying small child. I can remember the name of the boy very well who began the process of ruining my life. His name was Brian. I don’t remember his surname. He looked a bit like a young Beach Boy or infant Nazi.

I had protruding front teeth. Teeth are the curse of my family. My Dad had his all out voluntarily as a young man, just sick of all the continual chips and fillings and accidents, his brother smashed his all in on a trip at home as a child. No one escapes it. Brian the Beach Nazi calls me Bugs Bunny. I don’t understand. Then he calls me Goofy. This gets hysterical laughter from the other kids. They all suddenly start sticking their teeth out and calling me Goofy. I just sit there and cry. I know instantly this incident is a life-changing one, that it will not go away.

That summer term in school is seemingly unending. The one thing I can do is clock watch. Every minute passed is another triumph. I hide away at playtime. If I am discovered it’s to be surrounded and called Goofy. Occasionally one kid would say “What’s Up Doc?” like Bugs Bunny. Of course, I am in no position to fight back. The other children are legion and without the imperfections I need to counter.

We are given bottles of full fat milk to drink at random points of the day. The milk smells like sweat but I drink it. I have learnt not to stand out if I can help it. My Mum comes to pick me up each day with a beaker of Ribena which I guzzle like it’s a reward for survival though it’s probably to get the taste of free milk out of my famous mouth. My sister is in the buggy, my brother is in the womb. Those few hours between getting home and going to bed are the happiest of my day. My parents try their best with the sticks and stones speech. It doesn’t work. I am miserable and being clever doesn’t help either.

After the summer, I moved up to Mrs D’s class. Mrs D lived on a houseboat and dressed like Felicity Kendal in the Good Life. But she didn’t look like Felicity Kendal. By this point I had begun to really stand out at playtime preferring not to join in the ambulance-chasing games that dominated the playground. No, like some sort of underclass ponce, I would read books of poetry from the school library in the corner of the playground. This isn’t normal behaviour for a five year old boy. I remember cutting my head slipping on frost one morning and a girl in our class helping me up. I remember being totally and inconsolably stressed out by our introduction to graphs. I remember Ian my tormentor from the previous year being expelled for stealing the entire class’s lunch money. He’d been told to take the envelope of money up to the secretary’s office and he just took the notes out of it and stuffed them in his pockets. There was no plan or alibi or escape route. He just nicked it.

What I remember most is the Nativity. Last year, my friend Bob gave me a brief slice of psychoanalysis. We were talking about this breakthrough in the research into stammering. Apparently, lots of stammerers suffer near-death experiences before they are able to talk. Car-crashes, near-drownings, fires etc. This lack of vocabulary in the moment of fear does something to the part of the brain where you form words forever. Something like that. I was drunk and don’t remember. Anyway Bob says something like we all have a formative memory that shapes us, something that upsets us, something that fixes our personality to an extent. I couldn’t think of anything at first.

“When was the first time you felt humiliated?” she asks.

At this point, I almost immediately start to cry. In the middle of a Cardiff pub on a Tuesday night. I could be wrong about all this but here goes. So, I’m this bright, weird kid. I don’t fit in. There’s probably something wrong with me but I’m well behaved and very good academically so no one’s rocking the boat. Because my Mum has two young children and young children don’t do timetables, sometimes my Mum is late collecting me. Not much, 10 minutes or so but I’m sat in the classroom with my buck teeth and my poetry stopping Mrs D from getting on home. And this winds her up. She hasn’t a chance of getting promoted, maybe. Her home life is a disaster, possibly. And subconsciously she sees a chance of getting her own back on me for all the times I’ve made her stay in school a few more minutes than she needs to be there.

So, it’s Nativity time. And this is the first of Life’s Beauty Contests. Some kids get to be born more Aesthetically Pleasing than others. That’s a given. What shouldn’t be a given is that the best looking kids should automatically get to be Mary and Joseph but it always happens. I didn’t want to be Joseph. I didn’t want to be anything. But I’d have settled for a shepherd, maybe an innkeeper. But no, Mrs D, looked at me and clearly went

“That sticking out teeth muthafucker is going to be the comic relief. I’m gonna make him a donkey.”

And so it is that I am pushed onto the stage in a brown body stocking, huge ears and tights in front of a few dozen mums and dads. Who laugh. And I mean really fucking laugh. There is pointing. It lasts forever. The laughter, that is. Somehow I don’t cry but I want to.

Back in 2018 I am crying. I tell Bob the whole story.

“That bitch knew what she was doing,” she says.

Bob used to be a teacher.

“Do you think that’s why you love to make people laugh, Paul? When did you first start telling jokes, doing impressions, etc.? I bet it wasn’t long after that.” It wasn’t very long at all. No.

I’d never made the connection. That laughter wasn’t nice. It was the laughter of parents relieved that isn’t their child. This was the 1970s. People were fucking awful. They’ve always been dickheads but this was a bad time. Punk had to happen. I was not yet a punk but I was an outsider. That moment sealed it.