2 A Scar Is Born, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

A SCAR IS BORN

By an odd coincidence, I was born on my birthday. In the same place as my mother, Harton Hospital, South Shields, County Durham, though luckily not at the same time. I was born plain Eric Idle. We couldn’t afford a second name. There was a war on. At the time of my birth, Hitler was trying to kill me. Nothing personal, but fortunately he missed. The closest he got is one of my earliest memories: a shot-up U.S. Wellington bomber, limping home from Germany, crashing in flames in the field beside my nursery school.

“Nothing to worry about,” said the nurses as they hustled us inside.

Surely the scariest words you can ever hear. Then I learned the truth from my mum: “The American pilot was looking for an emergency landing in the field. He saw the kids playing and deliberately turned away, taking the plane down.”

I’ve always liked Americans. They’re brave buggers.

So, close, Adolf, but no cigar.

If one of the best ways to appreciate life is to have an unhappy childhood, I was very fortunate. Things began badly and got worse. Try this for irony: my father was killed hitchhiking home from World War II. He’d been in the RAF since 1941 in the most dangerous seat of a Wellington bomber, that of the rear gunner/wireless operator, from which he emerged unscathed, and yet seven months after the war in Europe was over, he was killed in a road accident hitching home for Christmas. All over England, servicemen were waiting to be demobbed, and as the trains were full for the holidays they were told to thumb for rides, since everyone stopped for the boys in uniform. My dad got a lift in the back of a lorry load of steel. Just outside Darlington a car swerved to avoid oncoming traffic, the truck veered off the road, the load of steel shifted and crushed him. He died in hospital on Christmas Eve, my mother by his bedside. I was almost three. You can see how Christmas was never much fun in our household. I wonder if that’s why I wrote the song “Fuck Christmas”?

After I was born my father was rarely home. Wars are like that. The Air Force maps they used had code words on them. I found the words Spam Exit in my dad’s tidy handwriting. I also found a few references to myself in his tiny RAF diary for 1945; the choking words for July 7: Eric’s first paddle & trip to the Beach.

My father’s grave is in an RAF cemetery. The dead are lined up in neat white slabs, forever at attention—name, rank, serial number, and date of death: December 24, 1945. Above, the Latin words of the RAF motto: Per Ardua ad Astra. “Through hard work to the stars.” It could be the watchword for mankind entering the Space Age. Or a young man entering show business.

My mother disappeared for a while into depression, and I was brought up by my Gran in Swinton, Lancashire. Her husband, a dentist who I called Pop, took me to the Belle Vue Circus in Manchester where, amazingly, it turned out we were circus royalty. My great-grandfather was Henry Bertrand, a famous ringmaster and circus manager in the 1880s. I still have his notepaper, with his imposing picture in white tie and tails, announcing he is the Advance Manager of Roby’s Midget Minstrels. Only afterward did I realize that I too ended up in a circus: and a Flying one at that.

When I did a little research into him recently I found out that, incredibly, he had begun life as a comedian. Isn’t that slightly too much coincidence? In my novel The Road to Mars I postulated that this was evidence of a comedy gene. I was joking, but now I’m not so sure. Anyway, as a child it was exciting to be taken backstage at Belle Vue Circus to meet the terrifying clowns, who were very respectful to Pop as a Bertrand and extremely friendly to me. Pop also took me to see various variety shows at the Manchester Hippodrome, where I saw the best of British Music Hall comedians: Morecambe and Wise, Robb Wilton, Jimmy Edwards, Arthur Askey, Norman Evans, Mrs. Shufflewick, Norman Wisdom, and the Crazy Gang. The most memorable thing about the variety shows were the tableaux vivants, where a stage full of beautiful girls stood or sat, stark naked. This was the first time I ever saw a nude woman and suddenly there were twenty-four of them. It was called “A Scene from Winter” and fake snow fell while they posed with nothing on but discreetly placed drapery. The orchestra played and someone recited a daft little poem while the girls just sat there. They weren’t allowed to move. In those days, it was illegal to move around on stage naked. If they did they could be arrested, but as long as they didn’t move, it was alright and everyone applauded. I remember thinking, This is great, and ever since then I have always been very fond of nude ladies. So that’s my background in show business: circuses, clowns, comedians, and nude ladies.

My great-grandfather, Henry Bertrand, Ringmaster.

In 1948, when I was five, my Gran took me to see three films in one day. I’d never seen a movie before, and I was hooked right away. We saw Joan of Arc, The Glass Mountain, and a Marx Brothers movie, one after the other. Twenty-four nude ladies all at once and then three movies in a day. Can you see the way my life’s going? We were a pre-television generation and grew up with radio, listening to gripping series like Journey into Space and Dick Barton: Special Agent! and hilarious comedians like Al Read:

“Can you smell gas or is it me?”

There was also the incomparable Goon Show, a popular BBC Radio Comedy with Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, and Harry Secombe.

The first time I ever saw TV was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. My school brought in a tiny eight-inch black-and-white screen and we sat around watching people walking up and down singing “Vivat Regina!” in funny costumes. They gave us lots of coronation toys, mugs, golden coaches, and paper crowns, and that morning on the radio the BBC announced we’d conquered Everest—well, a New Zealander and a Tibetan Sherpa conquered Everest, but it was a British expedition.

When I was five, my mother, now working as a nurse in Cheshire, sent me to school for the first time to St. George’s, Wallasey, a small seaside town just a ferry ride across the River Mersey from Liverpool. One day I was missing from home. I’d met a boy called George playing on the Red Noses, the sand dunes at New Brighton. This was a very popular outing from Liverpool, and we were always playing with kids from the other side of the Mersey. George and I played happily all day, losing all sense of time. Many years later, when I met George Harrison and we became close friends, I had a very strong feeling that we had met before, and I often wondered if he was the boy who bunked off with me that day. I guess I’ll never know, but when I finally got home my mother was freaked out. It was difficult for her to cope with a growing son and a full-time job, and my disappearing like that scared her. So, she accepted an offer from the RAF Benevolent Fund and put me, at the age of seven, into the Royal School Wolverhampton, which had just changed its name from the Royal Orphanage. The war had given this Victorian institution a shot in the arm, but there is no escaping the pull of irony. I was sent to a school paid for by the RAF to grow up with boys all of whom had lost their fathers in the war. We called it the “Ophny,” short for Orphanage.

My first night at the school I found myself in a dormitory with a lot of crying boys. I decided not to join them. What was the point? Earlier that day, when my mother dumped me there, she simply left and disappeared. She didn’t say goodbye, she just took off. Later on, she said, “Well, I didn’t want to cause a fuss. You were happily playing so I thought I’d just slip away and avoid a scene.” Very Northern mother, that. Above all else, avoid a scene. I still have nightmares that I’m back at the Ophny. It was very grim at the time, and is terrifying in retrospect. I was there from seven years old until I managed to escape at the age of nineteen. It was a physically abusive, bullying, harsh environment for a kid. The terms were an interminable fourteen weeks. At the age of seven they seemed everlasting. Twelve years? You get less for murder.

In the Junior School, Miss McCartney whacked me across the hand with a wooden ruler because I didn’t understand a math problem. Surprisingly, I remained bad at math. At the age of eleven I nervously entered the Senior School. Bullying was endemic. The prefects were allowed to whack you with slippers. The masters could beat you with canes. For severe crimes, like giggling in Prep, you could be sent to the headmaster for “six of the best.” I was once sent for a beating for “silent insolence.” Not even saying anything. I mean, what chance does that give you? The Senior School had a dormitory a hundred yards long and at night the prefects would patrol up and down. If they heard someone talking after lights out, and nobody owned up, everybody had to get out of bed and bend over their beds while they went down the line and whacked the whole dorm. And it was freezing. I was cold until I was nineteen. No wonder I moved to California.

But unhappiness is never forever. There were moments of happiness. Sardonic laughter at how, while you were being beaten, they would say, “It’s for your own good.”

“Oh, well why don’t I do it for you then?”

I was fairly funny at school, and humor is a good defense against bullying. It’s hard to hit a smaller boy when you are laughing. I got used to dealing with gangs of males and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances while being smart at the expense of authority. Perfect training for Python.

I used to be very bitter about my school days, but now I think it was there I learned everything I needed to survive in life. It’s a cruel joke to be called Idle when shoved into an English boarding school, but it does prepare you to deal with insult, and I always had several good comebacks up my sleeve. Asked about the origins of my name on a British TV show, I speculated it was from Yorkshire and came from the “idle” mechanism on the woolen looms. When I got home there was a message from George Harrison saying, “Come off it. You’re just from a long line of lazy old bastards.” I have since learned that the actual origin is from the English word idel, meaning “unused ground” or “patch of waste.”

Hmm. “A patch of waste.” I’ve been called worse…

When I was twelve my Gran gave me a small portable typewriter and I began writing stories: The Mystery of the Missing Skull, a Boadicea story, and endless war tales about heroic RAF men. I was always interested in words, because in such a sterile environment you have to create your own entertainment and explore your own brain. Reading was and still is my great escape. I also liked puppeteering with string marionettes, writing sketches, and doing funny voices, hiding in character and poking fun at the masters. We were very subversive and got huge laughs. I performed in a school musical, Toad of Toad Hall, where I played Second Field Mouse. I turned down the offer to play First Field Mouse as I realized Second Field Mouse had more words.

I became a folkie in a trio where I played harmonica with the Sinfield brothers on banjo and guitar, and we mainly did blues. It has always struck me as odd how we identified with the black struggle in the southern U.S., when we were very white boys in an English boarding school thousands of miles away from the Deep South, but their songs became our songs of protest too, and we sang away to Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. We were being repressed, and I guess the spirit of the music, the soul of it, was very close to what we felt.

Then along came rock and roll. Elvis saved our lives. He seemed to be singing directly to us. At fourteen I wanted to play guitar very badly. By fifteen I did.

Elvis was amazing. We adored him. I heard him first singing “Heartbreak Hotel” on every juke box at Butlins Holiday Camp in Skegness in the summer of 1957, while teddy boys snapped their fingers and girls jived to that haunting voice: “Well since my baby left me…” Back at school we gathered excitedly around the telly to see if it was true what was in the papers, that the cameras wouldn’t shoot him below the waist. He danced, he jived, he shook those hips, and we heard the screams of the girls, but nothing below the waterline was shown on television. Perhaps it was the trousers. Elvis was our hero throughout my school years and we listened to him under the sheets, first on crystal sets we built ourselves, sending away for parts like cat’s whiskers and tuning coils, and then finally on tiny transistor radios. Later, when Elvis was sent into the army, it cast a gloom over us all. It seemed they had won. They cut his hair and flew him off to Germany. Then Buddy Holly died. It was all too much.

At the Ophny, every Monday afternoon from the age of eleven we had to pretend we were in the army. Joining the CCF (the Combined Cadet Force) was compulsory. We’re eleven years old and we’re out on the playground in army boots, marching up and down the square in itchy uniforms being yelled at by professional drill sergeants from the Walsall Barracks. What the hell’s this? I can still feel the webbing on the gaiters and smell the Blanco product with which we painted them khaki. Polishing boots and shining brasses was something we had to do not just for our own uniforms but also for a designated senior boy, because in our first year we were all “fags.” In British boarding-school-speak, a fag is a first-year slave for a prefect, making him toast and cleaning his shoes and running his errands. If we were late we were beaten. “Character forming” is, I think, the expression. By the age of fourteen, not only could I perform arms drill and shoot a .303 Lee-Enfield rifle with reasonable accuracy, I could strip a Bren gun blindfolded. Then they’d drop us in the Welsh mountains in full gear and say “See you,” and six hours later if you were lucky you’d stagger into a military camp in North Wales armed only with a compass and a bit of cheese. Very useful little things to know in life. And certainly, it prepared me for Python movies…

So yes, things were rough, but we fought back. We organized our own nightlife. There was a girls’ school under the same roof. We’d see the girls in chapel because church was compulsory twice on Sundays, but they would be on their side of the chancel and we on ours. Of course, being teenagers with rampant hormones, we’d try to slip messages to them during the long and interminably boring psalms while God was being cruel to the Children of Israel. As we said of the Children of Israel, “When will they ever grow up?”

I volunteered for the job of School Post Boy. Every afternoon I’d collect the official mail and take it down to the bright red pillar-box on Penn Road. I’d exit through the back gate of the Boys’ School, turn left, and walk fifty yards to the back gate of the Girls’ School, where there was always a crowd of young females hanging out. I exchanged pleasantries and clandestine billets-doux not intended for the public mailbox. They had cryptic acronyms on them, SWALK (Sealed With A Loving Kiss) and BURMA (Be Undressed Ready My Angel). On my return, there would be hastily scribbled responses. By being both helpful and flirtatious I soon had a girlfriend of my own.

In the Long Dorm, we slept in numerical order. They’d have made us shit in order if they could. My number was 63 and, randomly, next to me was 64, Halls Junior, a wonderfully subversive chap and luckily in my form. We became accustomed to slipping through the back gardens to the off-license to buy bottles of Mitchells & Butlers Old English stout and Caerphilly cheese. These we would consume after lights-out in the comforting warmth of the metal stove in the Scout Hut, where the Boy Scouts met by day and we relaxed by night, smoking Balkan Sobranie in clay pipes or Baby’s Bottom tobacco through long-stemmed rosewood churchwarden pipes. At this point Halls Junior and I upped our game. We realized that while the Girls’ School was desperately out of bounds, it was terribly close and there were no actual locked doors between the Boys’ and Girls’ Schools. All we had to do was face the fifty yards of darkness and suddenly we would be there. Fortunately, the Cadet Corps had taught us how to creep about silently in the dark, so we made a recce and it all worked perfectly: no one was around in the early hours of the morning. Thus emboldened, we climbed the stairs up into the girls’ dorm, made rendezvous with our respective amours, and led them back to the Scout Hut, where we enjoyed a bottle of sweet martini and some Babycham, a cheap pear champagne.

These midnight encounters continued for some time until finally word got out and other boys began to take advantage of this exciting opportunity. Eventually it was not uncommon to be woken at night by a girl asking where so-and-so’s bed was. In the end, the clandestine nightlife of the school became so sophisticated that we stole and copied the key to the swimming pool, a reeky green steamy hellhole, and if you wanted to go swimming with the girls, all you had to do was to put your name down on a list after Prep, and you would be woken and escorted by flashlight through the byzantine corridors down to the pool, where a small group of girls in dressing gowns awaited.

It’s amazing we were never busted. The reason of course was that the prefects became involved and thereby utterly subverted. Hard to bust other boys when you have a sweet companion in your own bed. I’m not too sure how much all of this led to full intercourse. I think a lot of it was what was called “heavy petting” in those days, for despite all this opportunity I managed to enter Cambridge a virgin. But unlike Isaac Newton, I did not leave it like that…

I got very good at misbehaving and being sneaky and antiauthoritarian at the Ophny. It was like a combination of the army and prison, where you learned to adapt and trust your peers. My form was a highly organized criminal group. We never took a straight exam until O level at sixteen, because we’d always steal the exam papers. Some boys were very adept at picking locks, or they’d unscrew the backs of wardrobes where the teachers stored the tests and then they’d write the answers overnight on stolen exam paper and smuggle those in under their jumpers and substitute them. It was only at O level that I discovered I was comparatively clever when most of the other boys in my class simply didn’t return after the summer holidays. They’d all failed. That was the first straight exam they’d ever taken. I think only eight of us returned. There were rumors that some were already in jail…

We had very muddy playing fields and I wasn’t very good at football, so on a Thursday afternoon, instead of changing for compulsory games, I would put on my school cap and march out the front door and go downtown to Wolverhampton and watch a movie. I did this regularly, walking boldly past the headmaster’s study, and nobody ever caught me, because if you’ve got your bright red school cap on and you’re using the front door, you’re clearly doing some school business, right? So, I learned very early on that if you’re brazen, nobody questions you. If I’d been sneaking out, I would probably have been caught. Well, I finally was caught in my penultimate year. I was a senior prefect and taking Prep when the headmaster sent for me and he said, “Ah, Idle, did you enjoy the movie this afternoon?”

“No, not very much, sir, it wasn’t very good,” I said, annoying him.

I’d been spotted and reported for watching a racy film, Butterfield 8, with Elizabeth Taylor. So I was beaten of course, six of the best, and next morning hauled up in front of the entire school and denounced by the headmaster for this dreadful crime. Idle had been caught downtown going to an X-rated movie! Well, I couldn’t have given myself a better PR job. Suddenly I was a hero. The whole school loved me! I was publicly sent to the back of the hall and I was no longer a prefect. Kids were slapping me on the back and giving me the thumbs-up. It was brilliant. Then, at the end of the year the headmaster left the school with the surprising recommendation that I be made Head Boy. Maybe he liked me. Maybe he liked Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe he just wanted to screw up his successor…

In the first term of my final year, my wonderful ex-RAF history teacher, Mr. Fry, arranged for me to apply to his old Cambridge college, Pembroke. I took a Harry Potter steam train to the Fens and was interviewed to read English by an economist, the Dean, and an Arab scholar. Amazingly, they offered me a place if I could pass O-level Latin in a year. A doddle.

Since I was now suddenly and weirdly Head Boy, the school insisted I must also be the head of the Combined Cadet Force, which I didn’t want to be. At the end of six years of military training they had made the mistake of sending us off on a Civil Defence course, which showed precisely what happens when a nuclear bomb goes off, and as a result I had become violently pacifist. During the Easter holidays (1962) I went on the Aldermaston march, the annual CND anti-nuclear rally. We marched from Aldermaston in Hampshire to Hyde Park, a distance of about fifty-four miles, behind banners, singing protest songs. We shall overcome. We didn’t. Instead we camped overnight in Reading and then marched proudly into London. My friend Alan Sinfield, a dark-haired, saturnine, poetry-reading guitarist from our folk trio, was by then at University College, London, and we were very lefty and very committed and it was great. When I got back to school, the new Padre called me in and said, “You’re a hypocrite, Idle. You’re the head of the CCF and you went on the Aldermaston march.” And I said, “Well, I resign.” And he said, “You’re not allowed to resign.” So, at the Monday Army Parade, I would take the salute from the English master, turn “the wrong way about” to annoy the professional drill sergeants, and slope off and read. I refused to go to military camp in Wales at the end of the year. They couldn’t throw me out, because I’d left. I’d been accepted by Cambridge University, I was on the Aldermaston march and I didn’t take any of their Combined Cadet Force bollocks seriously.

Then my entire life changed.

What changed me forever was Comedy. My epiphany began at Beyond the Fringe. In early 1963, I stayed with Alan Sinfield in North London, and we went to every single play we could. It was the time of the playwrights known as “the angry young men,” so named after Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s groundbreaking play, which we saw at the Royal Court Theatre. For this new sold-out revue at the Fortune Theatre, performed by four men from Oxbridge, we could only get standing-room tickets, which was just as well because I would never have stayed in a seat. I rolled around screaming with laughter. I have never laughed so hard in my life. I had no idea you could be that funny, or that you could laugh at the Prime Minister and the Army and the War and the Royal Family. Everything I secretly hated was being mocked, and they were doing this so wittily. They were young, smart, and dangerously funny. This was anger, but it was being used for laughter. I immediately bought the record and learned everything—Alan Bennett’s sermon, Peter Cook’s prime minister speech, Jonathan Miller’s whimsical monologues—and we would go and watch Dudley Moore playing jazz piano in Oxford Street. Beyond the Fringe was an amazing show. From that point on I could not conceive of life without comedy.