David Mitchell: Back Story (4 page)

So I settled on chocolate as a respectable sort of sweet to aspire to owning. And I liked chocolate, just nowhere near as much as toast. At Christmas and Easter, therefore, I would be given quite a lot of chocolate. I would be aware that this was a good thing; that, in the economy of children, I was briefly rich. This was a state of affairs to be cherished, I reasoned. So I wouldn’t eat it. I’d hoard it. This took very little self-control as the pleasure I took from eating chocolate was massively outweighed by the displeasure I endured from ceasing to own it.

What a natural miser, you might think. I hope not – and I don’t think so. In general, I like what money buys more than the money itself. But I don’t spend a lot on chocolate. Of course, my nest egg – or nest of chocolate eggs – was no good to me. When I returned to my stash weeks later, it had taken on the taste of the packaging and developed that horrible white layer. A poor reward for my prudence.

I have no idea whether these feelings of oddness and inadequacy are normal and, if so, whether I felt them to a greater or lesser than normal extent. Is it normal to feel you’re not normal but want to be normal? I think it probably is.

I certainly don’t think that those feelings drove me to comedy. Although it may explain some of the murders (see Book 2).

I’m always suspicious of that ‘comedy comes from pain’ reasoning. Trite magazine interviewers talk to comedians, tease a perfectly standard amount of doubt, fear and self-analysis out of them and infer therefrom that it’s this phenomenon of not-feeling-perpetually-fine that allowed them to come up with that amusing routine about towels.

Well, correlation is not causation, as they say on Radio 4’s statistics programme
More or Less
. Everyone’s unhappy sometimes, and not everyone is funny. The interviewers may as well infer that the comedy comes from the inhalation of oxygen. Which of course it partly does. We have no evidence for any joke ever having emanated from a non-oxygen-breathing organism. At a sub-atomic level, oxygen is absolutely packed with hilarions.

What distinguishes the comedian from the non-comedian, I always want to scream at the interviewers, is not that they are sometimes unhappy, solemnly self-analyse or breathe oxygen but that they reflect upon these and other things in an amusing way. So stop passing this shit off as insight, interviewers. You’ve not really spotted anything about the people you’re speaking to. You think you see unusual amounts of pain when it’s just performers politely glumming up so as not to rub your noses in the fact that their job is more fun than yours. So they mention that they sometimes feel lonely and hope the article plugs the DVD.

I suspect that my levels of infantile self-doubt were no more remarkable than my year of birth – which is 1974, by the way. And I certainly didn’t feel inadequate all, or even most, of the time. I often felt special and clever and like I’d probably grow up to be a billionaire toy manufacturer or captain of the first intergalactic ship with a usable living room. In those moods I didn’t want to be normal.

If I was a happy little four-, five- or six-year-old – and I think I probably was, for all my worries and doubts – it’s thanks to my parents. They always gave me the impression that they were delighted by my very existence – that I rarely did anything wrong and, if I actually did anything right, then that was a tremendous cherry on the amazing cake. I was made to be well-behaved in front of other people, but I certainly felt I could say anything to them – scream, rage, cry, worry, speculate as to the presence of wasps, ask to be addressed in the manner of an eighteenth-century king, pretend to be in a spaceship or on television, suddenly need the loo – and all would still be well.

There is really only one thing I remember about their general parental shtick which irritates me now, and that was their attitude to Oxford. They were really quite down on it. I suppose they’d only just moved there and didn’t particularly feel welcome or like they belonged there – in contrast, I think, to Salisbury with which they’d also had no previous connections but had immediately loved. My mother missed living by the sea – she still does – and my dad, who grew up in the north, has never had the accent but developed a little of the sixth sense for snootiness. And you don’t need a sixth sense for snootiness to detect it in Oxford. It’s undoubtedly a snooty place. But then it’s got a fair bit to be snooty about. (It’s also got a massive chip on its shoulder about Cambridge, which is understandable.)

I think my mum and dad imagined they’d move somewhere else before too long, so they discouraged me from getting attached to the place. You’re not really from here, you were born in Salisbury, your mum’s Welsh and your dad’s a bit Scottish, so you’re not even really English – you’re British and not really from the only place you can remember ever being in. That was the message I was given. And I can understand why.

But that’s not much use when you’re four, when you’re looking for the things that define you. You want a home town and you want to be able to bask in the illusion that it’s the best place in the world. You might even consider supporting the football team.

Such securities were denied me because, while they never said Oxford was a dump and would always concede that it was a beautiful place with a famous university, I was never allowed to forget the city’s failings – and indeed England’s. England, I was given the impression, was the snootiest part of Britain and consequently undeserving of my allegiance.

My parents still live in Oxford and I’d be very surprised if they ever leave. They have lots of friends in the area and they’ve grown very fond of it. My brother, Daniel, was born there and our parents were already coming round to the place by then. Consequently he did support the football team for a while and feels tremendous allegiance to the city, to the extent that he has, up till now, neglected to move away.

So I’ve always felt a bit rootless, but without any of the cachet of most rootless people. You know the sort: Danish father, Trinidadian mother, live in Thame (I’m thinking of a specific boy in my class). For people like that, the fact that they have no single place of allegiance is part of what defines them – it’s interesting and glamorous. Being definitely British but with your loyalties split between various unremarkable parts – Oxford, Swansea, Salisbury, the Scottish Borders – has no exotic upside to compensate for the absence of a one-word answer to the question: ‘Where are you from?’

The Danish-Trinidadian boy had real candles on his Christmas tree, which necessitated having a fire extinguisher on stand-by. And he was called Sigurd Yokumsen. I bet no one ever mistakes him for a fucking novelist.

- 3 -

Light-houses, My Boy!

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.