David Mitchell: Back Story (7 page)

The downside of pianos is having to practise. I learned that young. I started having piano lessons aged six and I suppose that means I could have been a concert pianist. I had the opportunity to put in the ten thousand hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell recommends. Although, like learning the details of how a magic trick is done, thinking about a musician in that way really undermines their art in my eyes. Suddenly one is more amazed by the massive faff that the attainment of their skill has involved than by the skill itself. It seems such a ridiculously obsessive, disproportionate act, like keeping all your wee in jars. You feel like saying they needn’t have bothered.

I think I wanted to learn the piano because of my maternal grandfather, who played it beautifully. He was Welsh and, until he died in 1985, probably my favourite person in the world. He couldn’t read music but he could make tunes from his head turn into tunes coming out of a piano. This was the closest to magic that I ever witnessed before I got an iPhone, and it meant he possessed a quality that the Welsh seem to value above all others: he was musical.

I am extremely proud of my Welsh heritage. My mother’s parents were kind, interesting, funny, happy people and their house in Swansea was a wonderful place to be. I adored Swansea too; it is truly an ‘ugly, lovely town’ as Dylan Thomas said. It seemed to me in every way preferable to Oxford, and not just because the people were friendlier – which, according to my parents, it had in common with everywhere outside Stasi-controlled East Berlin.

I loved the weird and wrecked old industrial buildings – the huge warehouses near the largely disused docks with the names of defunct companies written in faded paint between dozens of smashed windows; the dark appearance and malevolent smell of the Carbon Black Factory which, as we drove from Oxford, signified that we were nearly there. I loved the graceful terraces of the Uplands where my grandparents ran a filling station; the shiny writing on the brand new ‘Leisure Centre’ which struck me as so much swankier than a mere ‘public swimming pool’ could ever be; the Victorian ironwork of Mumbles pier.

And the seaside – the amazing Gower coast, more beautiful than a thousand Radcliffe Cameras. Actually a thousand Radcliffe Cameras wouldn’t be beautiful. It would be odd but also monotonous: a vast and weird expanse of limestone pimples. I think I mean a thousand times more beautiful than the Radcliffe Camera. (If you haven’t heard of the Radcliffe Camera, this may be a baffling paragraph. I should explain that it’s not a camera, it’s a building – a very pretty building which doesn’t even look like a camera. It looks more like the dome of St Paul’s.)

I learned so many things through Swansea. What the Second World War was; that the Germans had tried to bomb British cities to bits but failed; that lights had been put on Clyne Common near my grandparents’ house so the Luftwaffe would mistake it for the docks and unleash their payload harmlessly there. I thought this plan brilliant and was not yet sufficiently aware of the city’s wrecked centre to realise how seldom it had worked.

I learned the difference between rugby and football: the fact that the latter required rigorous policing while the former would only have a couple of bobbies overseeing a crowd of tens of thousands; and that the Welsh were pre-eminent in the former and, largely, disdained the latter.

Where the world’s best ice cream is made: Swansea. And by whom: Joe’s ice cream parlour.

Where coal came from and how it was used. What a slagheap was. How coal had made Britain great but how there wasn’t so much left now. How Welsh coal burned hotter.

I’ve never had a stronger sense of belonging to a place than I did about Swansea when I was sitting on my grandfather’s knee, behind the counter of his filling station in the Uplands, being introduced to all the customers.

And then there were my evil grandparents: my father’s mother and father, who lived in Scotland. ‘Evil’ is a terribly unfair way to refer to them but it was how I felt a lot of the time. I think that many children probably cast their grandparents in these contrasting roles, largely on the basis of one set of grandparents being marginally more easy-going than the other. But, as a small child, it felt to me that, while I could do no wrong in Grandpa and Grandma’s eyes, to Grandad and Grannie I was trouble. Particularly to Grannie. To her, I think I represented all that was flawed in my father’s personality for having chosen to marry my mother rather than someone stupider and more old-fashioned, plus the much greater flaws in the character of my mother, and all the consequent flaws in the disgracefully modern way they’d chosen to bring me up.

This is a familiar collection of attitudes for a disgruntled grandmother to have – I expect a lot of people will recognise it from their own families – but, looking back, it seems truly daft. By any objective reckoning, my parents were conventional. They weren’t hippies; they believed that children should be, if not ‘seen and not heard’, well-behaved and obedient, and should, in public at least, defer to adults. They weren’t as old-fashioned as they would have been if they’d been born in the 1910s instead of the 1940s but, since my grandmother didn’t trouble to give birth to my father until 1946, I think that was more her fault than his.

I don’t want to give an exaggerated impression of how difficult she was: she wasn’t horrible all the time and she could be very kind. But she was tricky and inconsistent, and kept tricky and inconsistent dogs as pets.

My grandfather on that side was a remarkable man who died in 2011, three days after his 100th birthday. He was intelligent, witty, successful, quite rich and as financially generous as he was emotionally miserly. He loved fishing and shared many of the temperamental attributes of his prey.

This was not a man you hugged. I don’t know how I knew this – maybe I’d been told or maybe I just felt it. But I only ever shook hands with him, as did my dad. He would kiss my mother on the cheek perfunctorily, like a chat show host with a difficult actress.

Icy judgement emanated from him. He abhorred being kept waiting and, if we were going out for lunch (something which happened when he was around because he was rich), we’d have to get to the restaurant early when it was deserted, cryptlike. If we didn’t, his displeasure would manifest itself in my dad’s rising stress levels. Grandad hardly needed to say anything himself; some unseen power would make my father squirm, like when Darth Vader uses the force to strangle someone.

He had a snooker table and I remember once, when very small, wandering into the snooker room where he and my dad were having a game. I was too young to know what snooker was but, seeing a red shiny ball on a table at about my eye level, I picked it up. The reaction was like an east wind as my dad quickly took the ball from me and replaced it. My grandfather showed no surprise, only quiet displeasure. My behaviour had merely been typically disappointing.

He loved comedy though and, while we were never close, I think he was proud that I became a comedian, even if
Peep Show
was probably never to his taste. He was more of a fan of Peter Sellers and I can’t fault him there. I remember him wheezing and crying with laughter at the various
Pink Panther
films and I think such abandoned enjoyment of comedy from someone who was so controlled and controlling made me respect comedy even more. I concluded that everyone loved and admired comedy, however stern or important they might seem.

I was wrong about that. Lots of people don’t particularly like comedy. Some really have no sense of humour at all – they genuinely don’t find things funny. Consequently they often laugh a lot in the hope that they won’t be found out – that, by the law of averages, they’ll be laughing when a joke happens. I find that sort of person extremely unsettling.

And then there are people – and these don’t unsettle but enrage me – who think comedy is trivial. They believe that serious, intelligent people should focus on worthy, momentous things and that jokes, levity, piss-taking, subverting and satirising are the pastimes of the second-rate. Words cannot express how second-rate I consider such people. In my experience the properly intelligent, whether they’re astrophysicists, politicians, poets, lawyers, entrepreneurs, comedians, taxi drivers, plumbers or doctors, however serious or trivial their career aims, all
adore
jokes. And they have that in common with a lot of idiots.

For as long as I can remember, I have always thought that being funny is the cleverest thing you can do, that taking the piss out of something – parodying it, puncturing it – is at least as clever as making that thing in the first place. This view, which, I’m happy to say, will be most offensive to the people I want most to offend, was probably formed watching my cold grandfather, with all his financial acumen and preference for fish over humans, cry with laughter at a van being repeatedly driven into a swimming pool.

- 6 -

Death of a Monster

My attempt to swerve round another bus stop is scuppered when I can’t help stopping to stare at the advert on it – for Turkey. ‘Bootiful!’ declares a bronzed Bernard Matthews as the Aegean sparkles behind him. It must have been his last gig before he died – and a great piece of lateral thinking from the guys in Ankara.

Or it would have been, if they’d actually had Bernard Matthews. Sadly – and this is where I can’t pretend ad executives are fools – the Turkey advert halts me in my tracks not with a great visual pun, but with a picture of a girl’s arse. The arse is flecked with white sand and in the background are some Roman ruins. Now, that’s pulling in two different marketing directions. You can get away with women in bikinis on holiday pictures because you’re saying it’s a sunny climate in which to go to the beach. If the woman looks sexy and men associate the destination with sexy thoughts, that’s not your fault. You might even give the bikini woman a toned husband and small child to make it even more respectable. Although that reduces the subliminal sexiness.

But if you stick white sand on the arse of the bikini-clad woman, there’s nothing incidental about it. You’re in the realm of also showing a tantalising glimpse of the side of a breast. Really, you might as well at that stage. You absolutely
never
see that sort of bikini-clad woman with kids. You’re overtly going for sexiness and taking the risk that you look a bit cheap as a result.

So putting a Roman ruin next to the sandy bottom is mixing your messages. It’s too late to go all ‘lecture tour of the Med’ – that’s like a Spearmint Rhino club saying it’s got a library. It doesn’t take the curse off the arse any more than if one of the adhering bits of sand turned out to be an interesting shell or fossil. An alliance between the history-liking parts of the brain and the bronzed and shapely woman-liking parts of the penis is unlikely to convince. It’s a coalition without credibility.

Holidays were a big deal for my parents when I was little. Most of the year was spent planning the summer holiday, which puzzled me because I would have been just as happy spending the fortnight at home. It seemed nonsensical to be going somewhere we wouldn’t have access to a television.

The first summer holiday I remember was in France when I was four. We went to a village called Benodet on the Brittany coast and stayed in a caravan. A British holiday company had put loads of them there, so that holiday-makers on a budget could soak up the Gallic atmosphere by living in France as trailer park trash for two weeks. I must say, I loved it.

It was a big financial stretch for my parents, largely because of the poor exchange rate. It may surprise you to learn that I wasn’t aware of that at the time. But, no, I’m not that intelligent/tedious, I’m afraid/relieved to say. I think at that point I probably wasn’t even aware of how money worked in my own country.

I remember shopping trips with my mother when I was very small. In those days, food shopping still involved going to lots of different places: baker’s, butcher’s, greengrocer’s, fishmonger’s, etc. All the old types of shop were present except for the grocer’s, which had been supplanted by a supermarket. But my mother would only buy things like tinned food, sugar and flour there – nothing that needed to be fresh. I don’t think she would have said so but I suspect she considered that ‘common’.

The other ‘shop’ I was aware of was the bank, which, I had been told, was where you went to get money. I assumed that they just gave it to you and then you exchanged it for all the other things you needed. When you ran out, you went back for more. The relationship between work, earning and spending was lost on me. It was an attitude prescient of the boom conditions of the early 2000s. It came as a nasty shock when my mother explained to me that the bank only looked after your money – it didn’t give it to you – and you had to work in order to get hold of it.

So my parents’ reduced spending power, thanks to a weak pound and a strong franc, was beyond my understanding and I only know about it because it was mentioned on future holidays.

‘It’s a lot easier now you get ten francs to the pound,’ my father would often say.

‘Yes, it was terrible when we first came. Everything was so expensive,’ my mother would reply.

That memory won’t go away. When I’m befuddled and incontinent in a home, in anywhere between one and six decades’ time, my last coherent remarks will be on the subject of exchange rates in the late 1970s. In the summer of 1978, all I knew was that French things were prohibitively expensive, as I wouldn’t have put it at the time.

Eating out, for example – which didn’t bother me but must have been a shame for my parents because it meant we largely ate food they’d brought with them. But I was introduced to French bread, Orangina and Boursin – all things that were then unobtainable in Britain. The fact that I liked the Boursin came as a massive surprise to my parents who, like most Britons at the time, thought garlic was a bit exotic. They liked it, but they thought of it as an adult or acquired taste, rather than a very basic ingredient that the British inexplicably decided to turn their nose up at for a few generations.