What Does This Button Do?: The No.1 Sunday Times Bestselling Autobiography
Bruce Dickinson
‘I was spotty, wore an anorak, had biro-engraved flared blue jeans with “purple” and “Sabbath” written on the thighs, and rode an ear-splittingly uncool moped. Oh yes, and I wanted to be a drummer…’Bruce Dickinson – Iron Maiden’s legendary front man – is one of the world’s most iconic singers and songwriters. But there are many strings to Bruce’s bow, of which larger-than-life lead vocalist is just one. He is also an airline captain, aviation entrepreneur, motivational speaker, beer brewer, novelist, radio presenter, film scriptwriter and an international fencer: truly one of the most unique and interesting men in the world.In What Does this Button Do? Bruce contemplates the rollercoaster of life. He recounts – in his uniquely anarchic voice – the explosive exploits of his eccentric British childhood, the meteoric rise of Maiden, summoning the powers of darkness, the philosophy of fencing, brutishly beautiful Boeings and firmly dismissing cancer like an uninvited guest.Bold, honest, intelligent and funny, this long-awaited memoir captures the life, heart and mind of a true rock icon, and is guaranteed to inspire curious souls and hard-core fans alike.
Copyright (#u9bd56332-a305-571d-9823-01471384aa30)
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
SECOND EDITION
© Bruce Dickinson 2017, 2018
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
Cover photograph © John McMurtie 2018
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein and secure permissions, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any future edition of this book.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Bruce Dickinson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008172442
Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008172503
Version: 2018-04-03
Dedication (#u9bd56332-a305-571d-9823-01471384aa30)
To Paddy, Austin, Griffin and Kia.
If eternity should fail, you will still be there.
Contents
Cover (#u143836bc-4619-5429-92c1-405e046ee930)
Title Page (#uc409cf07-d0c8-5510-a403-c343a7604b1b)
Copyright (#uf3c05216-dcb8-5d21-a006-59c84bbcdf64)
Dedication (#ufff50f75-37cf-5685-b0f1-74836e4e9d15)
Preface (#u17582fea-9e71-5ddd-a410-6ef13d039948)
Foreword (#uf5f27e4b-3738-5348-92fa-61a0ae80e10f)
Born in ’58 (#u192185d5-8052-5ba2-86a5-7d1e2731418c)
Life on Mars (#uefe49f9b-f76e-5b58-ba24-6d0acee8503b)
If You Want Skool, You Got It (#u2fdb5acf-7cde-50b6-9d59-ba04b34e3872)
Angelic Upstart (#ucd32892b-7226-5dfc-adcc-2d926df1a072)
The Kipper’s Revenge (#u264f4115-3be0-5d07-9158-b7fa62a0a4a9)
An Unexpected Journey (#u46b14184-856e-5411-82d4-32ba781a839e)
Lock Up Your Daughters (#u1e1a41ee-0a44-5ceb-a089-4ae5b5b686d4)
Minibusted (#u7d41e315-4652-5d7e-9417-a670de8838b9)
Going to the Dogs (#u9db13ee7-fb57-5322-a8e6-5bdbbcbfd6dd)
Dope Opera (#u1de333f0-2643-5ae3-9332-82e9c71aae20)
A Heavy Metal Crusade (#u12611545-8b0c-5cf9-8d5c-0022a16e0486)
Ham of the Gods (#u97277de0-4855-591a-877f-8cf535f21cd2)
Neighbour of the Beast (#u0695f034-5dfb-53b7-bdbf-e81af3e53014)
The Big Dipper (#u77091af3-3824-5894-b382-e89bb8b7b57a)
On the Bandwagon (#u063275ee-bd45-579f-a8a9-c0700e42853b)
New Battery (#ua3fe7011-2798-5826-89c7-090c77c83ef1)
Organ Pipes (#u8d368222-4afc-5e5b-9cdd-d629f0efe56c)
Powerslave (#ub462a9d0-ca01-51f0-b7a1-9bbebb7c9fe1)
Iron Curtains (#u4ed275f4-e59e-561d-bbbb-4dd89b07b428)
Snow, Leather and Bondage (#u52abd491-0622-5cb9-8706-1e5741de410b)
The Boys from Brazil (#u818912f9-2bb6-5624-9954-f8a8f3b63a4b)
Much Ado About Cutting (#u83b01287-8e31-5257-9dab-8d3df7171fb1)
You’ll Believe a Drummer Can Fly (#ucb9ec3ed-c185-50a3-ba82-f60bcc01cef8)
Double Dutch (#u9a346208-76b7-53f6-9121-21c4adf6e937)
You Cannot Be Serious (#u0361e900-ad64-5cf8-8bb2-649f6a0cd0c3)
Moonchild (#u5e3cce1f-0434-5d54-9053-d1bb764f6c6d)
Slaughtering Daughters (#u3aeb7655-6acc-5330-b10e-431cf3428536)
Fault Lines (#u1c495891-a608-56f8-a613-1e1b56283556)
Wing Nut (#ubc99a909-01e6-5b6e-8587-52092e63d8a1)
Out of the Frying Pan (#u49df3c0c-221c-5a99-bf56-19aeaec95f71)
Into the Fire (#u8f060be3-1622-5db8-abb7-007041b2fe85)
Radio Pirate (#u5fd3c57c-7339-50b2-bb45-abb164dd2c41)
Edison and the Light Bulb Moment (#u4e5caabf-953a-5878-8d9a-6bce90ac86b2)
Brain Swap (#u9461134f-20f1-5e8b-b381-08f6329dae0b)
Feet Wet in the Goose (#uf15f430a-dc86-5caf-ac88-934ab5565ff7)
To Fly, To Swerve (#uffbe42a8-3f13-5613-92c9-5d72c165362c)
Black September (#u07c0efac-5923-5a66-a2bb-c49104af7ec3)
A Close Shave (#u9a96044d-742e-577e-a963-1942cde5a5bb)
The Spruce Bruce (#u52a67657-cc5e-58bd-a4a0-6bfce81deb1f)
What Could Possibly Go Wrong? (#uce89d99c-a687-53fd-9fec-d7e556979444)
Bruce Air (#ua97acb9e-9f7c-511e-9487-544bf71d9152)
Alchemy (#u517f318f-42f6-50da-a06d-5e3baf738c1a)
Bitter Experience (#ua13d5f92-40f6-507f-911d-46f5db1462c7)
To Ride the Storm (#ua3e9a0be-7266-5704-a77b-c8bd9d4f7770)
Fuck Cancer (#u795b1567-e4ab-5090-9147-022767eeca14)
Afterword (#uc67e6622-505b-59e6-a02a-a9769ea12831)
Acknowledgements (#uf8bef715-f1bc-5ecf-9677-9b31f0bf01e1)
Picture Section (#u0c898565-7db0-5ace-b81f-e8cc53f0c0c2)
About the Publisher (#u6d12d548-903d-5900-8e34-c519c0805376)
Preface (#u9bd56332-a305-571d-9823-01471384aa30)
I don’t keep a diary, although part of me thinks that perhaps I should. Anyway, I don’t. I’ve always found reading other people’s diaries becomes very tedious and seldom entertaining. I suppose keeping a diary can help future generations to assess the personal solar systems of the famous, the notorious and the merely self-important, but in the main I find diaries terrifically dull. More fool me for believing that they should be otherwise.
A brief extract from my life might read:
Monday 12 February. Answered the door. ‘No, I don’t want any fish, and I’m not in need of any hi-fi speakers, which you’ve obviously stolen and secreted in your anonymous white van parked where the CCTV can’t read its deliberately filthy number plate …’
One rather wished for a Jehovah’s Witness. At least I could have had a good argument, even though we wouldn’t have really got anywhere.
The cat has been shitting in the plant pot again. This accounts for the smell of crap that I mistakenly blamed on the drains. Not content with trying to drink the water out of the toilet, he now insists on presenting his bottom to me and puckering it like a sea anemone before taking his siege perilous on my chest and making biscuits with his claws on my T-shirt. This cat is by far the biggest rock star in the house.
This is the sort of stuff that diaries are composed of. I’m inclined to change the word ‘composed’ to ‘composted’ and suggest that this might well be the outcome most of them deserve.
It’s the mundanity of the diarist’s daily life versus their legend that makes me most wary of the genre. Richard Burton writes scathingly of his ‘underdone and dry halibut’, devoting several calories of effort to describing the undistinguished white wine that accompanied it; Joseph Goebbels finds time to comment on all manner of inconsequential family events while getting on with his role in launching and directing the Holocaust.
In spite of all these shortcomings, perhaps I should keep a diary for a bit – just to see what happens. It could even turn into a sequel to this book, although a second self-penned book about me sounds a bit suspect. In the meantime I’ve got 40,000 words of stories that for one reason or another never made it here: Ted Nugent discussing how to deal with a man holding a pointy stick; touring Scotland in a stolen car with a plastic goose on the roof; launching a practice thermonuclear strike from a submarine, only to fail dismally; the world of cross-dressing airline captains; disastrous flaming sambucas; the cultural insights gained from flying the Haj pilgrimage. These – and many others – are still to be revealed.
If the truth is ever told about my driving abilities then I might find it necessary to flee the country, although I’ll admit I did nearly kill Garry Bushell in Florida by accident in an incident that still divides public opinion.
Then there’s the whole world of public speaking, entrepreneurial enterprises, crooks and conmen that’s barely touched upon in this book. And, of course, there’s the not-so-small matter of an Iron Maiden tour on a 747, plus the tour that’s taking place as we speak.
So, it’s not that a little bit of water has passed under the bridge since 2015; it’s just that the equivalent of the Hoover Dam has built up in the interim.
‘Watch this space,’ as they say … whoever ‘they’ are.
Foreword (#u9bd56332-a305-571d-9823-01471384aa30)
I had been circling for two hours over Murmansk, but the Russians would not let us land.
‘Landing permission denied,’ said in the best Star Trek original-series Mr Chekov accent.
I didn’t know if this controller was an Iron Maiden fan, but he would never have believed me anyway; a rock star moonlighting as an airline pilot – incredible. In any case, I didn’t have Eddie on board and this wasn’t Ed Force One. It was a fishing expedition.
A Boeing 757 from Astraeus Airlines with 200 empty seats and me as first officer. There were only 20 passengers from Gatwick to Murmansk: lots of men called John Smith, close personal protection, all of them armed to the teeth. Not that Lord Heseltine needed it. He was pretty good at swinging the mace around when he had to. Then there was Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph. He was on board too. I wondered if the Soviet controller read any of his leader columns. I thought not.
‘What sort of fish are there in Murmansk?’ I had enquired of one of the John Smiths.
‘Special fish,’ he deadpanned.
‘Big fish?’ I offered.
‘Very big,’ he concluded as he left the cockpit.
Murmansk was the headquarters of the Soviet Northern Fleet. Lord Heseltine was a former Secretary of State for Defence, and what Max Hastings didn’t know about the world’s armed forces wasn’t worth printing.
The world below us was secret and obscured, submerged beneath a cotton-wool bed of low cloud. To negotiate, I had a radio and an old Nokia mobile phone. Incredibly, it got a signal halfway round each holding pattern, and I could text our airline operations who would talk to Moscow via the British Embassy. No sat phone, no GPS, no iPad, no Wi-Fi.
As James Bond says to Q at the beginning of Skyfall: ‘A gun and a radio. Not exactly Christmas, is it?’
After two hours of going round in circles, physical and metaphorical, the rules of the game changed: ‘Unless you go away, we will shoot you down.’
One day, I thought as we turned and headed towards Ivalo in Finland, I should write a book about this.
Born in ’58 (#u9bd56332-a305-571d-9823-01471384aa30)
The events that aggregate to form a personality interact in odd and unpredictable ways. I was an only child, brought up as far as five by my grandparents. It takes a while to figure out the dynamic forces in families, and it took me a long while for the penny to drop. My upbringing, I realised, was a mixture of guilt, unrequited love and jealousy, but all overlaid with an overwhelming sense of duty, of obligation to do the very best. I now realise that there wasn’t a great deal of affection going on, but there was a reasonable attention to detail. I could have done a lot worse given the circumstances.
My real mother was a young mum married in the nick of time to a slightly older soldier. His name was Bruce. My maternal grandfather had been assigned to watch over their courting activities, but he was neither mentally nor morally judgemental enough to be up to the task. I suspect his sympathies secretly lay with the young lovers. Not so my grandmother, whose only child was being stolen by a ruffian, not even a northerner, but an interloper from the flat lands and seagull-spattered desolation of the Norfolk coast. East England: the fens, marshes and bogs – a world that has for centuries been the home of the non-conforming, the anarchist, the sturdy beggar and of hard-won existence clawed from the reclaimed land.
My mother was petite, worked in a shoe shop and had won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School, but her mother had forbidden her to go to London. Denied the chance to live her dream, she took the next dream that came along, and with that came me. I would stare at a picture of her, on pointe, probably aged about 14. It seemed impossible that this was my mother, a pixie-like starlet full of naïve joy. The picture on the mantelpiece represented all that could have been. Now, the dancing had gone out of her, and now it was all about duty – and the odd gin and tonic.
My parents were so young that it is impossible for me to say what I would have done had the roles been reversed. Life was about education and getting ahead, beyond working class, but working multiple jobs. The only sin was not trying hard.
My father was very serious about most things, and he tried very hard. One of a family of six, he was the offspring of a farm girl sold into service aged 12 and a raffish local builder and motorcycle-riding captain of the football team in Great Yarmouth. The great love of my father’s life was machinery and the world of mechanisms, timing, design and draughtsmanship. He loved cars, and loved to drive, although the laws relating to speed he deemed inapplicable to himself, along with seatbelts and driving drunk. After losing his driving licence, he volunteered for the army. Volunteers got paid better than conscripted men and the army didn’t seem picky about who drove their jeeps.
Driving licence (military) instantly restored, his engineering talents and tidy hand led to a job drawing up the plans for the end of the world. Around a table in Düsseldorf he would carefully draw the circles of megadeaths expected in the anticipated Cold War apocalypse. The rest of his time was spent drinking whisky to drown the boredom and the hopelessness of it all, one imagines. While still enlisted, this beefy Norfolk swimming champion – butterfly, no less – swept my waif-like ballerina mum off her feet.
As the unwanted offspring of the man who stole her only daughter, I represented the spawn of Satan for my grandmother Lily, but for my grandfather Austin I was the closest he would ever have to a son of his own. For the first five years of my life, they were de facto in loco parentis. As early childhood goes, it was pretty decent. There were long walks in the woods, rabbit holes, haunting flatland winter sunsets and sparkling frost, shimmering under purple skies.
My real parents had been travelling and working in a succession of nightclubs with their performing-dog act – as in poodles, hoops and leotards. Go figure.
The number 52 on the house at Manton Crescent was painted white. It was a standard, brick-built, semi-detached council house. Manton Colliery was a deep coal mine, and it was where my grandfather worked.
My grandfather had been a miner since the age of 13. Too small to be legal, he cunningly and barefacedly lied about his age and his height, which, like mine, was not very much. To get round the regulation that said you were tall enough to go ‘down the pit if your lantern did not trail on the ground by its lanyard while suspended from the belt’ he simply put a couple of knots in it. He came close to going to war, but got as far as the garden gate. He was in the Territorial Army, a part-time volunteer, but as coal mining was a reserved occupation he didn’t have to fight.
So he stood in his uniform, ready, as his platoon marched off to fight in France. It was one of these Back to the Future moments, when opening that garden gate and going to war along with his mates would have prevented a lot of things happening, including me. My grandmother stood defiant, hands on hips in the front doorway. ‘If you bloody go I won’t be here when you get back,’ she said. He stayed. Most of his regiment never came back.
With a miner for a grandfather, we got the council home and free coal delivered, and the art of making the coal fire that heated the house has turned me into a lifelong pyromaniac. We did not possess a telephone, a refrigerator, central heating, a car or an inside toilet. We borrowed other people’s fridges and had a small larder, dank and cold, which I avoided like the plague. Cooking was two electric hobs and a coal-fired oven, although electricity was seen as a luxury to be avoided at all costs. We had a vacuum cleaner and my favourite device, a mangle – two rollers that squeezed the water from washed clothing. A giant handle turned the machine over as sheets, shirts and trousers flopped out into a bucket after being squeezed through its rollers.
There was a plastic portable bath for me, as my grandfather would arrive home clean from the pit washrooms. On occasions he would come back from the pub, stinking of beer and onions, and crawl into bed next to me, snoring loudly. In the light from the moon through the wafer-thin curtains, I could see the blue scars that adorned his back: souvenirs of a life underground.
We had a shed in which bits of wood would be hammered and banged, to what end I have no idea, but for me it was a place to hide. It became a spaceship or a castle or a submarine. Two old railway sleepers in our small yard served as a sailing boat, and I fished repeatedly from the side catching sharks that lived in the crevices of the concrete. There was an allotment and some short-lived chrysanthemums that went up in smoke one bonfire night after a rocket went astray.
We had no pets, save a goldfish called Peter who lived for a suspiciously long time.
But one thing we did have was … a television. The presence of this television refocused the whole of my early existence. Through the lens of the TV screen – seven or eight inches across, black and white and grainy – came the wide world. Valve-driven, it took minutes to warm up, and there was a long, slow dying of the light to a singularity when it was switched off, which became a watchable event in its own right. We hosted visitors who came to look at it, caress it and not even watch it – it had such mystique. On the front were occult buttons and dials that turned like great combination locks to select the only two channels available.
The outside world, that is to say anywhere outside Worksop, was accessed primarily by gossip – or the Daily Mirror. The newspaper was always used to make the fire and I usually saw the news two days late, shortly before it was consigned to the inferno. When Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go into space I remember staring at the picture and thinking, How can we burn that? I folded it up and kept it.
If gossip or old newspaper wouldn’t do, the world outside might require a phone call. The big red phone box served as a cough, cold, flu, bubonic plague, ‘you name it you’ll catch it’ distribution centre for the neighbourhood. There was always a queue at peak hours, and a hellish combination of buttons to press and rotary dials in order to make a call, with large buckets of change required for long conversations.
It was like a very inconvenient version of Twitter, with words rationed by money and the vengeful stares of the other 20 people waiting in line to inhale the smoke-and-spit-infused mouthpiece and press the hair-oiled and sweat-coated Bakelite earpiece to the side of their head.
There were certain codes of conduct and regimes to obey in Worksop, although etiquette around the streets was very relaxed. There was little crime and virtually no traffic. Both my grandparents walked everywhere, or caught the bus. Walking five or ten miles each way across fields to go to work was just something they were brought up to do, and so I did it too.
The whole neighbourhood was in a permanent state of shift work. Upstairs curtains closed in daytime meant ‘Tiptoe past – coal miner asleep’. Front room curtains closed: ‘Hurry past – dead person laid out for inspection’. This ghoulish practice was quite popular, if my grandmother was to be believed. I would sit in our front room – permanently freezing, deathly quiet, bedecked with horse brasses and candlesticks that constantly required polishing – and imagine where the body might lie.
During the evening the atmosphere changed, and home turned into a living Gary Larson cartoon. Folding wooden chairs turned the place into a pop-up hair salon, with blue as the only colour and beehive the only game in town. Women with vast knees and polythene bags over their heads sat slowly evaporating under heat lamps as my grandmother roasted, curled and produced that awful smell of dank hair and industrial shampoo.
My escape committee was my uncle John. He forms quite an important part of what button to push next.
First of all, he wasn’t my uncle. He was my godfather – my grandfather’s best mate – and he was in the Royal Air Force and had fought in the war. As a bright working-class boy he was hoovered up by an expanding RAF, which required a whole host of technological skills that were in short supply, as one of Trenchard’s apprentices. An electrical engineer during the Siege of Malta, Flight Sergeant John Booker survived some of the most nail-biting bombardments of the war on an island Hitler was determined to crush at all costs.
I have his medals and a copy of his service Bible, annotated accordingly with verses to give support at a time when things must have been unimaginably grim. And there are pictures, one with him in full flying gear, about to stow away on a night-flying operation, which, as ground crew, was utterly unnecessary – done just for the hell of it.
While I sat on his knee he regaled me with aircraft stories and I touched his silvered Spitfire apprentice model, and a brass four-engined Liberator, with plexiglass propeller disc melted from a downed Spitfire and a green felt pad under its wooden plinth, the material cut from a shattered snooker table in a bombed-out Maltese club. He spoke of airships, of the history of engineering in Britain, of jet engines, Vulcan bombers, naval battles and test pilots. Inspired, I would sit for hours making model aircraft like many a boy of my generation, fiddling with transfers – later upgraded to decals, which sounded so much cleverer. It was a miracle any of my plastic pilots ever survived combat at all, given the fact that their entire bodies were encased in glue and their canopies covered in opaque fingerprints. The model shop in Worksop where I built my plastic air force was, amazingly, still there the last time I looked, on the occasion of my grandmother’s funeral.
Because Uncle John was a technical sort of chap, he had a self-built pond the size of the Möhne Dam, full of red goldfish and cunningly protected by chicken wire, and he drove a rather splendid Ford Consul, which was immaculate, of course. It was this car that transported me to my first airshow in the early sixties, when health and safety was for chickens and the term ‘noise abatement’ had not even entered the vocabulary.
Earthquaking jets like the Vulcan would shatter roofs performing vertical rolls with their giant delta wings while the English Electric Lightning, basically a supersonic firework with a man perched astride it, would streak past inverted, with the tail nearly scoring the runway. Powerful stuff.
Uncle John introduced me to the world of machinery and mechanisms, but I was equally as drawn to the steam trains that still plied their trade through Worksop station. The footbridge and the station today are virtually unchanged to those of my childhood. I swear that the same timbers I stood on as a boy still exist. The smoke, steam and ash clouds which enveloped me mingled with the tarry breath of bitumen to sting my nostrils. I walked to and from the station recently. I thought it was a bloody long way, but as a child it felt like nothing. The smell still lingers.
In short order, I would have settled for steam-train driver, then maybe fighter pilot … and if I got bored with that, astronaut was always a possibility, at least in my dreams. Nothing in childhood is ever wasted.
Somewhere, the fun has to stop, and so I went to school. Manton Primary was the local school for coalminers’ kids. Before it was closed, it achieved a level of notoriety with Daily Mail readers as the school where five-year-olds beat up the teachers. Well, I don’t recollect beating up any teachers, but I was given the gift of wings and also boxing lessons, after a fracas over who should play the role of Angel in the nativity play. I was lusting after those wings but instead got a good kicking in the melee that continued outside the school gates. The outcome was far from satisfactory. When I returned from school, dishevelled and clothes ripped, my grandfather sat me down and opened my hands, which were soft and pudgy. His hands were rough, like sandpaper, with bits of calloused skin stuck like coconut flakes to the deep lines that opened up as he spread his palms in front of me. I remember the glint in his eye.
‘Now, make a fist, lad,’ he said.
So I did.
‘Not like that – you’ll break your thumb. Like this.’
So he showed me.
‘Like this?’ I said.
‘Aye. Now hit my hand.’
Not exactly The Karate Kid – no standing on one leg on the end of a boat, no ‘wax on, wax off’ Hollywood moment. But after a week or so he took me to one side, and very gently, but with a steely determination in his voice, said, ‘Now go and find the lad that did it. And sort him out.’
So I did.
I think it was about 20 minutes before I was dragged away by the teacher and frogmarched home with a very firm grip. My boxing lessons had been rather too effective, and my judgement, at the age of four or five, rather less than discerning.
The ratatat-tat of the letterbox elicited an impassive grandfather: slippers, white singlet and baggy trousers. I don’t remember what the teacher said. All I remember was what my grandfather said: ‘I’ll take care of it.’
And with that, I was released.
What I got was not a beating, or a telling-off, but quiet disapproval and a lecture on the morality of fisticuffs and the rules of the game, which were basically don’t bully people, stick up for yourself and never strike a woman. A gentle, forgiving and thoroughly decent man, he never failed to protect what mattered to him.
Not bad for 1962.
In the midst of all this, my real parents, Sonia and Bruce, were back from the dog-show circuit and living in Sheffield. They would visit on Sunday lunchtimes. I still have the cream-and-brown Bakelite radio set that was on at these occasions. They were always rather strained affairs, leaving me with a lifelong horror of sit-down meals, as well as gin and lipstick. I would push food around the plate and be lectured about not leaving my Brussels sprouts and the perils of not eating food when it was rationed, which of course it wasn’t anymore, but no one could comprehend that reality. The same post-war hangover restricted you to three inches of bathwater, anxiety over the use of electricity and a morbid fear of psychological dissipation caused by speaking on the telephone excessively.
Conversations were peppered with local disasters. So and so had a stroke … auntie somebody had fallen downstairs … teenage pregnancy was rife … and some poor lad had sunk through the crust of one of the many slag heaps that surrounded the pit, only to find red-hot embers beneath, leaving the most horrific burns.
It was following one particular Sunday lunch, when I’d eaten the Brussels sprouts and the chicken formerly wandering about in the garden allotment, that it was time to move on and in with my parents. With my uncle John, I always rode in the front seat, but now I was in the back, staring through the rear window as the first five years of my life shrank away into the distance – then around the corner.
I finally faced forward, into an uncertain future. I could fight a bit, had caught several nasty bugs, commanded my own air force and was pretty close to defying gravity. Living with parents – how hard could it be?
Life on Mars (#u9bd56332-a305-571d-9823-01471384aa30)
I have never smoked tobacco, except in the odd joint when I was aged 19 to 21, which we’ll address a bit later on. I say this because, in fact, I probably smoked a pack a day just by being around my parents. My God, could they puff away. Aged 16, they tried to enlist me in the filthy weed society, but it was my greatest act of rebellion to evade their yellow-stained clutches.
Drink was frequent, and frequently reckless. My father was violently anti-seatbelts on the grounds that they might strangle you, and I lost count of the number of times he drove home blind drunk.
Nothing in childhood is ever wasted, except occasionally parents.
So now I really don’t recommend drinking anything alcoholic at all and then driving, not even one. Of course, youth and indestructibility means I am guilty of hypocrisy of the first order, but fortunately I grew up a little bit before I killed myself, or, more importantly, killed an innocent somebody else.
But we have fast-forwarded way too far in our time machine. The button to push for the cassette recorder did not even exist as I joined my new school in what was supposedly a rough area of Sheffield, Manor Top.
Actually, I thought it was okay. I learnt to extrude mashed potato, fish and peas (it was Friday, after all) through pursed lips, forming a crinkly curtain with which you could compete with your fellow diners for longevity before it fell from your mouth.
I think Gary Larson must have attended this school too, because the scary horn-rimmed glasses on the female staff gave them that designer concentration-camp-guard look beloved of seventies sexploitation films. Better still were the Hannibal Lecter types who administered the punishment beatings. Abusing mashed potato and peas was a beatable offence, and a stick was laid heavily into your outstretched palm. To be quite honest I don’t even remember if it hurt that much. It just seemed a bizarre thing to do, witnessed and solemnly entered in the punishment book. I felt as though I should have been wearing striped pyjamas on Devil’s Island.
I didn’t stay at that school for long because we moved. Moving was to become a feature of my life forever, but as a family our stock in trade was moving house, mainly to make money. My new abode was a basement, which I shared with my new sister, Helena, who was by now a sentient being capable of actual words.
There was a window the size of an iPad, which opened into a gutter full of dead leaves. There was a refrigerator with an enjoyable electrical fault. I would hang on to it with a damp cloth and see how much electricity I could take before my teeth started rattling. Up the stone steps was the rest of humanity. And oh … what humanity. I was living in a hotel. A guest house. My parents ran it. My father had bought it. He sold second-hand cars from the front of it.
Dramatically, the house next door was purchased. Suddenly, the empire struck back and built an extension linking the two properties. Dad rolled out his blueprints, which he’d drawn and designed himself. I found a piece of wallpaper and tried to design a spaceship with life-support systems to go to Mars.
Builders appeared and they seemed to be working for him as well. As for me, I gained useful, if poorly paid employment. I didn’t put up buildings but it was bloody good fun knocking them down. Demolishing toilets was my speciality. When I was at university later on I could never take seriously the exhortation to ‘smash the system’; I knew much more about smashing cisterns than they ever would. It was all very impressive.
Next, the hotel, the Lindrick, had a bar constructed to Dad’s own design. As far as I could tell, the Lindrick never really closed at weekends, especially with Dad behind the bar. I would hear the tales on Monday from Lily.
‘Ooh, that Mr So and So headbutted Mr Rigby … and then that other fellow was dancing on the table and fell over. Ooh, he broke the table in half, you know. It was teak as well. I think it was his head what did it …’
It was all bed-hopping among the travelling salesmen, and some of the people who stayed were just plain odd. One creepy individual stayed for two weeks and gave me a card and whispered, ‘Ay up, I practise Karma Yoga.’ He would then leave at 7 p.m. and walk the streets till dawn. And no, he didn’t have a dog to walk.
Other people came, and some never left. A few dropped dead in bed. If it was a horrible death, everyone was kept informed by Grandma Lily: ‘She were burnt to death in her car …’
One evening, two gentlemen surprised each other in the dark, each of them assuming they had been fondling a female guest. That took quite some sorting out in the morning. It was like living in a permanent state of farce.
More bits were being added to the hotel all the time, and more of the family moved up to Sheffield. My paternal grandparents, Ethel and Morris, sold up their seaside boarding house and moved in down the road. Grandad Dickinson was a dead ringer for rascally actor Wilfrid Hyde-White, only with a broadish Norfolk accent. A roll-up behind one ear, a pencil behind the other and the racing paper in hand, he set about what would now be called ‘repurposing’ buildings. In practice that meant knocking them down, but using the dressed stone to put them up somewhere else.
Grandma Dickinson was a formidable woman. Six foot tall, with intense, black curly hair and a gaze that would fell a tree at 20 paces, she’d worked as a servant girl, and had been purchased from the railway carriage where she lived with 18 other girls on the land. She was fleet of foot and might have had an athletic career, but she couldn’t afford shoes: 200 metres barefoot was no match for the opposition in spikes. She never forgot that humiliation till the day she died.
While Ethel baked cakes, Morris would emerge from the toilet with a half-smoked roll-up and lots of boxes ticked for the horses. ‘Here you are, sonny – don’t let on,’ he’d say, and he would slip me half a crown from his hand, clawed from years of laying bricks and handling trowels.
At a family summit spent drinking all afternoon in our hotel bar, my uncle Rod did me several favours, one of which was to persuade me never to have a tattoo. Uncle Rod (who was actually my uncle – my dad’s brother) was charismatic to say the least, and frankly looked a bit like one of these roguish gangsters who might be surrounded by women of easy virtue. Right now, though, I sat on his knee aged 10 as he explained the British film-certification system to me: ‘Now, yer ’ave yer X films and, basically, yer have your sex X and yer horror X …’
Whatever he said next faded into the background as I stared at the scars on the back of both of his hands. Uncle Rod had a habit in his youth of misplacing other people’s motorcars. Despite the family’s best efforts, he was so prolific that he was sent to a horrific young offender’s institution known as borstal. Self-tattooing with brick dust and ink was the thing in borstal, and it marked you for life as a product of that institution. Uncle Rod had spent what then would have been a considerable amount of money to get them removed. It was early skin-graft surgery, and these days it would qualify as a special effect in a low-budget horror movie. I just thought, I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got. That really doesn’t look like much fun.
Then Uncle Rod reverted to talking about war films. I had seen loads of them with Grandfather Austin: 633 Squadron, The Dam Busters, Battle of Britain, The Charge of the Light Brigade.
‘And what about Ice Station Zebra?’ I piped up.
‘’Aven’t seen that one,’ he grunted, and he went back to his pint.
Ice Station Zebra was the movie that introduced me to my first rock ’n’ roll band. Yes, with a truck, electric guitars and gigs. The band were called the Casuals. They’d had a hit with a track called ‘Jesamine’ and were now playing residencies at clubs for a week or so at a time. They stayed in the hotel, and during the daytime – which for them, being creatures of the night, didn’t start till midday – they would surface, bleary-eyed and longhaired, in stack-heeled boots and white trousers, for a late breakfast of tea and toast provided by Lily, who was all of a twitter.
I am sure I must have appeared precocious with my questions about rockets and submarines, and it was probably a way of levelling the playing field that the guitarist brought down his electric guitar. I held it. It was surprisingly heavy. He explained carefully how it worked, and I just stared at the round steel discs under the strings and tried to imagine how sound really worked, produced from such tiny fragments with the tinniest-sounding twanging strings.
Like most bands, they were bored silly during the day, and they decided to go to the cinema. Ice Station Zebra was on at the Sheffield Gaumont. Popcorn in hand, aged 10, sitting in a cinema with a rock ’n’ roll band watching a war movie about nuclear submarines and rockets: I thought, This is living.
Dad expanded his empire and purchased a bankrupt petrol station. It was a huge property, an old tram garage with four ancient petrol pumps, no canopy, and workshops full of caked oil and dirt half an inch thick adhering to 50-year-old bricks. The motor trade started to dominate our lives. I pumped petrol in between falling off scaffolding (repurposing buildings), and polished cars and scrubbed wheels with wire wool until my fingers turned blue in winter. I washed windscreens, checked tyres and watched the growing number of cars coming and going as sales picked up.
Dad was an encyclopaedia of motor-car components. He was a natural engineer and would go straight to the heart of the problem. His diagnosis was seldom wrong. He could recount the provenance of the exhaust system of the Fiat whatever-it-was, and why it was superior to the gizmo of the Ford, but anyway, both of them were actually designed by an unknown Hungarian genius. That sort of thing. Get him started, it could go on for hours.
We sold up the hotel as he acquired the dealership for Lancia motor cars, and did rather well until they produced one that rusted faster than you could drive it. I expect money must have been made on the house transactions because there was a property boom, and a house was still an achievable objective for a working family. At one point we made the mistake of selling before we had anywhere else to live. It must have been a very good deal.
In the end we moved back into a terraced house only a hundred yards up from the hotel we’d vacated a year or so earlier. Some people are addicted to crack. We were addicted to moving house.
If You Want Skool, You Got It (#u9bd56332-a305-571d-9823-01471384aa30)
In the midst of all this I was relocated to a hothouse environment. I was being spirited away from the evil influence of mashed potato, spit and being straight-armed by the locals.
I was on my way to a private school: Birkdale preparatory school, alma mater of, among others, Michael Palin of Monty Python fame. It was one of the strangest, most eccentric educational institutions I have ever encountered and actually, in the end, I quite enjoyed it. I say in the end because in the beginning the bullying was fairly intense. I use the term ‘fairly intense’ only in comparison with what came later, at boarding school.
Bullying happens because weak people need to prop up their ego by beating up or humiliating others. Of course, if you are a new arrival, or just different, you become a prime target. I ticked all the boxes. Break time was the worst, up against the dustbins with 12 kids hitting you, watched over by a female teacher, whom I assume must have got some kind of power trip from not stopping it. In remembrance of both grandfathers I always refused to submit. The odds were ridiculous, but I still fought back. I wasn’t going away.
After a year or so it calmed down, and a year after that it was as if nothing had happened and my very own self was assimilated into the group mind – or so they thought.
I took refuge in books, the library, writing and drama. The angelic wings of yore came back to haunt me, and I got my first namecheck in a review of a school play in the Sheffield Star, no less.
‘Mole, besmudged of face, played by Paul Dickinson.’ (Bruce, of course, is my middle name, but then you knew that.)
I was a bit disappointed that they omitted to mention that I got a good, proper laugh from the audience. Early lessons in comic timing during our school production of The Wind in the Willows also included dropping my wooden sword during a pregnant pause, which corpsed the stalls, and delivering the correct line ‘I say Ratty, this chicken is delicious’ while clearly eating a lemon tart.
Further productions followed and I was sold on the stage, though, truthfully, actors seemed to take it awfully seriously.
Lessons proceeded normally. In other words, I don’t remember a thing, except that the Merino sheep has a spectacular coat, and a rather splendid view of Tolkien from my history teacher, Mr Quiney: ‘One bloody feast after another, a long dreary walk, a battle and some rubbish songs.’ I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when I was 12. Entertaining, but he had a point.
For those wishing to learn French there was Mr White. But Mr White was only interested in playing with his vast train set, which occupied half of the top floor. French lessons consisted of watching the OO-gauge Flying Scotsman whizzing round for 20 minutes.
Classes were streamed in sets A, B, C or D, from the most brilliant to the severely challenged or just plain bored. I yo-yoed from one set to another. I was always just plain bored, but was bribed to do well by the promise of a bike with racing handlebars should I leap up the pecking order.
Towards the end of my time I found myself in a class with only eight people, and we didn’t have lessons as such. We sat around, talked, argued, discussed, wrote things because we wanted to, and played practical jokes that tried to be interesting rather than just cruel. Teachers came and we spoke as equals. It was extraordinary. It felt like my brain was popping with ideas, like popcorn in a pan. Delightful.
Of course, there was a reason. The aim of this whole process was to take a fairly stiff set of exams that took a whole week in order to get into the highly competitive boarding-school system from age 12 or 13 to 18.
Big boys’ stuff.
School wasn’t the only place to get an education, however. I learnt to ride a bike, and hurtled around the neighbourhood. I had a chemistry set, which stubbornly refused to make anything of any entertainment value, and my dad taught me to play chess. We played frequently, until one day I beat him, and then we stopped.
On holidays in Great Yarmouth I spent my time surrounded by zinc buckets full of pennies. The expression ‘bucketloads of money’ was simply work in progress for an amusement arcade on the sea front. It was owned by my cousin Russell’s parents.
Every trip to Great Yarmouth ended up in the flat above the amusement arcade. It was furnished with questionable coffee tables supported by Nubian-slave statues, and a carpet that was more like a white hairy sea of synthetic tendrils that looked like it would eat you if it didn’t like your shoes. There was small talk, and then I was presented with the cast-offs from my cousins: hideous suede-fronted cardigans and other monstrosities designed to make a 10-year-old look like 50 years old.
Buoyancy was a family trait. In order to learn not to drown, my father had simply been thrown in the Norfolk Broads. I learnt to swim under his supervision, but in not quite as abusive a fashion. Somewhere, lurking in the bottom of a mouldy suitcase, is my certificate from Heeley Baths, Sheffield, listing that I, on that day, swam 10 yards in approved style. After ingesting enough chlorine to blind a First World War battalion, I squinted pink-eyed from the sunlight, relieved that the ordeal was over. My dad swam like a fish. He would swim three miles in the ocean as a boy. I, on the other hand, have always regarded swimming as thoroughly hazardous. It is merely preventative drowning. I am one of nature’s sinkers. ‘Relax,’ cry the floaters, but sadly my feet go the way of gravity and the rest follows suit.
Before we venture through the hallowed portals of an English public school, there are a few more pieces of the jigsaw to throw on the table.
I was reasonably solitary. I wasn’t interested in sport. I spent long afternoons at the weekend in the public library, browsing and daydreaming. I had discovered wargaming, and my evenings were spent researching the accuracy of the Brown Bess musket and the tactics of the infantry square, and painting my white-metal Scots Highlanders, shortly to be unleashed on an unsuspecting Napoleon.
My uncle Stewart, a teacher, had been a county table-tennis champion, so, for Christmas, a rather fine table-tennis table appeared. Dad and his brothers batted away and argued over who had won, then went off to the pub. I immediately organised the Battle of Waterloo to be refought on it the next day. It was green and it was flat – perfect. It was one of many small events that caused my father to regard me somewhat strangely, as if subverting a table-tennis table was somehow unmanly.
I had developed a wonderful set of spots as I approached the day I would leave home and take up residence for the next four years at Oundle School in Northamptonshire. Not great, but seeing as there were no girls anywhere on the horizon, not a showstopper. What made them break out into suppurating sores was the application of engine oil, burnt rubber and grime-encrusted fingernails. Just before semi-leaving home, I’d been introduced to motor racing.
Tim, a friend at school, and his elder brother Nick had a very enthusiastic father. He drove a massive Cadillac and had a huge trailer, in which was a miniature racing team for his sons. As far as I could gather, he owned a nightclub and drank a great deal of barley wine.
The karts were 100cc rotary valve, and they were very fast. I had never even turned a wheel before, but I just got in the seat, got my bump start and hurtled off towards the first corner down the long straight at Lindholme, the former RAF base.
I turned the wheel, did a 360-degree spin and stalled the engine. I did the same thing at just about every corner round the circuit before I got back to the trailer, followed by two very sweaty brothers gasping their last after chasing me round the circuit and restarting me half-a-dozen times.
We debriefed. Clearly I needed more information as to what was going on.
By the end of the day I thought I was flying: foot flat to the floor, down the straight, braking as hard and as late as I dared, the adrenalin shooting through my hands and heart. The truth is, I probably just about made it round without spinning off, but bugger that, steam engine driver, fighter pilot and astronaut – add racing-car driver to the list.
Angelic Upstart (#ulink_8ecfef1f-906e-5b43-86b0-8cd353c22c05)
Before we go to boarding school, with all that entails, can I just have a word about religion? Something I experienced, and experimented with and had experimented upon me at four, too early an age. The outcome, though, was totally unexpected, and if God ever moved in a mysterious way, here was proof positive.
I don’t recall my baptism, but apparently I somehow managed to ingest quite a quantity of holy water. I could have drowned in the font. I am not sure that swallowing God’s special sauce caused any sort of aura to appear, but it might have been an influence on my early interest in angel wings.
School had the usual harvest festival and a bit of dreary carol singing, but it was only when I arrived at Birkdale that I was exposed to evangelical religion, bible black and fighting Satan on all fronts.
There was a cabal of zealous teachers and, by chance or design, they were the same teachers that ran school expeditions, including one to Fort William in Scotland. It consisted of 10 days’ camping, playing robust semi-military games, climbing mountains, bridging rivers, leaping from tree to tree (‘The Lumberjack Song’, anyone?) and religious brainwashing. Think Bear Grylls with no possibility of escape.
There were prayers and lectures, and every evening there was a group assembly in which 10-year-olds were encouraged to stand up and identify sins, and would be rewarded for their folly by rapturous praise, hugs and applause. I stood up and identified a fly on the wall, which was clearly a servant of Satan, because it had been distracting me from the balderdash being spouted by the part-time messiahs and full-time school teachers.
With no sense of irony at the age of 10, I was welcomed into the fold, and told that I was now evangelised. My purpose in life was to go and convert people to Christ.
Well, being a mission-oriented sort of chap, I sallied forth into the town and set about converting a couple of Highland girls by handing them a leaflet and inviting them to the campsite for a fun evangelical evening of happy-clappy hymns accompanied by bad guitar-playing and Aran sweaters.
‘Fuck off, you twat,’ was the robust response.
At home in Sheffield I was enrolled in the Christian Union, where I wore a little badge and was encouraged to read The Screwtape Letters and lots of other rather less inventive tracts, some of which covered subjects like masturbation and marriage. Confused, I thought, Did they go hand in hand?
My parents were a bit bemused, having seldom been near a church since I half-swallowed one when I was nine months old. However, they tolerated it on the basis that it seemed harmless enough and gave me something to do on Sunday mornings.
Not too long after this, hormones kicked in, and I began to look at girls in a rather different light. I no longer wanted only to convert them; there was something more that you could diddle about with. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
My school friend Tim was discussing the subject of exactly where to put fingers. Incredibly, it was the only time anybody had spoken about sex thus far, other than being told it was, by and large, sinful, except for making babies. Further in-depth enquiries about what this fairly sexually advanced chap got up to revealed that he did something on his own time involving a sock and his pyjamas.
‘Then what happens?’ I asked, trying to picture the scene.
So he told me.
‘Really?’ This was all news to me. Well, God hates a coward, as the expression goes, and my monastic existence turned into an onanistic one. As for Sunday school, given a choice between wanking yourself silly and Christian Union, there was a clear winner. It was masturbation and libraries that saved my soul from the narrow-minded proselytising and a stifling, evangelical straitjacket, and thank God for that.
But I never got around to telling you the good bit about God and his mysterious ways.
The official custodian of our spiritual health at Birkdale was the Reverend B.S. Sharp, at the time the vicar of Gleadless at the splendidly dark Victorian Millstone Grit church. Unlike the part-time evangelical types, ‘Batty’, as his nickname suggested, was more than a little eccentric, and he was stone deaf. As reverends go, he was regarded as being harmless.
Batty would conduct hymn practice, and the entire school would traipse into his church and commence singing while he walked up and down the aisle waving his arms about, seemingly oblivious to the out-of-time, out-of-tune and smirking schoolboys (no girls, of course). As he passed me – I was standing at the end of a pew – singing, or rather mumbling, he paused; he cocked his head, rather like a parrot, and peered round at me. I suspect he was positioning his good ear.
‘Sing up, lad,’ he said.
So I sang a bit louder. He brought his entire face close to my mouth. I realised he was missing a lot of teeth and I tried hard not to laugh.
‘Sing up, lad.’
Well, I like a challenge, so I yelled at the top of my lungs, and once I started I didn’t stop. The embarrassment left me and I carried on to the end of whatever verse it was in whatever hymn. I confess that it felt wonderful – not that I would admit it at the time.
He stood up and waved his arms about a bit more, then leaned back over to me.
‘You have a very fine voice, boy,’ he said. And then he strode off down the aisle and I never saw him again.
Like I say, nothing in childhood is ever wasted, and if there is a God, he or she is full of mischief.
Sadly, the choirmaster at Oundle didn’t share Batty’s enthusiasm for my dulcet tones. It became clear that singing, as in singing in church, was very undesirable, although to describe the school chapel as a church would be to do it an injustice.
Oundle’s chapel had pretensions of being a cathedral at the very least. It had a choir and the usual, and possibly verifiable, rumours about choirboys and choirmasters. The school choir dressed in frocks and had their free time spirited away from them in fruitless praising of the ineffable one until their voices broke.
There was a singing test, which was compulsory. I was very proud to say that I failed in spectacular fashion. Every note that was white on a keyboard was black when I returned the favour. I was given a chit – a piece of paper – to deliver to my housemaster. On it was written: ‘Dickinson – Sidney House, NON-SINGER’.
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