Frank Skinner Autobiography (27 page)

Liz gave me my first under-bra experience. I still recall the exciting contrast between the firm, rubbery nipple, and the soft flesh around it. We were under Uncle Ben's Bridge, by the side of the canal, at the time. That night, I lay in bed musing on the ludicrous fact that, in an age when man could land on the moon, you still couldn't buy a headboard with a toilet-roll holder fitted.

That year, a few mates and me went on holiday to Brean Down, near Weston-super-Mare. One night in the caravan, we got very drunk on scrumpy-cider and one of my friends hit Shane over the head with a wine bottle. This sounds dangerous, but Shane was one of the hardest people I ever met. He was a scruffy lad, with a big, beaky nose, and black spiky hair that made him look like a dishevelled crow. When he became a working man, doing felt-roofing, he once fell off a house, arseholed, and turned up at the pub two hours later with his face bloody and pieces of gravel embedded in his head, all set to carry on drinking.

Anyway, that night Shane remained upright, so the other guy hit him again, this time selecting a slightly weightier vodka bottle. I stepped in and managed to calm things down but it caused a bit of a stir on the camp-site. The police were called, but by the time they arrived the storm had passed. When we went home, I carried a blue St. Christopher that I'd bought for Liz out of my meagre spending money. I gave it to her on the Saturday night we got back. She thanked me, told me the postcard I'd sent describing the vodka-bottle incident had caused her mom and dad to forbid her to see me again, and went on to say that, anyway, there was a boy at her school who wanted to go out with her and she liked him better. So that was that. I had been dumped for the first time.

I saw her eight months later and she had stupid hair, so I was glad.

Inevitably, I suppose, it was Nervous Test Jayne who gave me my first under-knicker experience. We went to a party one night and got a bit drunk. We were both fifteen. On the way back, we snogged and groped like, well, fifteen-year-olds. I went under the bra first. This was the order of things. Her nipples were cold, and when this became known around school (what are you looking at ME for?) she was given the nickname Crystal Tips. I stopped there. Partly because I was scared and partly because she had bad breath and I was starting to lose interest. But she wasn't. ‘Would you like to see my new panties?' she asked. To be honest, it was a bit dark for a fashion show, but I didn't want to cause offence so I went with it. She undid the zip on her skin-tight turquoise flares and opened them to show me her knickers. Her smile told me it was lucky-dip time. I slipped my right hand down her proffered pants but it got stuck. During my spell as very-local rock hero, I had taken to wearing two rings on the middle-fingers of my right hand, each with a large letter ‘C' so that, on adjacent fingers, they formed my initials, ‘CC'. (You remember, Chris Collins.) How cool is that? Of course, I didn't wear them in bed, or their rhythmic clicking would have caused my parents to think that I had bought a very large stop-watch. The rings had now caught on the waistband of Jayne's knickers. Without missing a beat, she reached down, slipped them off my fingers, and popped them in my jacket-pocket. What a girl. I took a breath and then dug deep. What a time to be thinking about your infant school nativity play.

I think Jayne was hoping that we might develop things even further over the coming weeks, but the bad breath had put me off and I avoided her till the summer holidays set me free. At the time, I was not aware that bad breath was often just a temporary thing, perhaps, on this occasion, brought on by drinking disgusting wine. Anyway, I let Jayne slip away, and when we returned from the summer break she was going out with a bloke who looked like a parrot.

It was election day, yesterday. Last election, in 1997, I was working for the BBC as part of their
Election Special
team. My job was to spend the whole day and, as it turned out, the first eight hours of the next day flying around the country in a helicopter, giving a (how did they put it at the meeting?) ‘light-hearted and slightly off-the-wall view of the day's events'. I went to an OAPs' tea-dance and listened, as you might expect, to the usual OAP mixture of right-wing clichés and downright silliness, including ‘I blame decimalisation', ‘There's too many blacks' and ‘The weather hasn't been right since they landed on the moon'. I met a Tony Blair lookalike and a John Major lookalike, neither of which really did, and I visited an exhausted Asian couple in hospital, where they had just had one of the first election babies. All through the early hours, using makeshift landing sites in fields and jumping into fast cars, the soundman, cameraman, director, pilot and me listened to the results coming in on the radio: Portillo's lost his seat, Labour have gained Grantham, ‘it's looking like a landslide'.

I usually find politics intensely boring. It seems to be mainly the pastime of men with bad hair who look as if they smell of tobacco, but on this night – for the first and maybe last time – politics seemed really dynamic and exciting. There was a feeling in the air that something special was happening. People will probably deny that it ever existed now, but there was a profound sense of optimism and hope that I, personally, hadn't really felt about anything since I'd stopped drinking. As we flew from Manchester to London at sunrise, with the three-man film-crew asleep in the back, I looked down on the light, fluffy patches of mist covering the dark green landscape below and said to the pilot, ‘So, the dawn breaks on Blair's Britain,' and he nodded. Neither words nor gesture had the slightest hint of irony. A couple of weeks, and it was back to the same old bollocks.

Anyway, back to the Oldbury Tech story. In this episode, a moral dilemma, an artistic success, and an academic failure. And probably quite a lot of other stuff that won't actually occur to me until I start writing it.

One day Shane, who by now had left school, and me were out walking when we spotted a wallet on the pavement. He quickly picked it up, and we scurried off to a quiet car park behind the nearby shops to see if we'd got lucky. And, if so, exactly how lucky we'd got. Eighty quid was the answer. We both got very agitated. To try and give you a sense of what we're dealing with here, a pint of cider at the time cost thirteen pence. We discussed whether or not we should do the decent thing and hand the wallet in to the police. I may have had a shorter discussion in my life, but I can't remember it.

As a Catholic, of course, it might have occurred to me that a man has to pay for his sins sooner or later, but I suppose I figured that, with forty quid, I could afford to pay for almost anything. It was a butterfly-crushing moment of massive proportions. I had forty quid to spend, and so did one of my closest friends, but we couldn't spend it on material goods or our parents might have asked difficult questions about our sudden affluence. We only had one choice. We'd have to drink it. The school summer holiday had just begun, so if I was to take advantage of the lie-ins afforded by the summer break, lie-ins that I'd probably need given these new circumstances, I had five weeks to drink two hundred and eighty pints of cider. I didn't bother with the maths, it was party-time.

It was during this period that I started to fall in love with drinking. That was exactly how it felt: ridiculous highs and lows, light-headedness, loss of appetite, and an inability to cope with any prolonged absence from my loved one. Some people drink and some people are drinkers. I discovered, that summer, that I was a drinker. If I'd handed in the wallet, my life might have taken a very different, and probably much healthier, turn for the better. So, if Cash had started the process, cash was about to take it on to another level. Oh, how we drank.

In the midst of this dream-like summer came my O-level results. Much better than expected. I'd got two: Art and English Language. Basically, the only two that you don't need to revise for. I had done no work for my O-levels because I was going to be a rock star and academic qualifications didn't seem very relevant. My parents, being of working-class stock, didn't have much awareness of O-levels and the like and I worked hard to keep it that way. I made sure they didn't get to hear about parents' evenings and stuff, in case someone there let it slip that I was a work-shy, piss-taking little waster who was heading for a massive come-uppance. That could have caused tension at home. They were already starting to get suspicious about my social life. A couple of polo mints on the way home didn't seem to hide my drinking-habit as well as it used to. I hadn't noticed but things were starting to come to a head.

While I was waiting for rock-stardom to hit, I figured I might as well stay at school and relax. I knew if I timed it right, I could avoid having a proper job altogether. The school agreed to let me go on to the upper-sixth provided I re-took some of my O-levels and improved my general attitude. I think the Art teacher had spoken up for me, so I began A-level Art and A-level English, with O-level re-sits coming up in November. Soon I was in trouble for skipping classes and the headmaster, Mr Lardner, told me that this was my last warning and if I got in trouble again, he'd be forced to expel me. Yeah, yeah, there had been plenty of naughty boys go through the school while I'd been there and I'd never heard of him ever expelling anybody. Two weeks later, in the October of 1973, I was in his office again. A few pals and me had discovered where they chucked the used dinner-tickets when they were done with them, and decided to sell them, cut-price, to the other pupils. Having invented the speed-bump, we now moved on to re-cycling. The one thing we never allowed for was serial numbers. As I walked into Mr Lardner's room, I could hear his secretary typing away in the adjoining office. It was my expulsion note. ‘Collins,' he said, ‘you're a drifter, and one day you'll drift into something you can't drift out of.' I've looked back on this sentence on many occasions, and wondered if it was as prophetic as it sounded. What was it, in retrospect, that I later drifted into and had not been able to drift out of? Drinking, marriage, comedy, none of them seem to quite fit. Now, if I'd joined the American vocal group The Drifters in later life, this quote would have been a remarkable, almost supernatural, turning-point in the book. As it is, he was probably just talking bollocks, as headmasters are ever inclined to do.

When I returned to the common room to tell my schoolmates what had happened, they seemed kind of concerned but I also sensed a bit of ‘Oh, well, we can't sit here talking. We've got classes to go to', so I had a cup of coffee from the machine that sixth-formers were allowed to use, and then I walked home. And slowly it dawned on me. What the fuck was I going to tell my dad?

I waited till him and Mom had both got home from work and then said I had some bad news, and gave him the note. Rather grandly, it said that I had been ‘embezzling the school meals service'. It also said I was expelled. My mom started to do a ‘I'm not surprised' speech but my dad cut it short by chucking his dirty boiler-suit at me and shouting, ‘Here, you'd better put these on and get down the Birmid, with the darkies.'

The Birmid was a local factory that always had the thick smell of heavy industry spilling out of its open windows. It was hard, hot, dirty work for forty hours a week. I think he had hoped that I would be the one who wouldn't have to work in a place like that, the one who would do special, different things, but now that dream was gone. As for the rest of his remark, well, I'm not defending it, but these were less enlightened times and he was very, very upset. I never heard him be impolite to a black or Asian person in all the time I knew him, and he was not a man who worried about offending people he thought needed to be offended. Nuff said.

I considered trying to explain that he shouldn't worry because I was going to be a rock star, but it didn't feel like the right time. That night he came home drunk, obviously having dwelt on the day's events. My mom had gone to bed so it was man-to-man time. After a short speech about his own missed opportunities, he slapped me hard across the face. Fair enough, I thought. It was the last time he ever hit me and we both went to bed with tears in our eyes.

According to today's papers, I'm in a ‘shoot-out' with the ex-Chelsea player-manager, Gianluca Vialli, over the house I'm supposed to be buying. According to the estate agent, ‘Both seem to like it and it has a 75ft garden, big enough for a kickabout.' Well, that's alright then. Both the
Sun
and the
Mirror
price the house at three and a quarter million. Obviously, two million isn't impressive enough for them. And they've given it an extra bedroom as well. So, what's it all about? Well, I heard through Jenny, my PA., that the estate agent got a bit panicky when he read that Caroline and me had split up and had asked if this might affect my future plans, so I'm guessing he's using the papers to make me think ‘Oh shit, I'd better cast caution to the wind and sign everything quickly or Vialli will get my house.' Of course, it may well be that Vialli really is interested, in which case I suspect Dave Baddiel's enthusiasm about me moving in might now start to wane a little. Either way, that's how famous I am. I'm going to stop saying that because I feel you're no longer taking it in the spirit that it's intended.

In the early seventies, teenagers who needed a job went to the Youth Employment Office. Here they were dealt with by experts who were specially trained to cater for the needs and problems of young people. When I turned up on a Monday morning in October 1973, there was a fat girl making her way to the counter. The YEO woman asked her the sort of job she had in mind. ‘Well,' said the fat girl, ‘all my life, I've wanted to work with animals.'

‘Yeah,' said the woman, ‘well we don't get many jobs like that, but they need a checkout girl at Woolworths. Here's the details. Next.' The fat girl waddled away, looking slightly shaken and clutching an official-looking white card in her chubby hand. Her butterfly had been well and truly crushed, but no wonder if
she
'd stood on it.