Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [42]
That summer I went to Corfu with my best friend Sam, who had forgiven me for beating him in the boxing (it wasn’t just a beating, it was a devastating display of my superiority). Sam is properly posh, he’s the real deal. He has lords and ladies on one side of the family and royalty on the other. He’s in line to the throne, although it would have to involve a lot of unforeseen deaths or a bomb at a Royal wedding he was running late for. I spoke just as ‘proper’ as him. As you know, my dad was Canadian and my mum from Hungarian stock. I don’t have Sam’s pedigree, but in his presence I too sounded like an aristocrat.
I’ve always picked up other people’s accents very easily. The problem is that rather than use them as an impression I tended to keep them. Without a doubt I get this from my mum, who embarrassingly takes the accent of whoever she is talking to and starts speaking like that herself. This led to countless cringeworthy scenarios during my youth. If she was in an Italian restaurant and the waiter said, ‘Whatta can I getta you?’ she would reply, ‘I woulda like a Spaghetty Bolognesey anda Garlico Breado, thank you, yes, please.’ What made it worse was that she wasn’t that good at accents and would sound more like Manuel from Fawlty Towers. (I’d like to add that Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel, is a very fine actor, and I’d like to wish him and his family well.)
The worst was when she addressed Pila. Pila was a very sweet little Filipino lady who cleaned our big Hampstead house during the few months we were rich. Pila could barely speak English, so in return, my mum would barely speak English back to her. ‘Mis … Kati … would … like … me … do … now?’ Pila would hesitantly enquire.
‘Pi … la,’ my mum would respond equally slowly, ‘must … you … now … very please … do … How do you say? … Ironing?’
The habit nearly became dangerous in a newsagent when my mum was buying some magazines from a six-foot dreadlocked West Indian man. ‘Whatsup, Blood,’ rapped my mother, ‘I is lookin’ to buy dis here readin’ material, Jah Rastafari.’ Luckily Steve and the newsagent were old friends from Brixton, and he managed to diffuse the situation.
So Sam and I went to Corfu sounding like Princes William and Harry. We went with his parents, Hugh and Harriet, his brother Luke and his friend from Eton (wait for it …) Quentin Farquar. Hugh always wore corduroy trousers that were one size too small for him, even on the beach. Harriet was lovely jubbly, Luke was like Sam, but older, and Quentin was a perfectly named posh wanker.
I’ll never forget Quentin turning to me on the flight and embarrassing me. ‘You’re quite plebby, aren’t you?’ he mocked. ‘I bet you say things like settee rather than sofa, and serviette rather than napkin, and toilet rather than loo.’
I didn’t really know what he was on about. His class teasing made me afraid to speak for the remainder of the flight for fear of saying the wrong thing. In hindsight what I should have said was ‘Hey, stupid name snob, what does that say?’ and pointed at the ‘Toilets’ sign on the plane. ‘It doesn’t say “loos”, does it? Have you got on the wrong flight? This is Pleb Airways, mate. You’re fucking with the wrong fake posh boy. Why don’t you ask Sam what happened in the boxing tournament?’
When in Corfu, Sam and I were on the hunt for girls or, as Quentin called them, ‘top totty’ (I think Quentin is probably still a virgin). We both had suntans and Ray-Bans and were feeling confident. Sam’s dad rented us a couple of Vespas, and we hit the local town. It was actually more of a historic village. But we weren’t perturbed. We had until nine o’clock, our Corfu curfew, and were determined to make the most of it. We scoured the streets. If we had been ‘on the pull’ for elderly Greek men playing cards, we would have been in luck, but other than them the streets were deserted.
Finally we spotted two similarly aged young girls and devised a carefully thought-out