Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [47]
I left Arnold House and headed to a public school called Merchant Taylors’ in a place named Northwood, outside London in Middlesex. My parents thought it would be good for me to go to a school in the sticks, lots of beautiful grounds, sports and fresh air. It took me ages to get there, and when I got there, I hated it all day, then it would take me ages to get back. Everyone else at the school lived locally in suburbia. There were 150 boys in my year and I couldn’t stand any of them. They were all the same to me. Boring. There’s a Billy Connolly routine when he mentions how the real characters in life are the very rich and the very poor, but everyone in the middle is dull. That’s what the boys at Merchant Taylors’ were. Middle. They were middle class and lived in Middlesex and destined to be working in middle management with a middle parting, driving a middle of the range Audi in the middle lane.
The teachers were like they were from another era. They all dressed like Professor Snape from Harry Potter and were about as friendly. One of them was friendly though. Particularly friendly with certain boys; I would say overly friendly. He fancied them. He never did anything improper while I was there; he would just hang out with the students a lot, complimenting them on their work and their bottoms. Years after I’d left I heard that he was fired after his lust finally got the better of him and he lunged for a boy’s crotch in the pavilion after a cricket match.
I had no real friends. Not even the paedophile showed an interest. Not a happy time for me, made worse as I was beginning the long and painful transition from boy to man, commonly known as puberty. Why it has to take so many years, I have no idea. There’s a classic scene in the film An American Werewolf in London when he first changes into a werewolf. He collapses on the living room floor and, while screaming in agony, his body changes shape with hair sprouting out of it. The whole scene lasts about forty seconds. As painful as it looks, I wish puberty happened like that. Exactly like that. Even with the soundtrack. The song ‘Bad Moon Rising’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival should be cued up on the family stereo of every teenager in the world. As soon as they feel shooting pains in their body, they must rush to the hi-fi and press ‘play’, then drop to their knees and transform into an adult. That’s where the analogy must end; they shouldn’t then go on a killing spree and wake up naked in London Zoo.
As it is, this excruciating maturing of your body is spread over several years. I wasn’t even aware of puberty. It never crossed my mind that my body had a lot of growing up to do and nobody mentioned it. My mother and father failed to tell me anything at all during this time. I think they left it to each other, but because they weren’t on speaking terms, they didn’t realize I was still in the wilderness. I never had the chat about ‘the birds and the bees’; in fact, for many years, I thought that birds and bees had sex with each other.
So it was a bit of a shock when my body experienced its first changes. Hair appeared under my arm. Not both arms, one arm. I had hair under one arm for almost a year. My left arm. I appeared to be going through puberty from left to right. I was half man, half child. I was all set to become a Greek mythological figure.
Once a week we had swimming. Changing for swimming was a chance for all the boys in my class to catch up with each other’s various rates of development. Some kids had experienced no changes whatsoever. I had my hair under my left arm, other kids had hair under both arms, or pubic hair or both, or a little wispy moustache or a small gathering of hairs on their chest. Everybody was at different stages. Everybody except for Panos Triandafilidis, the Greek kid, who was so hairy, it was difficult