as I caught a glimpse of an impossibly handsome bequiffed blond boy in a designer black suit, arguing with one of the staff. I instantly recognised him as one of the kids from a TV show I watched on Channel 4 called The Pocket Money Programme. He looked like a movie star – and he became one. It was Jude Law.
Clang! Sorry for the name-drop! There’ll be a few along the way. Keep a tally if you like.
Over the next couple of weeks we set about rehearsing Ramsbottom (we got there!). Many of the cast members were four or five years older than me and had also appeared in a version of the show at their school in south London. There was some consternation amongst them that I had taken the place of the boy who played Accrington Stanley in their production, and I sometimes overheard grumblings of ‘how Tom had done it better’.
I made some friends – well, some of the younger cast members tolerated me – but I didn’t make it easy for myself. Part of the problem was that I was a Habs boy. I’ll tell you more about the school later on in the book, but put it like this – when you assemble all the new boys on the first day of school in a grand old hall and tell them that they are ‘the cream’ of the country, well, you’re not exactly putting Humility on the school syllabus.
Up to this point I had struggled to impress in any department. Now that I was finally making a name for myself, I had become insufferable. Back at school it may have been the order of the day to crow about your achievements, but in the outside world people saw us for the entitled little shits we were. And while I had shone in the school production, I was certainly no better than anyone else in the NYMT. But I thought I was and it put a few noses out of joint.
I had trouble sleeping in the chatty, overpopulated science classroom-turned-dormitory and became tired during rehearsals. As I had done in the school production, I started to lose my voice. I remember feeling ill and mumbling during a run-through and some of the cast asking me to put in a bit more effort.
In fairness I was just a thirteen-year-old, away from home, going through puberty, and my home life had been rocky. At times I would be holding court, boring the others with the same old stories, but equally I could be moody and sullen, especially after a performance. As a counter to my arrogance, I was never convinced that I had done a good enough job onstage, and I would chastise myself endlessly. To this day I rarely watch things I have been in, because I am almost always mortified by the results.
There were happy times too. Although I was a nuisance, I could always find someone to while away the hours with, listening to Rick Astley on the radio (number one at the time with ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’), swapping jokes and dance steps.
I loved performing and definitely grew from the experience but offstage I was a polarising figure, still working out how to be part of something, instead of the focus of it. On the last night we were each given a poster advertising the show and we all signed each other’s. One boy simply wrote ‘fuck off’ on mine, in very small letters.
B – Baldy!
One of my earliest memories is of being three and a half years old at nursery, watching the other little boys and girls skip out of the classroom and noting how the folds in the backs of their legs were unblemished. My own legs, like my arms and neck, were already riddled with scratches. I had been told repeatedly not to scratch – but if I didn’t scratch then there was nothing to do but wheeze. And, oh, how I wheezed. Dr David said I had eczema and asthma and hay fever and gave me some special cream and a blue-and-white Ventolin inhaler, which I was to use every morning and every night and in between if necessary.
When the summer came, my eyes got red and puffy and I sneezed and coughed even more. In the winter I caught every cold going. From a young age I felt at odds with my body. This blotchy, dumpy vessel betrayed my boisterous, carefree spirit. I wanted to run, jump, climb – and I did – but within seconds I was bent double at the kerb, gasping for air.
And yet I remained funny cheeky Matthew. Inquisitive, outgoing, playful, I had many friends, who I entertained with songs and jokes and silly voices aplenty. Even on the sidelines, while the others played football, I would pretend to be a TV commentator. My asthma and eczema were an inconvenience but they didn’t define me.
However, an event would soon occur that would shape my childhood.
In 1978, when I was four, Mum and Dad took my older brother Howard and me to Portugal on a family holiday. Our grandmothers – both widowed – joined us.
I was struck with wonder at the otherness of everything and was easily distracted. I was always lagging a few steps behind, and my poor parents were constantly having to remind me not to wander off on my own.
One day, while we were walking along the street, I got separated from my family. I looked up and they were nowhere to be seen. I cast my eyes up and down and across the road. There were several people around and from a distance quite a lot of them looked like my mum and dad.
Eventually, I spotted them, on the other side, waving anxiously at me. I stepped off the kerb, into the road, and was knocked down by a car.
A small crowd gathered. My distraught father ran over, picked me up off the ground, swore at the driver, kicked the car and carried me off.
At school I recounted the story to friends and teachers. I enjoyed the drama of it. My father, coming to my rescue. Me, the survivor.
Two years later, in 1980, aged six, I woke up one morning to find several hairs on my pillow. The next day the same thing happened, only this time there were a lot more. By the end of the summer all of my hair had fallen out.
I wasn’t initially all that concerned. At four my hair had been blond and curly, but at five it was a big brown pudding bowl and I loathed it. Why couldn’t I have nice short hair like the other boys? I hated having it cut, because it made my neck and back all itchy. Worse, when Mum washed it in the bath I always got soap in my eyes.
In the changing room at Aylward First and Middle School – a ten-minute walk from our home in the north-west London suburb of Stanmore – I could do nothing but laugh as I easily pulled out the last two or three remaining strands in front of my friends. It didn’t feel real.
But it was.
The doctors – and we saw an endless stream of them – concluded that it must have been a delayed response to the shock of being knocked down by the car in Portugal two years earlier.
And so I was the first six-year-old in my class to learn the word ‘alopecia’.
Suddenly everything and anything else that I was at that age was eclipsed by the fact that I was the little boy in the town with absolutely no hair. And that is how it was, from the age of six for the remainder of my youth. Right up until I became famous, my lack of hair was considered the most – perhaps even the only – notable thing about me.
I was never allowed to forget for one moment that I was bald. If I went swimming or to the cinema or got the bus or went to a shop or simply walked down the street, adults and children stared at me.
‘You got no hair,’ said the younger kids, pointing.
Others who had previously called me Matthew now yelled ‘Baldy!’ as I passed by.
Or ‘Skinhead’ or ‘Slaphead’ – but mainly ‘Baldy’.
Apart from my parents’ friend Melvyn, who used to call me ‘Curly’, though I never got it.
My baldness was a source of amusement, sympathy and revulsion for everyone.
Some people chose to inform me that I had something called leukaemia. ‘You’re dying,’ said one of the older girls in lunch break one day, matter-of-factly, as she tossed an apple core, missing the bin.
I pondered if maybe she was right, that perhaps there was something that my parents had thought not to tell me. I accepted I might be dying and I hoped that I had been a good enough boy to go to heaven.
Initially