Connery (Part 6)

Roger Moore

Already you have a fairly good idea of my education. School was not difficult. Doing homework, for instance, was optional. It wasn’t actually optional but so few people did it in any serious way, you knew you were protected by numbers if you didn’t do it as well. In fact, if you were serious about learning anything, you actually had to stay behind and ask the teachers to give you something extra to do. Asking questions in class was showing you were interested and there was some unwritten rule that made being interested in something perverse if not downright wrong. I was torn. I wanted to please my teachers, but I also wanted to please my classmates.

We went to the school in Barrow-in-Furness, because my mother had fond memories of the violence perpetrated on her by the nuns in her school and the only catholic school in the area was a good forty minutes away by bus. Mum would talk about how the nuns would lift her up by her ears or make her kneel on a mat made of pencils and say hundreds of Hail Marys, the number changing depending on the seriousness of the crime, but never less than a hundred.

The bus rattled noisily along with shouts and laughter as from the top deck we looked over the hedges into other people’s gardens and spat on the heads of people walking on the pavement, but we had been separated from our village friends who all went to a nearer comprehensive and that set us apart. I didn’t mind that so much. But it did make a difference. Before I went to school, my life was the village and for a little while Uncle Mike’s place in Yorkshire as well. Sometimes, we would go further afield for drives but we always came back home. Dad even took us to London. Which must have been four or five hours in the car. We dashed around looking at the sights – Trafalgar Square, Madam Tussauds, the London Museum, Buckingham Palace and Harrods – and then he drove us back the same day, arriving at Feather Lane in the early hours of the morning.

‘Why should we spend money on a hotel when we’ve got a perfectly good roof at home?’ he said, which made sense.

We didn’t argue or even find it odd at the time. What your mum and dad do: that’s what’s normal, isn’t it? Like the smell of towels in your house. They don’t smell of anything. They’re just towels. It is only when you visit someone else’s house and you realise their towels smell of something else that you realise yours must as well. Or the tap water tastes differently in different cities, different countries and therefore must taste of something at home as well. In the same way you think you don’t speak with an accent but of course you must. When I went to university, I realised I spoke with a strong northern accent. I worked diligently to eliminate it which because of my proclivity for languages and a penchant for imitation was not too difficult. And then many years later when I spoke at my father’s funeral, Uncle Mike came up to me after and said why did I speak all posh now. He complimented me on it. Said I sounded ‘transatlantic’. So for us, Taylor and I, until we went out into the world, we assumed parents all drank as if they had stopped making beer and wine and gin and you had to finish it off before the government came and took it away. For me the definition of adult fun was being drunk or being in the process of getting drunk. The idea of being drunk was something of a mystery actually, because my parents were never really drunk, in the sense that there wasn’t a clear demarcation between their normal selves and their drunk selves. Of course, I realise now that they were drunk all the time, but at that time drunk didn’t even make much sense. Dad smelled of burps and beer and he’d spray himself with so much aftershave flies would drop out of the sky if they came anywhere near him like they were hitting some kind of invisible forcefield. He’d spray a cloud of it in the air and then walk through it and absorb it. That and cigarettes were what he smelled of; that was the smell of dad.

Mum smelled nicer. Her Gordons Gin had a soapiness to it. And wine smells of fruit, a little too ripe. And her perfume was nice as well, ponging lightly of cucumber freshness, sunshine and dewdrops. And she would sometimes bake – I remember fresh bread and fruit scones. Her cakes were delicious, but she would often sit down with the big bowl of the cake mix and we’d grab a spoon each and eat the whole lot before it had the chance to get into the oven and become a cake. Just like the jelly, we were a family who ate things raw.

Allan smelled of hedges and rainwater and dog, a rough meaty smell that stung your nostrils. He rolled on the ground and no one ever wanted to wash him. In the summer, dad might hit him with a pneumatic stream of water from the garden hose, as he ran yowling away, but that was the extent of it. We had a narrow garden closed in by high hedges on both sides and then an orchard with pear and apple trees at the bottom. We ate all the pears and apples and we picked gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries and damsons. We collected cockles and winkles from the sea when the tide was out and we’d boil them, pull them out with pins and eat them with vinegar. Dad had a shed at the bottom of the garden full of doors and cupboards and dead mice. It fell down in a storm and instead of fixing it, he poured a full canister of petrol over it and set it alight. There was a mushroom cloud of sudden flame that singed our faces. I loved watching it burn and love of fiery destruction was something I shared with dad. Once an old rowboat had beached by the Rock and we went down with some petrol and set it on fire.

He was the same with his cars. He loved tinkering and working on them but he got bored and then he’d sell them and buy another one. He always bought things that were going wrong: he liked the wheeling and dealing. He liked visiting the second-hand car dealers and the scrapyards. He drank cans of beer while he worked and then went upstairs and had a shower singing all the time at the top of his lungs something from off the radio – ‘Here comes the rain again, falling on my head like a memory!’ – and filling the bathroom with steam and the acid fug of his aftershave.

Mum and dad didn’t go out that much. They weren’t pub people. Neither of them could see the point in paying so much for beer and drink when it was cheaper to get it from the off-license and drink it at home, watching videos or television. Sometimes, they had parties but rarely. Their idea of a good night was take away food from the local Chinese, a video or two from the garage and then playing records with the windows open until the neighbours threatened to call the police. It was lucky we were on the end of the row of cottages and Mr. Whillough was basically deaf, otherwise we would have had much more trouble. Taylor was the victim. She liked going to bed early and she had to wear earplugs the whole time. She had one of those eye-masks as well.

‘You live like gypsy,’ Elliot said and although I punched him in the mouth, I saw his point. He wasn’t upset.

We had a fight and he ended up kneeling on my neck and twisting my arm behind my back, so I guess he won. I think I let him. All the time Allan barking like a maniac. That must have been a few weeks before Allan died. As I think I’ve already noted, people who live in the countryside don’t have a very romantic view of animals. Farmers and people who work on farms, animals are basically there to be used and worked, or fattened, killed and eaten. There are pests like rats and mice and badgers and predators like foxes that need to be trapped and killed. People who grow up in towns have little or no contact with animals and they think of animals as either dogs and cats, pets essentially or exotic stuff like dolphins and giraffes. Or Disney cartoons. That’s it really. In Slatecross and the fells and fields around, we had a more pragmatic attitude to animals and although it might shock you, there was quite a lot of killing of animals around the various farms and barns. I think I already said all this earlier. I’ll go back and check. But it is important you know because it makes things clear later. For instance, Allan was no innocent. He was part of the killing game. We used him as a ratter, though he was as useless as a cardboard hat and though he’d drag a rat out of a hole, he’d then run away from it scared and we had to stomp on it to kill it. Elliot Comb, Stephen Pritt and I would shoot blackbirds and rooks and ravens and pigeons, starlings and robins and swifts as well. We’d get five pence from the farmer for every dead crow we brought him. Sometimes, it wasn’t for profit though. Like when we spent a whole afternoon collecting snails from the dry-stone wall that ran along a nearby stretch of the A590 and then lined them up across the road and waited for the juggernauts and buses and cars to crunch them all to shell, bubbling snot and spit. We were curious about badgers and mice and voles and eels and pike and trout what not. Not just in terms of killing them but what they might look like on the inside. I was fascinated by what animals looked like on the inside. How the bones all fit together, what strings there were that tied the knot of life to limb, what jellies and pastes the body hid, what fluids and secretions oozed and poured. Also, that line between something being alive, perhaps nearly dead and being actually dead. The line was like when you’re in the water and you can see the line with your head half in between water and air. The meniscus. The demarcation of two entirely different states. Something I learned from seeing lambs slaughtered at Fenwigs’ farm with the seven chimneys and the savage rabid dogs was that the most important thing was not to puncture a certain part of the gut otherwise you got stink all over the place. It was the poo pipe. Already killing was a messy enough business but you really didn’t want to mix unexcreted excreta up with it and have it spill out, dripping all over the place. Some might revel in the sticky aspects, but I certainly didn’t. I wasn’t squeamish. Not at all. I could poke dead things with a stick and pick them up and throw them at Taylor if she was in the vicinity, but there was no point having to smell something that bad if you could avoid it.

One day we made a cannon out of a drainpipe and used it to blow some wood pigeons to smithereens in the orchard. This was careless innocent cruelty. The other thing about living in the countryside is that there is so much nature around you, it never occurs to you to be a thing that needs conserving. You kill the lambs and next year there’s a new batch. And as for adders, foxes and what have you, the supply seemed to be everlasting. And even if it wasn’t, who cared? A world without rats would be a good thing. Right? Would that you could kill them all and be done!

Allan’s death was Stephen Pritt’s doing though. I heard about it from Elliot Comb and then I ran and saw what he had done. Elliot and Stephen were always falling out, and my friendship with either one of them was largely based on how much they couldn’t stand each other but it being the countryside and there not being that many people around to actually be friends with, you had to make do with what you had. ‘He killed your dog, the mad bastard,’ Elliot ran up to me shouting. ‘He killed your dog.’ I felt sick to my stomach. I hadn’t particularly loved the dog. I was fond of him, but I didn’t understand people who talk to dogs and get all mushy. It’s a dog. And I really don’t understand how affectionate dogs become towards people. The only way I can understand it is by realising that people quite like slavery when they have the upper hand. Dogs are slaves and, worse than that, they’re willing slaves. If we thought about it for two seconds, it would be disgusting. None of this occurred to me then. I was way too young. Allan was a cheerful presence and he was something to go for a walk with, so you weren’t on your own but at the same time you didn’t have to talk or listen to any nonsense. All that summer we had been bored and so we had been killing a variety of things in a variety of experimental ways which admittedly were becoming a bit tortuous. There had been some particularly nasty doings with the frogs we’d found in the pond near the caravan site that involved explosions. Again this is children’s stuff. Anyone who grew up in the country will recognise it and be far more understanding than ‘townies’. Although all the years that have passed does make it a bit strange to me as well. I suppose I’ve become a townie myself.

Aside from that, we had also been putting stuff on the railway tracks. Not animals or birds or anything. Usually coins and stuff. The train went by and flattened a two pence piece until it was the size of a flattened drinks can and it would be scorching hot to the touch when you took it off the metal of the rail. Sometimes we put toys on the tracks as well or Taylor’s cabbage patch kid which she was really too old to have anyway. Sometimes we put pieces of fruit and then we’d lie down in the long grass close up and watch as the train thundered past and destroyed everything in its path. To cut a long story short, that’s what Stephen did to Allan. He did it at dusk at a bend in the line so that the driver wouldn’t have a chance to stop. An experiment he called it. Tied Allan up like a damsel in distress in an old black and white movie.

I was furious when I found out. Livid.

‘It’s stealing,’ I told him. I don’t think I spoke to him for all the rest of the summer.

I told dad he got hit by a truck and I buried the two halves down the orchard, in a bag. Dad and mum treated me to a Chinese takeaway that night, though it being a Saturday, they probably would have had one anyway. I heard them later through the wall talking about how I hadn’t cried and they were worried about me. It was supposed to be a private conversation, but they had Jeff Wayne’s War of the World playing too loudly – ‘the chances of anything coming from Mars are a million to one he said’ – and had to shout over it.

The next day I went down to the beach to practice feeling sad, to see if I could make myself cry. I’d cried before so I knew it wasn’t physically impossible. But I hadn’t cried much. And I’d cried more because I’d been hurt or was angry about something. I never cried because I felt sad or sorry. I never felt sad really. I was cheerful. And even here trying to cry on the beach I ended up meeting Sean Connery and that cheered me up a lot and I kept the meeting secret like a treasure, a hidden treasure. It was the first time I really understood the benefits of not saying something. And the fact that it was something that might impress people, might make me look more important in their eyes, made it all the more precious to keep.

The lying came a bit later. Great Uncle Paddy came over. He had spent his childhood in the logging camps of Canada. He grew up poor, dirt poor with my grandad in Drogheda and then Belfast. He had been so hungry during his life that he couldn’t bear to see food go to waste. After we finished eating, he’d stay at the table and lick his plate. Mum would hustle us out of the room so that we wouldn’t embarrass him. I remember going to the airport to drop him off and the sky was so blue and at the airport I bought a book about the new Popeye film starring Robin Williams. The pictures of the sky in that book was as blue as the sky as we drove to take Great Uncle Paddy back and from that point on whenever I think of the idea of blue sky or I hear the phrase ‘blue sky thinking’, I think of that trip to the airport and Popeye. I’ve never seen the actual film, though I’ve heard it’s not very good.  

Dad took me to see Rocky and Rocky II and the next week they showed Rocky III at the Astra. Then I went to the boxing club in the basement of the Traveller’s Rest drinking man’s club. An old Irish man ran it who knew my grandad before he rolled off the roof of the shipyard and died in the divot his body made in the paving of the yard below. He told me grandad had a lunchbox with one hardboiled egg and two bottles of Guinness. I skipped rope and hit the heavy bags and every so often I went into the ring and had a proper fight. This was sometime later; I was eleven at least, although I couldn’t say exactly. They showed Karate Kid as well and so that was in the back of my mind. My mum thought it was a terrible idea and my orthodontist was likewise horrified, but my dad said that it would teach me a good lesson and he was all for it.

Wait I forgot all about Great Uncle Paddy.

He had three fingers on one hand and two on the other. He had got lost coming back from a logging camp and there was a blizzard and the snow, and the frost cut his fingers off like knives. He got Parkinson’s later on and a drinking habit because he spent his whole time working in bars and from what I overheard from mum, he was a lonely man and he was taken in by people who basically worked as cleaners or co-workers and really had nothing to do with him other than that but felt sorry for him. He lived in a small town called Moonbeam and he showed us photographs of it. There was a flying saucer by the side of the road.

‘That’s the main attraction, Larry,’ he told my dad. ‘It’s all bull.’

He did obviously get hungry and he had a mighty thirst. He always had a flask on him, and he was the only person I ever saw who did that. Previously, I had thought it was a thing only characters did in films. Then I saw him do it and I thought everyone must do it but then afterwards I never saw anyone else do it ever and so I gathered that it was him and pretty much him alone. He even put some of his whisky in our dandelion and burdock and we got giddy off it, hot-faced and then sick. But mum couldn’t exactly shout at him; the amount she and dad drank. In fact, Great Uncle Paddy felt he had finally arrived home. There were other members of the family who came over and said hello and were polite; people we never saw all year around but were suddenly there, their eyes glancing around the room whenever mum and dad went out to get more drinks or a plate of cupcakes or scones or ginger snaps or one of the cakes mum brought home for free because they were past their shelf date; but the fact of the matter was Great Uncle Paddy loved Mary and Larry and he loved us too because we were more like him than they were, because we were all lonely and alone; and mum and dad knew what it was like to get drunk like him. And I grew up hating the idea of getting drunk, but I understood how it felt to be alone and that was enough. I can sit next to a drunk and feel disgusted at the reek of desperation and the mouth that comes off him or her, but at the same time I recognise it as my own Pheromones stink.

So, I went boxing. And hitting people was an enjoyable taboo to get over. And being hit was by far easier. I enjoyed being punched in the face. Much more than I enjoyed skipping. It’s strange. Most people are scared of physical pain. Especially sudden violent physical pain; largely because it is something that they are not used to. Boxing taught me to take punishment without complaint and not to fear it. It was very useful to get over the shock that most people feel upon being struck. That paralysing assault on personal space as much as on the physical body: the sense of self: who you think you are. An intrusion: an offence to be felt both physically and metaphysically. I didn’t feel it like that at all. Michael Collins punched me in the face and I felt the world spin and I span and when I stopped the world continued spinning and I saw Michael juddering back into my field of vision and when he steadied and I had a sense of exactly where he was – right in front of me – he hit me again and beautiful bright fluorescent magenta flowers bloomed against a field of deepest orange beneath a green sky. My legs were paper tubes holding up a small car’s engine and they collapsed, accordingly, concertinaing to the ground. I considered all this with perfect equanimity on my way down and I wondered what the rules were again. Yes, I remembered. I would be safe on the floor but unless I got up, the fight was over and no more punching or being punched. I could take a count of four but anything more than that and the referee would stop the fight. Michael was too confident of his big windmilling blows, having connected twice already. I knew that he would do it again. He liked the feel of my face on his gloves. And so, I stepped forward his arm hit my forehead, but I was now within his defences and I began pummelling away with my fists at his body. I was surprised my arms still had the strength but there was also the adrenalin from being punched and I saw an opening as Michael stepped back to try and escape the attack. He should have gone in closer and hugged me like he loved me. That was the way to do it. To succeed at boxing, you always worked against your instincts: stepped into danger, pushed towards pain. It wasn’t a strong punch that clipped his jaw, but it took him down. It rang his bell, as they say. He was so surprised he didn’t get up. He didn’t come back to the Traveller’s Rest after that night.

And I only continued for another couple of weeks because I saw Karate Kid at the Astra – like I said earlier – and I went through all the martial arts. At the time, I took them seriously enough but also simply as something to do. There was the yoga, the stretching, the warmups and the dance-like kata that saw you kick and punch your way around a room hitting all points of the compass and finishing exactly where you started. I enjoyed the sparring more than anything and the instructors and the adults were always full of apocalyptic fantasies of nuclear war and societal collapse to make their training to kick and punch people seem like a vitally sensible thing to do.

‘When everyone is fighting for food…’ a conversation might start.

‘Come the bomb…’ somebody would begin hopefully.

There were homilies on not having to let anyone push you around because you could drive their nose bone into their brain, on self-defence via arm breaking and protecting yourself and your family with GBH. When they said these things, I’d find myself wondering: why would I protect my family? Why would they need protecting? I did a couple of months in Taekwondo with a man who I would later readily identify as a sadist but at the time I thought of him as some sort of hardened, tough but fair sergeant major type, training us harshly so we could survive in a combat situation in the Mad Max wasteland to come. He loved to punch students in the stomach when they weren’t expecting it to teach them ostensibly to always expect to be punched in the stomach. We would flinch whenever he passed close. He also enjoyed adjusting your fighting stance by standing behind you with his body pressed against yours as he leaned into you and made minuscule adjustments of where your arm should be, elbow at this angle and how your knee should be bent just so. Again when I was older, I would think back and have a forehead slapping revelation but at the time, it didn’t make me feel anything other than vaguely uncomfortable and I was relieved when a workmate of dad’s started a karate club in the community centre at Carton-in-Furness. It was closer to Feather Lane – I could walk there and back or take my bike – and Bill Tunnel was a good teacher who didn’t need to hurt you to prove a point. Bill was gently spoken and wise, which is just a fancy word for sensible. He also thought that the nuclear war was coming, and Japanese fighting skills would be essential, or at least give you a significant edge.

When I went to La Rochelle, I was already a green belt, but I came back with a new determination to move up to black belt which would involve a full contact fight in Newcastle where the headquarters of the association were located. It would take me another two years to get there and to win my first Dan black belt. But I did it. I could see the benefits now of the martial arts that I had happened into. I had never taken the end of the world stuff that seriously, but I realised now that I was learning skills that I could apply to murdering someone. Everyone talked about the importance of self-defence and how the philosophy of martial arts was purely peaceful, chivalrous even, but we all knew that was rubbish. We were practicing breaking kneecaps and smashing faces in, stabbing the ganglia of nerves under the jaw – instant death! Being able to move swiftly and hurt someone was an important skill and not being afraid of confrontation, a sound psychological frame of mind. It was important that when aggression was called for it wouldn’t be panicky and wild, but controlled and disciplined. Straight lines would be obeyed. Blood wouldn’t rush into my face and my breathing wouldn’t become hyperventilating panic gasps. Bill and the others from the shoe factory and the shipyard liked me. I was disciplined and I had grown up to be very strong and quite tall. Plus, I wasn’t a nuisance. Had never been. A gentle soul. Old beyond my years. That’s what everyone said. Sad eyes. They didn’t know that the patience in me was because I was dedicated to a secret vocation. I felt like a spy at large in a world that didn’t understand or suspect the pact of aggression I had formed against it. And I have to insist that there was no emotional compulsion. Nothing political either. I wasn’t disgusted at the world and I had no animus against people as such. If I had been old enough to vote, I would probably have voted for the liberals. Of course, there were the minor calamities, the rages and minor humiliations that would plague anyone growing up. School teachers who abused their positions of power, later on bosses and bouncers, an assortment of bullies and fools. The bus drivers who insisted on seeing lost bus passes. The cinema cashier who policed the AA certificate films too rigorously. People who thought it was funny, people who enjoyed inflicting minor outrages on others. But these were all below me. The insolence of office. They didn’t disturb me more than temporarily.

Mum and dad found my karate daft and let no opportunity pass by without ridiculing it. I would do my yoga stretches every morning and I would often go for runs. I had a punch bag put up in the garage and would circle it and deliver roundhouse kicks and punch combinations for an hour or so. Taylor was impressed more than anyone else. She saw a quiet purpose that she had hitherto not suspected; and she respected it, seeing it as akin to her own dedication at school and with her music. But it was also different. Finally, here was something that wasn’t a basic attempt to keep up with her own discipline. Taylor came to my competitions and fights and she drove me to Newcastle when I went for my first Dan black belt. And she was surprised when I stopped going to karate as soon as I had it. She didn’t understand that I had gained all the knowledge I needed, and the fantasies and conversations were wearing thin. I didn’t want to teach other people and I began to think that being known as someone who was good at martial arts was in itself too conspicuous. I still trained on my own and I took to fell running to keep fit and get out of a house the air of which you could scoop out with a spoon. Bill Tunnel kept bothering dad about me no longer going, but Larry was distracted himself. I was almost sixteen and soon I would be leaving school and going to work in the shipyard. Except I decided I wanted to continue to VIth Form as Taylor had done. She was now on her way to university, much to Larry and Mary’s disdain. She would do a year of Sociology at Leeds before she dropped out and moved to London where she got a job as a copywriter at a big advertising firm that had once employed Salman Rushdie. She would change her name and we would lose contact with her for a few years but that was in the future. It was Taylor who drove Great Uncle Paddy back to the airport, even though she only had her provisional license. Once she learned to drive, she became the designated driver.

Mum and dad were beginning to get paranoid about driving long distances. They were always over the limit alcohol wise but in the past that had never stopped them. We drove up to Scotland, the trip to London and back that I already told you about. Criss-crossed the country. But then dad got stopped by the police and he failed the breathalyser and had his license suspended for six months. It didn’t matter too much because he went to work in the works van and mum drove him around the other times, but when he got his license back, he began to be reluctant to drive anyway and mum caught his paranoia and they both refused to drive if it was far. This struck me also as an excuse. People often find dramatic excuses for doing something they wanted to do all along but that would have reflected negatively on them if they’d just up and done it. They had become tired and uncertain. They had us very young. They were both still in their teens and so as we were growing up, they were also still young, I understand now, though at the time they had that ageless permanence that parents always have. This also was true of their drinking and smoking and their hardworking and lack of sleeping. They could sustain it because basically they were in their twenties and then their thirties. But as they got passed the middle of that decade, they began to feel the physical consequences of their lifestyle decisions deeply. Mornings became harder and they were inclined to physical carelessness. When they fell over, they didn’t bounce so much. As I got older, I realised how unusual it was. And getting older, I quickly caught up with my parents. When I was twenty, I was already older than they had been when they had had Taylor. I could look at photographs of them holding us as babies and finally see them for the kids they were. I also noticed that as you become an adult you stop falling over. Or at least you ought to. When I was a kid, I was running everywhere and as an inevitable consequence, I’d be falling and grazing my knee, scuffing my trousers and what have you. Taking tumbles left, right and centre. I wasn’t particularly accident prone, it was just a feature of childhood, especially a childhood lived so frequently out of doors in the rough and tumble. Becoming an adult was marked by a sudden and rapid decline in tripping and falling over. Mum and dad though were always breaking things, having accidents, stumbling and losing their balance. You know that phrase that women use to excuse and cover up the effects of domestic violence: ‘I walked into a door’? But my mum really did walk into doors and dad did too. When he was working on cars, he was constantly interrupted by torn thumbs and scorched forearms, stubbed toes and minor electrocutions. It was lucky he didn’t actually do much work on the submarine because the chances are high, he would have blown everybody up. The cars were always getting into bumps and scrapes, but dad and mum didn’t mind. They didn’t care. Things were there to be broken and that included us. Their physical carelessness extended to our welfare and we were always getting burnt or bruised or choking on something. In a more alert area and age, social services might have been called, but I don’t feel we were treated badly. Mistreated that is. There was no maliciousness, just a kind of benign neglect. Maybe not benign. We rarely went to the hospital. Mum had a big plastic ice cream tub full of plasters and ointments, sprays and pills and she had a book of Reader’s Digest medical advice that she would occasionally consult, using a magnifying glass to read the small text because she was vain about her reading glasses.

‘Sherlock Holmes is on the case I see,’ dad would say.

He was the same. He’d tape his thumb back on or run an offended piece of flesh under the tap until the swelling went down, take two painkillers with a swig of lager and then go back to work, or if it was really bad knock off with a can of lager in front of the television and a film, a packet of frozen peas slapped on the wounded limb.

When we went to the airport with Great Uncle Paddy in the passenger seat shivering with his Parkinson’s in full rage, a bobble hat on his head even though it was the height of summer and I was stunned for some reason by the blueness of the sky and have always linked it to airports. If you say the word airport I think of a blue sky and the Robin Williams Popeye book, I told you about. It was blue, blue, blue. We got to the airport and dropped him off at the gate and I was walking around the departure lounge in Manchester Airport while Taylor went to the loo. There were a few shops and boutiques and then the access to the gates and there was the glamour of all those other places. All those other names. Far away. Those vapour trails that crisscrossed the sky above our garden… that’s where they were going. People around me would soon be in Hong Kong or Canada or Australia, Berlin or Paris, Rio de Janeiro or New York. And this is when I saw Roger Moore. He was striding across the concourse and there were a few people trailing him, I’m not sure if they were journalists or fans. And he had a woman with permed blonde hair walking next to him holding his hand. He looked magnificent, tall, handsome, beautiful and he swung a small briefcase in his free hand. There was something carefree about that action. Like he was telling us all, ‘Yes, I’ve got a briefcase but it’s full of sweets and comics.’ There was a smile on his face, but his eyes were fixed in the middle distance. Taylor came back from the toilet and I told her I had seen Roger Moore and she said ‘Yeah, right! I believe you: many wouldn’t.’ I understood then that no one would believe me. Just as no one would have believed me about Sean Connery and this confirmed my initial decision to not tell anyone about that encounter. But this encounter hadn’t even been an encounter. It had been a … what? A sighting I suppose.

I sulked on the way back even though we stopped at Little Chef and I ate gammon and chips with a slice of pineapple on the salty gammon steak. I tore a sheet of paper from the back of my Popeye book and gave Taylor a biro. I asked her to write: ‘Best of luck, Sammy. Roger Moore.’ She laughed. But did it anyway. She tried two or three times and then got it right. It looked careless like someone who had signed thousands of autographs and wanted a quick line from Roger Moore without worrying too much about legibility. There was definitely an R there and then it looked like a bumpy road to the swirl that served to underline it. I told Taylor that it wasn’t a lie. I had seen him, but it wasn’t fair that people wouldn’t believe me. She agreed to keep my secret. When I sulked, I always said I was thinking. I would go outside for a think sometimes and this wasn’t far from the actual truth. Thinking back now I wonder if I really saw Roger Moore. Maybe it was some man who looked like Roger Moore. What would Roger Moore be doing in Manchester? But then again what was Sean Connery doing on the beach by Hampton Rock? Nothing made any sense if you kept asking questions. It was like rain falling on a wedding cake. It would collapse sooner or later.

When we got home, it was Taylor who told my parents I had seen Roger Moore and forced me – reluctantly – to show them the autograph. Dad and mum were so proud and thought it hilarious and we put in a video of Live and Let Die that he’d done off the TV to celebrate, even editing the adverts out with the pause button. It was easy to refine the lie and tell it convincingly when I went to school the next week and this came as a revelation. A convincing lie can end up creating a wholly different universe. I put the paper in a green envelope that one of my birthday cards had come in.

It was ironic that I had both my secrets, both my revelations from rival James Bonds. Sean Connery had shown me how powerful a kept secret can be, and Roger Moore had revealed to me the power of lying.

People were impressed. School children were impressed. But even my parents. There was a glamour like a residue that attached to me. If you said things and people understood the world only by what you said, then it was so easy to manipulate the world just by saying different things. I no longer had to live in sordid ordinariness. Of course, there were strategies to learn. There was a limit to the credulousness of people and there had to be rationing too. And I still saw my lie as basically justified. After all, I had been very close to Roger Moore. No more than five or six metres away. Why was that not the same as meeting him? I had Taylor fabricate the autograph simply to give myself a receipt for an experience I considered that I already rightfully owned. Hilariously, Pete Stobart brought in an old copy of Look In with a feature about James Bond guest written by Roger Moore and with his autograph at the bottom of the page. He asked to compare the autographs and I immediately agreed, ready with an excuse about how he was leaning on my back when he signed it or some such to explain any eventual discrepancies, but the autographs matched exactly. I wondered how many Roger Moores Taylor had signed

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