Johnny Vegas - Becoming Johnny Vegas

‘I surrender!’

‘And you wonder why you’re always picked last?’

Our Dimon blowing his birthday money on sweets for everyone and ten packs of Star Wars cards for me down at the corner shop near Thatto Heath Park, and the bollocking we all got from Aunty Kath for filling up on Blackjacks, Sherbert Dips, Cola Cubes, Fruit Salads and Drumstick lollies before his birthday tea –

‘I’m cooking nothing this week till all that’s gone, do you hear me?’

‘Yes’

‘Pat, get the clingfilm back on’

‘What about my cake?’

‘Don’t push it!’

Me getting Astro Wars for Christmas after pleading with Steve Butler for a full term of playtimes for a go of his, then praying with all my might that his batteries would have an acid leak and he’d have to make do with a game of Bulldog like everyone else –

‘I only ask Lord because you’ve seen him – he’s a proper tight git’

All the patients from Rainhill Hospital wandering around Thatto Heath Lane, some shouting random swearwords, but most just dazed and confused from the institutionalisation –

‘Bloody buggers ... bloody’

‘Mum, that man just—’

‘Shush and finish your pie’

The pig that used to escape from Piggy Fletcher’s and run riot down the lane, stopping traffic and drawing out all the drunken wannabe rodeo cowboys from The Vine pub

My nan, Mary, taking us to Blackpool and telling us we could stay in the Funhouse for as long as we wanted, even if it meant missing our coach and catching a train home

My dad building us a sledge and dragging it – with me sitting on it – all the way to Taylor Park’s big hill, just so we could crash it into a tree –

‘You’re not concussed, you’d be vomiting if ... here, use my hankie, and not a word to your mum, all right?’

Sitting in the garden with my mum if I went home from school for lunch, watching The Sullivans courtesy of a long extension lead and eating my Blackburn’s steak pie with cream cake to follow –

‘Well, will you marry me?’

‘Yes, yes, I will!’

‘I think Kitty’s gonna be all right, Mum. Mum, are you crying?

‘Shush and finish your cake’

Not sleeping for weeks after watching Salem’s Lot but being grateful that Dad had a crucifix hanging in every single room in the house. And wishing our Mark wouldn’t keep whispering –

‘Michael, open the window, Michael’

Actually worrying that Mum might be part vampire as she applied her prescription sun-block after being diagnosed with a rare allergy to sunlight. Wondering if I could bring myself to stake her if the blood-lust ever overwhelmed her mothering instincts –

‘That’s not your mother, she belongs to the Master now’

‘Forgive me, Mum!’

Realising that vampires don’t tend to wear crosses around their neck as Mum did, and therefore deciding all was probably well

Dad taking the day off and taking me out of school to visit the Liverpool Maritime Museum –

‘Shut? Ah, well, do you want to see the huge police station I built?’

‘All by yourself, Dad?’

‘I did the stairs. I remember telling the foreman that those drawings the architect sent were wrong ...’

All of Dad’s stories and how adversity never seemed to get him down. Never even hearing him shout like some of the other dads on our street

All the front doors left open on our street and all the verbal snippets of family life –

‘Mum, Muuuuum, come and wipe me bum!’

That camping holiday in Wales when Dad’s old army tent ripped in half following a force twelve gale, and the sleepless night that followed as the rain blew in –

‘Dad, I’m cold’

‘Go to sleep’

‘Dad, my sleeping bag’s wet’

‘Go to sleep’

‘Dad, can I go and get a shower?’

‘No, go to sleep’

‘Dad, when can I get a shower?’

‘When you wake up, now go to sleep’

‘Dad, can I mind the torch?’

‘No, go to sleep’

Mum having her drink spiked with Pernod at The Catholic Men’s Society New Year’s Eve party and her coming home singing ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ before getting poorly –

‘No, the bucket! Under the stairs, next to the bleach!’

Butlin’s! Us and the Holkers paying for two families of three in the self-catering chalets but smuggling the rest in. Simon getting the short straw and having to go in the boot of the car –

‘Well, just take little breaths and for God’s sake don’t make a sound till we’re well past reception!’

Rumbles with the Protestant school, St Matthew’s, but making up by home-time as half the kids in our street went there –

‘You don’t get Communion because Jesus dun’t even believe in you!’

Almost wetting myself laughing at watching a truck drive backwards at high speed thanks to rewind on Martin Hurley’s brand new video recorder –

‘Can I do it?’

‘No, you might break it. You should tell your mum and dad to get one’

‘Maybe ...’

‘That’s what you always say’

Wimpy’s opening in St Helens and my dad acting genuinely bemused as to why I’d want to opt for that over a pig’s trotter from Kwik Save’s in-store butcher’s department –

‘But it’s what Action Man would eat in a real war’

The Morris 1800 that my dad refused to scrap despite living under it with a tool-kit every spare Saturday afternoon. Putting it in our backyard after demolishing the wall to get it in. All the make-believe day trips we went on in it, although even then my brother made me sit in the back with my seat-belt on –

‘Do you wanna go to Disney World or not?’

‘Yes, but ...’

‘Because any more out of you and I’ll turn this car around right now and we’ll go straight home, got that?’

The fights my brothers had with other kids in the street – the Rodens, Gaz and some of the Fords – all over nothing and forgotten the minute a football appeared on the scene

Offering Lee a go on my bike the awful day I found him sitting looking lost on the kerb outside his house after hearing his dad had died falling from a ladder on a building site –

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah, just no going off kerbs, and don’t let me mam see you’

Dunking cold toast in a flask lid of hot tea for breakfast in school because we’d attended early mass during Lent –

‘Chocolate’

‘Sweets’

‘Newsround’

‘Newsround dun’t count – it’s educational. You have to give up something you’d miss, like Tiswas or Hong Kong Phooey’

‘He’s right. You’ll end up in purgatory for Newsround’

‘Blue Peter?’

‘Same difference’

That moody bloke who’d had the first ever double-glazing fitted in our street –

‘Your dad doesn’t earn in a month what one of these would cost to replace, now bugger off and play outside yer own house!’

Playing football in the grounds of St Matthew’s Church and my dad not bollocking us when the vicar called round to grass us up because he never forgave them for not giving up their cast-iron gates during the war effort.

Flashing Julie McDonald and doing ‘The Penguin’ around the back of Rainhill cricket club in a giddy, nine-year-old fit of wild romantic abandon

‘What you doing that for?’

‘Dunno’

‘You’re not funny’

‘Right’

Struggling to explain the flashing incident in Confession that week and being grateful I’d got funny Father Joyce instead of stern Father Turner –

‘I accidentally showed myself to a girl from school’

‘Accidentally what?’

‘My pants were loose, they fell down’

‘And what did she do?’

‘Told all her mates in class. They kept calling me “The Flasher”’