My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up by Russell Brand Read Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Russell Brand
of all writers of that genre, beating Roald Dahl and Lewis Carroll. Her books captured a prewar, innocent Britain where protagonists could have names like Dick and Fanny without raising a titter. These days even the word “titter” makes me think of tits.
39
RUSSELL BRAND
fiction: what a turn-on. So I wanted a well-balanced, cheerful, mongrel, Enid Blyton–type dog along the lines of her immortal
“Timmy,” that I could have grown up with—not the Looney-bitch that turned up. Topsy was a mixed blessing. As a result of coming from dog borstal, she was a bit troubled and would take any opportunity to tear things up. She tore up a koala bear that was stuffed with polystyrene balls, once. I remember looking through the letter box and seeing the stairs and the hallway all covered in white plastic, like a suburban Narnia.
Also, Topsy ate money. Not in the metaphorical sense of having to go to the vet’s and have a lot of operations or anything.
She just liked eating money.
My mum would leave cash on the kitchen work surface after those “Clothes Parties,” and once Topsy ate it. I like to think that Topsy was a vehement anticapitalist and that this money-guzzling was a statement of some kind, but I only like to think that ’cos I’m a twit.
I was seven years old when my mother got cancer for the first time; she had to have a hysterectomy, which was diffi cult
for her and cemented me forever as an only child. If you have no brothers and sisters it defines you for life; even when you’re thirty you refer to yourself as an only child.
While she was in hospital, I found myself uprooted from the security of Grays and forced to go and live with her family.
They’re good people, but I’d never felt part of the family; I watched Christmases and birthdays through patio doors in my mind. The first night at my maternal grandmother’s house in Brentwood I wet the bed. She humiliated me while we changed the sheets, saying I was “too old for that sort of business,” and that I was bad and responsible for my mother’s illness. I’ve found that difficult to forget. She was a much-loved woman, my grand-40
Fledgling Hospice
mother, Dusty Miller, and meant the world to her children and my cousins. I took that exchange as further evidence that there was something wrong with me.
The hospital my mum was in (the same one where I was born, in Orsett in Essex) was all decaying and falling apart: it’s been made into flats now. Everything’s been made into flats now: schools, churches, hospitals. What are we to do when the occupants of these flats have children, get married, get ill and die? Bury them in the scarce earth only to learn their coffi ns
have been made into flats now?
The hospital became the bleak venue of a courtship between my mum and her new boyfriend Colin. I fucking hated Colin.
Before she was ill, she used to have these parties—of which I would be quite disapproving—at which loads of people would gather downstairs, making adult noises, not sexy noises, just the adult rumble, punctured with Sid James laughs and the clinking of glass. I think Colin had first crossed our threshold to attend one of these gatherings, and then visited her when she was in hospital.
My mum eventually recovered, and I went back home to live with her again. She told me that she had only survived because she loved me so much. For the first seven years of my life, the house in Grays had been a kind of extension of my mother’s womb—a comfortable environment in which I felt safe. In later life I wrote a poem about mum’s illness called “Hysterectomy Angel,” which ended with the somewhat troubling (at least in terms of conventional Freudian psychoanalysis) line: “When I fall in love, it will be with Mother.”
But now my incestuous bubble was about to be punctured by the arrival of this swarthy yet utterly humdrum man. Colin was a
good-looking
individual—somewhere between David
41
RUSSELL BRAND
Hasselhoff
39
RUSSELL BRAND
fiction: what a turn-on. So I wanted a well-balanced, cheerful, mongrel, Enid Blyton–type dog along the lines of her immortal
“Timmy,” that I could have grown up with—not the Looney-bitch that turned up. Topsy was a mixed blessing. As a result of coming from dog borstal, she was a bit troubled and would take any opportunity to tear things up. She tore up a koala bear that was stuffed with polystyrene balls, once. I remember looking through the letter box and seeing the stairs and the hallway all covered in white plastic, like a suburban Narnia.
Also, Topsy ate money. Not in the metaphorical sense of having to go to the vet’s and have a lot of operations or anything.
She just liked eating money.
My mum would leave cash on the kitchen work surface after those “Clothes Parties,” and once Topsy ate it. I like to think that Topsy was a vehement anticapitalist and that this money-guzzling was a statement of some kind, but I only like to think that ’cos I’m a twit.
I was seven years old when my mother got cancer for the first time; she had to have a hysterectomy, which was diffi cult
for her and cemented me forever as an only child. If you have no brothers and sisters it defines you for life; even when you’re thirty you refer to yourself as an only child.
While she was in hospital, I found myself uprooted from the security of Grays and forced to go and live with her family.
They’re good people, but I’d never felt part of the family; I watched Christmases and birthdays through patio doors in my mind. The first night at my maternal grandmother’s house in Brentwood I wet the bed. She humiliated me while we changed the sheets, saying I was “too old for that sort of business,” and that I was bad and responsible for my mother’s illness. I’ve found that difficult to forget. She was a much-loved woman, my grand-40
Fledgling Hospice
mother, Dusty Miller, and meant the world to her children and my cousins. I took that exchange as further evidence that there was something wrong with me.
The hospital my mum was in (the same one where I was born, in Orsett in Essex) was all decaying and falling apart: it’s been made into flats now. Everything’s been made into flats now: schools, churches, hospitals. What are we to do when the occupants of these flats have children, get married, get ill and die? Bury them in the scarce earth only to learn their coffi ns
have been made into flats now?
The hospital became the bleak venue of a courtship between my mum and her new boyfriend Colin. I fucking hated Colin.
Before she was ill, she used to have these parties—of which I would be quite disapproving—at which loads of people would gather downstairs, making adult noises, not sexy noises, just the adult rumble, punctured with Sid James laughs and the clinking of glass. I think Colin had first crossed our threshold to attend one of these gatherings, and then visited her when she was in hospital.
My mum eventually recovered, and I went back home to live with her again. She told me that she had only survived because she loved me so much. For the first seven years of my life, the house in Grays had been a kind of extension of my mother’s womb—a comfortable environment in which I felt safe. In later life I wrote a poem about mum’s illness called “Hysterectomy Angel,” which ended with the somewhat troubling (at least in terms of conventional Freudian psychoanalysis) line: “When I fall in love, it will be with Mother.”
But now my incestuous bubble was about to be punctured by the arrival of this swarthy yet utterly humdrum man. Colin was a
good-looking
individual—somewhere between David
41
RUSSELL BRAND
Hasselhoff
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