How Not To Be a Boy

by Robert Webb

Aged eleven, my body makes an average garden rake look like it just had a great Christmas and could do with a nap.

It’s a long pass and I welcome the sight of the ball arching towards me in the same way that a quadriplegic nudist covered in jam welcomes the sight of a hornet.

One way of imagining life is that it’s a competition between love and death. Death always wins, of course, but love is there to make its victory a hollow one.

That’s where I grew up. And in front of the TV. That’s the other place. Buck Rogers, Michael Knight, Zorro, Dick Turpin, Bo and Luke, Jon and Ponch, Steve Austin, the Doctor, Thomas Magnum, Hannibal Smith, Colt Seavers, Captain Kirk, Commander Koenig, Dr David Banner, Mr T, Tucker Jenkins, Roj Blake, Flash Gordon, Logan, Monkey, Steel, Starbuck, Stringfellow Hawke, and Robin Hood. What a great bunch of guys and not a father among them. Not one.1 And according to most of them, there are few problems in life that can’t be solved by punching someone quite hard in the face. These are my alternative role models. We’re off to a terrific start.

I take the sandwich, hoping that John won’t notice the absent crusts. He is a strong advocate of what seems to be the male consensus that the crusts on sandwiches are ‘the best bit’, as is the fat on ham, the rind on bacon, the runny surface of a fried egg, the stalk of any vegetable and the skins on sausages. All of this is ‘the best bit’, a view which I think insane but I’m clearly in the minority.

And if you’re especially frightened and insecure, as I was at that age, or as Donald Trump is now, then membership of the in-group is best secured by showing the maximum contempt for an out-group: in this case, girls.

I try to dry my eyes before anyone notices. I’m not going to tell anyone about this, not even Nan or Tru or Mum. They would be nice about it, of course, but I know the truth about my bee. I wasn’t supposed to look after it. I was supposed to stamp on it.

So – the thing or two I know about luck. Thing number one: you should do your best to notice luck so that you don’t accidentally take credit for it. Thing number two: luck is not your fault.

a boy and a girl who came top of their class would each need a different excuse: if accused of intelligence, the girl would be expected to shrug it off and say that she just worked very hard. If accused of diligence, the boy would be expected to claim that it was all done at the last minute and he just happens to be quite good at that particular subject.

They’re right. Half the time I am making snooty judgements. I do have ideas above my station. If for no other reason than ‘above my station’ is where I might get some fucking air.

Many years later I’ll be talking to a friend (not David, but another comedy writer) who puzzlingly seems to have moved from one terraced house to an almost identical one in a slightly different part of Brixton. He tells me that, in the last place, the neighbours started using his bins for their overflowing rubbish. I ask him, ‘What did you say?’ ‘Oh God, I didn’t say anything,’ he replies. ‘No, we decided it would be easier to move house.’ This makes me laugh for about three minutes. I know he’s joking, but mainly I’m enjoying the idea that I’m not the only grown man who will go to incredible lengths to avoid an awkward conversation. Especially with a rule-breaker.

I wait till no one else is in the Form room and ask Mrs Slater if it’s ridiculous for me to think of Cambridge. ‘No, not ridiculous,’ she says quickly, and then, ‘We’ve certainly sent dimmer people than you there.’ This is encouraging. ‘Although,’ she adds thoughtfully, ‘not for quite a while.’

Of course she should do what she likes with it and of course she should go out with whomever she chooses. It’s charming that she wants to buy her boyfriend a Guinness. No, not charming, natural. Completely normal. Of course it is. On the other hand, Eric is a shit and I hate him. Eric gets to sleep with Tess and should therefore be lashed to a cruise missile and fired into the sun. End of argument.

On the side is painted the name of his business, which today looks less like an advertisement than like a rare flash of self-awareness: ‘Paul Webb, Ltd’.

We are not the same thing as our emotions. With practice, you just get to watch them bubbling up and simmering down again.

For twenty-five years I’ve been made to feel welcome in Woodhall Spa Conservative Club: drinking there and playing snooker with Dad, Mark, Andrew and their friends. My public support for Labour has been discreetly overlooked. It’s recognition that community is more important than politics, even as the best political disagreements are often about how best to maintain a community. Dad made exceptions for me just as I made exceptions for him. His views on snooty, Champagne socialist, metropolitan, formally pan-affectionate, middle-class Oxbridge luvvies had to take a step back when he noticed he had one for a son. And my views of baby-boomer, non-college-educated, slightly racist, deeply sexist, angry white working-class Tories were tempered by having one as a dad. This is the kind of forced empathy that villages, not just families, are rather good at. Given the divisiveness of the Brexit vote and the Trump presidency, I think it’s worth saying that it’s precisely these exceptions, these accommodations we have to make with each other, that create cracks in the wall of mutual suspicion and make possible a politics of civility – cracks which the algorithms and self-policing identity groups of Facebook and Twitter hastily try to paste over.