So sugar gave me life, but it exacted a price - slavish adherence. Addiction to it and an addiction to addiction in addition.
Sweetened breakfast cereals were one thing, and relatively harmless at that. Weekly boxes of Sugar Puffs, Ricicles and Frosties would be ordered by my mother over the telephone and delivered along with the rest of the groceries by Mr Neil, who always called me 'young man' and who drove the van for Riches, the little store in the village of Reepham, which lay some two or three miles away from our home hamlet of Booton. Men like Mr Neil no longer exist; little stores like Riches no longer exist.
As a result of Mr Neil's weekly deliveries, I could eat almost as much breakfast cereal as I wanted without having to spend any money. My sugar hit was free. Of course it was. Why wouldn't it be? I was a child who lived in a house where there were always Sugar Puffs in the cupboard. Perfectly normal and natural. All this changed when at the age of seven I was sent to a Gloucestershire preparatory school almost exactly 200 miles from our Norfolk home.
My introductory morning at Stouts Hill, for such was the school's name, presented the first in what was to be a long line of disappointments. After a night of homesick weeping and lonely hiccupping I had awoken to the bumptious din and frightening mystery of an alien institution going about its daily rites.
'You! What are you doing? You should be in the refectory,' a prefect shouted at me as I caromed panic-stricken down random corridors.
'Please, what's a refectory?' A picture of some kind of medieval punishment chamber arose in my terrified mind.
The prefect grabbed me by the shoulders and steered me down a passageway, and down another and finally through a door that led into a long, low dining-room crowded with loudly breakfasting boys sitting on long, shiny oak forms, as benches used to be called. He marched me to one, prised two boys apart, hoisted me up and wedged me into the space between. I sat there blinking with frightened embarrassment. Timidly raising my head, I saw that there was cereal available. Cornflakes or lumpy cooked porridge. Of Sugar Puffs, Frosties and Ricicles there was no sign. I might make the claim that life was never the same again, that trust, faith, hope, belief and confidence died in me that day and that thenceforward melancholy marked me for her own, but perhaps that would be pitching it a touch strong. Nonetheless I was shocked. Was there now to be no sweetness in my life?
The school did have one institution that counter-balanced the troubling deficiencies of the refectory. 'Tuck', as you may know, is an old-fashioned English school slang word for sweets. What Americans call candy. While I had encountered sweets before, of course I had, they had usually come in quarter-pound bags scooped from large glass jars in Riches or Reepham Post Office. Pear drops, sherbet lemons, toffee eclairs, humbugs and fruit bonbons: all rather dowdy, respectable and pre-war. The Stouts Hill School Tuck Shop offered wilder excitements in this, the rising golden age of confectionery. Cadbury's, Fry's (hurrah!), Rowntree's, Nestle's, Mackintosh's, Mars and Terry's were still individual independent manufacturers. From Mackintosh's came Rolos, Caramac and Toffee Crisp, from Fry's (hurrah!), Turkish Delight, Crunchie bars and Chocolate Cream. Cadbury's gave us the Picnic and the Flake as well as their signature Dairy Milk wrapped in delicate purple foil. The Bournville giants were even then preparing to launch within one year of each other the legendary Curly Wurly and the Greatest Chocolate Bar in the History of the World, the Aztec. Nestle's meanwhile offered us the Milky Bar and KitKat, Rowntree's had the Aero, Fruit Pastilles, Fruit Gums, Smarties and Jelly Tots, Mars had the Milky Way, Mars bar, Maltesers and Marathon. Bless my soul! I never noticed till now that the Mars products all began with M. Marathon would many years later be rechristened Snickers, of course (and I would help launch the new name by recording the voice-over for its advertising campaign: if I had known such a thing might happen back then I might well have exploded), just as Mars' Opal Fruits would one day become Starburst. Doubtless they had their reasons. They also produced Spangles, the square boiled sweet that has become shorthand for just the kind of lazy, overwrought nostalgia in which I am now wallowing. But hang in there if you will; there is a point to all this beyond the mere fevered recitation of brand names.
The Stouts Hill Tuck Shop was open for business on different days for each of the four houses into which the school was divided: Kingfishers, Otters, Wasps and Panthers. I was an Otter, and our tuck day was Thursday. First you queued up for cash. Whatever pocket money your parents had allocated you was kept in trust and doled out in instalments by the master on duty, who recorded the withdrawn sum on your individual page in the pocket-money ledger. As the term wore on I watched in dismay as my capital dwindled away. Desperate letters were written home begging for a ten-shilling note to be sent as soon as possible. 'Please, Mummy, please. All the other boys have got enough money to last them for ever. Oh please, please, please ...'
And so it began.
Glorious as the Stouts Hill Tuck Shop may have been, it was but a John the Baptist to the messianic radiance of the Uley village shop, unworthy to tie its red liquorice bootlaces or lick its sherbet dabs. The little post office and general stores was just half a mile from the school gates, and we would pass in crocodile formation on supervised walks through the village, turning our heads in unison towards its inviting windows like cadets honouring their monarch with an eyes right. On the shelves of that shop gleamed, glistened and twinkled the most exotic, colourful and sugary-sweet treasure I had ever seen or had ever dreamed of. Jamboree Bags. Trebor Refreshers. Fruit Salads and Blackjacks a farthing each (that's four for one old penny). Foam shrimps. Rice-paper flying saucers filled with sherbet. Swizzels Matlow Twizzlers that fizzed and popped in the mouth like fireworks. Love Hearts. Chewy sour cola bottles and rubbery white milk bottles. Chocolate buttons sprinkled with hundreds and thousands. Strips of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit and Spearmint, boxes of Chiclets and Pez, loose cubes of Bazooka Joe and packs of Beatles- branded bubblegum, each one with a card inside that offered a picture and priceless biographical information: 'John hates marmalade but Ringo is very fond of lemon curd!', 'George is the tallest Beatle, but only by half an inch!' and other devastating and valuable secrets, all finished with the exclamation marks that remain a characteristic of fan literature to this day. On other shelves there were gobstoppers, aniseed balls and everlasting strips. Sherbet fountains, dabs and dips. Wine Gums, Wagon Wheels and Walnut Whips. Forgive the accidental rhyming. There was the much-prized Spanish Gold, pouches of yellow waxed paper with a picture of a red galleon on the front packed with strands of shredded coconut browned with chocolate powder to make it look like rolling tobacco. Liquorice curved into a Sherlock Holmes pipe, complete with bowl and stem. White candy cigarettes with red ends and rice-paper-wrapped chocolate cigarettes presented in a fake Chesterfield's carton.
All the elements were now in place. Sugar. White powder. Tobacco. Desire. Lack of money. The forbidden.
Yes, forbidden. The village shop was out of bounds to all boys. The extra sugariness of the sweets, the blindingly bright cheerfulness of the wrappers and the loutish American informality of chewing-gum and gobstoppers offended the mostly military sensibilities of the staff. The produce was all somehow just a bit vulgar, just a bit ... well, frankly just a bit working class. Heaven knows what those same poor schoolmasters would have made of Haribo Starmix or the Kinder Happy Hippo. It is perhaps as well that they predeceased such unpleasantnesses, for I'm sure their hearts would have given out.
Seven years old, 200 miles from home and a deprived addict. There are plenty of stories of children younger than seven who are already full alcoholics or were born addicted to crack cocaine, crystal meth and Red Bull, and I am fully aware that my sugar dependency reads as tame by comparison. The fact of it is an indictment of nothing and a lesson to nobody. Nor is it satisfactorily explicable. I have given you the outline of it but that does not suggest necessary or sufficient cause for so compulsive and all-consuming an addiction. After all, my contemporaries were subjected to the same advertisi
ng, had available the same cereals, candies and comestibles and were compounded of the same organs, senses and dimensions. Yet from my very earliest consciousness I sensed with savage unswervable certainty that other people were not seized by the same rapacious greed, insatiable hunger, overmastering desire, shivering lust and terrible, hurting need that had me in its grip almost every hour of every day. Or if they were they had levels of self-control that entirely shamed me. Perhaps, I wondered, perhaps everyone but me was strong, characterful and morally assured. Perhaps only I was so weak as to succumb to appetites that others could control. Perhaps everyone else was equally gnawed by equally keen desires, but had been granted by nature or the almighty an ability to master their emotions that in my trembling desolation I had been denied. We should consider that the atmosphere of my school, like that of any given private school in those days (and many today) quivered with righteous religiosity (today's schools quiver with righteousness without the religiosity, which is only just an improvement). You might be able to imagine then something of the spiritual torture that accompanied my more corporeal agonies. The Bible is crammed from end to end with stories of temptation, interdiction and chastisement. A forbidden fruit hangs from a tree on the very first page, and as we go through we are given more terrible lessons on how greed is punished and lust accursed until we reach the full, final and insane damnations and ecstasies of St John's Revelations, having passed through wildernesses and desert trials, locusts, honey, manna, ravens, sores, boils, plagues, scourges, tribulations and sacrifices. Lead us not into temptation. Get thee behind me, Satan. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay.
In such an atmosphere, with a physiological craving already in place, it is little wonder that guilty connections came to be made in my mind between sugar and desire and satisfaction and desire and satisfaction and shame. All this years before the even fiercer terrors and torments of sex were to make themselves known to me and carve in my heart and bowels the same pattern; gouging it, of course, with deeper and crueller cuts. I say, I am a self-dramatizer, aren't I?
Since 90 per cent of my schoolfellows appeared immune to all this trauma, introspection, shame and temptation I still wonder, looking back, whether I was especially weak, especially sensitive or especially sensual.
To pay for sweets I stole from shops, from the school and, most shamefully of all, from other boys. These acts of theft were conducted, like the eating, in an almost trance-like state. Shallow of breath, eyes glazed over, I would ransack the changing rooms and desks, my insides churning with fear, elation, dread and passionate self-disgust. At night I would raid the school kitchens, homing in on a cupboard in which were stored great catering-sized blocks of raw jelly that I tore with my teeth, like a lion tearing an antelope.
I chronicled in Moab the occasion when I was found by a prefect to be in possession of contraband sweets, bubblegum and sherbet fountains that could only have come from the village shop.+ I persuaded a good-natured little fellow called Bunce, who quietly hero-worshipped me, to take the rap. I had been guilty of so many prior transgressions that one more would result in a severe caning, whereas Bunce, who had no form and no record, would be let off with a warning. It all backfired, of course, and the headmaster saw through our little stratagem. My reward was an extra special beating for having been so wicked as to lure an innocent like Bunce into my web of sin.
The real-life Bunce and I have been in touch since the publication of Moab. He was very good-natured about it and reminded me of an event I had entirely forgotten.
Very early on in my school life I had told Bunce that my parents were dead.
'How terrible for you!' Bunce, always kindly, was deeply moved.
'Yes. Car crash. I have three aunts that I get handed around during the school holidays. You must swear not to tell anyone, though. It's a secret.'
Bunce nodded, a look of stout defiance on his downy face. I knew that he would sooner cut out his own tongue than say a word to anyone.
Towards the end of term, I asked Bunce what plans he had for Christmas. He looked uncomfortable as he confessed that he was off with his family to the West Indies.
'What about you?' he asked.
'Derr ... in Norfolk with my parents, of course. Where else?'
'B-b-but ... I thought your parents were dead and that you lived with aunts?'
'Ah. Mm. Yes.'
Damn. Busted.
Bunce looked hurt and confused.
'You mustn't mind me,' I said, staring at him fixedly, 'You see ... I ...'
'Yes?'
'I say these things.'
We never spoke of it again. Not until Bunce reminded me of it forty-five years later. He remembered the incident with absolute clarity. 'I say these things,' were, he maintains, my exact words.
Regularly caned, always in trouble, never stable, never settled in or secure, I left prep school a sugar addict, thief, fantasist and liar.
The pattern continued at my next school, Uppingham in Rutland. More stealing, more sweets. By this time the sheer quantity of sugary food I had gorged upon was beginning to take a real and painful physical toll. Not in the waistline, for I was as skinny as a pencil, but in the mouth. Caries, cavities and cankerous ulcers were constant companions. By my fourteenth birthday I had lost five of my back teeth for ever. The need for sugar was destroying me. The rush of excitement as I stole and the rush from the sugar as I sat and feasted on my kill inevitably ended, such is the way of passion, in the crash of guilt, melancholia, nausea and self-disgust that follow all such addictions ... sugar, shopping, alcohol, sex, you name it.
More stealing resulted in a rustication, which was the public-school word for being sent home for a few weeks: 'suspension' I suppose one would call it now. Finally the school could put up with me no longer, and I was expelled.+ I had gone to London on an officially sanctioned weekend away to attend a meeting of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London, of which I was an enthusiastic member. Instead of being in London for just two nights, as agreed, I stayed away for a week, blissfully locking myself into cinemas watching film after film after film. Enough, as parents and schoolmasters never tired of saying, was enough.
Tobacco's bitter juices will soon take over the story. Once that loveable leaf had me folded in its fond embrace, sugar never had quite the same hold over me again. But there is a little more yet to tell of my troubled relationship with C12H22O11.
As I grew to late adolescence and early manhood my loyalty to Sugar Puffs was little by little replaced with a passion for Scott's Porage Oats, made with cold milk, but generously sprinkled, to be sure, with spoonfuls of granulated sugar. At the same time, my childhood adoration of sherbet and fizzy chews gave way to a more adult preference for that altogether more sophisticated confection, chocolate. And of course there was coffee.
The Sugar Puffs addict has moved on to Scott's Porage Oats.
It is 1982, and I am in a shabby set of rooms in London that belong to Granada Television. Ben Elton, Paul Shearer, Emma Thompson, Hugh Laurie and I are gathered there to rehearse for the first series of what will later become a TV sketch show called Alfresco. The title of this first series is There's Nothing to Worry About. I wanted it to be called Trouser, Trouser, Trouser but was, perhaps rightly, overruled.
Providence has once again been merciful. Alfresco.
We are in our early twenties and have left university eight months earlier. Everything should be wonderful in our lives, and I suppose it is. Hugh, Emma, Paul and I have won the first Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival for our university revue; a tour of Australia has followed. We have just come from filming that revue for the BBC and now we are about to create our very own television series.
Big sticky tins of Nescafe and boxes of PG Tips teabags stand on a trestle table at one end of the room. There is something about rehearsal that encourages the consumption of great quantities of tea and coffee. This morning, as a sketch is being run through that everyone is in except me (it involves music and dancing), I
make coffee for them all and realize, as my hand goes towards the teaspoon, that I am the only one who takes sugar.
There I am, teaspoon poised over an open bag of Tate and Lyle. Suppose I were to give it up? I have always been told that tea and coffee are infinitely better without it. I look across at the others and vow there and then that I will go sugar-free for two weeks. If, after a fortnight of unsweetened coffee, I have failed to acquire a taste for it, I shall return to my two and a half teaspoonfuls none the worse off.
I light a cigarette and watch the others. A rather splendid swell of proud elation surges up inside me. Perhaps I can do it.
And I do. Ten days later somebody hands me a coffee to which sugar has been added. I leap and start at the first sip as if I have been given an electric shock. It is the most wonderful shock of my life for it tells me that I have succeeded in giving something up. It is far from the greatest tale of triumph over adversity you ever read, but that memory of myself staring at the bag of sugar and wondering if I really could quit never left me. It was to be the one faint whisper of hope in the bottom of Pandora's box. I can still smell that rehearsal room and hear its piano. I can still see the packets of biscuits on the trestle table and the Tate and Lyle bag, some of the sugar gathered into translucent crystalline lumps from the repeated insertion of a wet teaspoon.
I saw and smelt and relived that scene once more twenty-seven years later in a room at the Hotel Colbert in Antananarivo, Madagascar. It was very, very hot and very, very humid, and I was wearing nothing but boxer shorts. An approaching thunderstorm growled menacingly, and the hotel's internet connection, flaky at the best of times, failed. As I stood up from the desk to go to the bathroom a terrible sight caught my eye.