My brother, Michael, who is 10 years older, became a difficult adolescent, though no more so than any other 16-year-old. He – poor bugger – was frogmarched off to the Navy, with the suggestion it would make a man of him. It was bloody cruel.
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He was my boyhood hero and I worshipped him. He’d come home on leave from far-flung places with his kit bag slung over his shoulder, and there would be the smell of this rough, blue serge uniform.
I think my mother and stepfather realised it had been a mistake to send him off to the Navy, and they wanted more opportunity for me than that.
But I’m not sure I thought of acting as a career choice. I was in the HMS Drake choir and was was not a bad singer, and at primary school I had a lot of fun acting. I liked showing off. I got the impression that I was quite good at it, but I can remember my mother saying: “Stop showing off.” That’s a terrible thing to say to a child.
I developed a stammer in my adolescence that ruined my confidence and made me very unhappy. I used to make up the most complex sentences to get around it, which made chatting to girls very difficult. I’m not sure what brought it on, but my mother had a nervous breakdown when I was eight or nine; she was taken away and put in a padded cell.
The stammer didn’t go until I was 18, at art college in Leicester. Every now and then – usually on stage when a night is not going well and you hope for a bomb scare so you can go home – I can feel myself about to stammer. I have to breathe steadily.
If I could go back to that young boy in Plymouth, I’d say: “Show off as much as you like.”
