Cleese - So, Anyway...

Copyright 2014 by John Cleese

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

Originally published in Great Britain by Random House Books, an imprint of Random House Limited, London.

Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

Extracts from sketches written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman copyright John Cleese and The Graham Chapman Estate used by kind permission of David Sherlock and The John Tomiczek Trust.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cleese, John.
So, anyway / John Cleese. First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-385-34825-6 (alk. paper)
1. Cleese, John. 2. ComediansGreat BritainBiography. 3. Motion picture actors and actressesGreat BritainBiography. I. Title.
PN2598.C47A3 2014
792.7028092dc23
[B] 2014037869

ISBN 978-0-385-34824-9

eBook ISBN 978-0-385-34825-6

Jacket design: Richard Ogle

Jacket photograph: Andy Gotts/Celebrity Pictures

Photograph on : Business Wire via Getty Images

v3.1_r4

TO DAD AND FISH

I made my first public appearance on the stairs up to the school nurses room, at St. Peters Preparatory School, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, England, on September 13, 1948. I was eight and five-sixths. My audience was a pack of nine-year-olds, who were jeering at me and baying, Chee-eese! Chee-eese! I kept climbing the steps, despite the feelings of humiliation and fear. But above all, I was bewildered. How had I managed to attract so much attention? What had I done to provoke this aggression? And how on earth did they know that my family surname had once been Cheese?

As Matron Fishy Findlater gave me the customary new-boy physical examination, I tried to gather my thoughts. My parents had always warned me to keep away from nasty rough boys. What, then, were they doing at a nice school like St. Peters? And how was I supposed to avoid them?

Much of my predicament was that I was not just a little boy, but a very tall little boy. I was five foot three, and would pass the six-foot mark before I was twelve. So it was hard to fade away into the background, as I often wished toparticularly later when Id become taller than any of the masters. It didnt help that one of them, Mr. Bartlett, always referred to me as a prominent citizen.

In addition, as a result of my excessive height, I had outgrown my strength, and my physical weakness meant that I was uncoordinated and awkward; so much so that a few years later my PE teacher, Captain Lancaster, was to describe me as six foot of chewed string. Add to that the fact that I had had no previous experience of the feral nature of gangs of young boys, and you will understand why my face bore the expression of an authentic coward as Fishy opened the door and coaxed me out towards my second public appearance.

Dont worry, its only teasing, she said. What consolation was that? You could have said the same at Nuremberg. But at least the chanting had stopped, and now there was an expectant silence as I forced myself down the stairs. Then

Are you a Roundhead or a Cavalier?

What?

Faces were thrust at me, each one of them demanding, Roundhead or Cavalier? What were they talking about?

Had I understood the question, I would almost certainly have fainted, such a delicate little flower was I. (And perhaps I should explain to the more delicately nurtured that I was not being asked to offer my considered views on the relative merits of the opposing forces in the English Civil War, but to reveal whether or not I had been circumcised.) However, my first day at prep school was not a total failure. By the time I got home I had learned the meaning of two new wordspathetic and wetthough I had to find Dads dictionary to look up sissy.

Why was I so ineffectual? Well, lets begin at my beginning. I was born on October 27, 1939, in Uphill, a little village south of Weston-super-Mare, and separated from it by the mere width of a road which led inland from the Weston seafront. My first memory, though, is not of Uphill but of a tree in the village of Brent Knoll, a few miles away, under whose shade I recall lying, while I looked through its branches to the bright blue sky above. The sunlight is catching the leaves at different angles, so that my eye flickers from one patch of colour to the next, the verdant foliage displaying a host of verdant hues. (I thought I would try to get verdant, hues and foliage into this paragraph, as my English teachers always believed that they were signs of creative talent. Though I probably shouldnt have used verdant twice.)

Of course, Im not sure it is my first memory; Im sure I used to think it was; and I like to think it was, too, because it would make sense, baby me lying in a pram, contentedly watching the interplay of the glinting verdant foliage and its beautiful hues.

One thing I do know for certain, though, is that shortly before this incident with the tree, the Germans bombed Weston-super-Mare. Ill just repeat that

On August 14, 1940, German planes bombed Weston-super-Mare. This is verifiable: it was in all the papers. Especially the Weston Mercury. Most Westonians were confident the raid had been a mistake. The Germans were a people famous for their efficiency, so why would they drop perfectly good bombs on Weston-super-Mare, when there was nothing in Weston that a bomb could destroy that could possibly be as valuable as the bomb that destroyed it? That would mean that every explosion would make a tiny dent in the German economy.

The Germans did return, however, and several times, which mystified everyone. Nevertheless I cant help thinking that Westonians actually quite liked being bombed: it gave them a sense of significance that was otherwise lacking from their lives. But that still leaves the question why would the Hun have bothered? Was it just Teutonic joie de vivre? Did the Luftwaffe pilots mistake the Weston seafront for the Western Front? I have heard it quite seriously put forward by older Westonians that it was done at the behest of William Joyce, the infamous Lord Haw-Haw, who was hanged as a traitor in 1946 by the British for making Nazi propaganda radio broadcasts to Britain during the war. When I asked these amateur historians why a man of Irish descent who was born in Brooklyn would have such an animus against Weston that he would buttonhole Hitler on the matter, they fell silent. I prefer to believe that it was because of a grudge held by Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering on account of an unsavoury incident on Weston pier in the 1920s, probably involving Nol Coward and Terence Rattigan.

My fathers explanation, however, makes the most sense: he said the Germans bombed Weston to show that they really do have a sense of humour.

Whatever the truth of the matter, two days after that first raid we had moved to a quaint little Somerset village called Brent Knoll. Dad had had quite enough of big bangs during his four years in the trenches in France, and since he was up to nothing in Weston that was vital to the war effort, he spent the day after the bombing driving around the countryside near Weston until he found a small farmhouse, owned by a Mr. and Mrs. Raffle, who agreed to take the Cleese family on as paying guests. I love the fact that he didnt