Free My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up by Russell Brand Page B

and crack. I was a connoisseur of the Penguin, which came in yellow, green, blue and red wrappers. I was a particular devotee of the blue variety, even though all Penguins are the same below the surface, which I think is as perfect an analogy as we’re likely to get for the futility of racism.
    Once the blues were devoured I’d feast upon their inferior cousins the greens, then the reds, and finally those filthy heathens the yellows.
    When my mum recovered I was happy to return home. She again said she’d pulled through because she loved me so much. I felt proud and responsible for her improved health. “Better be grateful, ’cos your mum’s not died,” adults intoned. Auntie Brenda said, “If your mum tells you to go down the end of the garden and jump up and down, you’d better do it.” I thought such an eventuality would be a sign that she’d gone loopy and if she said anything of the sort I’d write to Dr. Barnardo myself and demand refuge.* Before I had chance to put pen to paper it
    * Dr. Barnardo was the head of a charitable fund for orphans. In my mind, he is a benevolent Col o nel Saunders figure, smiling at unloved children. He had more personal relevance than I, as a man with parents, can ever justify.
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    How Christmas Should Feel
    was disconcertingly decreed that I should go to boarding school to make me less clingy; Hockerill, a state-run boarding school in Bishop’s Stortford. Now what I should’ve done is at the audition or interview or what ever it was that took place in that musty room full of swivel-eyed skeleton folk, is carried on like a nut, gurning, swearing and talking about Satan so they’d’ve thought, “Uh oh, this boy’ll be a drain on resources”—but I’m such a vain nit that I charmed them and tried my best. Th ey
    took on a few troubled kids a year, in the hope of setting them straight, and they concurred that I’d benefit under that remit.
    Visiting my nan the day before departure, I smashed up the bathroom in an impotent prison protest. That night, my dog Topsy died. She opted to spend her last evening behind the sofa alone to prepare for the hereafter. The next morning she lay with her dry, pink tongue lolling out—undignified in death. I tried to put it back in her mouth; a squeamish, teary mortician, I couldn’t make her passing palatable. I was taken to Hockerill 63

    RUSSELL BRAND
    drained of defiance and broken. As she left me, my mum sobbed with a grief so profound it was hard to imagine that the tears would ever stop. That night in the dormitory I wet the bed. I was on the top bunk, so the piss drizzled through the mattress.
    The boy below, deposed by the acrid shower, remained magnanimous and sweet. My pajamas were all sticky-legged. Strip lighting graffitied over the protective darkness and a cliché of a matron made me change the sheets. Even Tony Cottee and Frank McAvennie, the hastily Blu-tacked saints upon the wall, could do nothing to alleviate my fluorescently lit nocturnal shame. V
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    7
    One McAvennie
    Hockerill allowed pets, so I had my filthy clan of murderous, sex-crazed gerbils and a General Woundwort–style rabbit (that arsehole from Watership Down) that I picked up at a rural auction I had attended with one of my aunts. The rabbit was being sold by the pound for meat but I saw in the still-live creature the possibility for a better outcome for both of us and bought him off a farmer, saving him from the pot, dragging out his life long enough for him to bite me on the arm, delivering a scar that remains to this day along with the self-harming scars that I angrily etched a few years later. Being gored by a rabbit is embarrassing; if someone survives a shark attack you think them a hero, people strain to marvel at their scars. If you bear the mark of a brutal encounter with a rabbit, people assume you’re somehow to blame.
    They still have teeth, it still hurts—perhaps more, because a shark attack would necessarily take place in salt water