February 07, 2004
The saints be praised. It's a cow
In the screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce's house there are seven children and many holy statues. They are his faith and inspiration, he tells Tim Teeman
On the back seat of a Liverpool cab, speeding towards the seaside suburb of Crosby, a four- year-old is chattering to herself: “I want to learn Spanish”, “There are worms in the door”. Her father, Frank Cottrell Boyce, shakes his head. “Eloise. Barmy. Talks to herself all the time. She has this whole other world.”
Maybe she gets it from her dad. Cottrell Boyce, a ruffle-haired, softly spoken screenwriter (his movies include Hilary and Jackie, Welcome to Sarajevo and 24 Hour Party People), has seven children aged from one month to 18. For him, storytelling is “a full-on, nightly ritual”.
Everything is a story in the Cottrell Boyce house. When he woke his son Benedict to tell him Eloise had been born — this at 10.30pm on millennium eve — the three-year-old rubbed his eyes and said: “I have had a very disappointing day. First I lost my spanner and now this.”
It was this kind of disarming directness that inspired Cottrell Boyce, 42, to create Damian, the seven-year-old protagonist of Millions, the story of two brothers who discover £229,000 dumped by a railway track. Written first as a screenplay (directed by Danny Boyle, of Trainspotting fame) and then a novel, it is a thriller with a topical edge. Britain is on the verge of converting to the euro and there are bank robbers on the brothers’ tail. What to splurge on? 15,291 travel-size Monopoly sets? 18,816 stuffed-crust pizzas? Or water wells for the poor?
The money creates chaos around the morally upstanding Damian. School becomes a hellish marketplace, distrust corrupts neighbourliness. “What if giving people money just makes people more money-ish?” Damian asks. He is obsessed by saints and has conversations with them. “He’s half in this world, half in the next,” Cottrell Boyce says. “The fact that Damian’s mother is dead is like the wardrobe in the Narnia books: it allows him access to another world. I wanted to give Damian an infinite amount of money and something that it couldn’t possibly buy — the return of his mother.”
Like Mark Haddon’s Whitbread-winning The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the novel can be read by children and adults. “I find a lot of children’s fiction substantial, and a lot of adult fiction utterly infantile,” says Cottrell Boyce. “I’m as likely to sit down and read Just William as I am Chekhov.” The English, he says, are the standard-bearers (“the Brazilians ”) of children’s books. “It’s our great inheritance: Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit, Richmal Crompton. Alice in Wonderland is my favourite book. It defines its own terms, has a real completeness about its world. The Simpsons is the same.”
And Damian is reminiscent of Christopher, the protagonist of Curious Incident: motherless, set apart from his peers, honest and wise and without guile. “You think you’re being good,” Damian notes, “then it turns out you’re being a problem and not natural.”
Like Damian, Cottrell Boyce moved when he was seven, out of Liverpool to a shiny new suburb, Rainhill. “I genuinely thought we had moved to the countryside. I thought there would be deer. I sat at the window waiting for goldcrests and herons to appear. I imagined capturing amazing animals, that I lived in a wild savannah, but it was just outside St Helens.”
His father was a teacher, the first of his working class family to experience social mobility. “I thought that trajectory would carry on. I fully expected to be a duke by his age.” At 14, he would watch his father’s Open University arts foundation programme at 5am. “These guys with their strange facial furniture lectured about the Renaissance and I remember thinking ‘F***, this rocks’ — the idea of artists in factories working together.”
At 16 he began helping his English teacher with his Punch and Judy show. “In middle class areas, they’d never raise an eyebrow when Punch beat his wife. Then you’d go to very poor areas and the policeman would say, ‘Have you seen Mr Punch?’ and the kids would mumble, ‘No’. I remember once looking out of the flap when Punch kicked his wife and a little girl passed out, then two other kids did the same. Once at a kids’ party when he did it, a kid growled, ‘Leave ’er alone, yer bastard’. ”
He was brought up, and remains, a Catholic. The dining room table in his Crosby home has a pew running down one flank and crosses on the wall. In the living room, a row of saints, including suppurating St Rita, bleed and beseech on the mantelpiece.
“I’ve always loved the saints very seriously. St Francis is one of the greatest people who ever lived. But I also like them in a camp way. A lot of them were nutters like Joseph of Copertino who could levitate. The Celtic ones were always getting into scraps. These are amazing stories full of heroism, eccentricity and bloodiness. The saints gave their names to our towns, hospitals and schools, yet people have forgotten them.”
Cottrell Boyce is initially cagey about his faith, claiming he does not want to be seen as preachy or his novel devotional. “I enjoy being a Catholic. Why stick with it? Lack of curiosity, lack of intellectual ability . . .” he jokes nervously. “It keeps me in touch with reality, which is a strange thing to say about religion, but it does. It gives you an interest group with which you identify very strongly. It’s reassuring.”
He’s worried he sounds too flip. “There have been times in my life when my faith has become much more serious,” he says. His eldest son Joe and his eldest daughter Chiara became chronically ill through inherited blood disorders. “They recovered but I prayed more when it happened, initially to make my child well, but in the instant you do it you realise what you’re really praying for is the strength to deal with it.”
Cottrell Boyce is most fascinated by children when they’re about eight — his son Benedict, and Damian’s, age. “At that age you think you run the world, you have a swagger. It’s very attractive. Benedict’s best mate is two years older than him. He plays chess with the old guy who lives two doors away. He draws no distinctions between people.”
The tone of Millions is pure Gregory’s Girl (Cottrell Boyce’s favourite film) — peppy, direct — and very different from the gritty miserabilism of his screenplays. “As a writer, you deal a lot with maimed characters and so it’s great to write something about a time in your life when you feel equal to the world. Benedict feels emboldened to talk about anything. In the book, Damian’s clarity of vision is proved correct — we don’t get wiser as we get older, we get befuddled and distracted.”
His school doesn’t know what to do with the precocious Damian. In real life, Benedict — a Just William de nos jours with bowl haircut and his father’s dancing eyes — is home-educated by Denny, Cottrell Boyce’s wife, a former teacher. “It isn’t some kind of hippyish withdrawal,” he insists. “He has friends his own age and it works very well. School used to be a sacred space. But the pressure on kids is immense. There is a corporate presence in schools. Kids are being forced to academically conform. Maybe I’m idealising it but when I was young school encouraged you to be different.”
He doesn’t know if Damian’s incorruptibility is “sociologically true, but it’s desirable. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett starts the other way round, with a little girl with lots of money who has it all taken away from her. But she stays the same little girl. We should hold that kind of stoicism out to children as a possibility.”
Cottrell Boyce is writing a new children’s novel and two film scripts, one based on Eric Lomax’s The Railway Man, about the men behind the Burmese railway, the other a “Mission: Impossible set in Elizabethan London”. Doesn’t a houseful of kids disturb him? “It gives me a good excuse for avoiding meetings: ‘Sorry, I’ve got three parents’ evenings this week’. Xavier, our month-old, is our way of saying, ‘We’re not ready to go into atrophy just yet.’
“There’s a Brazilian saying: ‘He walks like the father of seven sons’. I’m never sure if that means he’s got a real swagger or he’s bent double, but I get a huge amount of pleasure from it. It just licenses you to do all the things you want to do. I’m a big kid really, so I can completely, legitimately, play football in the garden (in which stands a life-size model blue cow from the set of Millions), or go swimming or go to the art gallery and do some drawing and that’ll be me being a good dad.”
The children have co-opted their father’s talent for storytelling. “Four of them have created this fantasy house within our house. They’re like the Brontës and their weird shared fantasy world. There was this horrible Chinese rug in the living room that had been there for donkey’s years which we were going to throw out but we couldn’t because it’s part of their house.
“When I discovered half-eaten Weetabix upstairs I suggested they didn’t leave food because it attracts mice. As I left the room, I heard this urgent whisper, ‘See I told you he knew.’ They thought I’d cracked their secret world, but I hadn’t. I think their reality will always be impenetrable to us.”
Naturally, the big kid who grew up in the savannahs of suburban St Helens just loves that.
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February 07, 2004
Millions is fresh, funny, touching and wise in its portrayal of hope and human frailty, says Amanda Craig
Manna from Heaven
MILLIONS
By Frank Cottrell Boyce
Macmillan, £9.99; 208pp
ISBN 1 405 04736 4
Damian Cunningham is a boy who has lost his mother and gained a fortune. His bereaved family has moved house and he is trying to cope with the knowledge that his mother has moved “to a better place” by exercising a religious mania about saints. One day, while hiding in his “hermitage” by the railway track, a miracle happens. A bag stuffed with money falls out of the sky and lands at his feet. Suddenly Damian and his brother Anthony are rich. There’s just one problem. The money is in sterling and in a few days’ time Britain is to adopt the euro. They have to spend a quarter of a million, fast.
Money is a kind of magic, and, although there are no wizards or dragons here, this book is stuffed with the supernatural qualities that a child’s imagination can bestow on ordinary life. Long before the Psammead in E. Nesbit’s classic Five Children and It turned a mine to gold for a day, dreams of incalculable wealth have filled children’s minds. The screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce’s first novel has all the classic ingredients to delight children, but adds the anguish of bereavement to its irresistible comic adventure.
Millions concerns the everyday life of a schoolboy with a well-informed fantasy life that makes him “see” saints. He belongs to two worlds. His obsession makes him ridiculous to teachers and fellow pupils, but infinitely endearing to the reader. Damian and his father are magnets for useless information, and their pub quizmaster-style exchanges are a way of coping with grief. The boys’ secret stash of money transcends this, however. They buy everything from a miniature football game, to bicycles, pizzas, micro-scooters and statues of Damian’s favourite saints. As word gets round that they have money to burn, inflation in the playground soars. So does Damian’s guilt. He wants to do good, yet not only do the charities he tries to give cash to prove fallible, but he’s in danger from the crooks who planned the heist which led to his luck.
When, with the help of St Nicholas, he gives £7,000 to the Latter-day Saints, he is horrified when they spend it on a plasma-screen home cinema, dishwasher, microwave and foot-spa. “It wasn’t even a robbery at all in one way. It was more like recycling,” Anthony, the cynic, says.
But Damian has a conscience which leads him on a dangerous, bitter-sweet odyssey with police and crooks on his trail. People are “even more complicated” than money, as he realises. Realism and fantasy blend to an ending that is the fulfilment of our hero’s dreams of bringing life back to a dead place far away. It’s a long time since a children’s novel really questioned the materialism that has invaded childhood. Millions does so in a way that gently mocks unworldliness, while showing it is preferable to greed.
Damian’s voice leaps off the page and into your heart. There is a comic contrast between his innocent idealism and Anthony’s eagerness to wheel and deal. But what evolves is the tale of a family struggling towards a kind of unexpected nobility and purity. What Damian really wants is to see and hug his dead mother one more time, and to know she loves him. He gets this, we believe, and his dream of happiness is perfectly poised between heartbreak and laughter. It’s a fantasy that springs from working-class Catholic roots, but which speaks to anyone acquainted with grief. Millions is fresh, funny, touching and wise in its portrayal of hope and human frailty.
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Millions (Read 8,724 times)
