A Quote by Eric Idle
My father, who was a sergeant in the RAF during the Second World War, was killed in a hitchhiking accident while returning home on compassionate leave. As a result, my mother had to get work, as a nurse, and at seven the RAF put me into a boarding school and ex-orphanage called the Royal Wolverhampton School.
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I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertaker's assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertakers assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.
Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.
I got into boxing for two reasons. One was that my father was a boxer. Secondly when I was young, all healthy men in the UK had to do two years "National Service" in one of the armed forces. I chose the Royal Air Force over the Army and Navy. My father's reputation went before me and therefore the RAF encouraged me to box. There is much rivalry in sporting competitions between the Army, Navy and RAF. Competing has great privileges. I didn't need too much encouragement with all these perks being offered, so I started training with a vengeance.
My education was paid for by the RAF Benevolent Fund, so a charity school, run like an orphanage, with uniforms and beatings. It was tough, but it got me to Cambridge - like being a chrysalis suddenly becoming a butterfly.
My mother was a stay-at-home mum and my father was an RAF pilot.
I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home.
I remember one time I went to Craigslist to find something; that's how bad I wanted it. It was a pair of Raf Simons - this was like 2010. But Raf said he was going to make them for me.
I spent my earliest years in Colwyn Bay in north Wales with my mother and grandmother, while my father was stationed with the RAF in India.
When I was seven, I had to stay home for several weeks because of some ailment, whereupon my father elected to teach me so that I should not fall behind. In fact, he taught me in three months as much as the school taught in two years, so, on returning to school, I was shifted from grade 4 to grade 6.
I was born in Edinburgh, in Scotland, a few days after the end of the Second World War. Both my parents had left school at a very young age, unwillingly in my father's case. Yet both had deep effects on my education, my father influencing me toward measurement and mathematics, and my mother toward writing and history.
Growing up, I was your classic Catholic Irish kid. I went to mass every Sunday. Then in secondary school I went to boarding school, and there was mass seven days a week before breakfast - it may have put me off!
I went to school in Tanzania for two years, from five to seven. I started off in my mother's school with a lot of African children - but then I was put into the international school.
I became religious and at 14 went to a boarding school 500 miles from home to begin theological studies. By the time I started university, politics had replaced religion in the economy of my enthusiasms but I had no idea what to study. My boarding school emphasized languages which I was bad at, and deemphasized math and science which I was good at.
I tried to join the RAF cadets at school so I could fly a plane but then I realised you had to do all the other cadet stuff like training before they let you in a plane. Then you're roped in for life.
My mother was quite poorly. She suffered from bipolar disorder, which at that time was called manic depression. She spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals, and my father was away a lot with the RAF and then with his job in civil aviation, so I was raised in part by my sisters and my godmother, Sylvia.
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