14

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

or

BROOMSTICK PRICK

It was not cool to be Draco.

As soon as Daniel, Emma and Rupert were cast, their lives changed. They left school and from that point onwards Potter was their life. They were in a bubble, for better or worse, and all chance they had of a normal childhood was practically gone. It wasn’t like that for me. I was one week on, one week off, whereas they were constant. Outside of Potter I went to a normal school, had normal friends and tried very hard to be a normal teenager.

Perhaps you know some normal teenagers. Perhaps you are a normal teenager. If so, you’ll know that being marked out as odd is not a good thing. So yeah, with my bleached hair and my regular absences from the classroom, it was not cool to be Draco. To plenty of people in the school corridors I was the Harry Potter Wanker. I was the Broomstick Prick.

And so, perhaps I overcompensated a little. I acted up. My prepubescent cheekiness developed into something more disruptive. Remember that I’d moved from an exclusive school where academia was the be-all and end-all, to a normal school where your coolness rating depended upon your ability to source cigarettes, or your prowess on the skateboard or BMX. I started smoking, and I’ve already told you about my escapade in HMV. I wasn’t the naughtiest kid in the school, not by a long way, but I did feel the need to offset my other life with a bit of normality. I was routinely late for school, and forever bunking off PE or disappearing on my bike to get some sweets. Often I got away with it. My schedule was changeable—I was often out of lessons because I was filming—so the teachers would assume that I was off doing something legitimate. When I was in class, I was far from the model student. I don’t think I was terrible, but I was forever doodling on my books, chatting with friends or winding up the teachers. I used to keep a MiniDisc player in my pocket, with the headphone wire running along my sleeve to my wrist. It meant I could sit in class, resting my cheek on my palm, listening to music. I thought it was a genius move. My teachers took a different view. I lost count of the times an exasperated teacher said, “You have to have the last word, Felton.” And because I did always have to have the last word, I’d reply, “Absolutely, sir!” with what I hoped was a winning grin.

The trouble is, the older you get, the less disarming your cheekiness becomes. I can see now that to disappear filming for weeks at a time before rocking up at school with a bit of an attitude almost certainly would have come across as arrogant to the teachers. They afforded me no special treatment. Quite the opposite. I remember one teacher putting me in my place by mocking my hair colour and asking me who’d cracked an egg on my head after I’d once again insisted on having the last word. Even in drama lessons, where you might imagine I would have thrived, I was disruptive. I had no problem going onto a major film set and pretending to be a wizard flying a broomstick with a fan in my face, watching some bloke waving around a tennis ball on a pole. That took place in a safe environment, surrounded by like-minded people, and it wasn’t going to affect my social standing one bit. But to act in a drama class in front of lots of other teenagers who’ll laugh at you if you get it wrong and even if you get it right? That was a completely different kettle of fish. My defences went straight up. No doubt it outwardly looked like regular teenage disdain. I’m sure my teachers thought I was giving them the full Draco, but it was more complicated than that. I flunked drama with a series of Ds (although that didn’t stop one drama teacher asking me, tongue in cheek, if I could get him a part in the films).

So I failed to earn the enduring respect of my teachers during my time at school, with perhaps one exception. Every school child needs a Dumbledore in their life. For me it was Mr. Payne, the headmaster. I’d missed a few weeks at the beginning of his first term at the school, and so I hadn’t met him until one day when he knocked on the door of my music class, where my mate Stevie and I were sat at a keyboard making up our own songs. He asked to see me. I followed him outside, unsure why I’d been called out by the headmaster. It was nothing sinister. “You’ve not been here for the last few weeks,” he said. “My name’s Mr. Payne, I’m going to be your head teacher for the rest of your time here, and I wanted to introduce myself.”

I immediately thrust out my hand and said: “Tom Felton, nice to meet you.”

It was plainly not the response he was expecting. It was the response of a kid used to spending a lot of his time in the company of adults, someone with one foot in a different world. The response of a kid trying to disarm him. He could easily have dismissed that gesture, or found it thoroughly inappropriate. But he didn’t. After a moment’s hesitation he shook my hand and smiled.

And he carried on smiling, even when I found myself up in front of him for some misdemeanour, as I regularly did. He was always fair, never sarcastic. He was endlessly patient and excited to share his love of his subject, maths. Unlike lots of other teachers, he treated me like a young adult. Perhaps he understood that my behaviour came not from a desire to make anybody else’s life difficult, but from an unconscious need to impose some normality into my existence. Maybe he was just a nice guy. All I know is that he had an anchoring effect on my life back then. I’ve often thought that I’d like to go back and repeat that handshake as an adult. If you’re reading this, Mr. Payne, thank you.

Normality was the goal. It wasn’t always achievable.

Some friends and I used to go fishing at a couple of ponds in Spring Grove at the bottom of my street. Those ponds didn’t hold much in the way of fish, but that wasn’t really the point. It was a place to hang out, smoke secret cigarettes and, if we were lucky, land the occasional carp. I used to tell my mum I was sleeping over at a friend’s house, he’d do the same, and we’d actually spend all night by the water’s edge with our rods, our cigarettes and a disgusting tin of cold Spam for sustenance. Living the dream.

One evening I was there with three mates. Our rods were out and we’d set up for the night, just as we had any number of times before. We were chatting easily, having a bit of a laugh together, when I suddenly heard voices in the distance, but getting nearer. Minutes later, a crowd of about forty kids came into view. I felt a shard of ice in my stomach. I didn’t know these kids—they were perhaps a couple of years older than me—but I was sufficiently streetwise to interpret their intentions. It was a mob of bored youths from the area, amusing themselves by marauding the streets and causing trouble. I knew instinctively, as they approached, that they would think they’d hit the jackpot if they twigged that they’d come across the Broomstick Prick. If that happened, I was in proper trouble. Everything about their demeanour told me they were up for a fight. And with forty of them against four of us, I didn’t like the odds.

I kept my head down and tried to disappear behind my friends. I figured that, in a situation like this, they wouldn’t want to be associated with the Harry Potter Wanker and would do what they could to keep me out of the mob’s line of sight.

I was half right. They certainly didn’t want to be associated with me.

Before I knew what was happening, my three mates scarpered. I couldn’t believe it. A few of the boys picked up my fishing rods and threw them into the lake, by which time the rest of them had worked out who I was. I wanted to run, but my feet were planted to the ground in fear. A couple of boys sidled up to me and started to push me about a bit. They both had lit cigarettes in their hands and they poked the burning ends into my face, much to the crew’s amusement. It sounds dramatic—it was dramatic—but far worse was the suppressed threat of violence that seemed to hum around the mob. Even if I found the strength to run, they’d be all over me, grabbing clumps of my bleached hair and grinding my face into the dirt.

The wider group moved ever closer to me. I tried to step back. They kept advancing as I slipped and staggered in the mud, and prepared myself for what was to come.

And then, from somewhere behind me, I heard the screech of a car braking hard. I glanced anxiously over my shoulder and saw the tiny Peugeot owned by my brother Chris. I hadn’t called him. He didn’t know where I was or that I was in trouble. He’d turned up completely by chance and I’ve never been more pleased to see anyone in my life. He climbed out of the car and found himself immediately surrounded by a few of the crew. Chris is quite a presence, with his shaved head and his earrings, and his arrival had an immediate impact on the gang. They sheepishly lost interest in giving me a hard time, allowing me to stagger further back and put some distance between us. Chris approached. Words were exchanged. I couldn’t hear what he said in his quiet voice. To this day I don’t know. All I do know is that a minute later the gang had buggered off.

Who knows? Maybe I’d have attracted that kind of aggro even if I wasn’t the Wizarding Wanker. But there’s no doubt that my bleached hair and claim to fame made me more of a target. If Chris hadn’t turned up at just the right moment, it could have ended very differently.

I learned, from that incident and others, to be careful. My life was good, but it was also occasionally scary. When I was fifteen someone stole my bike—my prized possession Kona Deluxe—from the school bike shed. Whoever took it left a note saying: “We know where you live, we’ve got our eyes on you and we’re going to kill you.” I don’t suppose whoever wrote that really meant it. More likely it was just a misplaced attempt at bravado. But it was a terrifying message to receive and for some time I was petrified that I would run into a nutter who would carry out the threat.

I developed a kind of Spidey-sense, an inbuilt radar that told me I was about to be recognised and a situation had the potential to kick off. I remember standing in line to get into an under-18 nightclub in Guildford that my friends had coaxed me to come along to, head down, eyes to the floor, because I knew it would only take one person to say “Hey, are you…” and the dominos would start to fall and my evening would take a distinct turn for the worse. Half of me thought it would be fine—the people queueing up outside that club were definitely not the types to be into Harry Potter, if you get my drift. But even so, as the line became a little rowdier and the elbowing a little more frequent, the Spidey-sense kicked in and I knew I had to get out of there. I’d learned from past experience that this was not a good environment for me. I decided that I could forego an evening in the nightclub for a quiet life. Collar up, head down, without explanation, I left for home.

As I said, it was not cool to be Draco.

But here’s the thing. Looking back at my Muggle life, the good experiences outweighed the bad. I am pleased to have spent at least some of my time in that normal school with normal people having—by and large—a normal experience. I’m pleased to have had the sarcastic teachers and the classmates who couldn’t give two hoots about my other life. Part of me is even pleased about the cigarette butts in the face. They were all part of the regular rough and tumble of a normal childhood. At the very least, they were not part of the cloistered upbringing I could easily have had forced upon me. I’d have been a very different person if I hadn’t been given the opportunity to experience the ups and downs of a normal life alongside the madness of being part of Harry Potter. As it was, I had the best of both worlds.