King Nicholas and the Copeman Empire

Copyright © 2005 Nick Copeman
First published 2005 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Random House


Chapter 1: A King is Born

They all were looking for a king
To slay their foes, and lift them high;
Thou cam’st, a little baby thing,
That made a woman cry
GEORGE MACDONALD (1824–1905)


‘Your Majesty, you must flee now while you still can.’

‘I didn’t ask for your advice, Archbishop.’

‘But Your Majesty, your front lines are breached, the Queen is slain and your own safety is more in doubt the longer you stay.’

‘And what qualifies you to advise on matters of war, Archbishop? A mere member of the clergy? Even your own bishops have deserted you in your hour of need. If I were you, I would pray for my life.’

‘But I pray only for your life, Your Majesty. Your castle now offers you little protection. If you do not leave now, you face certain death. God save the King!’

‘Stop talking like a tit, Baby Face, and move your Irn-Bru out the way – my rook’s about to kick your bishop’s ass.’

When most people have a game of chess, they just get the board out and play. But that’s just not good enough for my best mate John ‘Baby Face’ Painter who, ever since we were kids, has always insisted that we dress up like wizards, talk in an old-fashioned way and quaff our drinks from tin goblets.

The reason Baby Face was calling me ‘Your Majesty’ that evening was because earlier in the day we’d both changed our names. We got the idea from Joe Tomms, one of the local idiots in Sheringham, who’d said that his uncle in Norwich had changed his name to Elvis Presley. We didn’t believe him at the time, but while we were surfing the Net using the computer in Sheringham Library, we came across the website for UK Deed Poll Online which did indeed allow you to change your name to anything you fancied for just £29.

We still weren’t totally convinced it would work, so we tapped in Baby Face’s dad’s credit card details and each entered a new name – the sillier the better. I was a little shocked when, at the click of a button, the name I’d had for the last twenty-five years was officially changed, from Nicholas Henry John Copeman, to Henry Michael King Nicholas. He changed his from John Kenneth Painter to the Right Reverand Baby Face Archbishop of Fantaberry, solely because he was drinking a bottle of Fanta, which the Head Librarian, Rose Williamson, confiscated, saying, ‘Three things are banned in my library: food, drink and superglue.’

Baby Face was annoyed when he came to print out his details, because there was a red squiggle under the word Reverand, and I pointed out that that was because he’d spelt it incorrectly. After a caution from Rose for swearing, he went back to the website to fork out yet another £29 to correct the error, but then found that he’d have to wait seven days before he could change it again.

A few days later, we received our new National Insurance cards in the post. His said ‘TRRBFABO FANTABERRY’, which looked stupid, but mine was great ... ‘HM KING NICHOLAS’.

I don’t know why I chose to be called HM King Nicholas. In fact it was actually my second choice after one that referred to female genitalia, which the site rejected. I suppose I just thought it’d be cool to be a king. And my mum’s friends at the Salvation Army have always said I look a bit like Prince William. So though I may have been unemployed and living in a small bungalow in a sleepy Norfolk seaside town, with my mum (Mumsy), dad (Huffa Puffa – so named because of the ‘huffa’ and ‘puffa’ noises he makes when he is annoyed by something, usually the ‘youth of today’) and our dog (Honey), I was now, albeit slightly fraudulently, the king of all I surveyed.

There was something about being called King Nicholas that slowly started to have an effect on me. Nothing drastic to begin with, just little things, such as sitting up straighter when I was watching TV, maybe using a little dish for my crisps instead of eating them straight out of the bag, and occasionally serving my Irn-Bru in one of HP’s cocktail glasses, garnished with a maraschino cherry on a stick, instead of slurping it straight out of the can, which Mumsy has always said is unhygienic. I started making an effort to talk in a more refined way too, occasionally saying ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, and ‘ourself’ instead of ‘myself’, just like the Queen does.

Mumsy seemed generally impressed with my new name, and in particular with the sophisticated manner that came with it. HP said over dinner that he wasn’t at all amused and couldn’t believe I’d wasted almost a week’s benefit money on a new name. He told me to change it back and asked what was wrong with our own family name.

I’m not sure why Baby Face and I wasted so much time doing pointless things like changing our names, but when you haven’t got a job and you’re living in a town where life goes past at the speed of a shop mobility electric scooter, I suppose you have to make your own entertainment. There are so many ‘codger carts’ in Sheringham that I once witnessed a pile-up of three of them outside Budgens, resulting in an unlikely case of pavement rage. One old bloke started smacking another on the head with an In-Store Bakery Pain Rustique, while shouting ‘heffalump’ at him.

By my own standards, Baby Face’s lifestyle was rather aspirational. Despite falling out with his parents over a serious matter that he won’t tell anyone about, he ended up with his own static caravan on Beeston Regis Caravan Park and got around in a Reliant Scimitar, just like the one Princess Anne drove in the Seventies. Though we were both on the dole, we certainly weren’t short of things to do. On the contrary, our Filofaxes were crammed with enough activities to make any head of state need a good power nap.

Most mornings at nine, I’d call on Baby Face and we’d walk at a businesslike pace over to Roy Boy’s Truck Stop on the A148 for a Breakfast ‘Gut Buster’, two cups of tea and a read of the morning papers. Baby Face says you need to keep abreast of current affairs, though he’s usually to be found with his head in the Daily Sport. On Mondays, we’d get the bus over to the Cromer Job Centre to sign on, then head round to Nobby’s Discount Store in Sheringham to buy our groceries for the week: mainly bread, noodles, Irn-Bru, Transform-a-Snacks and Birdseye fish fingers. If it wasn’t a Monday, we’d head round to my place to catch Zena: Warrior Princess(our house is one of the few in Sheringham that receives Channel 5).

At 10.30 – weather permitting – we’d have a round of putting by the station. In winter we’d revert to Connect 4. At lunchtime we’d have a Pot Noodle and watch Neighbours and Home and Away. Between 2.00 and 3.30 we’d write letters, and at 4.00 it was afternoon tea at the Salvation Army Drop-In Centre. After tea and cake, we’d rush over to Baby Face’s caravan and don our charity shop blazers and ties in time for Countdown, have fish fingers or a ready-meal for dinner at six, then a quick game of Fifa on the X-Box before evening television commenced. Sorry to make a boring list of our activities, but I just didn’t want you to think we were like all those other people on the dole, who see it as an excuse not to do anything constructive with their time.

The main downside to being on the dole is that there is something of a stigma about it. As I commented to Mr Hill, proprietor of Bertram Watts Booksellers of Sheringham, there are, surprisingly, no style magazines catering for this large market segment. When I mentioned this to Baby Face, he drafted me a letter to the Prince’s Trust, which I signed and sent off, outlining our desire to launch a monthly glossy magazine called People of Leisure, aimed specifically at those out of work and covering relevant and interesting topics such as managing debt, dressing for success on a budget, and including a special colour pull-out section containing snooker and darts tips from the professionals.

Just below my King Nicholas signature, which I’d practised several times on an empty box of Rice Krispies to give it an effortlessly regal appearance, I wrote, ‘P.S. We royals should work together – call me if you’d like to meet for tea.’

We received a big envelope in the post the following week containing an information pack and a covering letter from Prince Charles, thanking us for sending in our idea and asking whether we’d like to attend a workshop in Norwich, where we could discuss our business plan further with volunteers from the local business community. Baby Face wetted his finger with a bit of spit and rubbed the signature, which didn’t smudge because it was in fact printed on rather than handwritten. Baby Face reckoned that if Prince Charles couldn’t be bothered to sign the invitation himself, it probably wasn’t worth going along anyway. Entrepreneurs like Baby Face and I are always having great ideas and Baby Face said we couldn’t be wasting valuable time and money on train rides into Norwich in response to every letter we received.

As someone very intelligent once said, ‘Getting a job is a full-time job in itself’, and this is what I kept telling HP, though he seemed totally unconvinced. He kept telling me time and again how, when he was made redundant from his first job in the maize-based snack industry, he didn’t just sit around feeling sorry for himself, but rather applied for every single job going – from the Harbour Master at Lowestoft to the newsreader for Look East. He did actually end up doing some newsreading for a few months on local TV and became quite a celebrity, culminating in his being asked to officially open the Pound Stretcher in North Walsham. In between writing his job applications, he’d do lots of other useful things, like making concrete doorstops and babies.

All the family have concrete doorstops, embedded with flint stones and a metal hook in the top, which HP made during this jobless phase. He even made five spare ones to pass on to future generations, so if my sister Clare or I ever have kids, we know what to expect, along with all the other christening presents.

Every time my Uncle Peter walks through the side door – we only use the front one for special visitors, such as the Captain of the Salvation Army – he stops and reminds us that it’d be illegal to make a flint doorstop these days because it’s an offence to remove beach material. When he says this, he always shakes his head and puts on a very serious look, which a policeman would reserve only for the most serious incidents, such as a driver being twenty times over the limit. Uncle Ptends to be very serious about most things, so we tend not to take too much notice. And I was conceived while HP was on the dole – something he blames on ‘the long afternoons at home’.

I don’t class myself as a dropout, it’s just that I think I’m one of those people who need to ease themselves into life gently, a bit like mountaineers who have to acclimatise themselves to altitude gradually before they can ascend a really big mountain. Part of the problem I have is being measured against the success of my older sister, Clare, who has paved the way as far as excellence is concerned. When she was breezing through her 11+ exam and being offered scholarships at lots of posh schools, I was still struggling to read (fair enough I suppose, seeing as I was four), but when she was getting straight As in six A levels, I was still struggling to read and about to fail my 11+. Then, when she was qualifying as an accountant at Ernst & Young in London and busy deciding which colour BMW would work best with her skin tone, I was being advised to downgrade my Alevels to AS levels, to give me a better chance of passing at least one.

My sister is very cool and I love her to bits, but I just wish she could have been totally thick, so that I might have won more praise for my own little successes. I am still rather hurt that I received no praise from HP when I won ‘chubby bunnies’ on a holiday camp (it’s that game where you stick as many marshmallows as possible into your mouth and try to say ‘chubby bunnies’), and all because Clare had done something boring, like getting a place at Cambridge University.

Luckily, I have always been Mumsy’s hero. Mumsy’s little soldier can do no wrong. After two months of being unemployed, I came back from the Job Centre, having been told I’d been put on Job Seekers Plus, which is for people who are doing particularly badly at finding a job. Mumsy thought that the ‘Plus’ meant I’d been promoted, and she baked a chocolate cake to celebrate. She went round town telling everyone how great I was and Ethel from the charity shop telephoned to congratulate me. Mumsy even phoned Clare to tell her the good news, who told Mumsy that she had herself been promoted, to the board of her firm of accountants. Mumsy said she was very proud of both of her clever children and would post half the chocolate cake to Clare. She iced ‘Well Done Cla’ on the top, before running out of space. So she had to take the chunk that HP was about to scoff back off him, and reattach it to the end with a smear of leftover chocolate coating that I was planning to spread on some hot pitta bread during one of the commercial breaks in The Bill. She then added ‘are’ by accident so it spelt ‘Claare’. Clare called to thank her for the cake a couple of days later, saying it had got a bit squashed in the post, but tasted very nice.

HP, on the other hand, was starting to lose patience with me and thought I needed a bit of military discipline. I’d been a keen member of the Combined Cadet Force at school, where young boys get to smear dirt on their faces and fire machine guns, but I’d dropped out in the sixth form in order to grow long hair and play the drums in a band. HP was one of the last people to do National Service and managed to get a commission in the Royal Navy, just like my other uncle, whom we all call ‘The Commander’. HP thought a stint in the Navy was just what I needed – the perfect experience to make a man of me and instill a sense of pride and discipline. At 25 I would be just young enough to attend selection at the Admiralty Interview Board (AIB) and, if I passed, could go on to get a commission and do quite nicely for myself, money-wise.

Though I lived on the coast, I didn’t know much about the Navy, except that it was like the army at sea – they had ships, beards and, someone suggested, they were possibly a bit gay. HP was determined to get me swotted up on what they really did and on current affairs in general, so that I could get a good test score at the AIB. To try and get me excited about his geography and history tutorials, held every evening between five and six, he nicknamed them ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’.

My uncle, ‘The Commander’, is now in his seventies – still a bachelor though – and he served for several years, most of them spent drinking pink gin in the wardroom and typing up orders on a Remington typewriter, though he somehow still managed to get two medals. His favourite toast, used every day as the sun comes over the yardarm: ‘Wives and sweethearts ... may they never meet.’

The Commander comes round for roast lunch at the bungalow every other Sunday, catching the Bittern Line train from Norwich and sucking a lozenge so that ‘germs might not alight in my oesophagus’. There’s always an hour to kill between him arriving and Mumsy and HP getting back from the Salvation Army service, so HP encouraged him to give me coaching on naval culture. The Commander showed little interest and instead gave me lots of coaching in the types of drinks popular in the Navy and how they were best served and consumed. This, he told me, required a lot of practice, and that it was important that I make him several pink gins to ensure I got into the habit of putting in the right amount of Angostura bitters. The only cocktails I’d heard of before were called things like Slippery Nipple and Sex on the Beach. The Commander scoffed and said on no account to request such drinks in the wardroom, as anything not in the Savoy Cocktail Guide could lead to embarrassment and was almost certainly ‘tart fuel’.

In between drinks, he showed me some other stuff, like how to do sword drill, which he started off showing me with a walking stick, until he appeared the following week with the real thing – his Wilkinson ceremonial sword, made by the same people that make the razors. He also showed me how to draw a pistol. He still had the shoulder holster he was issued in Cyprus and had a deactivated Webley to go in it. He claims it’s deactivated – I’m not convinced. Mumsy told me off for doing sword drill in the kitchen, because I left lots of little holes in the lino floor where I’d been standing at ease with the point on the ground, and HP was worried that the extension ceiling might spring a leak after I bodged a hole in it doing a salute, where you thrust the blade up in to the air and kiss the handle of the sword. So sword drill was banned from the house, and only to be practised in the garden when Honey was safely indoors.

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