Paul Daniels (14 page)

On the first day I met him, David introduced himself by gnawing straight into my ankle. It was sufficient to draw blood and I was not a little shocked, so the next time I was ready for him. When the human Jack Russell dashed into the room upon our arrival, he sank his teeth into the back of my leg and I grabbed his hand and returned the compliment by biting him on the arm. He let out a yelp and ran straight to Granny who
started to sympathise with his misfortune, whereupon he bit her, too. After that he never came near me again, but the rest of the family spent a fortune on sticking plasters.

Despite having found girls, I was still passionate about magic. Jackie was also happy to share my interest and we spent hours getting all my old props out from their box under my bed and reviving my act. Well, that’s what we told the parents.

At the Methodist club one night, it was advertised that a Doctor Hebblethwaite was going to give a lecture on the History of Magic. I couldn’t wait to hear it and booked my place well in advance. Having just turned 20, I felt that I knew everything there was to know about the art. Like many youngsters, I was the bees’ knees, a god-like creature sent to walk upon this earth and I found my place in the hall knowing that I knew it all.

The lecture was good. Towards the end of his talk he began expounding the future of magic and the modern face of the art. Picking up a large, solid billiard ball and a magic wand, he placed the full-sized red billiard ball on his open left palm, closed his fist and extended his arm well away from his body. Spinning the wand around his left fist, he opened his hand to show that the billiard ball had vanished. I suddenly woke up and sat there enthralled with my jaw hitting the floor. I didn’t have a clue how he had achieved this. I didn’t know everything.

I just couldn’t believe that, with all my knowledge, I had been fooled so easily. As my mind drifted away from what he was saying and concentrated on solving the problem, his words abruptly caught my attention again. He mentioned ‘the Middlesbrough Circle of Magicians’, which despite living in the area for more than 20 years was something I had never heard of.

Declaring my serious interest in the craft at the end of the evening, Doctor Hebblethwaite gave me the address of the
society and suggested I apply. This was something that I was determined to do, but upon reading their literature realised that it was a very exclusive club. Having witnessed the superb quality of the doctor’s skills, how could I ever hope to be enrolled in such an Elite group? I had nothing to lose so I finally worked up the courage to apply. I went to the Secretary’s house wearing all the gear that I had worn for my shows when I was in Hong Kong – a white tuxedo with a black velvet collar, a frilly shirt and dicky bow and, wait for it, a short black cloak with a red lining. I’m sorry. What a lemon I must have looked. I pretended I was on the way to a gig, just to impress the Secretary, Martin Marshall.

Several weeks later, I was standing in front of the audition committee and, feeling extremely nervous, began my routine. I was in awe of these gentlemen and thought that they must all be far better than I was. They treated it all so seriously and I came away thinking that I had not been good enough. They said that they would let me know and it was a couple of weeks before I got the letter that said that I had been accepted as a member. I wish that more societies would make it this tough to get in. Now it seems that if you can afford the fee you can be a member, and I still think that the Theatrical Art of Magic, forgive the capitals, should be worked at to make you appreciate what you have got. Years later I found out that, because I had developed into a magician without the influence of a magic club, I had apparently fooled them successfully in a couple of the tricks that I’d done. I didn’t go to the Middlesbrough Circle of Magicians for over a year after I had been accepted because I really didn’t think I was good enough and I didn’t want to show myself up.

I persuaded Jackie that we should make love. We did and she fell immediately pregnant. Out of the blue, my life, which had been totally within my own control, was in turmoil.

Telling our parents was the worst thing about the affair. Gathering together as if for a wake, the whole family sat together in one room, while I explained our state of affairs. It was awful. There was a stunned silence at the end of my short speech and at that point I would happily have used some form of magic to open up the floor and quickly disappear. Then, as anyone who has been in this situation will tell you, I actually felt invisible when they started discussing the circumstances without me or Jackie being consulted. I cared greatly for Jackie and despite my father making it clear that I didn’t have to do the honourable thing, I proposed to Jackie and she accepted. In my mind there was no option and we were married four weeks later in the Methodist Chapel on Normanby Road, home of the Youth Club. That was the way it was then, and although the marriage was not to work out, I am glad that we did it. If not, I would have missed out on Paul, Martin and Gary, my sons.

Modern society is not as glib about this subject as it claims to be. The shock of discovering that your girlfriend is expecting a baby is as big now as it was then, certainly among educated and caring people. The shame of the situation in the moral climate of the late 1950s, however, was quite acute and I was eager to reduce the degree of embarrassment as much as I could.

So many things were happening at this time, that it seemed as if I had been caught up in a whirlwind. I bought my first car for £15 from a local scrap heap. Destined for destruction, my Dad saw its potential and with me as labourer, somehow managed to get it running smoothly. The bodywork was something else, though. The 1938, wooden-floored Standard Flying Nine was rebuilt completely and had 15 coats of hand-rubbed cellulose applied to it, turning it into a gleaming black and red sports car. I was offered £150 for the car the day we finished it. Not a bad investment, but I didn’t sell it.

It was also about then that the Hippodrome cinema had to close. It simply could not compete with television. The public imagined that the little screen in the room gave them the same experience as the real thing. It didn’t and it can’t. There is nothing like having your imagination filled by the movies or the theatre, where everything else is blacked out and only the vivid images fill your mind. We all gathered in the cinema for the last night and, after the audience had left, played frisby with the 78rpm records and shot the foam from the fire extinguishers all over the place. Dad got a job driving a bread and cakes delivery van for Wonderloaf but he must have missed the magic of the cinema enormously. He didn’t work for them for long and went on to work for ICI at their Wilton works. He stayed there for years, working in hazardous conditions. Occasionally, the plant had some sort of explosion but he was lucky that it was never on his shift. The chemicals also played havoc with his health and, years later of course, I considered that one of the best things I ever did was to give him a permanent job making props for me. All that was in the future, however, and having recently had concert party experience in the Army, I persuaded Trevor to do the Working Men’s Club circuit with me. We got a booking at The Club, Peterlee. This was a brand new town and had built the most superb working men’s club, a new trend occurring in the north. This was the first of many truly luxurious clubs.

Industry required their workers to work around the clock in shifts: six ’til two; two ’til ten; and nights. It’s a generalisation, of course, but I believe this was the main reason that the North initially escaped the ratrace that was taking place in the South, as everybody went to work in the same direction. In the South, everybody scatters across the metropolis. Northerners all went to the same type of work and all knew how much each other earned, because it was the same. There was simply no point it
trying to ‘keep up with the Jones’s’ because everybody was in the same boat financially.

Somebody, somewhere, came up with the plan to turn the workmen’s institutes, rough red-brick clubs, into places of entertainment. Approaching the breweries, committees asked to borrow money to build a new type of club, which would provide the workers with a new leisure experience. Owing to the fact that the breweries stood to make a fortune by selling their beer, they agreed and these new clubs sprang up everywhere with snooker halls, lounges, bars and huge concert rooms. Variety shows were available six nights a week, with up to eight different acts on, as well as Bingo.

The Club in Peterlee was the biggest of these. Arriving there with Trevor, I thought it was very funny that the architects had had no idea what was required in a concert room. The floor of the stage had been carpeted and the first act on was a tap dancer. He still did his six-minute slot, but the audience, sitting at tables, thought he was rubbish because they couldn’t hear him.

On this occasion, Trevor and I had been asked to do three, six-minute spots and would receive the grand sum of £3 for our efforts. We had carefully planned and rehearsed our routines. Trevor went on first with his accordion. He was a natural on this instrument and had started to play when he was very young, without lessons. He’d developed like this for a long time and then Mam and Dad paid for lessons, which put him right back at the beginning, but eventually he became a better musician. We had wired him up with small lights around the accordion to give him a finale to his act. This was closely followed by Bingo. For some, this game was the highlight of the evening and sometimes the acts got the impression that they were just filling in between games, rather than being the main attraction.

Once someone shouted ‘House’, half of the audience would disappear back to the bar in order to refill while I did my magic
act. Sometimes Jackie would act as my assistant. More Bingo and then Trevor and I did our comedy spot. While in Hong Kong, I had heard these wonderfully funny American records by a comedy singer called Stan Freeburg. We performed a routine of miming to these records, which, because they had not been heard in the UK, went down really well. What was really funny was the fact that we stuck an old Dansette record player on stage with a microphone up against the tiny speaker at the front in order to amplify it over the rest of the venue. It must have sounded awful but we got a lot of other bookings so maybe we were funnier than we were awful.

By this time, Jackie and I had moved into a first-floor council flat, over a bank, on Normanby High Street. Lenny the Lion was a very popular ventriloquist act and his mother got married to a local councillor and moved in below us. The council offices also moved away from the grime and the smoke of South Bank, but I noticed how many office workers who’d moved there became sick because they were so used to the pollution, while the fresh air was killing them off. I guess you get used to your own environment and I read recently that the medical profession thinks that we are now so protected that we are not building up immunities in the way that we did when, as children, we played in the dirt. Funny old world, isn’t it?

I had made several things for our new home because, on £4 10s a week, we had very little money to spend on furniture. We supplemented our income from the little we got from the clubs, but with a new baby on the way we had to be very careful.

One night we went to bed and suddenly heard strange footsteps outside our room. From the lounge-diner-kitchen, a corridor ran past the bedroom, through to the back end of the old house and down a few steps into the bathroom. The corridor ran past a frosted glass partition outside the bedroom and this is where we heard the footsteps coming from. Leaping
out of bed and opening the door, I looked down the corridor only to find it empty.

After several nights of this, during which it was becoming more and more difficult to get some rest, Jackie became convinced the corridor was haunted. If there was no other explanation, then it had to be a ghost, she decided. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but couldn’t figure it out either, so I decided to sit in the corridor one night and ‘ghost watch’.

I was used to ghost watching, in a way, because in Eston Cemetery there was a tomb and, according to legend, if you ran around it three times in the dark of the night, the devil would come out and talk to you. I tried that. It didn’t work. Maybe you had to do it at midnight. I would love to meet a ghost, even though I don’t believe in them. The reason is that if I met one, I would ask it some sensible questions about the afterlife and nobody seems to do that, do they?

With Jackie safely tucked up in bed, I took my seat in the passage complete with a favourite book and waited in the dimming light. About an hour later, I heard footsteps approaching rapidly, walk right through me and vanish off down the hallway. Although there was no sense of coldness, or draughts, it was the most peculiar sensation I had ever experienced.

A blast of inspiration encouraged me to go downstairs and ask if I could look around the downstairs flat. It had exactly the same layout as ours, including the partition and hallway. Then I discovered a clue. Their bedroom had a ‘sticky’ door, which took some effort to open and close properly. I asked if they would open and close this for me, as I dashed back up into our hallway. Sitting in the corridor, the strange sensation happened once more and this time I noticed how the opening of their sticky door caused the floorboards in our hallway to move. As their partition was supporting the floorboards of our hallway, it set off a chain reaction that sounded just like some phantom
walking along it. I went back, eased their door, put some long nails diagonally into our floorboards and that was the end of our ghost.

Paul was born, taking us by surprise as he was premature. Jackie had been to the doctor with stomach pains that had interrupted her sleeping and caused acute tiredness. The doctor assured her it was not the baby and gave her some sleeping pills. That night the pains came back and she took a pill. The pains grew stronger so I said, ‘Well, have another pill.’

After about three pills, with no easing of the pain and losing all hope of slumber, we realised it must be something more serious. After a quick warning telephone call, we beetled along to the hospital several miles away in our little car and were told that the arrival had indeed begun. With all the pills Jackie had been taking, apparently they had to keep waking her up in order to deliver the baby.