David Jason: My Life (3 page)

Except, as closer inspection from my bedroom window revealed, it wasn’t a chicken. It was part of a human arm. I’m not sure even the Presslands would have been hungry enough to boil
that
up.

I was too young to know, but I often wonder what must have bulked larger in my mother’s mind at the moment she realised what had come to rest on the tiles: the sheer horror, or the disappointment at not getting a free roast. In any case, the local Air Raid Patrol was called and the warden turned up with a ladder and quietly bagged and removed the offending limb.

The Luftwaffe never did manage a direct strike on 26 Lodge Lane, but they did manage to take out a stretch of three houses down the road. The assumption was that a German plane had got hit, and the pilot dumped his load in desperation as he struggled to get back across the Channel. There were strikes on Nether Street, Percy Road, Lodge Lane – you could follow the track of these discarded bombs across a map. Two hundred
yards to the right and the despairing bomber would have taken down, at the very least, our outside toilet and anyone who happened to be in it.

A narrow escape for the Whites, then, and a cautionary illustration of the thinness of the thread by which all of us held our lives in those dark and tremulous days. Although, of course, had the bomb dropped two hundred yards the other way, it would have been nowhere near us. But that’s not as good a story, nor as good a cautionary illustration.

So, the German armed forces failed to get me, and so, too, did my seven-year-old brother, although he also had a go. My mother checked on me one night, when I was just a few months old, and found Arthur slumbering in the cot on top of me and in grave danger of smothering me. He said he’d got frightened of the dark and had clambered in for company.

A few years later, Arthur was again almost successful in seeing me off, this time by using an old canvas army shoulder bag, which we normally used to hold wooden play bricks, to strap me to the coat hook on the rear of the back door in the kitchen – with my compliance, I should add, because we both agreed that if he spun me round in this position until the bag was tight, I would then, when released, spin back and amusingly resemble a tangled parachutist up a tree. (Look, I was seven, right? I was just delighted to have my older brother condescending to play with me.)

Actually, we were wrong about the parachute impression. As it turned out, my proximity to the door prevented me from spinning and unwinding in any way, and, accordingly, having turned blue, I didn’t resemble a parachutist at all, but, more closely, a hog-tied Smurf. Kids: don’t try this at home. The entertainment continued when, in what could almost have been a scripted moment, my mother entered from the other side of the door on which I was hanging, and obliviously asked, ‘Where’s David?’ At which point, my brother straightforwardly reported, ‘He’s on
the back of the door.’ My mother shut the door to reveal me, bright blue, gasping my next-to-last breath.

Obviously Arthur had some productive impact on my childhood, too. He spent a lot of time wheeling me around the streets in a wheelbarrow, like some kind of nobleman in an eighteenth-century litter. And he was the source of my early wardrobe – lots of hand-me-down clothes that I was sincerely assured I would ‘grow into’. In fact, I was assured I would ‘grow into’ a lot of things, including the large bike I received for Christmas, aged ten, to the pedals of which my father had to attach wooden blocks so that my feet could reach them. For a while there, I was touring the neighbourhood on what was, in effect, an orthopaedic bike. I didn’t exactly look suave and sophisticated. Then again, I had a bike: the joy of that fact overwhelmed any embarrassment.

As it turned out, I was to get most of my growing done by about the age of fourteen when I reached five foot six and my body decided it had had enough of lengthening and left it at that. We shall have cause to return, periodically, to the advantages and disadvantages of my less than statuesque height in the course of this narrative.

Around the age of eight or nine, though, I did become the proud owner of a pair of perfectly fitting wellington boots – a fantastic breakthrough if only because this meant I could now clamber down into the brook without soaking my socks. The brook was in the nearby park, and my big childhood mates Ronnie Prior, Ray Jeffers and I would head there to spend long afternoons building dams, prior to appointing ourselves fighter pilots and bombing those dams to bits by throwing stones and making all the appropriate noises while we did so. The war was over by then, but it lived on in our imaginations and our games – how could it not?

Incidentally, in case, dear reader, you still have the appetite for this kind of thing: find a building site that has a large pile
of soft sand – not sharp sand, but soft sand. Then push some house bricks around the sand to form a network of mountain roads. Then wet some of the sand and mould it to form tank turrets. Push twigs into the turrets to make guns. Now position these sand-tanks on the mountain roads and, from a distance of fifteen to twenty feet, attack the tanks with thrown stones. Hours of amusement can be yours. And no batteries needed.

Lodge Lane when I was growing up was a quiet backstreet, mostly made up of houses, though it also included Smith’s the cobblers, and a greengrocer’s run by a family called the Olivers, who owned a horse and cart and would deliver the fruit and vegetables door to door. Every year they would decorate the cart and dress up the horse and set off for a rally in Hyde Park and would often return with prize rosettes, to the widespread pride of the neighbourhood.

Also using a horse and cart, but to less popular effect, was the window cleaner, a largely cheerless soul who, as was the tradition, carried a bucket with him to collect up anything the horse left behind on its way through. I often found myself wondering – as you do – what would happen if you were to insert a firework into that bucket, when it was full, and then if you were to light the touchpaper on that firework and retreat. And one day, entirely in the interests of science, I found out.

What would happen is this: there would be a muffled bang, followed by a really quite magnificent fountain of horse shit, much of it eventually attaching itself to both the window cleaner and his recently completed work. A splendid result. Except for the window cleaner, obviously. And I don’t suppose the horse was all that happy, either. Still. Nobody much liked that window cleaner. Or his horse, frankly.

Lodge Lane also had an off-licence, Chubbs, where jugs of beer could be filled from taps. The railings outside the shop had been commandeered for the war effort and you could easily climb up and lean over into the backyard. If you were lucky,
there would be a crate of empty pop bottles within reach and, with a willing accomplice behind you on the pavement, you could lift a few of them out and pass them back, and then take them into the shop to claim (or, in fact, re-claim) the deposit – though I think Chubbs wised up to that little racket eventually and started stacking the crates further from the wall. It was from Chubbs, incidentally, that I got my first Jubbly – a pyramid-shaped carton of frozen orange juice, and a complete treat. As the advertising slogan used to say, ‘Lubbly Jubbly.’ I would get to hear those words again, a lot further down the line.

Then there was the street’s tiny shop-cum-cafe with four tables and chairs and, on its little counter, a battered tea urn and a dingy stove with a greasy, blackened frying pan. It was run by an ancient bloke called Harry, who was forever in a pair of exhausted, shiny-kneed corduroys and who had a wounded foot which prompted him to go about with a proper shoe at the end of one leg and a carpet slipper at the end of the other, held on by half a dozen elastic bands. I used to go into the shop on an errand to buy my mother’s cigarettes for her and find Harry grimly making tea and egg-and-bacon sandwiches for the local builders – salmonella on legs, you would have to assume, and unlikely to pass muster with the hygiene inspectors these days, but a key community service in any case.

I was also responsible for bringing back my father’s
Daily Mirror
and, on Sundays, his
News of the World
, and running round to Radio Rentals, the electric appliance shop, to swap the battery for his radio set. No electricity, remember. For my father to listen to the Home Service of an evening, he required two electric ‘accumulators’ – unwieldy glass jars which enabled you to peer in at the metal plates, steeped in their mysterious liquid. You’d have one accumulator wired up to the radio, and the other on charge at Radio Rentals. For my part, I would eventually acquire a crystal radio set, which miraculously required neither batteries nor electricity. I kept it in my bedroom,
twitching the whisker of wire to find voices or music, and lying in bed in the dark, me with one earpiece, Arthur with the other, listening to the great wide world.

There wasn’t much to keep us off the streets in those days, although when I was about seven, my mother took me to church a few times – or, as she referred to it, ‘the House of God’. She wanted me to be religious. She wasn’t particularly religious herself, but she clearly believed it would be nice if I was. Perhaps she thought of it as an accomplishment, like playing the piano – something her son might do to make her proud. Anyway, on none of those trips to the House of God did she stay. She pushed me in through the door and left me there for the service while she walked home. One Sunday, after depositing me, she had just got into the kitchen and was probably about to make herself a cup of coffee (or Camp chicory essence, more like, which was what passed for coffee in our house in those days), when lo and behold I turned up behind her. (This was easily achieved as the key to the front door always dangled on a string, fixed by a nail to the back of the front door, so you could simply reach through the letter box and pull it out. This was as good as asking burglars to come in and help themselves. But as there was very little for burglars to help themselves to, it didn’t seem to bother us much.)

Seeing me, my mum said, ‘What happened? Why didn’t you stay in church?’

I said, ‘I’ve come home. I’ve had enough.’

She said, ‘What do you mean?’

I said, ‘Well, I’ve been going to the House of God all these weeks, and every time I go He’s never at home.’

To my seven-year-old mind, it stood to reason. Why wasn’t He home? If you went to Auntie Win’s, my dad’s sister’s, as we would for Sunday tea sometimes, Auntie Win was actually there. And you’d get a piece of cake if you were lucky. God, on the other hand, was never in. And as for a piece of cake, forget it.
On top of that it was always so cold in there. So why would you go? Disillusion with religion set in right there.

I probably figured my time was better spent playing Knock Down Ginger – that classic game where you rap on someone’s front door and run away, a sport, alas, with very few takers these days, in the PlayStation and Xbox age. A shame, really, because clearly Knock Down Ginger promotes a healthy, active lifestyle, especially if – as once happened with me – you have barely finished knocking when a bloke throws open the door and comes out after you.

I promptly turned and scarpered, only to swivel my head and discover that this bloke was still coming. Normally blokes would just open the door and shout. So I put my head down and ran a bit faster. He was still on my tail. I went over a wall. He was still there. I ran and ran. He ran and ran. There was no losing him. Finally – at a point where London began to give way to open countryside, or so it seemed to me – I realised that I simply couldn’t run any more. I had to stop. This would mean getting a belt round the ear, I knew, but at least I wouldn’t die an agonised death by exhaustion, which seemed to be the alternative. So I leaned against the wall, trying to recover, and awaited my fate. My pursuer soon reached me and I braced myself for the clobbering that would surely follow. In fact, he leaned there too, breathing heavily for a while. And eventually, when he had composed himself, he said, ‘Well run, son. Bloody good run.’ And then he turned and walked back the way he had come – followed, eventually, at a slightly bemused and wary distance, by me. Needless to say he was taken off the list for Knock Down Ginger.

The strike on Lodge Lane had left a handy bomb site. It didn’t occur to us kids to think of it as a place where people had suffered and died or to consider the gravity of the scene in any way. Rather it seemed as if the war had gifted us the perfect playground. We had all the bits of bricks we could possibly desire for throwing
around and building things, and an absolutely brilliant location for bonfires. Percy Road had their bomb site and we at Lodge Lane had ours. Every autumn, in the run-up to Bonfire Night, we’d go out in the evening and raid the Percy Roaders’ bomb site, because they might have a stash of rubber tyres or bonfire-building materials, or some other treasure they had collected. And then the Percy Roaders would come and make a revenge raid on our bomb site, usually in the dead of night.

Then there was the mob from round Downing Street way (not that one, another one). Our site faced the opening to the alleyway which led to Downing Street, so it was strategically well placed to see off invaders from that direction – especially given that someone eventually came up with the ingenious idea of tying an old rubber bicycle inner tube to the gateposts, which were still conveniently standing, and using the resulting machine as a catapult with which to ping half-bricks across the street into the alley. We had a stack of broken masonry ready as ammo at all times, in case of attack. The real heavies in the gang were the ones who pulled the rubber back. I was too slight for that duty, but I saw active service as one of the loaders, passing up the bricks. The Downing Streeters didn’t used to know what had hit them. Well, actually they did: it was house bricks.

House bricks and, on one occasion, worse. Ernie Pressland, my next-door neighbour, who was a bit older than me, was the leader of the Lodge Laners – all boys of course. Girls might as well have been another species for all that we had to do with them at that stage. Under Ernie’s instruction one day, we used bits of slate – still lying around the place from the bombed roof – to construct tomahawks, made with a wooden chair leg, split at the top, with the slate, cut into the shape of an axe head, slotted into it and bound round with string. Hey presto – the classic American Indian hand-held scalp-taker.