David Jason: My Life (4 page)

The next time the Percy Roaders raided us, out we sprang from our hiding places. Mine, I remember, was a galvanised
water tank. We chased them into an immediate, screaming retreat, brandishing our tomahawks. Unfortunately one of our number, getting slightly too much into the western spirit, threw his weapon. It arced meanly through the air and bounced against the back of some poor kid’s head, causing the kid in question to fall to the ground. Those of us in the pursuing pack instantly put the brakes on and ran the other way. Whatever happened after that, I genuinely know not. I assume the poor chap managed a full recovery, because we would have heard about it fairly quickly if he hadn’t. Nevertheless, slate tomahawks were quietly withdrawn from our armoury from that day forward.

As 5 November was shortly to arrive, we decided to build ourselves the mother and father of all bonfires. We collected rubbish from all over the neighbourhood and stacked it high into the air. Ernie, again in charge of the operation, had the genius idea of constructing the bonfire with a low tunnel into its core so that, when it was finished, someone could still crawl into the centre of the pyre and light it from within. This made sense because, given the late-autumn weather, the bonfire was likely to get soaked by rain, but this approach left a dry centre, ready for ignition.

Because I was the smallest, I was given the duty, come the appointed hour, of crouching down and burrowing deep into the mound with the matches – a duty which I regarded as the utmost honour. However, as I was within, getting it lit, some prankster – by the name of Ernie, I’m fairly sure – decided it would be most amusing to light the outer end of the tunnel. I think it had been Ernie’s plan all along: he thought it would be great fun to see an incandescent White exit, or not, from the centre of the fire. From outside came the noise of uproarious laughter, followed by acrid smoke and flames. Somehow I managed to push my way out, not best pleased.

Still, at least I wasn’t hospitalised in that particular incident – unlike the time when a lump of brick, thrown by my
brother’s mate Jimmy Bickers, created an opening in my forehead which required closing by qualified medical staff. And unlike the time when the top of my skull broke the flight of a rusty paint tin flung by, of all people, my brother Arthur – his third significant attempt on my life. And unlike the occasion when the back of a parked-up welder’s truck into which I happened to be scrambling proved to contain a six-inch nail which cut a long, deep groove in my thigh. Blessedly, Mr Bickers, Jimmy’s dad, the owner of the only car in Lodge Lane, was at home and prepared to play the part of the ambulance driver. I needed anaesthetic while that particular gash was healed, and in those days that meant chloroform dripped onto a gauze mask. Really, if the wounds didn’t get you, there was a decent chance the treatment would. It’s a wonder I made it through this period at all. But such was life as a Lodge Laner – lived under the permanent risk of death to ourselves and others.

Eventually, to our immense chagrin, when I was about ten years old, the council levelled the bomb site and built a small block of flats in its place. And with that we lost our playground. The flats are still there, and the alley too, and many of the old houses, but sadly not number 26, which at some point became a car park. But times have changed, of course, and customs with them, and you’ll look in vain nowadays for children throwing handmade tomahawks at each other. Maybe they’re doing it on the internet, instead. That would be far safer.

With our playground gone, we had to seek other venues for our amusement. But the world of entertainment was itself moving on rapidly. There was untold excitement round our way in the summer of 1953 when Ronnie Prior’s dad acquired the neighbourhood’s first television set. He had it installed for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II that June and then invited everyone within about a three-mile radius to come and share the experience. You’ve never seen such a crowd gathered in a single sitting room. People were hanging from the light fittings.
The technological marvel we were all straining to see had a glass screen, the thickness and approximate shape of a standard goldfish bowl and affixed to a teak wood cabinet large enough to conceal several bodies. Yet the apparition on that screen of these silvery figures, going about their regal business in Westminster Abbey, seemed utterly miraculous. The only thing you’d ever seen like it was the movies. But this was the movies in the corner of a room – unthinkable levels of magic.

Two years later – just in time to catch the launch night of Associated-Rediffusion, the first ITV channel, in September 1955 – we had our own set at 26 Lodge Lane, on hire purchase. You put a sum down, paid a weekly fee, and then two years and half a dozen new tubes later, the television was yours. That opening night for Associated-Rediffusion included a variety show, a boxing match and an advert for Gibbs SR toothpaste. But never mind the fact that the tubes kept going and that my father was never entirely happy with the positioning of the aeriel on top of the set, I rather liked the look of television. My hunch was that it had a great future ahead of it, if it ever managed to catch on.

CHAPTER TWO

The cockerel from hell. Something called acting. And the law feels my collar.

EVERY SUMMER MUM
would take me and my brother and sister to stay with her family in Wales, going on the train from Paddington, which was a stunning scene of noise and smoke in those days. It’s hard to convey, now, the excitement in the build-up to those trips. Sleep the night before would prove nearly impossible. Then there would be the ride on the Underground, taking our cardboard cases; and then, at Paddington, the walk down the ramp that led into the station, with the unutterably exciting sound and smell rising out of the place and beginning to envelop you. I remember us working our way across the thronging concourse, seeking out our train, utterly trusting my mother to find the right platform – completely in her hands in that wonderful, literally carefree way of childhood, which goes eventually and which you can never get back. I would spend the entire train journey with my head out of the window – not too far, for fear of getting decapitated by another train coming the other way or the arm of a passing signal, but part of the way out. There was something magnetically compelling about catching sight, on bends, of the rest of
the train that you were in, and I positioned myself where I could see this magic whenever it happened. By the time we got to Cardiff, where we changed for the valley train and Pontlottyn, half my face would be blackened by the steam, like some kind of peculiar London-born Pierrot doll. At which point my mother would have to spit into her wadded handkerchief and clean me up. The first time we travelled up from Cardiff on the Merthyr line, I thought I was in fairyland. The line ran along and through mountains so green they hurt your eyes, and the river wove in and out of the valley like a blue ribbon. I was a young lad who had lived among the bricks and mortar of London. Here, you could virtually smell the colour green.

In Pontlottyn I had two uncles – Uncle Llewellyn and Uncle Idris, known as Uncle Id – and a batch of cousins, large and small. Uncle Id had two sons, my substantially older cousins, Cyril and John. John was a miner whose leg was badly injured when a tunnel he was working in caved in on him. Some weeks later, he came out of hospital. It didn’t stop him riding a bike, though, with his broken leg stretched straight out in a plaster cast and his other foot doing all the pedalling.

You might think Cyril, meanwhile, had taken a blow to the head, because during some possibly over-lubricated evening or other, with a few of his beer-drinking mates, he had taken a bet that he wouldn’t drink a glass of petrol. On the plus side, I guess he must have won the bet. But the petrol did untold damage to his digestive system, put him in hospital for quite a long time and, essentially, crippled him for the rest of his life. Kids: don’t do this, either.

Obviously a fairly deep streak of eccentricity ran through this part of the family generally, as evidenced by the fact that, sometime around 1940 or 1941, with the Blitz in full swing, a party of them had come up to London to stay with us in Lodge Lane in order, basically, to have a look at the war. I guess they must have thought it was the kind of thing that wasn’t likely to happen
all that often and that you might as well get a sight of it while you could. So up they came. And they were, apparently, thrilled when a doodlebug obligingly cut its eerie mechanical path above our roof in broad daylight, bringing the excited Welsh visitors rushing from the backyard, through the house and into the street in order to track its course, while my mother tried and failed to convince them that it might be better if they joined the rest of us under the kitchen table at this point.

Anyway, the general trend was for the London part of the family to visit the Welsh part, rather than the other way round. Sometimes we would stay with Mum’s friend, Mrs Rogers, who lived on the hillside in a place called Abertysswg, in a big house that I was very impressed with. Other times, though, we would stay with Uncle Id, which was a different experience. Uncle Id had been a miner, but had retired in order, it seemed, to be able to spend more time doing what he principally loved, which was drinking. He lived very poorly in one of a network of tiny workers’ cottages in the heart of Pontlottyn. The houses had no gardens but backed on to a little square of wasteland, partly given over to stinging nettles, in the middle of which was a string of toilets – about half a dozen cubicles, each one shared. This less than magnificent emporium was known as the House of Commons. Each cottage had its ascribed cubicle – Id’s was number four, as I recall – but you shared it with five or six other families from the square. By these standards, the outdoor privy by the back door at Lodge Lane, cramped and draughty as it was, came to seem almost Roman in its luxury. As for the smell that routinely greeted you as you gingerly eased your way into the House of Commons … well, let’s just say that, on a hot summer’s day in Wales – and, just occasionally, you did get one of those – the aroma rising off that block would have been enough to stop two advancing legions of the Spartan army.

Uncle Id had a pet cockerel with only one working eye, called (naturally enough) Nelson. The other eye was missing, presumed
lost in some long-forgotten dust-up with another cockerel. And whether it was because he still bore a grudge about that, or for other reasons, Nelson had what we would now call ‘issues’. In fact, he was essentially a Rottweiler in a cockerel outfit. This battered bird had appointed himself protector of Uncle Id’s property and its chief guardian against invasion, not just by other animals but also by humans. Indeed, the only human Nelson was prepared to tolerate was Uncle Id – to the extent of coming to sit on his shoulder at breakfast, where Id, who appeared to love Nelson as much as he loved anyone or anything, would feed him bits of bread. You can imagine the wonder I had for Id, who appeared to possess the powers of Dr Dolittle.

Mostly, however, Nelson would adopt a sentry position on the window ledge out the back, flicking his head around and flexing his neck to scope the surroundings with his one good eye. To know Nelson’s fixed monocular gaze was to know fear. Deep fear. Coming in or out of the house, your best chance was to hope that he was asleep, when you just about had a chance of tiptoeing quickly around him. What you didn’t want to do, however, was to get caught between the back door and the House of Commons. Because then Nelson would attack.

Dear reader, I don’t know if you have ever been attacked by a cockerel, but if you haven’t, then allow me to tell you that it’s an experience with very little to recommend it. Sometimes a cockerel, defying physics, has the uncanny ability to come at you low, hard and seemingly out of nowhere. Or Nelson did, anyway. Occasionally, you would peer tentatively from the rear threshold of the house and establish that the horizon was clear. Then, just as you were marooned in the middle, he would materialise aggressively at your ankles, chasing you into the House of Commons. And then you’d be stuck there, looking out through a knothole while he paraded up and down outside the door, daring you to come out again. What was it with that bloody creature?

There wasn’t a time that I returned to London from Uncle
Id’s without a pair of legs peppered with beak wounds below the knee. Moreover, this double jeopardy – the aroma of the toilet block plus the chance of getting pecked to ribbons by a violent half-blind cockerel – meant I spent an awful lot of the summers of my childhood determinedly crossing my legs and clenching my buttocks, evacuating my bowels and bladder only as a very last resort.

Despite the battles with Nelson (and perhaps a little bit because of them), Wales was a magical place to my boyhood self. With my cousin Derek, who was roughly the same age as me, and his gang of mates, I would go out all day clambering around those mountains, drinking water from the springs and playing in disused mines, among the overgrown railway tracks and abandoned wheelhouses. One year Cousin John, who after his leg injury had healed had been given a job ‘at the surface’, as they called it, organised for me and my mate to take a tour of a working mine. I would have been about fourteen. I remember us both climbing nervously into the lift with John and the mine safety officer, and then descending slowly through the cold and wet to where no man or beast should go. In the cage of the lift on the way down, the darkness was so thickly black that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. I know that’s a familiar expression, but I experimented, bringing my fingers right up to touch the tip of my nose and even touching my eyelashes, where I still couldn’t see them.

Eventually we reached the bottom, where the pit ponies stood mournfully in their stalls. We were shown around and taken halfway to the pit face. All I can say is that those men who worked there, in that wet, dusty, close environment, were heroes.

On the return journey to the surface, it seemed to take an eternity to reach the top and we were more than a little relieved when the doors finally clanked open and we stepped out into the light and the warmth of the day. John then took us over to the winding house, where the man who operated the lift said, ‘Did you enjoy that, boys?’ We must have looked a little
uncertain, even as we politely nodded, and he burst out laughing. ‘I had you going up and down that lift like a yo-yo,’ he said. He was bringing the cage up and then gently sending it down again, then up again, then down again, just for a laugh. He knew that it was so dark that we had no point of reference, and no way of knowing which way we were going. The secret, and his expertise, was to make the lift change direction so smoothly and gently that you never noticed it happening.