shard in my heart. Like I said: jealousy. Everyone had to suffer more than him or he lost his rag. No wonder Mum left him, a better explanation at the time than admitting to myself that neither parent wanted me. As I often joked on stage, I had a pretty sorry childhood: both my parents were sorry.
He never left us food or money, either, so me and Fred would run down to the market stalls in the Harrow Road and pilfer what we could. No shoes or socks, but that was not as uncommon back then as you might think. Some of our attempts at cooking stretched the definition of hot food to its limits. But somehow we survived for a couple of years before Dad suddenly decided to place us with guardians over in Hatfield. I can only imagine that someone must have complained about our thieving or it looking like his kids were being raised by wolves, because he never had a drop of compassion in his blood, let alone a conscience.
I remember one day I did something to annoy him and he picked me up and threw me from one side of the kitchen to the other. No word of a lie, I hit the ceiling on the way over. In a way those incidents taught me how to fall without hurting myself, a skill I used to good effect on film, as everyone knows. So, anyway, you can guess how relieved I was about this guardianship lark. Mind you, even that the old man managed to foul up.
The first couple we stayed with were nice enough, but then Dad stopped paying them. I never knew why. But anyway out we went and found ourselves with a second set of guardians in Deal, Kent. They were nice, too. If anything it was them that first inspired me into acting, because they had to be putting on an act of kindness, and very convincing it was too. So after a while I tried to catch them out, started mucking about, testing their patience. Eventually they got fed up with it and asked me to leave.
‘See, I knew it,’ I thought to myself. ‘Can’t fool me’. But deep down I knew it was me that was the fool.
Fred stayed on in Deal, but before I left I stayed up all night to watch a film crew at work. Being so small and weedy I was able to get right up close and personal. Fascinating it was. ‘On location’, they call it. Deal planted a seed, all right. But at thirteen schools and any sort of home life were behind me and I was back on the streets again, though at least this time I had footwear.
In a way having had such a rough start actually helped me adjust to life on the streets, and I started to develop my acting abilities. There was this all night tea van that used to park itself up in the city seven days a week. The smells that wafted off that van drove me to distraction, but this was no barrow on the Harrow Road, and I was no longer a light-fingered school boy. The man behind the counter looked tough but kind, the sort of chap who had to graft long hours to make ends meet but you could still have a laugh with, and, I hoped, milk some kindness from.
Being short my eyes barely cleared the counter top, my ears framed by a salt seller and a bottle of brown sauce. If being knocked about by my old man taught me how to fall without hurting myself, that tea van taught me how to use my face and body to communicate. So there I’d stand, knees slightly bent to make me seem even shorter and these big ‘help me, mister’ eyes peering over the scattered sugar granules and tea spoons. Worked a treat. Three in the morning he’d pass me over a mug of Bovril and a pie. I don’t think anything has ever tasted so good, even when I hit the big time and could afford to eat anything and anywhere.
On the seventh night, however, he nodded to me to come closer, and I stole myself to being told to shove off. ‘You should try the army,’ he said.
I felt impelled to be honest with him, since he’d kept me alive pretty much all week. ‘I can’t. I’m only thirteen.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you could convince them otherwise,’ he winked, making me blush.
He said Cardiff was the place to go, but if I’d realised how far away Wales was I might never have attempted to walk there; but walk there I did and ended up in the Navy as a cabin boy bound for the Argentine. The Army came later, though even then I put on such an act for the Recruiting Sergeant that he let me in with tears rolling, knowing full well I was totally unqualified to be a bandsman. I learnt every instrument I could get my hands on; carried on with the boxing I’d started at sea and got myself fit as a flea. I owe the Army everything, especially for the grub. No, really, Army food made a man out of me; and Army life gave me the confidence to…
Oh, but I do feel tired. Happens quite often these days, but then I am ninety-five. It’s no laughing matter. I’m afraid I’m going to have to skim over the rest of my life, but it’s the part you’re all familiar with, so no harm done.
I made an effort to treat my own children exactly the opposite way I was treated. Like I said, I never saw Dad again. But I can guarantee he saw me. I was at the cinema, on the television, in magazines, on posters; I even had hit records: ‘Don’t Laugh at Me ‘Cause I’m a Fool’, with more than a trace of irony.
But I never wanted revenge. I never harboured grudges, even when I was lost at sea. I never stopped wanting to reach out to him, to cure him of the jealousy that had eaten him to the core as much as the booze.
And even now I like to think that maybe once, just once, he saw my face on a billboard or heard my voice on the radio and pulled his motor onto the hard shoulder - and mindful that no one was watching - sighed, ‘That’s my boy.’
Imagine Me
When I saw him standing flaccid at the graveside I thought the ground would open up for me. I made him the shadow at my side, the decades wedged between us like wall insulation, fending off the cold, diminishing the cost. The nearly beloved, blackened by a soot fall of respect, picked their words uncertainly from the phrasebook of bereavement. Then Fate swallowed hard and she was gone, ropes and green baize left hugging the edges.
I followed him back to the house like someone else’s lost puppy. Alone at last, I wondered if he even knew I was there, as if I were the ghost he might welcome. But when he spoke it was as if to someone who had never left and I knew the hardest part was yet to come.
‘What do we do now?’ Part question, part statement, part cry for help.
I fixed my stare to his slipper-bound feet. Worried you’ll be next? I wondered. For though he was only sixty-five, he had enough health problems to take out a man half his age. But Father was made of resolute stuff, an ancient oak weathered by a thousand seasons; yet I knew he was ill-equipped to endure the first black rays of mourning. That’s the downside of taking someone for granted: when they go they take part of you with them – or rather take back the part that has your sap running through it. At twenty-three he put down roots, but it was Mum whose upturned leaves nourished him, making him sturdy. Yet surely grief was a disease that would worm its way beneath the bark now that the branch had been ripped free by the storm. He couldn’t stay strong forever.
The funeral was modestly attended; the respectful pauses quiet enough to hear a heartbeat in. Garden-fresh flowers and anodyne speeches, scantily filled sandwiches and sweet sherry: a communal devotion to the rituals of demise. The darkest rite of passage: when your time’s up, it’s up. No need to rub it in.
‘You’ll be wanting to get away soon, I suppose?’ No hint of statement or question this time.
‘There’s a train just after nine.’
‘Oh…’ he huffed. ‘Best put the kettle on, then.’
Eight o’clock. Still time, perhaps; though for what I didn’t know. I laid a consoling hand on the back of the kitchen chair and let it catch my would-be fall. He stole away to the shadows by the sink. Father and I were never close. No need to rub it in.
It was always cold in our house; sometimes it was warmer outside. But the first few months of the year were the worst. That was the time when we ceased to live in a house and were forced to inhabit a room. We had a big kitchen, like those you imagine in farmhouses. But that was where the similarity ended. In Number Nineteen there was no welcoming fireside glow, no waft of oven breath singeing freshly baked cakes; no endlessly replenished teapot on the table around which to warm your hands; no heavy drapes across the back door to cut out
the worst of the drafts. Only single-glazed windows with rotting frames, worn linoleum and tinned soup; strip washes at the sink, steam from a dented kettle and the ever-present spectre of condensation.
School was only better if your desk abutted a hot water pipe. A towering red brick building, short on funds and shorter still on competent management, it was forced to oversubscribe for a whole year following a fire at one of its counterparts. An encampment of second-rate portakabins arrived to cater specifically for our year, chosen in haste by money-conscious bureaucrats. Vests from Woolworths were our only defence against pneumonia. At least at break time a game of British Bulldog put an extra ten degrees between skin and air. Similarly, a good fight brought colour to my face, though more often than not that colour was a dark crimson that stained my sweater.
‘Are you going to take that coat off, love?’ my mother crooned, hastily drawing the curtains, oblivious to the fact that it could have little impact on either temperature or ambience. ‘You’re making me feel cold.’
Mum had a theory that behaving as if you were warm had much the same effect on morale as seeing a hot water bottle being filled at bedtime. That this implied the temperature in our house was influenced principally by