Untold Stories

  ‘You’re holding the bow wrong again. Nobody holds it like that. People will laugh at you.’ He purses my fingers again round the bow handle, his own violin held casually under his chin, jutting out from his shoulder as he tightens the silky hair of the bow. Even at ten, I know this is showing off, ‘Look! No hands!’ the kindest labelling of it. But holding this scrolled extension of himself is also him being a man and doing something that with my puny neck and chin I know I can’t do now and probably ever.

  ‘I’ve written you on the notes: E, G, B, D, F. What do they stand for?’ This, at least, I know. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. I know it too, because this favoured boy is not just an aid to memory but to me almost a creature of flesh and blood. It is as if the very structure of the stave has been rigged against me and this good boy deserving of favour is all the things I am not – capable, modest and quiet, who holds the bow with his small fingers just as my father does in his big ones and does not scrape it agonisingly across the strings as I do, but extracts from this unpromising almost plywood fiddle something sweet and tuneful. This good boy, who is not me, deserves favour from my father, as I never shall.

  Violin still jutting, Dad puts a sheet of music on the gunmetal stand. ‘Now the Day is Over’, copied out from Hymns Ancient and Modern in a hand as square and blunt as his fingers.

  Now the day is over,

  Night is drawing nigh.

  Shadows of the evening

  Steal across the sky.

  I start on the first note, dragging the bow across the strings.

  ‘Nay, Alan! Frame yourself. Look at your fingers!’ Once again, his big butcher’s hands come over mine, gripping the bow for me, so that now it is he who is playing the tune, not me. I let go of the violin and it falls on the floor.

  ‘You dateless article! What is the point?’ At first, I think that he is going to hit me, but, golden violin in one hand and bow in the other, he can’t, and instead he charges off down the attic steps. I know that I am a disappointment to my father and that this disappointment will outlast the violin and my childhood and go down into the grave.

  The attic door bangs shut. Through the open skylight I hear the trams hurtling down Otley Road and the bell-ringers over at St Chad’s beginning their practice. I climb up on the chair and look out at the evening sky.

  I’ve always liked looking in churches and though I’m not quite one of those who, in Philip Larkin’s words, ‘tap and jot and know what rood lofts were’ I do know what rood lofts were and it has brought me to Hubberholme at the top of Wharfedale and the very tip of the West Riding.

  The church is broad and low, like its liturgy, I imagine, but unique in the West Riding – its rood loft survives. Put up in 1558, it was perhaps salvaged from Coverham Abbey and brought over the tops on a farm cart. But they were behind the times at Hubberholme. They did not know in 1558 that Catholic Queen Mary was dead and that, as they were putting up their loft, everywhere else the lofts were coming down. But amazingly, it survives and is still here and a proper loft it is too, slatted as it could be for hay and straw as much as for candles and the cross.

  Centuries pass – births, marriages and deaths – the church’s next moment in history recorded in a picture frame hung slightly askew on one of the pillars – a roll of honour with the names and, unusually for England, the photographs of the young men of the parish who died in the First War.

  The harvest in, they go off on a farm cart, too, probably, down the dale to join those queuing to enlist outside Skipton Town Hall. And four years later, in Wilfred Owen’s words:

  A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,

  May creep back, silent, to village wells,

  Up half-known roads.

  One who does come back from that war, and years later has his ashes scattered here, is J. B. Priestley, and on another pillar is a plaque to say so.

  The rood, the roll of honour, the ashes of a writer – the remnants of history, the random trig points of time.

  I have never found it easy to belong. So much repels. Hymns help. They blur. And here among the tombs and tablets and vases of dead flowers, and lists of the fallen, it is less hard to feel, at least, tacked on to church and country.

  Amen. Or, with that lilting interrogation with which young people nowadays cast doubt on any certainty, Amen?

  Cheeky Chappies

  Brought up during the Second War I am a child of the BBC Home Service, listened to, at the beginning of the war anyway, on a wireless that still requires an accumulator. This is a heavy glass battery, the shape not unlike that of a miniature police box as was, though that too has long since disappeared and is remembered now only as the original of the Tardis in Doctor Who.

  The accumulator has to be regularly recharged, a process that involves me or my brother lugging it (the metal handle cutting into one’s fingers) along the path by the Recreation Ground and across Moorfield Road to an electrician’s grimy workshop somewhere in the perilous Edinburghs, which are poorer streets than ours and infested with wild boys and slum-my girls and urchins with a permanent rivulet of snot running from their noses.

  With the accumulator the wireless takes a long time to warm up, a phrase that later becomes one of the standard jokes in the wartime comedy show Much Binding in the Marsh, with Kenneth Horne and Richard Murdoch. We blame it, too, for our often poor reception so it’s a relief when Dad invests in another wireless, a Philco, bought second-hand through the Miscellaneous column of the Yorkshire Evening Post. Domed and in brown Bakelite, according to Dad this is a better set than our previous one not only because it runs off the mains but because it lights up.

  Television had briefly begun in the 1930s before the war put paid to it, but though I must have heard of it, it was one of those many things that happened Down South and certainly not in Leeds, and none of us had ever seen it. Still, the notion of it must have been there because Dad having promised us a wireless that will light up, it is a disappointment to find that that is all it does … no faces, no figures, just an illuminated dial and a knob with which to scan Hilversum, Droitwich, Dortmund and all the other faraway places of which we know nothing, the only two stations we ever tune in to the Home Service and the Light Programme.

  In common with virtually every family in the country at that time we settle down every week to listen to ITMA – It’s That Man Again – a title which I take to refer to Hitler, about whom there are constant jokes, but is more likely to be the show’s compère and anchorman (and the most popular comedian of the day) Tommy Handley. Relentlessly cheerful and with an unstoppable flow of wisecracks and repartee, Tommy Handley presides over a regular cast of characters, Mrs Mopp, the charwoman, Colonel Chinstrap, the drunk, Funf, the German spy, and half a dozen others, all kitted out with their particular catchphrases. With Mrs Mopp it’s ‘Can I do you now, sir?’, for Colonel Chinstrap ‘I don’t mind if I do’, the mere repetition of which is enough to have the audience and the nation in stitches. But not me.

  Tommy Handley’s unquenchable high spirits come to stand for the spirit of the Blitz and in his time (and for long afterwards) he is an iconic figure who is beyond criticism. But as a child I know that he is not funny, ranking in my book with those equally unfunny uncles whose idea of humour is to throw you up in the air, hard-hearted mirthless jokers on the family stage.

  I see Tommy Handley as the essential cheeky chappie, a type I have disliked ever since. There is Tommy Trinder too, who also shelters under the banner of the Blitz, harsh, male and, one suspects, not very nice and never raising a smile with me the whole of his long life. There is Ted Ray and Arthur Askey, both from the north it’s true but like Dickie Henderson, unmistakeable cheeky chappies. A child of the north, I don’t care for cockneys or their much-advertised Blitz-defeating cheerfulness: all that knees-up, thumbs in the lapels down at the old Bull and Bush cockney sparrerdom has always left me cold.

  Even Max Miller, though regarded by some writers (notably John Osborne) as a secular saint and revere
nced for his anarchic spirit and the subversiveness of his sexual innuendo, still has too much of a permanent grin on his face for me. Besides, those violent check suits he goes in for seem to me quite definitely common. Like the fox in Pinocchio, he is plainly up to no good.

  Cheeky chappies are not gender-specific: Two Ton Tessie O’Shea is a cheeky chappie, for instance (and massively unfunny). So to a lesser extent are Elsie and Doris Waters, sisters to Jack Warner, who started off as a cheeky chappie before ending up as the respected desk sergeant of television’s Dixon of Dock Green. Generally, though, cheeky chappieness was overwhelmingly male and there is not a breath of camp to it. It’s perky, aggressive, wisecracking and a routine. It’s seldom subversive and it caters to prejudice rather than running counter to it, its current exponents Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson.

  Happily, though, there aren’t as many cheeky chappies now as there once were; they began to peter out in the wastes of Dickie Henderson and Sunday Night at the London Palladium, where, once the native supply of cheeky chappies began to dry up they could be imported from America. Sammy Davis Jr was a cheeky chappie and Bob Hope, too, gag merchants whose art cost them only what they paid their gag-writers.

  Because cheeky chappies are practitioners and professionals. There’s no mining of their own lives and no undermining of them either. They do not put themselves down, make themselves the butt of their own jokes, as, say, Jack Benny used to do or Frankie Howerd. They are not their own subjects and comedy costs them nothing. And above all, of course, they are cheerful, repellently so, so that even as a child what I feel these comedians lack is a sense of humour.

  Having disparaged ITMA, it’s only fair to add that if I have a preference for the lugubrious in comedy that may be due to ITMA, too, as one of the regular characters was Mona Lott (catchphrase: ‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going’). She was certainly more up my street, more up our actual social street in fact, than Tommy Handley; more, too, than Jack Train’s Colonel Chinstrap, the programme’s resident drunk, whose jokes often meant nothing to me, brought up in a teetotal family with never a drink in the house. Mona Lott, though, was not too distantly related to those headscarved women who, though seldom so determinedly morose, populated my wartime childhood.

  Familiar too were the characters I saw portrayed on the stage in our annual visit to the theatre to see the pantomime at the Theatre Royal in Leeds. Here comedians like Norman Evans, Frank Randle and Albert Modley would play the dame in Mother Goose or Babes in the Wood though they could hardly be said to be in drag. A skirt, a wig, a battered straw hat were about as far as cross-dressing was allowed to go with any implication of effeminacy countered by a defiant pair of hobnailed boots.

  These comedians generally incorporated into the proceedings a version of their regular music-hall act. In Norman Evans’s case this was Over the Garden Wall (an act later revivified on television by Les Dawson). It may seem fanciful to claim that remarks like ‘Leave that cat alone! Do you know, I could taste it in t’custard’ were closer to real life than the gags purveyed by Tommy Handley, but so it was and I thought the Dame hilarious. And though Cinderella was hardly social realism it came much closer to my life than ever ITMA did, particularly as every pantomime would include a slapstick routine based on some household chore… wallpapering, say, or making pastry or doing the washing, procedures with which I was familiar and so found very funny. It was a lesson, though I didn’t realise it at the time, that comedy and real life were in some relation.

  Norman Evans (always minus his teeth) talked as northern women talked and, I fancy, carried over his act into a brief radio series in the late forties. Then came Al Read (catchphrase: ‘I thought, Right monkey!’), whose humour was even more rooted in everyday life, this development in radio comedy preceding by several years and without credit a similar revolution in the theatre. Radio was at the kitchen sink long before Arnold Wesker.

  Then there was Hylda Baker, who presented a different sort of northern woman, Edith Piaf without the voice or the love life, a little sparrow of a thing with a six-foot straight man (Eli Woods in drag). Again it may seem perverse to maintain that Hylda Baker and the lofty Cynthia were in any sense a representation of ordinary life but they certainly rang familiar bells with me. Hylda Baker and Wittgenstein can seldom have been mentioned in the same breath but certainly she was closer to everything that is the case than Tommy Trinder ever was.

  Life apart, the other thing that has always made me laugh is sheer silliness. Silly daftness is what my father called it. It was what was funny about George Formby, the only comedian who has ever made me fall off my seat laughing (at the Palace, Stanningley Road, it would have been). Arthur Askey was undoubtedly a cheeky chappie but he was redeemed by a streak of inspired daftness, as when he was doing his bumblebee routine; Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe and Ken Dodd were all silly as cheeky chappies seldom are. Silliness is surreal and without reason and to indulge in it is not without risk, a kind of balancing act, and risk is something cheeky chappies don’t like, hence their reliance on gags.

  In the forties, radio comedians lived on long after the programmes that had brought them fame went off the air. This was on account of Radio Fun, a children’s comic the cartoon characters in which had all figured on the wireless. But when I must have started reading it in 1940 I had never heard of any of them. Who was Lupino Lane, for instance? Or Revnell and West (‘The Long and the Short of It’) and if there had ever been a radio series featuring Jack Warner saying ‘Mind my bike’, as he did in Radio Fun, it had long since passed from memory.

  The fame of all these comedians had to be taken on trust and no one seemed ever to make it to the pages of the comic until long after their heyday was over. I doubt if the editors of Radio Fun had heard of Hegel but if one wanted proof of Hegel’s dictum that ‘The owl of Minerva takes her flight only when the shades of light are already failing’ the pages of Radio Fun would provide it.

  Comedians are supposed to have sad lives, though this isn’t a cliché I entirely endorse, the sad clown not a type I’ve ever come across whereas the mean clown, the selfish clown and the downright unpleasant clown are commonplace. Northern comedians were sad only in the sense that they generally ended up at Morecambe or the better end of Blackpool, retired to seafront homes presided over by wives every bit as formidable as the battleaxes they were wont to complain of in their acts, George Formby and his prison wardress of a wife, Beryl, the most famous example.

  Equally daunting, if only in appearance, was Mrs Albert Modley. Albert Modley was a northern comic who, unlike Norman Evans, had never quite acquired a national reputation but was well liked around the music halls of the north and never out of work in the pantomime season. I came across him only after his retirement when in 1974 we were making Sunset Across the Bay, a BBC TV film set in Morecambe, where he now lived.

  Included in the script was a scene in which two old men chat outside the hut on the Leeds allotment which one of them is having to abandon before retiring to the seaside. It was a nice scene and the director, Stephen Frears, thought to cast Albert Modley, though he’d never seen him on the stage as I had.

  When it came to the shot Albert turned out to be none too sure of the words, covering up his uncertainty just as he’d done all those years ago on the stage of the Theatre Royal with a good deal of laughing and stock phrases like, ‘By! It’s a beggar is this,’ or ‘By shots, this is a funny do. Hee hee.’

  Still, hesitant though he was, it seemed entirely authentic. He certainly sounded like the genuine article and looked it, too, in an old raincoat and cap, and we were all ready to shoot when Mrs Modley, who had been hovering in the background, suddenly came forward with a large hatbox.

  ‘He’s never wearing that old cap,’ said Mrs Modley. ‘Folks won’t recognise him in that fiddling thing,’ and she opened the hatbox to reveal a cap of truly epic proportions. It was the cap he had worn on the halls.

  ‘He has to wear his own cap,’ insisted Mrs Modley
. ‘They won’t recognise him without The Cap.’

  It was a difficult moment, with Mrs Modley insisting and even threatening and Albert in no mood to resist her. It was solved by the cameraman, who suggested that Albert should save The Cap for the shot and that Mrs Modley should take charge of it while he supposedly rehearsed with headgear of normal dimensions.

  When, having done several takes, The Cap came out of its hatbox and was put on Albert’s head (‘By shots, that feels better. This is more like it, hee hee’) and he proceeded to act his socks off, there was actually no film in the camera.

  The Last of the Sun

  At Thora Hird’s Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey, a joyous occasion which unaccountably went unrecorded by the BBC, I began by saying how scrupulous she was about the text and instanced her performance in A Kind of Loving made in 1962. Forty years later when we recorded The Last of the Sun and the last work she did, any diversion from the text was still making her distressed and unhappy.

  ‘No, I said that wrong,’ she would say, though by now she was sometimes so frail and breathless the wonder was that she could say anything at all.

  Age and incapacity had also robbed her of any notion of recording technique so that when she did get it wrong, or didn’t say a line to her own satisfaction, she didn’t wait for another cue but simply gave the line again, until eventually the producer, Colin Smith, found it easier to keep the tape running without interruption.

  Fortunately with us in the studio was Thora’s daughter, Janette Scott-Rademakers, who was licensed to be more brusque with her mother than either Colin or I would have dared or wanted to be and so managed to cajole and bully and sometimes laugh her into something like her old self and a recollection of her abilities. I think amanuensis would be the word to describe it; certainly Thora could not have done it without her.