by Lenny Henry
1 large onion (thin slices)
Salt
Pepper
Method
Lay slices of cheese in a heat-proof Pyrex dish until the surface is covered. Place under a hot grill.
Fry onion until translucent. Add bacon.
Take onion and bacon and add to the cheese in the dish. Add half a cup of full-fat milk.
Let the mixture brown under the grill.
Wait until there is a brown skin on top and the cheese is melted. Add salt and pepper to taste.
Eat with crusty bread. Delicious.
Sylvia was also always having Tupperware parties, so if we rocked up the next day, we’d be given containers of sandwiches or mini-pies or tiny cakes to take with us. I loved going to Tom’s house. Sometimes I used to go there when he wasn’t around just to hang out with his mum. We’d chat about school and whatever activities I was doing. I’d ask her about her day, and she’d chain-smoke and do whatever she had to do while talking to me. The Thomases had a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and many Reader’s Digest editions of books I’d never read. Three classic books crammed into one volume – great for when Tom was playing football and I needed somewhere quiet to sit and read.
Tom’s dad, Harry, lived and breathed cricket. He would always want to talk to me about great matches he had seen or played in. One of his friends was a black cricketer, about whom he never failed to remind me. They were an incredibly inclusive family, and during the latter stages of my time in Dudley (before I went off to London, after Greg had gone to Leicester and when Mac was off doing management training) I was a regular there, reading, chatting to his parents and hanging out with Tom. Eventually, he joined the Royal Navy at officer level – his O- and A-level exam results had been off the charts. He went off around the world, aged twenty-one, ordering dudes around who were much older than him. I’m not sure that sat very well with Tom, and when he came home on leave, you could tell that the sense of responsibility was wearing him down. He was smoking a lot and being quite grumpy. I made a joke once and tried to initiate play-fighting to get him out of his grumpy mood, and he did one of those weird martial arts things, where all of a sudden my hand was up my back and my face against a wall – like WHAM! I didn’t challenge him to a play-fight ever again. The navy had changed him. He had become one of those ‘My hands are lethal weapons’-type dudes.
Strangely, after the launch of my showbiz career in 1975 and the sudden influx of work in every corner of the British Isles, Tom and I once again had something in common. We were both misfits, outsiders who, although we were from Dudley and loved it, were now away from home much more than we were there. We had a common frame of reference and could both talk about ‘What it was like to be away from home all the time’. Tom would show up in London or Great Yarmouth or Bournemouth just to hang out for a few days. I appreciated that. He was also one of the first people to see my adopted daughter, Billie. Tom did a cool thing: the press had no idea that we’d adopted a small ten-week-old kid, so it was important to keep her relatively concealed for a time. Tom put on a papoose with Billie facing towards him, and we were able to walk a two-mile circuit, giving Billie some fresh air and me the opportunity to walk somewhere with her other than the backyard.
Tom has a big grin on his face in those pictures of us in Blackpool and those taken later at my house of him carrying tiny baby Billie. He lives in Canada now, and although we communicate through Facetime or Skype, as tends to happen it has proven difficult to keep in touch. He’s a mensch, though: whatever’s going on, if I want to talk about anything – family, showbiz, friends, career path, parenting – Tom will have an unusual take on the situation.
Who Am I #3
In this picture I’m doing an impersonation of Tommy Cooper. What’s interesting are the expressions on the faces of my classmates. They had never looked at me like this in my entire school life. By this time I had been performing at the Queen Mary for a year, so although my efforts meant I looked like a black Walter Matthau, inside I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, they like this! They like me! This is brilliant!’ (The Black Country Album: 50 Years of Events, People and Places, Graham Gough, 2012)
GIRLS
I have to talk about girls. Girls intrigued me. In childhood and early adolescence I went to church every Sunday, where there were girls – gorgeous black girls, hair perfectly oiled and straightened, starch-stiffened blouses and sticky-out frocks, fishnet stockings, flat pumps and the merest hint of the reddest lipstick.
These girls tormented you with the way they sang and moved during the hymns, as they gyrated for the Lord, then tossed you the odd devilish smile. They seemed possessed by the heavenly spirit. They would vibrate, weep, jiggle, wiggle and sing with a sense of spiritual enjoyment unmatched by Slade on Top of the Pops. But if I asked them for a date, I would get nowhere. They were not interested in me as dating material. I got no play. I was a living, walking, talking joke to these girls.
It’s my own fault, I guess. Let’s face it, I didn’t look like ‘boyfriend material’. No one wants to date a no-money-having guy with patches on his trousers. Also, I wasn’t tough, I wasn’t very good at fighting, and these girls definitely wanted to be with someone who looked like they could protect them.
I’d see them in the week or at night when I was running chores for my mama. They’d be talking to one of dem boys who had recently arrived from back home, the ones who went to the reggae club up by Green Park. They were aged between fourteen and nineteen and wore clothes that made them resemble their fathers: leather waistcoats, tight trousers, heavy shoes and trilbies or pork-pie hats. These guys played dominoes and cursed like their grandparents. Some ran amok in the streets late at night and carried razor-sharp knives for protection.
The church girls wanted a tough guy. It seemed so unfair, but these were hard times. The National Front was out there starting trouble if you were walking down the street and had black skin. Of course, these girls wanted a manly, hard-as-nails, dumplin’-and-rice protector, not some British-born fish-and-chips yout’ who didn’t know how to fight. When you’re being attacked by racist thugs – ‘Come on then, nig-nog, what you gonna do?’ – you can’t just come out with an impression of Kenneth Williams. So I stopped yearning for them. They didn’t want me, so I decided that I didn’t want them. (This feeling would wax and wane throughout my teens – eventually, I realised it wasn’t to do with black girls in particular; it was more to do with my own insecurities and hang-ups. The second I got to London, I realised that there were plenty of black and brown girls – fine as wine in the summertime – who would chat and smile and dance with me. Perhaps I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time … Dudley in the 1970s. Jump, Len – jump!)
But over in the park, things were different. I made my friends – and any girls who were around – laugh a lot. Sometimes that led to snogging, and that was joyous. Usually, it would be a behind-the-sheds/toilets/big-horse-chestnut-tree kiss, because some of these girls didn’t want to be seen kissing me. The kiss would be great, but if anyone walked by, they’d almost tear your bottom lip off trying to get away. I remember kissing a bi-racial girl over by the toilets. Mama found out where we’d been kissing and beat me with the broomstick. ‘Yu couldn’t tek dis nice girl out fe dinner and a movie and den to the Holiday Inn? Why yu don’t have no manners?’
Some girls didn’t care where you kissed them – the high street, the park, the counter at the local Wimpy, the back row of the pictures, the front seat of the bus. It didn’t matter: if they liked you, you got to kiss them whenever and wherever. I was pretty shy – so were most of us – but somehow, during the post-pubescent summer holidays, when our sap was rising (with all that implies), we forgot our reticence and got to kissing. I think this was also a major trigger for my entertainment aspirations: my showing off in local pubs, clubs and bars drew the attention of girls, and that was a good thing.
Between the ages of nine and fifteen, I had the usual childhood transitions to negoti
ate. I was growing up. My voice went from Aled Jones to Barry White in the space of a few years. My feet kept growing: at nine, I was a size 9; by twelve, I was a size 12. I was Dudley’s Big Foot. Other things were happening too. I became very attracted to members of the opposite sex. I had no idea what this was all about, but I wasn’t alone. My friends at school, even at the ages of ten and eleven, were uttering naughty things about our female classmates, and we wondered why our bodies were changing shape at such an alarming rate. One kid in our class had a full-on set of sideburns like Oliver Reed’s Bill Sikes by the time he was twelve. Others among us were putting on muscle and experimenting with wispy facial hair. I wasn’t one of these guys: I was growing upwards but not outwards and, try as I might, no hair was forthcoming in the facial area. But the merest whiff of a Sir Francis Drake-type goatee was making itself known in my pants area. What the hell was going on there? Why weren’t my parents talking about this? Don’t they have puberty in Jamaica? During the holidays, whenever I left the house to do God knows what, Mama would look at me, as if to say, ‘I’m not gonna say any ting to yu, yu wi’ find out soon enough. Jus’ mek sure yu come back by dinnertime.’
And there were things going on over at the park that, had she known about them, would have horrified her. There was a lot of snogging, mostly near the end of the day and usually involving cider, a pack of twenty Park Drive and Jeanette from Selbourne Road. This was all very innocent, but all manner of experimentation was happening. It was as if we were out of control, as if it wasn’t really us doing it. The physical need to learn about this stuff was the imperative, almost as though we were being manipulated by our sexual urges and need for knowledge. It was as if every time I came within fifty feet of one of my female classmates or one of the girls in the park, my entire body would say, ‘Don’t worry, Len, we’ve got this.’ And we would be consumed by each other, kissing until it got dark and we had to go home.
There were also weird self-exploratory moments. There was a lot of size-comparing. Several of us boys would secrete ourselves behind a bush, drop our pants and observe. Somebody would always have a ruler and we’d all be measured. I’m pretty sure my data revealed nothing monumental. Once the ruler had dropped, I’d be met with a sad shake of the head, the word ‘average’ hurled in my face.
Buffery Park was extraordinary. It was where we’d find the remnants of old magazines: odd, yellowing, torn-out pages from Health & Efficiency, Penthouse or Playboy. Health & Efficiency was the scariest, its underlying assumption being that nudity was normal and should be treated as such by the general populace. The women and men in the photographs didn’t pose seductively or provocatively for the camera; they were always playing netball or volleyball, or painting at an easel. These pictures made us laugh a lot. The more seductive fare of Penthouse and Playboy, however, aroused odd feelings that had us snaffling the odd page, folding it up, hiding it away and sneaking off home with it.
This was the early 1970s, surely a more innocent time – and yes, there were dodgy people around the park, but we knew them. One weirdo was a guy whom we all called Gerald. He spoke in a pronounced Black Country accent and had a club foot, which didn’t stop him chasing after us when we cheeked him. Gerald exposed himself to us on several occasions, and would also regale us with filthy rhymes, most of which began, ‘I gorra dog with two dicks.’ He seemed to have an endless supply of filth. The key things here are that (a) we recognised him on sight and so could run away if we wanted to; but more importantly, (b) he was ours. We owned him. We could pick him out of a line-up and recognise his voice in the dark. After he was hustled out of the Dudley Odeon for interfering with himself during Bambi, we saw him in the park the next day and told him how the movie ended. Community spirit in action.
This journey, like sailing round the world solo, was very much a ‘single-handed’ affair for the longest of times. The only news you received regarding the outer hinterlands of sexual activity would be from classmates, park mates or the magazine fragments found in the park. This led to a confused growth period during which sex was discussed a lot (usually inaccurately), laughed about (usually cruelly) and eventually experienced (usually disappointedly). I had no idea where to go to get informed about sex. I knew I wanted it, knew I had to have it, but no grown-ups were helping me to navigate these difficult waters. It was just me and a bunch of numpties down the park with no map, fuelled by cider, cigarette smoke and our imaginations. The Jamaican-born boys, particularly the ones who had been born in an agricultural area, were miles down the road – they’d seen livestock in action.
Interestingly, the grown-ups had all the information we needed to know; they just chose not to tell us. I started to understand what Big People’s Business was. Whenever Jamaican adults were in a room talking in hushed tones, with music on in the background and cigarettes being smoked furiously, we’d always be ushered out of the room and threatened with violence, hearing the words ‘Come out ah de room! Big People talkin’,’ or ‘Pickney! This is Big People Business! Tek yu backside an’ garn!’ I’ve just turned sixty and I’m only just realising that Big People’s conversations are full of the stuff of life – sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, the whole bit. No wonder they didn’t want us to listen.
THE GRAZEBROOK CONDUIT #2 …
Time conflates now, it subtracts and bends and twists and leaves gaps. The period between the ages of eleven and fourteen seems to blur, and my memory does not serve me as well as it might. But I do remember me and the lads playing football in Buffery Park, mainly on the patch of grass in front of the green bench where the old-aged pensioners sat. We’d set up the goals (two jumpers, naturally) directly in front of the bench, and if you scored and knocked an old codger off, you got an extra goal added on.
There were adventures to be had in the park: day-long games of hide-and-seek or kick the can, and twenty-a-side (sometimes more) football. We also played vicious cricket matches – us versus recently arrived tough guys from the Caribbean. Freddie Nettleford, who had arrived some years before, would bring these young lads over to the park and challenge us to a game of cricket, and stupidly we would agree. After fifteen minutes of having a leather cricket ball hurled at our heads at eighty miles per hour, we’d cry off and run away. Those guys could bowl fast fast fast. Another source of fun was doing an ‘all pile on’, where everybody would just lie on top of some unfortunate person in a big heap. I think the record was seventy kids piled on top of this poor kid. I think he had trouble breathing, but he was alright in the end.
At fifteen I was working in the Safari Bar at Dudley Zoo, which was situated within the crumbling walls of Dudley Castle. While the Queen Mary Ballroom was a chairlift ride away at the top of the grounds, the Safari Bar was situated at the lower end.
The zoo had seen better days, even then, but there was still something splendid about it. People thronged around its gates on a bank holiday, and the bars and restaurants made a pretty penny over the summer period. I’d been fortunate to get work at the Safari Bar in the summer of 1973. Greg and Mac already had jobs up at the Queen Mary, and they had put in a good word for me. There was an enormous chef called Robin, an attractive barmaid called Carol and an Irish head barman called Steve. The boss was a skinny Italian guy called Leo, who called me ‘Chocolat’ and paid me a few quid a day off the books. I loved sneaking off in my spare time and visiting Cuddles the killer whale. I always felt sorry for him somehow. There was a lot of time in between services to have fun and mess around, so that summer and the next I participated in all the high jinks that were to be had, while using any spare time to practise my impressions, voices and jokes.
On New Year’s Eve the Grazebrook Crew and I decided to go clubbing in West Bromwich, the Las Vegas of the Midlands. We met in the Safari Bar, which was problematic for me as I’d just been fired by the boss for terminal lateness. I arrived first, wearing my snazzy Freemans catalogue checked jacket, which I was painstakingly paying off at the rate of 15p a week. I clocked myself in the mirror – cool
er than cold.
An old colleague of mine was working behind the bar and she hinted that there might be free drinks. She slipped me a lager and lime. Result! The rest of the Grazebrook Crew arrived, eager for their first drinks and dispensing banter about girls, the crapness of some discos, and the rest. I told them I had no money. The lads were pissed off.
‘How comes you’ve never got any money?’
‘Why ent y’got y’self another job?’
‘We shouldn’t have to carry you all the time. Y’gorra pay your own way, chap.’
It was hard to bear, and in many respects they were right. I just got all hot in the face and couldn’t come up with an answer. They decided that if I couldn’t pay my own way, they’d leave me where I was, so off they went, leaving me at the bar, alone. It was a real lesson for me. I had to figure out how to pay my own way in the future, otherwise I was going to lose my friends. What was I to do?
Thankfully, the Queen Mary Ballroom, just a chairlift ride away, would provide an answer to that problem.
4
The Origins of My Comedy
LEARNING ABOUT JOKES
I had always been obsessed by jokes. Whenever there was a comic on TV, I’d write everything down. I had notebooks full of other people’s jokes. A lot of the material was unusable because it was adult. I was a kid, a young teenager.
The only gags that seemed to work for me were the ones I could match to a voice. So for an army joke I’d be Windsor Davies from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em’s Frank Spencer was always looking for jobs, so I could do building site jokes as Frank, doctor jokes too. Because he was an idiot, you could put Frank in any situation and he would be funny.