by Les Dawson
It felt so good for an old ham like me to play an audience and pit my wits against the likes of Joe Brown, Lionel Blair, dear old Bernie Winters and Danny La Rue, not to mention the contestants who could be pretty handy with a snappy line. It kept me on my toes and it was just what I needed … it’s a medicine in its own special way.
Also, now that money was coming in, the burden of the mounting bills was eased. I thanked God that only Pamela was still at private school: as I have mentioned, Julie was nursing and Stuart was a trainee motor mechanic, and doing well at it. He’d always been good with his hands and I looked forward to the day when he could save me some garage bills. I used to do a lot of patter about garages:
‘A garage charged me ten pounds, to tow me off a motorway … I got my own back, all the time he was towing me I kept my brakes on.’
‘A garage told me that my battery was flat. Big deal, what shape should it be?’
‘I said to a garage, “Will you service my car?” They looked at it and said, “Try Lourdes.”’
Meanwhile, Meg had had to start getting about on two sticks, and even that was becoming a struggle … all my fears came back. But once more, her dogged determination and cheerfulness allayed my anxieties, and I found myself lulled into a false security.
A convoy of cars wound its way into the golf club car park in Lytham, every one of them bringing close friends and relations to celebrate the long love of two people.
I had helped Meg into her dress. I had made sure she swallowed her pain-killers, and I had escorted her to a waiting hire-car. I had no intention of driving myself on this night: I had a date with champagne.
Meg and I stood by the clubhouse door to welcome our family and friends. As they saw Meg leaning on her sticks, they didn’t show pity or concern – just an all-embracing love. Our favourite song, ‘True Love’, struck up and I held her in my arms. My soul melted as her green eyes looked deep into mine. ‘I love you,’ she whispered, and I was too choked to answer her – it was a night to hold forever in a scented memory.…
Our wedding anniversary … twenty-five years together through thick and thin, we’d known the heights and we’d known the troughs. Here we stood in the middle of the ballroom at the Green Drive Golf Club, surrounded by our friends and family.… I still see Meg to this day, dancing with me and taking every step with those amazing sticks.
I’d drunk too much, and smoked too much, and Meg cocked an eye at me: ‘Your chest sounds like a foot pump,’ she said. ‘You’d better start looking after yourself.’ She telling me – and knowing what I did … I held her close so that she couldn’t see the tears spring to my eyes.… The night was a magical one and we saw dawn flush the sky.
At one of Meg’s weekly check-ups at Christie’s, when it had become very apparent that her sticks were becoming useless, the specialist suggested after a scan of her lower limbs that she should go into a wheelchair.
The atmosphere in the office was one of sickening realisations: for Meg, that soon she would be dependent upon such a contraption to get around, and for me, that her condition was worsening by the day.
The children still didn’t suspect anything. Julie would have done, had she been at home, but fortunately I had told her to return to Nottingham to resume her nursing career.
The wheelchair arrived and Meg sat looking at it. ‘Just how bad am I?’ she asked me in a low voice.
I lied to my back teeth. ‘Well, obviously it isn’t good, darling, but the specialist says that being in the chair will take the weight off your feet and give your legs a chance to get stronger with the radium treatment.’
Her next words shook me – she had never mentioned the word cancer before. She held my gaze. ‘Has the cancer spread a lot?’ she said quietly.
I wanted to shriek out: ‘Yes, it’s all over your body and God won’t make you better and I’m helpless to do any sodding thing and I love you.’ What I did say was: ‘Not a lot, angel, it’s in your lower back … that’s why your legs are bad. Christie’s are very happy the way the cancer is being contained, and the treatment might well help to fuse the bones more solidly and eventually get you back on your feet.… Until then, my girl, get in that chair.’
She smiled at me and kissed me. She seemed satisfied with my lies and dutifully sat in the wheelchair and started playing about with the controls. Back and forth she went, pressing the controls and roaring with delight as she grew confident with her new toy. In those early days, we had so much simple fun with the kids and Meg chasing about in her chair.… So much fun to cloak the tragedy of it all.
I was drinking somewhat heavily but it didn’t ease the pain. I drank in a hotel called the St Ives. I liked the bar there and I could chat with other showbiz people who frequented the place and try to forget about my private woes for an hour. I always remember the beautiful girl behind the bar; her name was Tracy and her smile always made me feel good. She really was a stunner, and all the male customers would try to flirt with her. The hours I spent in that place helped me to find the strength to face whatever was to be.
I cooked the meals and the children attempted to swallow the mess. Mercifully, on her good days, Meg would do the cooking and thus save us the trouble of an ulcer, and a lady came in to clean the house up, so life went on. Meg was still able to walk a few yards; she could leave the wheelchair at the foot of the stairs and walk up to our bedroom, but even that was getting more and more difficult.
I knew the time had come to suggest bringing her bed downstairs – but how to do so without arousing her fears?
I was coming to the close of the third series of Blankety Blank, which had been going very well in the ratings, but because of Meg’s condition I didn’t stay in London. The BBC allowed me a limousine to take me to the studio and then, after taping the programme, run me back to the north. It was tiring and I’m not an enthusiastic traveller at the best of times. I hate traffic jams and I hate delays at airports – I particularly hate the constant searches, which always make me feel soiled somehow.
At Heathrow once, a customs official with a face like an open grave gloomily started to rummage through my suitcase. Purely for comic relief I whispered to him, ‘If you let me through I’ll split half the packets of hashish with you and I’ll throw in some illegal Tunisian corduroy condoms.’
I thought he’d laugh. He didn’t, and I was trotted off to a room and strip-searched.
Despite my problems with travelling, at least with Meg the frustrations had always been tempered with laughter. Her sense of humour brightened the most idiotic situations. I can see her now in my mind’s eye, choking back the laughter at the sight of her portly spouse and a randy camel – it was on a family holiday in Egypt, and we had just visited the Pyramids. I mounted a camel which then tried to mount me – and not for sightseeing either, I might add. Upon realising that it was not going to have its way with me, the confounded flea-ridden animal got fed up trying and sat on my head instead. The family fell about and a Canadian tourist asked me to smile from under the camel’s bum as he fiddled with his camera.
Meg had many occasions to laugh. Some years ago I took the family on a cruise to the West Indies. We loaded so much luggage into the taxi, one of the springs went. We reached Manchester Airport and the police phoned to say that our burglar alarm had gone off and the property was now surrounded by alert constabulary. Ten minutes later, I received another phone call, this time from a neighbour, who kindly informed us that the police had gone having found no evidence of a prowler, but that she had spotted an elderly man with a bulging bag creeping through to the rear of the premises, and she had phoned the police and they had apprehended the old chap.
Throughout this call, my son had been tugging my trousers, and at the finish I cuffed his ears soundly. As he rubbed his appendages, he shouted, ‘That man isn’t a burglar, it’s Uncle Cyril – he’s going to put that wooden frame up for you today!’ Eventually I got through to our local cop shop and spoke to the sergeant. He wasn’t very pleased with me,
and poor Cyril was locked in a cell. They let me speak to him after they’d released the old lad, and his use of the English language was an eye-opener to say the least. I won’t tell you where he suggested I shove the wooden frame, but I assure you it would have been an impossible feat.
We hadn’t left Manchester yet and already the vacation was looking rather peculiar. The ten and a half hours we spent waiting for an aeroplane at Heathrow wasn’t calculated to make us double up with unbridled merriment, either.
As if reluctantly, British Airways beckoned to our unhappy band that the flight to St Lucia was at last ready to be boarded, and it was at that moment I found that I’d lost the bits of card that enable you to get on the sky-liner.
My family were kept waiting as the other more intelligent passengers climbed the steel stairs to await transport to far pavilions, whilst I scoured seats and floors looking for the bloody boarding cards. By this time my wife was sick of our marriage and the kids didn’t like me any more. A man shouted at me several times that the plane would have to go without us. Fortunately, before I found the strength to scream, my younger daughter’s little shoulder bag fell to the floor and the first things that fell out were the boarding cards, closely followed by a doll’s right arm and a grimy toffee. It took the combined strength of the family plus six airport officials to prevent me throttling my daughter, and there was talk of a sedative.
The other passengers glared at us, the air crew glared at us, and a stony-faced stewardess fastened my seat belt so tightly my tongue shot out.
The in-flight movie was a ‘disaster’ one in which an aeroplane sank under the Pacific, and my son decided that he had better inform his parents that he had developed acute diarrhoea.
We were to be met at the St Lucia airport and transported by luxury coach to our hotel. The first sound we heard as, feeling wobbly, we trooped off the aircraft, was the melancholy drone of an artillery piece closely followed by a loud whoosh and boom. Oh, I nearly forgot to mention, it was raining like hell. Armed men pushed us through the customs without a sign of a calypso, and the truth emerged: there was a riot taking place. The luxury coach was now ready for the knacker’s yard after getting in the way of a mortar. Two First World War army lorries took a cargo of near-hysterical tourists to their hotels via a banana plantation, and the curtain of heavy tropical rain ensured that we saw bugger all.
Our hotel looked as if the jungle was devouring it, and as the rain abated, a chorus of bull frogs started up. A scream from inside our room indicated that Meg had gazed upon her first lizard, which was posing against a section of floral wallpaper, and Pamela hooted with delight as she caught a cockroach under a glass tumbler. My wife flatly refused to go to bed and sat up all night with a broom handle. As I was being shunned by the family, I decided to go out on to the beach. A watery sun had begun to peep from behind a bank of dark nimbus and my spirits lifted.
The children joined me, and as large waves began to nudge the shore, I lectured them on the inadvisability of using surf boards without the appropriate tuition. Just then, a wave of some fifteen feet or more toppled over me, throwing me up then down, tossing me like a minnow one minute, wrestling me to the seabed the next. Stunned and half drowned, I floated like the carcass of a whale until the family stopped laughing and had the good sense to pull me on to the sand. A fussy black doctor called me an idiot under his breath and tersely informed yours truly that I had cracked two ribs and would have to be strapped up.
The capital of St Lucia is a smelly dump (well, it was then) called Castries and most of it was boarded up, so it was Thanks Be To God that after three nights of steel bands, insect bites, baritone frogs and darting lizards, malaria, beri-beri and potential leprosy, my tight-lipped, pale family and I staggered up the gangplank and kissed the decks of the good ship SS Countess. The wife and children were sea-sick the moment the ship glided away from the harbour, and I spent two wonderful days and nights getting absolutely pissed with anybody who would drink with me. I had purchased a superb and expensive camera with which to record this momentous trip, and in Venezuela as I posed the family under the celebrated statue of Simon Bolívar, somebody’s foot got in the way of my appendage and I fell in front of a shabby taxi. The driver braked, his rusty conveyance knocked over a fruit stall, and somebody called me ‘a gringo bastardo’. Incidentally, the camera was in bits; no photographs to bore the relatives with.
My son’s diarrhoea was the talk of the ship and several sensitive people suggested a long period of quarantine or a court martial. The smell from our cabin and his trousers became quite unbearable and on at least one occasion he was attacked with an air freshener. The swimming pool was never used despite the rather hot weather, and I couldn’t understand why until one morning I jumped in – I have known cold in the past but nothing to compare with the freezing waters of that pool. Within seconds my skin was a deep blue colour and my genitals had shrunk, never to resume their former health.… to this very day I can only enjoy sex with the aid of a radar beam to locate the equipment of desire. Throughout this disaster I only had to look into Meg’s eyes and laughter took over.…
The liner docked at San Juan, Puerto Rico, and I hired a taxi to show the family the sights. It gave me an excellent opportunity to practise my Spanish, and the driver, a fierce little man with a facial boil, congratulated me heartily. At the end of the trip I gave him a tip, and to my astonishment he damned near kissed my sandals. When he drove off I realised why – in his currency I’d given him a hundred pound note. I ran after the taxi shouting ‘Spanish bastardo!’ The cab sprouted an arm on the end of which two fingers were raised. The rest of the ill-fated, doom-laden vacation was spent vomiting as the ship crashed through mountainous seas, and I inherited my son’s diarrhoea.
That is why I am not very fond of travelling!
Going up and down the motorway every week was driving me nuts, and at the close of the season I wasn’t sorry to see the back of Blankety Blank for a bit.
Julie came home from Nottingham on an extended leave because, although domestic nurses came every day to wash Meg and tend to any soreness she was getting from sitting too long, Julie wanted to be with her mother. It was a boon for the family that Julie also took over the cooking: my efforts at the culinary art were so bad. I once tossed a pancake – I’ve no idea what I put in the mixture, but for three months I used it as a pelmet.
By this time only will power was enabling Meg to walk even a few yards. Something had to be done.
Meanwhile, the pantomime season was upon us. That year, thanks to some adroit bargaining by my agents, Norman Murray and Anne Chudleigh, I was headlining in Manchester at the magnificent Palace Theatre. The panto was Babes in the Wood, my favourite of all time. Also on the bill were Ruth Madoc of Hi De Hi fame (playing principal boy); John Nettles, a classically trained actor who was enjoying television success with a detective series called Bergerac (playing the villainous Sheriff of Nottingham); my lovable inventions, the Roly Polys, two stars of children’s television, Mark Curry and John Noakes, from Blue Peter, and a fine young singer, Louise English, as Maid Marion. I, of course, was billed as Nurse Ada, which meant I had a free rein to do what I fancied … within reason.
Rehearsals started in London and it gave me the chance to carry out my duties as King Rat and attend Lodge. To be King Rat in the Grand Order of Water Rats is an honour and a privilege. To be chosen by one’s own profession, it is a true accolade and tribute from one’s peers. After rehearsals in a gloomy church hall in Lambeth, a place so old the woodworm spoke Latin, I would dash off to various venues to help raise money for the charities that most concerned the Rats, and to oversee the monthly Lodge, which consisted of facts, figures, fun and comradeship.
Whilst I was rehearsing, I was absolutely thrilled to receive an invitation to attend a function at Buckingham Palace. Meg had been invited, too, and although I was informed that a ramp was available for wheelchairs, she declined the offer and I fully understood.
Rehearsals w
ere not going that well.… For a start, John Nettles had broken his leg whilst filming and so he was hopping about the dusty, depressing rehearsal-room on a crutch that must have seen service in Treasure Island.
As an actor John was quite superb, but at first I had the distinct impression that pantomime was not his forte and that the idea of a legitimate actor working as a double act with a variety comic did not seem to sit well with him. But how wrong I was. He was superb. All the stuff we did together was magic.
With rehearsals over, I would drag myself across from South London – not my favourite part of the Great Metropolis – to my Marble Arch hotel, where I would telephone home to see how Meg was. It was a ritual.
I left the rehearsal-room early the day I was due to attend Buck House, and it was just as well I did for the traffic had snarled into a static, choking, metal snake. The Lord only knows how long it had been stuck on Chelsea Bridge, but there was a car in front of me with a nodding dog in the rear window – and it was a skeleton.
I’ve never seen anything like it – they were even clamping pedestrians. Inside the cab I inwardly fumed. Tonight I was due to enter Buckingham Place – a dream – but if I didn’t get out of this foul-up soon, I’d be so late for the ‘do’ Prince Charles would be on the throne. God bless the cabbie I had … he weaved and twirled around odd little backwaters and eventually got me to my hotel with only forty-five minutes to spare. I went across to the taxi rank to book a cab for later, and when I informed the cabbie of our destination, he sprang to attention and gasped, ‘Gawd blimey, Les, this is a job for the Merc.’
Half an hour later, after a shower, a change into something more appropriate for the occasion, and two or three large whiskies, I sallied forth from the hotel, and there, gleaming seductively, was an old Mercedes saloon. My cabbie stood by the rear passenger door, wearing a black peaked cap and leather boots. He looked like something out of a pre-war German movie. He saluted and said: ‘I fort ’ard do it in style, guv.’ I grinned. ‘You look great, my old china, and now, let us away to the Palace.’ He smiled as other cab drivers made rude remarks at him. ‘F … awf,’ he said winningly, and we rumbled away towards our destination.