by Paul Daniels
AN AMAZING DISCOVERY
As 1953 approached, Europe quietly celebrated the demise of one of its most infamous dictators, Stalin. As well as the Russian leader, country singer Hank Williams, composer Sergei Prokofiev and poet Dylan Thomas also died. Even as 1953 was a year of death, it also heralded the key to life as two scientists at Cambridge University unlocked the mystery of DNA.
My days were filled with catching buses to and from school, reading magic books and struggling with homework that would have been easy if I hadn’t spent so much time on magic.
I tried to avoid sports as much as possible and looked like the skinniest white wimp of all time, well, at least to me. One of my worst fears was of going to the swimming baths. I couldn’t swim. Some people can’t and some people have negative buoyancy. I have it, my dad had it and my brother Trevor has it. We could sit on the bottom of the pool with lungs full of air with no problem at all, as long as we could stand up when we ran out of air. Dad should have been able to swim – he had six toes on one foot and they were webbed. Really.
Anyway, not being able to swim was a real pain. One day, in one of those small advertisements that you get in the Sunday papers (Are they still there? I haven’t taken a newspaper in years. I’ve read so many lies about me I can’t believe what they write about anybody any more. Shame, isn’t it?) I saw an advertisement for a ‘SECRET SWIMMING AID – Your Friends Will NEVER Know’. Wow, that’s for me! I sent off some of my earnings, and eventually a smallish, brown paper parcel arrived. What I told my mother it was I can’t remember, but I got it up to my room and opened the package.
This thing might have been secret when Victorians wore full-length bathing suits, but it certainly wasn’t going to be very secret now. It was a very wide rubber belt that came from above my waist to half-way down my thighs. Running up and down around the belt was a rubber tube, with a non-return release valve at the rear in the middle of your back and a mouthpiece that came up from the front.
God help me! I went to the beach with this thing rolled up under my normal bathing costume. ‘Your Friends Will NEVER Know’ – if they were blind, perhaps, because here was this skinny white kid with the most bulbous bathing costume ever around his loins. I walked out into the sea. The North Sea is very cold, even in summer. I walked out further. I had to get this thing underwater. Once the grabbing iciness had got to my waist I turned my back to the shore, rummaged around down the front of my briefs. I wonder what my friends, who would never know, would think that I was doing. I found the pipe. No, not that one, that one. I pulled it up and, still standing facing the sea, bent my head down and started blowing.
The sensation under the water was very strange. Very strange indeed. As the tubing filled with air it straightened itself out, pulling the belt both upwards and downwards out of my costume. ‘Flip’ up on to my stomach. ‘Flap’ down one leg, up my back, down the other leg. I wonder whether the guy who designed this ever used it. He was selling this contraption and risking a manslaughter charge if it didn’t work and I got drowned.
With one sudden, last big blow into the mouthpiece, which of course emptied my lungs, the belt became fully inflated and lifted my backside clean out of the water, thrusting my head under the waves. I was very aware that my Friends Will Never Know. They might have looked out to sea and wondered what the large black bum was bobbing about on the water, but I could rest assured that they would not connect it with me.
The advertisement was true! I was swimming! Well, I was flailing my arms around under the water trying to get my head back to the surface before I drowned but I couldn’t argue with the fact that I was afloat. A lucky wave arrived at the same time as I moved my arms in the same direction and I flipped briefly above the water, grabbed a breath and went under again. It might be of great interest to the designer to know that now I was bent over backwards, legs and head underwater, crotch floating upwards, and that the waves were carrying me nearer the shore. Again, that was lucky because I was able to grab the sea floor and stand upright. Fighting the gadget’s desire to flip me again, I found that the only way to get it off was to take off my swimming trunks, something that I was loath to do, so instead I fought my way around to the release valve situated in the middle of my back, grabbed it and pulled. The air started to come out in bubbles. As the bubbles rose in a direct line from my arse I can only assume that, although My Friends Would Never Know, they might well have got the wrong idea altogether as to what I was doing. I never used the SECRET Swimming Aid again.
The learning of magic continued and I could think of being nothing other than a magician. The problem was that I had no idea how you became a professional magician. I shared my thoughts with my parents who tried to dissuade me with the old argument about getting a ‘proper’, secure job. Their brushes with showbusiness had all been through my father’s stepsister, the infamous Auntie Maureen. The family rumour was that apparently she had had eight husbands, and none of them were hers! With my parents’ insistence that magic should remain a hobby, I had to content myself with showing my tricks to school friends.
I had left the Mission Sunday School by now and joined the Normanby Road Methodist Chapel for the highly religious reason that it had a better youth club facility. On my very first visit there, I watched other members running up to a vaulting horse and diving head first over it into a forward roll aided by a springboard.
‘I’ll try that,’ I thought. I ran. I hit the springboard. I flew through the air. I forgot to roll and landed right on the top of my head and invented the ramrod landing. What a natural athlete I am.
One evening I could not attend the club and that was the meeting when they organised a concert. Various members were assigned to perform and, in my absence and because I was always doing tricks, they put me down to do a magic show among a few other acts.
In true Variety style I was to appear singing as one of ‘The Bold Gendarmes’ and then dressed as a baby with ‘Sisters, Sisters’ before my solo six minutes to prove my conjuring worth. I was determined to do well and spent several weeks sorting out what to do, rehearsing and honing my craft. Up until this time, I had only performed magic from the pocket. Now I was being asked to do a spot in a hall, which was quite different. Being able to purchase props was out of the question, so everything I used was created from cardboard boxes and steel coat hangers. A lot of searching through notes and magic books helped me choose what to do. I had stopped reading any other books by this time anyway. Looking back I am amazed at my choice of magical effects. The act would work for me now, if I chose to do it.
Then, nervously standing in front of the mixed crowd, I began to perform the multiplying billiard ball manipulation routine. The balls appeared and disappeared between my fingers and I was delighted as the mums, dads, grannies and granddads laughed and clapped in all the right places. My assistant, complete with fishnet tights, was Margaret Dawkins, a young girl who had been cajoled into helping me. With a hat in one hand and a pack of cards in the other, Margaret went down into the audience and invited a member to shuffle them and throw them into the hat. Bringing the hat back on-stage, I did a routine called ‘Seeing with the Fingertips’ and with the hat held above my head, pulled out the four Aces.
My grand finale was the production of a full goldfish bowl from an empty box, complete with two goldfish. By the time I was 14, my mind had already started to extend the tricks in the books and look for ways to make them more entertaining. I also wanted to adapt the tricks to my own style of presentation. I had bought the plans for what was called ‘the Inexhaustible Box’ for one shilling and sixpence from the Boy’s Own Magic Club in Prestatyn, North Wales. My dad made it for me and I produced the goldfish bowl from that. I was to use this box in all shapes and sizes for the rest of my career. What an investment that was!
Once the applause had subsided, I reached inside the bowl to grab one of the fish by its tail. The audience looked on in wonderment as I held the wriggling orange fish in my hand and quickly slipped it stra
ight into my mouth. I ate it. The audience grimaced and groaned.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ I announced. ‘Because there are children in the audience’ – remember, I was only 14! – ‘I will show you how this trick is done. What you didn’t know was that I had swapped the real goldfish for a piece of thinly sliced carrot.’
I showed them a carrot and took a small slice off it. I shook it about to make it look real.
‘This was what I swallowed.’
The audience laughed. I then dropped it into another bowl and it swam away. A gasp of surprise superseded the applause and I left the stage as high as a kite.
Twenty years later, I did a fund-raising show in the same hall and a young woman came up afterwards and said she remembered that I was ‘the man that had swallowed the goldfish’. We stood there for a moment and between us worked out that she must only have been two years old when she saw the show. This demonstrated to me yet again the power of the entertainer and his medium. When people say that violence in films and television doesn’t affect kids to a degree they are right. It doesn’t affect all kids, but it affects quite a lot. So why bother affecting them badly?
I went on to perform lots of shows in that club room, not only for the Youth Club, but also as a guest on the Young Wives Concerts as well. I can only remember what I did on the very first show, however, and none of the dozens of tricks that followed.
My parents continued to voice their concern at my seemingly addictive hobby. Doing my homework was an unavoidable evil that had to be completed before I could spend the evening developing a new routine.
Grammar school held a natural audience in the form of my peers who began to respect me for what I could do. I never bullied friends into watching my tricks, but developed the knack of drawing a crowd in. Sometimes this was done simply by practising an effect which others would be inquisitive enough to watch, and even Pietrowski, our Polish war hero, loved magic. If he walked into a classroom while I was finishing a trick he would join in. On more than one occasion, we did magic for the rest of the lesson and didn’t bother learning French. I became a linguistic ignoramus.
Mam and Dad were not all gloom and doom and were concerned not to discourage my love of magic. They took me to see the famous Australian illusionist, The Great Levante, who was on tour and visiting the Middlesbrough Empire for a few days. I can’t remember much about the show. I know that he vanished a nun in an organ pipe; he did the ‘One Thousand Pound Trunk’ trick which most magicians know better as the ‘Substitution Trunk’, and one of his great claims to fame in those days was the disappearance of a kangaroo. It would lie in a suspended net hammock with Levante’s beautiful assistant Esme one minute, and then they both instantly vanished as the net fell to the floor. This amazing illusion was always rewarded with a great ovation, to which Levante would make his exit.
This great magician was not only a master of his craft, however, but a clever manipulator of the press as well. Each time he visited a town he gave the local newspapers the story that his kangaroo had escaped. There was an abundance of free publicity to be gained from this story, but no one ever seemed to ‘twig’ that the animal was always found just in time for the first house on Monday night, accompanied by a whole range of celebratory articles in the press once again. I thought he was wonderful.
A strange thing happened during my early teens. Do all children have nightmares? I certainly did. There was the witch who chased me from the back yard toilet and, in my dreams, caught me as I woke up in a sweat. Another involved being chased by a lion and it pulled the skin off my back in one piece, again at the moment of waking. There weren’t too many lions in our area so maybe the Tarzan films were getting to me.
The most persistent of the nightmares were completely different to those two. In my dream, I was ‘floating’ along a lane and seeing everything through my eyes, rather than watching myself. When I got to the top of the lane on the left there was an old lych-gate that led into an old churchyard. Ancient, leaning gravestones surrounded the old church and, as I floated towards the main door, the L-shaped church offered another door on my right. I knew, in my dream, that the door in front of me led into the church and I knew, with increasing horror, that the door on my right hid Death. I could not stop myself. Against all my wishes I opened the door and woke up screaming. I never got to see Death but I knew it was there. This nightmare was with me for most of my young life and continued into my early teens.
One beautiful summer’s day a friend, Colin Mason, and I decided to go for a bike ride. We set off out of the Tees Valley and headed south. A car would do the trip nowadays in half-an-hour but the climb out of the valley is steep if you are only using your legs and bikes were not as light as they are now. We came to a village and Colin, who had been there before, told me that he wanted to show me something really interesting. We turned off the main road and set off up a lane. I stopped. I knew this lane. This was the lane of my nightmare.
Colin could see that something was wrong and I told him about the lych-gate at the top. He asked if I had been there before and I said ‘no’. I just couldn’t tell him about the dream and I couldn’t stop myself from seeing this through even though I was icy cold and terrified. We went up the lane and there was the gate, exactly as it was in the dream. We went through the gate and walked along the narrow church path to the building. I wanted to go in the main door, of course, but Colin said that what he wanted to show me was in ‘here’ and headed for the side door. I wanted to scream and I don’t know how I didn’t.
He pulled the door open and …
NOTHING happened.
Colin wanted to show me a narrow wheelbase bier. This, he explained, was used to wheel the coffin from the hearse in the lane along the narrow churchyard pathways to the grave.
As I pedalled home, my head was full of wild thoughts; was I a reincarnation, for example? Was my former body buried somewhere in this village graveyard and did I have some strange mental connection with my previous life? How else could I have known the lane so well and dreamed my dream?
I got home to the greeting that all young people get when they have been out for hours. ‘And where do you think you’ve been ’til this time?’
I explained that we had been for a ride to a village called Swainby. There was something in the way my mother started to say, ‘Ah, Swainby,’ and I burst in with, ‘We’ve been there. We were on holiday there in a caravan on the bend of a river and Cousin Ada was with us and Dad came in the middle of the night and …’
Mam looked at me in amazement. Apparently, all this had happened while I was still being pushed around in a pram. According to her, I couldn’t possibly have remembered it at all, being that young.
It is my belief that the gliding up the lane came from the view from the pram and, over my head, the grown-ups had talked about the bier and what it was used for. At that age I didn’t understand in detail the word ‘death’ and somehow later in my young life my brain cells had put it together with something horrible and created my nightmare. Ever since this realisation, I have always tried to talk in a positive manner to babies and young children. We learn at a very early age.
* * *
Meanwhile, back at the cinema, I was still showing movies and bobbing out of the tiny trapdoor of a door at the back of the ‘circle’ to watch them from the back row. I was sitting there one night, minding my own business, when a young man several years older than me, reached out and put his hand on my thigh. I never even thought about what happened next, it just happened. I can’t remember being told anything about homosexuality or warned, so what I did was just a reflex action. There was no fear, no excitement, no thought at all, I merely reached out with my left hand, grasped his wrist and with my right hand snapped his little finger. It cracked and he screamed, causing everyone to look round as he ran down the stairs and out of the cinema. Dad came running up the stairs and asked what had happened and I said I didn’t know, the man just ran out. Years later, in a working men’s club af
ter a performance, a drag act sat next to me and ran his spectacles up and down my leg. Again, without thinking, I reached out, took them and broke them. I guess I wasn’t destined to be gay.
Dad decided to learn to drive with the help of my Uncle Eddie. The only problem was that Uncle Eddie had not been taught how to drive a car. His qualifying claim was that he had owned a motorbike sometime in the Twenties and the licensing authorities considered him to have the necessary road experience to enable him to teach others. He was, therefore, the proud owner of one of the new driving licences being issued by the Government. Dad was pleased to surrender his tandem bicycle with sidecar attachment for an old car that he had picked up from a friend for just a few pounds. With manual dexterity beyond any textbook, Hughie would discover the secret of what was wrong with any part of a car and repair it. This mastery of mechanics was to be something my brother and I relied heavily on in later years, but for now I was content to see him transform the ordinary car into a smooth-running, luxury vehicle. Well, perhaps not luxury, but it was to us. He even re-upholstered it, Mam and him cutting out the foam and leatherette shapes and gluing it all together.
On his first trip, we all gathered outside our house and watched in amazement as Eddie and Hughie ran the coughing, jerking vehicle around the streets as Dad tried to come to terms with the clutch. A few moments later and they reappeared from the opposite direction with smiles and laughter echoing around the tiny saloon. Dad had obviously passed his first lesson, but would still have to wait for an official driving test in order to earn his licence. Dad decided that he needed more time than Uncle Eddie could give him for practising. He sat Mam in the front seat and told her to look as if she could drive. Off they went to Stockton, a nearby town, with Dad driving carefully, red ‘L’ plates mounted front and rear and Mam trying to look serious. These were the days of hand signals by drivers of cars and vans. You want to turn right? You stick your right arm straight out of the vehicle. You want to turn left? You stick your right arm out of the vehicle and make forward circles with your wrist and hand. Well, that’s the theory. If you are a young man in a bit of a state because you shouldn’t be there anyway, with an unqualified companion next to you, maybe you lose control a little. Dad did.