Paul Daniels

by Paul Daniels

  Let me go back in time a little. Throughout my time at Eston Urban District Council I had dreamed of girls as well as magic tricks. I had dated but it never went much beyond kissing. Since time began man has constantly tried to get woman into bed, or on a grassy knoll. I’m not sure that I would have known what to do in either case. I had read about it and talked about it with my mates, but when it came to the real thing it was still a frightening prospect. I could easily chat up the opposite sex; it was taking it to the next stage that seemed to elude me. I had a strong hunch that my colleagues boasted about escapades that were based more in their minds than in reality. Men, gathering in groups, have always claimed more than they have ever done. If we were to put a tax on sex, maybe we wouldn’t collect as much as we think we would, I thought then.

  In an age when the ‘pill’ was unavailable and the female revolution in its infancy, sex was indeed a very risky business. Pauline had come and gone, as had my dreams of Irene. I had met a nice girl on a trip to Luxembourg but I didn’t want to know her when I got home again. Margaret Dawkins had been nothing more than a magician’s assistant to me and finished up marrying another friend, Don Freary. On the other hand, Avril was somehow special. I’m not sure where we met, maybe at the college I went to in preparation for accountancy in Middlesbrough, but I fell in love with the pretty blonde sufficiently to become engaged just before I joined the Army. Inviting me round to her house one evening, she deployed all those tactics women use to lead us lads astray. Well, maybe not astray, but to pop that question. What an innocent I was. Playing a record announcing it was dedicated to me, called ‘Mr Wonderful’, it was all too much for me and I dived in with a proposal. We nearly had sex but didn’t because the awareness of having to go away for two years was stronger than my desires. The last thing I wanted was to get this girl pregnant just before I marched off. Sex could wait, I thought, but sadly Avril didn’t. By the time I returned from the Army, she was in another man’s arms.

  So I sailed for Hong Kong in July 1957 on the Empire Fowey still a pale-faced virgin. Hundreds of soldiers were on board heading for the Far East. There was a lot of discussion as to whether we were going around South Africa. If we did, we would visit Cape Town and legends had drifted back to the barracks about the incredible hospitality shown to British troops passing through.

  Some of the lads on board were seasick while we were still tied up waiting to sail, and as we cleared Southampton Water, the ship started to rock and roll. Heading for the Bay of Biscay, more and more men started to head for the ‘head’. This 28-day journey to Hong Kong was not going to be a luxury cruise. I was fine, not even queasy, until I needed to go to the ‘head’ for normal purposes.

  The ‘head’ is nautical terminology for the toilets, located at the front, or ‘head’ of the ship. They were originally round holes cut out of the overhanging deck, positioned there since early Navy days. The British Navy had come on a long way since Trafalgar and it was once inside the ‘head’ I discovered that the Forces think of everything. Bolted alongside the walls of the latrines were metal troughs expressly for the purpose of vomiting in. A long metal rail ran the full length of this over the centre and was fixed at the perfect height for the men to hold on to and lean over as they brought up their insides. The sight of the deep steel canal filled to capacity with what seemed like the biggest collection of warm vegetable soup was too much to bear. As the ship rolled so the stuff sluiced one way and then the other. One whiff of the disgusting stench and I swiftly joined the row upon row of my colleagues at the ‘bar’. By the end of the day, my stomach was still ‘on fire’ because there was nothing left in it and yet I was still retching. When you are seasick you pray for an early death.

  It turned out that we were to be the first ship through the Suez Canal after the recent Suez crisis in which Colonel Nasser had seized control of the thin strip of water that ran through his country. This waterway was an essential oil supply route for Europe and fortunately urgent diplomatic efforts short-circuited the seriousness of the situation. It cut our journey by weeks but we missed out on seeing Cape Town.

  It didn’t matter. My Northern eyes saw sights that were hard to believe. From the Mediterranean and into the Red Sea, out into the Indian Ocean and across into the Pacific – it may all sound glamorous and, at times, the sight of the ship cutting through the glass-flat water was a spectacle, but the Army still held drills and shooting practice and all that jazz. Arriving in the Suez Canal provided its own entertainment with ‘bumboats’ crowding around the ship trying to sell souvenirs. I guess the closing of the canal had hit their business hard. Negotiations were made by shouting down the side of the ship and baskets were lowered on ropes to raise and lower the goods and the money. A failed deal, or even a bad deal, resulted in the locals mooning us. Maybe that’s where the name of their boats comes from.

  On our journey through the canal we could see Russian MiG fighters standing on the horizon. We considered them a threat until I looked at them through a telephoto lens and I could see quite clearly that they had no engines in them.

  The gulli-gulli man came on board at Suez. This character was an eastern magician who was allowed on board to entertain the troops and hoped to receive something in reward. It turned out that there are a lot of gulli-gulli men. The funniest thing was, that having looked forward to seeing this master of oriental trickery, I was surprised to noticed that all his props were from a magic dealer in London! Davenports, the magician’s paradise, was renowned throughout the world, I knew, but this seemed too far-fetched.

  He had other exceptional examples, however, that were simply wonderful, including performing the cups and balls routine with tiny live chicks. Having arrived with several eggs, which he carefully placed in the heat of the ship’s engine room, by the time we had sailed down to the end of the canal, the chickens were hatched and our mystic conjuror had his props! He was an extremely adept performer and made such an impression upon me, that I was to use this classic effect to open my act for years to come – minus the chickens, of course!

  Borrowing a coin he would immediately throw it overboard and after pronouncing his magic words: ‘Gulli-gulli, gulli-gulli,’ he would ask the spectator to look in his pocket, whereupon the same coin was produced.

  When the gulli-gulli man, nicknamed after the magic word he used, left the ship at the next port, he would take the chickens with him and sell them at a profit, to buy more eggs. Apparently, he ship-hopped in this way all year round.

  All in all, I didn’t think he was particularly brilliant, but my shipmates did. It was then that I realised the benefit of a foreign accent: if he’d been British, he would have been booed off. Later in life, I was to meet quite a few gulli-gulli men and some of them are extraordinarily good at the art of magic.

  The sleeping arrangements on board were interesting. The lower decks were filled with rows of upright poles that supported three bunks on each side one above the other, six in all, but the rows went on for ever. How many men were on our ship, I couldn’t imagine, but there were hundreds, possibly thousands, from all the differing regiments and corps of the Army. All I knew was that you really didn’t want to be in the bottom bunks during the time people were getting used to the sea.

  Amazingly, as I made my tour around the Navy’s pride and joy, I came across another magician. He was also experienced in hypnosis and was able to cure my seasickness problem almost instantly. Hypnosis is a combination of voice and rhythm, but you need a quiet room for it to take effect. All we could find on board this heaving hulk was a shower cabinet. As I sat in there, hoping the showerhead wouldn’t drip on me, I let myself relax under the calming influence of my new friend. Having read up on the subject, I realised there were many different levels of hypnotic states. I had no fear as the technique really involved self-hypnosis, realising it was often a case of needing a voice to guide you along. I also knew I had reserved, in spaces in my mind, the right to refuse what he would suggest to me. For the chance that this
awful condition could be removed from me, I was more than happy to ‘let go’.

  I could hear his gentle voice drifting into the background of my mind, but I was awake the whole time. He finished with a smile and I apologised saying that it hadn’t worked for me. ‘But you’re not feeling sick any more, are you?’ he enquired. I agreed with a ‘Wow!’ and from that moment enjoyed every minute of our four-week voyage.

  Chatting afterwards, I found out that he was a manipulator and an expert with cards, coins, balls and cigarettes. He could make them appear from the most impossible places and I’m sure if he was completely nude and in a glass fish tank, somehow he would have been able to produce a set of billiard balls. He was also in the medical corps, where I felt his magic skills would probably come in quite handy.

  The performance of our various skills became invaluable tools on the long haul across the ocean. Any magician should be able to work without proper equipment and be able to entertain using the things that surround him. A pack of cards was always available and is probably why so many tricks have been devised using this common ‘toy’.

  Pocket Magic, as it was called, was my forte so I was in my element on board ship, as we astonished crewmen with the many effects we created. I thought he was a brilliant magician but he performed in the then quite common style of being very serious during the act. It was probable that my friend had been brought up in an age where this type of magic was akin to a juggling act. Manipulators would even reveal how the effects were done because the dexterity in performing them was greater than the trick itself.

  Despite his excellent abilities, he had respect for me, too. Strangely enough, these impromptu shows were an essential ingredient in laying the foundations for future presentation techniques. Although I was obviously not as skilful as my magic partner, it was the comedy and my enjoyment of what I was doing that brought what I did to life. As a result, there was a strong awareness that the audiences on-board ship liked my magic better. I couldn’t understand this at the time, but later I was to have a greater appreciation of the power of laughter.

  Nevertheless, there was a surprising interest on board and word of my own performances must have got around for I was soon summoned to appear at a party in the Officers’ Mess. It was an early taste of a sort of on-board Royal Command Performance, for none of the other soldiers were allowed in these quarters. Not keen to disobey an order, or miss an opportunity, I prepared as best I could for the evening’s work ahead.

  The Officers’ Mess was luxurious compared to the grey metal surroundings that the rest of us had. I began by presenting an adaptation of the gulli-gulli man’s coin trick, which I had logically thought through that day, point by point, eventually making it more baffling. Again, but without deliberately heading for it, comedy was an important element, as I borrowed a coin and had it marked by pencil. Another officer chose a card, which was again marked, this time with his name. Me being me, I then gave the coin, which had been wrapped in the card, to the Padre. We had both a Roman Catholic and a Church of England Padre on board, and I asked them to take the coin and card and throw them overboard.

  ‘Would you please go together,’ I joked, ‘as I know you don’t trust each other!’ and got my first laugh. Just before they left through the door, I asked them to check the card and coin, which were deemed to be correct. Upon their return I even got the pair to swear on the Bible that they had indeed thrown the whole package overboard. When we opened the Bible, there was the card and the coin inside. The night wore on with me doing impromptu magic around the Mess.

  Next day, I woke up at three o’clock in the afternoon with a head that thumped like HMS Victory’s cannon and a very furry tongue. An officer passed by, saw me and said, ‘Daniels, you’re a bastard.’ Despite my pounding head and very unsteady feet I knew the correct military response. ‘Yes, Sir. I’m a bastard, Sir.’

  ‘On the other hand, you were quite amazing. Quite brilliant,’ he went on.

  This I didn’t agree to because I hadn’t a clue what he was going on about.

  ‘Sorry, Sir, I’ve got a headache.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, boy, the amount you drank last night emptied our bar! You said you didn’t want any. You said you didn’t drink but we commanded you. We had a plan you see. We had decided to get you totally pissed, so that we would see how you did it all. The frustrating thing was that the more pissed you became, the more baffling you were.’

  ‘Sorry, Sir.’

  My dulled and throbbing mind could not remember much of what I had done. The officer gladly went on to remind me in detail.

  ‘Finally, you amazed us all by having a card chosen, replacing it in the pack and then you threw the whole pack at one of the porthole windows. Damn me if the chosen card was there, stuck to the window. On the outside! That’s when you said, “Sort that one out, you bastards,” and passed out. We had you put to bed.’

  As the previous night’s antics slowly returned to my brain, his final words hit me like a blow to the stomach, when I realised what I had done. As the officer walked away, I looked over the side and felt my face turn white. There is no such thing as magic, only acting, and at some point in the evening I must have stuck the card on the outside, but when and how I couldn’t remember.

  As I leant over the bubbling water below, I could see a painter’s hammock suspended over the side from one of the davits. I realised that during the evening, I must have gone to the toilet and seen the hammock that gave birth to the idea. Horrified, I imagined how in the pitch darkness I must have climbed down the ropes as the ship cut through the Indian Ocean and stuck a duplicate card on the outside of the Mess window. It had obviously made a big impression on the officers, but it made a bigger one on me when I remembered that I couldn’t swim! The thought that I could so easily have been swept overboard in the blackness stopped me drinking for the next 20 years.

  My magical friend laughed uproariously when I told him what had happened and we continued to swap ideas and tricks. He taught me how to do a classic coin roll, in which a coin is manipulated across the back of the hand with the fingers acting like a conveyor belt. Juggling a coin from your thumb to small finger is a very difficult task to achieve, but I was determined to master it before we arrived at port.

  As the ship continued on its way to Hong Kong, my magician friend got off at Singapore and I never saw him again. I wonder if he is still doing magic? The coin roll eluded me for most of the way. I just kept dropping the coin. I had to find a way to increase my concentration and I did. I stuck my hand over the side. Two shillings and sixpence, the value of the half crown coin, is a lot of money when you are a soldier on a total of 17 shillings and sixpence a week. As I practised with my hand projecting over the rail, I was amazed at the increase in my concentration. All the way to Hong Kong, I only dropped it twice and, by the time we docked, I had it mastered.

  As the boat pulled into the enormous harbour I got my first taste of the colony. This place was beyond anybody’s wildest dreams. The port churned with activity. Hundreds of ships, big and small, were constantly on the move. San-pans were tied up in their hundreds, as well as plying their trade to and from Hong Kong island to the mainland. I was told that there were people who had been born on those tiny boats, lived on them and finally died on them without ever setting foot on dry land.

  One of Hong Kong’s unique fascinations was the seamless way in which ancient traditions still thrived, even after 150 years of British colonial influence had been woven into 5,000 years of Chinese culture. Adventures to more than 260 remote islands, breathtaking hikes over rolling green hills to stunning white beaches and treks to charming Chinese fishing villages beckoned. Sadly, I had to pinch myself through my uniform to remind me of the fact that I was not on holiday.

  The heat was the first thing that struck me as we disembarked. Already, one guy had been flown back home with severe sunburn. He had inadvertently fallen asleep on deck and had suffered 30-degree burns. The poor red-headed lad looked like on
e huge blister and it was the best warning we could have had against the effects of the sun.

  The first advert I saw on dry land was for a shop called the ‘Wan-key’ and wondered if they had known about the frustrations of being on-board ship for a month. I was soon to find out that sex was just about the number-one commodity in this area.

  We were marched to a waiting truck, which took us across this most beautiful island, to the fine-looking garrison of Fort Stanley. Hong Kong was the most awesome and colourful place I had ever seen, with its bright lights and garish reds and golds and the girls wearing their cheongsam dresses split almost to the waist – I was constantly having to push my eyeballs back in.

  We had hardly settled into our new barracks before a crowd of soldiers were around us asking us about Blighty and the weather and any news. As usual, I pulled out a pack of cards and started playing with them on the bed. One of the lads who had travelled over with me asked me to do a trick and others soon gathered around to watch. One very flash cockney lad, I have no idea what he was doing in a Yorkshire Regiment, kept shouting out things like, ‘I know how you do that! I know how you do that!’

  I ignored him but he became more and more of a nuisance. Best way with a nuisance, involve him in a trick. I let him shuffle the cards, take one, show it to someone else in case he forgot it, put it back and shuffle them again. He agreed that I couldn’t find his card.

  I placed the whole pack face down on the bed. ‘Now I am going to deal the cards on to the bed. As I take them off the top of the deck, I shall place them face up on the blanket. Just watch carefully and when you see your card think of the word “Stop”, but don’t say it out loud, just think it.’

  I started to deal the cards face up on the bed until I hesitated with a face down card in my hand.

  ‘The next card I turn over will be your card,’ I announced.

  ‘I bet you it won’t,’ he grinned.

  ‘If it’s a bet, then how much?’