by Paul Daniels
It wasn’t until I came home that I saw what the Daily Mirror had done to us and I heard how my mother had cried. Looking at the diary, I noticed that I had been booked to perform at Robert Maxwell’s birthday party, at his house near Oxford. I telephoned Mervyn to ask how strong the contract was and told him that there was no way that I could work for them after the way his newspapers had treated me after the wedding. I knew that if I was allowed on stage in front of that lot, I would not be able to resist letting fly.
‘I promise you, I will ruin that birthday party.’
Mervyn broke the contract.
The years at Sherwood were very happy. We loved the people in the village of Denham and everyone was very friendly. I had also taken on board a wonderful family, the McGees. Debbie’s mam and dad are great and became good friends with my mam and dad. Robert, Deb’s brother, sadly supports Chelsea, so there’s no hope there. Donna, Deb’s sister, is gorgeous and full of life. For years, she and her husband, Simon, tried to have children with no success. They went in for the treatment, you know, the bottled stuff (I did offer her draught, if you know what I mean, with no success either), and one wonderful, wonderful morning I was driving along and I got a call to say Donna was pregnant. I filled up and I had to stop the car. Funny that, isn’t it? Normally you stop the car and then fill up. Now they have two fabulous boys.
Then we got mice. Dad offered to rid us of our infestation. Debbie was a little cautious about the use of baited traps at first, but reluctantly agreed after Hughie’s insistence that it really was the only way. The traps went down, and the next morning Debbie came running upstairs screaming that there was a squashed mouse in the cupboard in the kitchen. I was getting shaved at the time so I just passed a comment that Dad would be pleased. She phoned the Lodge cottage and asked for the ‘mouse murderer’ to come and remove the poor thing. A few moments later and the doorbell rang. The open door revealed Dad standing there dressed in top hat and mourning tails, ready to perform a funeral ceremony complete with tiny casket.
The last I saw of this ceremony was Dad walking funereally down the back garden with Debbie shuffling along behind him. She was as daft as him!
Dad was always incredibly fit and very strong. Standing 5ft 4in, he had a tendency to be a little on the stout side, all due to Mam’s fabulous home cooking. He worked for me into his seventies, not just on illusions, but also around the estate, mending this and fixing that.
It was just a few hours after arriving for a convention in Lausanne, Switzerland, that I got the bad news. Dad had suffered a heart-attack. The good news was that he was still alive and in hospital, so I grabbed the next flight home and within a few hours I was standing at his bedside. The attack had been mild, but he was very shaken. None of us, including Hughie, had expected such a healthy, active man to suffer such a heart problem.
I had recently read how, in America, doctors had put sensors on to individual cells of the human body. If the eyes could see the oscilloscope, the brain was able to detect the sensors very quickly and make the cell react. There was obviously some power in the brain to make the body react positively, if it could see the result. I explained all this to Dad and asked the nurse if the heart monitor could be moved so that he could see it. I told Dad that he could control his heart by looking at the oscilloscope and being positive and that’s what he did, sitting up in bed watching the little green screen. Whether it helped or not, I don’t really know, but it gave him a focus and a hope and the doctor said that his heart steadied very quickly.
A few days went by and I walked into the ward on my usual visit only to discover that Dad’s bed was empty. It gave me a shock, until a nurse informed me that he was further down the ward mending something. Dad was underneath a bed with a screwdriver, fixing the mechanism. As we trotted back to his cubicle, I heard him say to a guy with a Zimmer frame, ‘What are you using that for?’
‘It’s helping me to walk,’ came the reply.
‘No, it’s not. You’re leaning on it,’ Dad reasoned. ‘Not leaning on it would help you to walk.’
Years before, Dad had developed an arthritic hip and when the doctors had told him to go to bed and rest it, he said, ‘if I do that, I’ll never get up again. I’ll do more exercise instead.’ This he did and slowly worked his hip back into full use again. I think the cod liver oil tablets also helped a lot.
Dad came home after his heart was shown to be in full working order and it was ten years before Dad suffered a stroke. I was so disturbed by the news, I can’t remember where I was at the time, but I dropped everything and ran to the hospital to find him once more. He had lost the use of his left side and was obviously very frustrated. I was distressed at seeing him in such a sorry state and wished I could do something to help, but no magic wand in the world could change things. It was down to Dad’s strong willpower again.
The hospital worried me though. It seemed that anybody over 70 was not worth taking the trouble for. Some of the staff saw my dad simply as a piece of meat in a bed. Thank God for the few who didn’t and who took the time to really be caring. And the constant stream of doctors and nurses wanting the same information astonished me. Why weren’t these statistics written down, or computerised and made available to all who needed it? I found the whole place terribly inefficient.
When we eventually got Dad home, I built a contraption to help him stand up. I designed it in such a way that if he fell over while attempting this, it would always deposit him safely back into his seat. Dad was totally unaware of the side where the stroke had robbed him of all his senses. It wasn’t a case of it not working any more; as far as his brain was concerned, his left side simply didn’t exist. Hughie was desperately keen to recover his proper functions and his drooping facial muscles improved a little, but it was an uphill task. Roy, our stage manager, used to massage him for hours.
Dad also started to have fits and I would get a call from Mam, run down the drive and try to control the incredible strength that people in such a state develop. Both Trevor and I had real problems recognising that this man was the same father who had been so fit and active. Trevor probably found it a bit more difficult than me as, being the older of the two of us, I had to make myself get on with the situation.
Mam surprised us all with her strength to cope, even learning to drive again and took Dad out on various errands. When he started to speak fewer words, Mam got very irritated and tried to bully him into responding. Eventually, I had a quiet chat with Dad on my own.
‘For some reason, Dad, you’re being bloody rude to Mam who is caring for you. What’s the matter?’
It took ages to get the answer out of him. ‘I sound funny.’
As a result of the paralysis and perhaps because his hearing had been affected, his voice sounded peculiar to him and this was making him too embarrassed to talk. I wondered why the experts at the hospital hadn’t warned us, or given us some guidance on what must have been a common problem for stroke victims.
I brought an extension telephone into the room and called an old mate of his. They chatted on the phone for about half-an-hour.
‘Now, Dad, if you can chat to your friend a couple of hundred miles away and he can understand you, then so can Mam. You only sound funny to you.’ His face lit up with the revelation and we never had any further problems, though he always hated sitting around.
Ordering an electric wheelchair, I hoped it would provide him with some mobility. What I had forgotten was that because he couldn’t remember right from left, the first time he sat in it, he turned it on and wiped out Mam’s rose border.
In the middle of all this, I got a call from the Combined Services Entertainment group. These were the people who organised the entertainment for the British troops stationed all over the world. Debbie and I have done a lot of shows for the troops, having been to Germany, Cyprus, Belize, the Falklands and Belfast. This time they wanted us to go to Saudi Arabia. At the time, Saddam was creating a lot of trouble and Desert Storm was brewing. I knew Deb
bie was always a bit wary about the Middle East, having been trapped there once, so I said I would go alone and I intended to tell her when the time was ripe.
The right time never seemed to come along and the trip was getting nearer and nearer. Christmas was also not too far away and I didn’t know how to tell her at all. The telephone rang and Debbie answered it. A Daily Mail reporter asked her how she felt about her husband going into the desert. I heard Debbie say something about him having it all wrong and that I wasn’t booked to go anywhere so I crept out of the room. She crept after me and I had to tell her.
The Saudis didn’t mind us going in and protecting them but they banned all alcohol and entertainment. If we were in their country we had to live by their laws, which seems very strange to us free-thinking and liberal people, doesn’t it? To get around this, I flew in with a large camera bag into which I had stuffed a lot of tricks, small in size but big in their effect.
First we had to undergo gas-suit training, which I remembered from my army days so I got through that very quickly. Then, with Tom Spencer from CSE as my ‘bodyguard’, we flew out to Riyadh. That was quite a trip. I finished up doing shows on top of tanks, in tents, in sheds, on the decks of ships, in fact absolutely anywhere. I remember being amazed when taken out to lunch in one of the towns to see British children sitting in the restaurant. Their mother asked if they could have my autograph and I expressed my surprise. ‘Oh, it’s nothing. It’s all being puffed up by the newspapers,’ was her reply.
I had just left the greatest amount of firepower I had ever seen a few miles away in the desert. How anybody could be that sheltered from the truth I couldn’t figure out at all.
At one venue I landed by helicopter to be told that the Americans were going to scramble their helicopter force in an exercise. Suddenly, klaxons blared out and men came running, pulling on their gear as they did so. Row upon row of engines kicked into life and the first wave lifted into the air in a checkerboard fashion. If you can imagine all the black squares taking off first then you have the idea. No sooner had they cleared the front row than all the ‘white squares’ took off. In a couple of minutes, there was no sign they had been there other than huge dust clouds swirling in the air.
On one occasion, a television crew caught me being transported across the desert on a tank. At home, I hadn’t told Mam and Dad I was going abroad as they would have worried. Dad was watching TV and, despite still suffering from his stroke, was bright enough to spot me.
‘Where did our kid say he was working this week?’ he asked Mam, and Debbie had to do a lot of waffling to get out from under that one.
An armoured vehicle took me for a ride in the desert. We zoomed out of the camp, went a few hundred yards and the young commander swung the vehicle around a few times.
‘Right,’ he said, ‘where’s the camp?’
As far as the eye could see in every direction were tracks. I didn’t have a clue.
Again, I was asked for an autograph and it turned out to be for his very young children. He showed me their pictures.
‘I hope I see them again,’ he said. The madness of war.
I think that the biggest surprise to me was to find out that Saudi Arabia exported vegetables. As we flew over the desert, we could see large round fields being irrigated from the centre, the force of water rotating the long horizontal sprinklers. They told me that they had plenty of water that came from desalination plants. We had just gone through a long season of sprinkler bans at home.
Tom had promised that we would be home for Christmas and so, a couple of days beforehand, we made our way back to Riyadh. Our plane had left early. Nothing else was going home. I couldn’t fly back as a civilian because I had come in as military and had no visa. Tom and I went along the runway in the dark, literally thumbing a lift on anything going back to Europe. We went to Germany and I phoned Debbie from there. ‘What are you doing in Germany?’ she asked.
I told her, ‘You have no idea how big this desert is!’ We did the same thing again and thumbed a lift to England. Home for Christmas.
When we went to Croatia, we got a huge shock. The authorities were talking about getting the various factions back together. They never will. It would take a huge re-education over several generations to make them realise the stupidity of their dislike of each other. We went to one village where one faction, at about 2.00am, crept out of their houses with their hands over the mouths of the children. They didn’t use their cars as it would have made too much noise and woken the neighbours. These were neighbours that they had grown up with, gone to school with, gone shopping and played with. They left them to take a pasting from an attack they knew would come with the dawn.
On our last night in this awful environment, where we had seen drunken 14-year-old kids with automatic weapons shooting into the sky and tried to sleep with rats running around our hotel room, we got involved in a charity show that the troops themselves were performing. Our troops were raising funds in Croatia for a hospital in Southampton because they didn’t think there was any point in raising funds for people who lived so far in the past. The biggest auction fundraiser that night was Debbie’s knickers!
Wars and arguments that are the result of something way back in the past always get right up my nose. Why can’t we live in the Now and the Future, learning from our mistakes and creating a better world, instead of perpetuating the disagreements? If we lived in the past then we should never go to Italy for our holidays because the Romans invaded us, didn’t they?
It is all so silly. To show you how silly it is, when we went to Croatia, the British troops were under the overall command of an Argentinian general! Who won that war, then?
One winter it snowed very severely and our lawns were covered with glistening white, perfect for tobogganing. Dad wanted to go out. I borrowed a sledge, mounted a sun lounger on it, stuck Dad on that and pulled him around the garden. Dad sat like Father Christmas on his sleigh and laughed like hell.
He struggled on for some time before he had another major stroke and was rushed into hospital once more. This time it didn’t look good and we sensed that the end was at hand. Remarkably, he had told Mam that the last two years had been the happiest of his life, which made a mockery of the euthanasia question. I believe if most terminally ill patients are given enough love, care and laughter, they can have a great time.
As Mam and I stood over Dad, he started to have another fit. Mam, having been a nurse, knew the signs and ran out of the room. My dad, having been forever my hero, was finally leaving me. I couldn’t help him so I ran after Mam.
I was very upset at the funeral, but I have never really cried for him since. We were great mates, Dad and I, and we had a grand life together. There seems no point in grieving because it is the law of nature that we are all going to die. When Dad died, I was aware of the fact that life had moved on and I had to move with it. I believe that life continues in our genes, our chromosomes and DNA, and I feel sometimes that Dad lives on in me. I am a continuance of his life and believe that he, and I, will travel on in my sons and grandchildren, too.
This really came home to me one night when I was working a short season at the Prince of Wales Theatre again. The night before, I had some shrimps in a restaurant and I must have had a bad one, a really bad one. The show started and I felt a bit queasy. Martin was to close the first half and I made it up to my dressing room but by now I felt really ill. As I entered the dressing room I felt faint and dropped to the floor deliberately so that I wouldn’t hurt myself if I fell over. I crawled to the toilet bowl and tried to be ill. Waves of dizziness came swirling around me and I became my father. I know that sounds weird. It wasn’t a dream. I was still me, but filling me were all the feelings of my father.
Early in the second half of the show, I passed out in the wings and they took me to hospital where, for a while, life stopped for me but they brought me back again – obviously, or I wouldn’t be writing this. That was the only time I missed a show through illness.
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We sold the house in Spain and Debbie bought me a boat. We called it Not a Lot and it was a very fast petrol-engined Bayliner capable of over 40 knots. She really could fly. The problem was that although she was only berthed in Port Solent, near Southampton, I could rarely get down to see her. We loved it when we did but there was a period of about 18 months when we couldn’t. Regular performances, as well as charity work, filled the days, the weeks and the months.
Charity work takes up so much time but it is good to give something back. We once kept every charity request for a period of 12 months and it added up to an average of 27 requests a day. You can’t do them all so I homed in on a few. I am a Water Rat of the Grand Order of Water Rats. This charity is over 100 years old and originally was put together to look after people in showbusiness, but now looks after a wider range of charitable needs. Great names of the past – Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Maurice Chevalier and the like – were all Water Rats. As I write this, we have Bob Hope, Jimmy Tarbuck, Bruce Forsyth, Sir Harry Secombe and so many more amongst our membership. From film stars to pop stars to Punch and Judy men, the Water Rats work for charity. I am proud to have been elected King Rat twice. I also work for the Royal Theatrical Fund, an even older showbusiness charity. More publicly I am involved with the Yorkshire Cancer Campaign, a Barker of Variety Club, the Children’s Charity and a patron of Dystonia and the Multiple Sclerosis Centre in Reading. It’s all go sometimes.
Debbie and I decided it was time that we had a rest and went down to the boat for at least a long weekend. I telephoned an engineer that I know down there and asked him to clean her up, top to bottom and back to front. ‘It’ll be nice to see you again,’ he said.
Port Solent has fantastic facilities for sailors and we drove down to arrive in the early evening. Not a Lot looked great and I looked forward to taking her out the next day. That evening we dined in the marina, went to the pictures and used the shower and toilet facilities, always immaculate, on the dockside. We went to bed on board and fell sound asleep.