by David Jason
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Map
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Picture Section
Index
Copyright
About the Book
The long-awaited autobiography of one of Britain’s best-loved actors.
Born the son of a Billingsgate market porter at the height of the Second World War, David Jason spent his early life dodging bombs and bullies, both with impish good timing. Giving up on an unloved career as an electrician, he turned his attention to acting and soon, through a natural talent for making people laugh, found himself working with the leading lights of British comedy in the 1960s and ’70s: Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Bob Monkhouse and Ronnie Barker. Barker would become a mentor to David, leading to hugely successful stints in Porridge and Open All Hours.
It wasn’t until 1981, kitted out with a sheepskin jacket, a flat cap, and a clapped-out Reliant Regal, that David found the part that would capture the nation’s hearts: the beloved Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter in Only Fools and Horses. Never a one-trick pony, he had an award-winning spell as TV’s favourite detective Jack Frost, took a country jaunt as Pop Larkin in The Darling Buds of May, and even voiced a crime-fighting cartoon rodent in the much-loved children’s show Danger Mouse.
But life hasn’t all been so easy: from missing out on a key role in Dad’s Army to nearly drowning in a freak diving accident, David has had his fair share of ups and downs, and has lost some of his nearest and dearest along the way.
David’s is a touching, funny and warm-hearted story, which charts the course of his incredible five decades at the top of the entertainment business. He’s been a shopkeeper and a detective inspector, a crime-fighter and a market trader, and he ain’t finished yet. As Del Boy would say, it’s all cushty.
About the Author
Sir David Jason was born in 1940 in North London. His acting career has been long and varied: from his theatre work in the West End to providing voices for Mr Toad from The Wind in the Willows, Danger Mouse and The BFG; and from Open All Hours and The Darling Buds of May to his starring roles as Detective Inspector Frost in A Touch of Frost and, of course, Derek ‘Del Boy’ Trotter in Only Fools and Horses.
He lives with his wife, Gill, and their daughter, Sophie, in Buckinghamshire.
To my lovely wife and daughter, my family and everyone who has helped me on this journey; this book is for you.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
AS WELL AS the family members, friends and colleagues who appear in this book, there are some additional people I would like to thank for their support, advice and friendship:
Rod Brown; Ray Cooney; Les Davis; Jack Edmonds; Ray & Gloria Freeda; Suzi Freeda; Don Gatherer; Saleem Goolamali; Lady (Mary) Hatch; Jimmy Mulville; Dave Rogers; Lynda Ronan; Alan & Linda Smith; Giles Smith. A special thanks to Meg Poole.
And anyone else who knows me!
INTRODUCTION
By way of greeting, a brief recounting of my time on a desert island with no discs.
WHICH NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE shall I begin with? The one involving the thirty-foot drop at Ronnie Barker’s house? The one with the pair of pliers and the bare electrical wire? The one in which the giant polystyrene sugar lumps rained down on me from a great height? Or the one caused by the rogue Flymo in Crowborough?
Actually, let’s get to all of those later. For now, as our little appetiser here, ahead of the death-defying feast beyond, let’s cover the one where I almost cop it on a desert island in the middle of the ocean.
We’re talking 1996 – my first holiday with Gill, who was then my wonderful girlfriend and is now my wonderful wife. I’m fifty-six years old at this point, and we’re in the paradise which is the Virgin Islands, in a lovely remote spot, and I have decided to go diving. (I am proud to be able to call myself a qualified Dive Master, a fact I may mention in the following pages more than once.) A bad hurricane has hit these parts in the preceding stormy season and very few of the tourist operations are back up and running as yet. However, in the little town I drive to, there’s one diving place open and the girl in the office, who is an instructor, says she’ll get a boat together and take me out for a dive.
So off we go, puttering miles out into the beautiful blue open water, entirely alone there, and the instructor drops anchor and we strap on the masks and tanks and plunge in.
And it’s bliss, as diving usually is. My two favourite activities in the world: diving and flying. I am rarely happier than when deep in the water or high in the sky. Psychiatrists: help yourselves.
Bliss, then. Bit of a strong current down there on this occasion. But even a few minutes at forty feet below – I’d recommend it to anyone. We clamber back into the boat and get ready to head for home, but the anchor has caught and won’t come up. I volunteer to dive back down and free it.
All good. The anchor is now loose and I surface. Except that, while below the water, I must have got sucked into the current at some point without realising, and when I come to the top, I discover I have lost the boat. Or perhaps the boat has lost me. It makes no difference. I’m in high, pitching waves and twisting my head around in a state of increasing disorientation, and the boat is nowhere to be seen. Indeed, nothing is anywhere to be seen. Just miles of pitching waves, and me.
Panic, at this point, is obviously a decent option. But I try not to. There’s a motto we Dive Masters know well: ‘Stop. Breathe. Think. Act.’ I had that thoroughly drilled into me by my instructor in the Cayman Islands, Ray ‘Taffy’ Williams, a former soldier with plenty of stories to tell who became a great friend. ‘Stop. Breathe. Think. Act.’ Any minute now, I think, a wave will lift me and I will catch sight of the boat, or the boat will catch sight of me.
The waves do lift me. But I don’t see a boat. I appear to be alone in the ocean, miles from land, under baking sun and, as I am gradually realising, with increasing dawning horror, at the mercy of a current drawing me ever further outwards.
It’s at this point, anxiously swivelling my head from side to side, that I notice a tiny island. At least, I think it’s an island. It bobs in and out of my view. It’s some distance from me, but it might just be swimmable. Is there any other option? I don’t think there is. I start to swim.
The swim is exhausting. It seems to last for hours and saps all the energy from my supremely fit (obviously) and (if you don’t mind me saying so) highly shapely fifty-six-year-old limbs. But, dragging myself onward, I do eventually reach the island. Relief!
Except not. Perspective has played a foul trick. When I get there, it isn’t really an island. It’s more a broad, high, steep rock. No gently shelving sand to fling myself onto then, like in the movies. Instead, a tall, jagged cliff face, slapped by waves.
This inhospitable crag remains, though, my only plausible saviour. Assuming I can get onto it, obviously. By now my arms and legs are heavier than they have ever been. I have to use the waves to lodge me halfway up the rock. I try twice and fail and get washed back. If I don’t get on this next time, I’m not sure I’ll have the energy to try again. One last desperate effort …
I ready myself, ride the wave onto the rock, and this time m
anage to cling on and climb up. At the top of the rock is a small dip containing a shallow puddle of seawater flung up by the waves. I lie down in this puddle. And then I pass out.
I don’t know how long I’m unconscious for, but when I come to, I sit up and discover that – well, what do you know, and isn’t this just typical? – it was all a dream and, flooded with relief, I’m waking up back in bed with Gill in the safety of the apartment.
No, I don’t. Because it isn’t a dream. The bit about it being a dream was a dream. I am actually and indisputably on a rock in the middle of the ocean, under the still-baking sun.
But hang on. My eyes focus and there, out to sea, is the boat, plainly visible in the distance. The boat! The instructor is still out there, on the bright blue water, looking for me. I wave and shout. But the wind carries the sound away and she’s looking down into the water. She’s not looking at the rock.
I’m over here! It’s OK. She’s got to see me in a moment, hasn’t she?
I watch numbly as the boat completes a few more silent circles. And then, with a sinking heart, I see it turn and motor away, growing smaller and smaller, towards the thin ribbon of the coast on the distant horizon.
Abandoned. She’s given up on me.
Well, now I truly am stuffed. Washed up, a castaway. What would Robinson Crusoe do? Seek a source of food among the vegetation, no doubt, and begin to build a shelter. Yeah, well, cheers, Robbie. I’m on a flipping rock. There is no vegetation, nothing with which to build a bijou shack and start a cosy bonfire, and very little altogether in the way of possibilities, short of beginning a new life as a cormorant.
Again, I don’t know how much time now passes. But I do know that, as I sit there, staring mournfully across the wide expanse of totally unpopulated water, I have time to reflect. Just suppose it did end here. Just suppose the clock was now running on my final few hours, the reaper donning his terrible cloak and getting the scythe from the umbrella stand in his hall, prior to setting out. Just suppose I was, indeed, about to die. Well, you’d have to say, it had been a pretty good innings. Cut short, maybe. But a pretty good stretch. A lot of luck in there. A lot of good times, with some truly great people. And some really amazing success. Only Fools and Horses, The Darling Buds of May, A Touch of Frost, a few BAFTAs on the mantelpiece – not too shabby as CVs go. If it should all come to a halt right now, in a hot puddle, well, at the very least you would have to argue that it had been a busy and fulfilling life, and not bad at all for a working-class lad from north London who –
Oh, stuff all that. Here’s the fact: I don’t want to die alone on a rock. I don’t even want to die in company on a rock, given the choice. I want to be alive. I’ve got stuff I still want to do. I’ve got Gill somewhere back on that shore. Reasons to live.
But what’s this? A dot on the horizon, growing larger, getting closer. The instructor has returned to the shore for help, that’s what she’s done. There are figures in the boat. They’re searching for me. I wave and shout and wave and shout. Someone in the boat lifts his head and sees me. Now the people in the boat are shouting and waving and the boat is coming to the rock. I’m saved.
True story, dear reader. And like the tale you’re about to read, not one I have told before, though now, looking back at seventy-three, seems as good a time as any. Looking back, I should say, in a state of boundlessly grateful and sometimes puzzled wonderment at the unlikelihood of the journey that took me from where I started to where I’ve got to.
It’s a story of immense good fortune, I have to say. But with scrapes, and a few things worse than scrapes, along the way. For, as we’ll see, that day in the Virgin Islands was not the only time in my life when I thought the boat had gone and the boat came back.
CHAPTER ONE
Life during wartime. A long-standing mystery resolved. And sundry near-death experiences, one involving a tomahawk.
WHAT I REMEMBER is being extremely young and hearing thunder and feeling the walls of the house shake and the floor beneath us tremble and fearfully asking my mother what was going on. And my mother holding me close and saying, ‘It’s nothing to worry about. It’s just God moving His furniture around.’
It wasn’t, in fact. It was Hitler moving London around – something the German Chancellor seemed to be particularly keen on at that point in his career. I was born on 2 February 1940, five months after the outbreak of the Second World War, and even though those five years of global conflagration quite clearly had nothing to do with me, the Luftwaffe nevertheless pursued me from aeroplanes, with impressive enthusiasm, for all of my tenderest years. Which is why I associate my earliest days with the smell and taste of brick dust.
My brother Arthur, seven years my senior, was eventually evacuated to the safety of the countryside, like half a million other London children. But I was too young for that, so my infancy was spent in war-torn north London, where, upon the sounding of the air-raid sirens, I was periodically strapped into a government-issue gas mask, an infringement of my liberty which, apparently, I bitterly resisted. Then I was made to lie down with my parents in the Morrison shelter – essentially an indoor wire-mesh cage which doubled as a stout dining table and which gave you a fighting chance of surviving in the event that your house collapsed around your ears. As the printed letter that had come round from Mr G. Beach, Air Raid Precautions Officer for the Borough of Finchley, had kindly explained: ‘Protection in your own home is an excellent alternative to communal or public shelters, and it conforms to the principle of dispersal which experience has proved to be a wise one.’ Excellent and wise, indeed. So, there, amid the distant and not-so-distant crumps and crashes and all the awesome noises of destruction, my mother would lie with me, dutifully honouring the principle of dispersal, and doing her level best not to transfer her fear. It was just God, moving His furniture around.
We kept my infant gas mask in the house for many years; it was like a rubber deep-sea diver’s helmet, but designed to hold the baby’s entire body, with drawstrings at the bottom. Long afterwards, I used to get an eerie feeling just looking at it.
We were the White family and for some reason the target of Hitler’s frustrated anger included our tiny terraced house at 26 Lodge Lane in Finchley – so tiny that when you opened the front door, you almost fell up the stairs, which were right in front of you. It was a three-up, three-down. There was a front room, which we were never allowed to go into except at Christmas and, presumably, in the event of a member of the royal family happening to drop in, although, in my recollection, this rarely happened. Beyond that was the middle room, where the open fire was and where the whole family sat and listened to the wireless – and where, much later, we gathered to watch the television. Beyond the middle room was the kitchen, and beyond the kitchen, out in the backyard, in a lean-to, behind a latched wooden door, was the lavatory – all mod cons. But no electricity, of course: electric light didn’t come to Lodge Lane until the early 1950s. Until then, it was gas lamps, with their fiddly mantles and constant hiss.
And then upstairs were three bedrooms, although one of them was really just a box room – a box room suitable only for a very small collection of boxes. That was where my sister June slept, after she came along, seven years after me, in 1947. I shared with Arthur, a cosy arrangement which prevailed for nearly a decade until he left home.
My mum, Olwen, worked as a maid in a big house in the well-to-do suburban part of Finchley. Her employer, always spoken of with great reverence in our house, was Mr Strathmore, a portly judge. Mum had found work with him when she left Wales as a young teenager, fleeing her drunken and violent father – not a passage of her life that she was much inclined to speak about. At first Mr Strathmore employed her as a live-in maid, and even after she met my dad, married and began renting a house of her own, she still went there in the day to clean.
She took me with her to work one day and I remember, as she unlatched the gate, being staggered by the grandeur of this place – a detached house in its own garden,
of all things, with its own drive. I went back and looked at it many years later, and, comparatively speaking, it wasn’t all that grand. But at the time, to a kid from Lodge Lane, it was a place of unimaginable richness – something from another world entirely. When my mother eventually retired, Mr Strathmore gave her a Japanese silk print of cherry blossoms – again, a rare and exotic item in our terms. It hangs in my house to this day.
There were no books in the family home, but my mother was a bright and talkative woman who loved a gossip and a story, embellished or otherwise, and was given slightly to malaproprisms: family lore has her leaning over the fence and solemnly informing Mrs Pressland from next door that the woman over the road had gone into hospital to ‘have her wound out’. And she was Welsh so, of course, she sang. One vivid vignette in my mind: being cuddled up with her on the sofa in the dining room on a dark winter afternoon, just the two of us in the house, the fire lit, her singing me Christmas songs as snow fell into the yard. In truth, physical affection and displays of emotion were rare, and moments of intimacy, too. But that wasn’t just my parents: that was how people were. It didn’t feel like a lack. We knew we were loved.
My father, Arthur, was a porter at Billingsgate market. His brothers were butchers – indeed, if you climb back through my family tree, butchers crop up a lot. It turns out that I come from a long line of people who knew how to wield a meat cleaver. There was a notable exception in the form of my great-great-great-great-grandfather (roughly speaking), back in seventeen-hundred-and-frozen-to-death, who owned a brick-making business in Sussex and was apparently an extremely wealthy man. But no sooner had the White lineage finally come into some money than one of the sons immediately blew the fortune away – drink and women, no doubt, and the rest of it, I’m sure, he wasted. And after that, everyone went back to being butchers again.