David Jason: My Life

by David Jason

  Anyway, my father had courageously stepped to one side of the family tradition of butchery and he was a fishmonger – firstly at Billingsgate and later behind the counter of the Mac Fisheries fish shop in Camden Town. He moved on from there to serve in another Mac Fisheries branch, in the Jewish community in Golders Green. A practical and resourceful man, he knew how to save a bob or two. He cut up an old bike tyre and stuck lumps of it around the front of his work shoes to form an improvised bumper against wear and tear and the cold water that fishmongers spend their lives sloshing around in. Thus rubberised, and making sounds like a pantomime horse, he would be up at four and trot off to work on his bike. Of course, 1940–45 were the years of the wartime blackout, making night-time cycling a potentially risky business. Sure enough, one dark morning soon after my birth, so the story goes, my father, his shoes and his bike dropped into a freshly made bomb crater. The bomb had dropped on the London side of the bridge at Archway, right in the middle of the road. It was so deep that it must have stunned him momentarily. He was down there for some time until the morning light dawned and some passing air-raid wardens heard his cries for help. They hauled him up to the surface, whereupon, as he stood dusting himself down, they could only express their astonishment. ‘Look at this bloke: he’s had a bomb drop right on top of him, and he’s still alive!’ My father did not correct them. He straightened the front wheel of his bike, smoothed down his hair and rode on to work.

  By all accounts, my father was something of a showman in the workplace, joshing with the customers, whom he loved, giving them a bit of a routine as he wrapped the haddock and the hake, messing about with the scales and the weights. It was probably his way of making the job tolerable, because a lot of the time he’d have been frozen and wet and on his feet for hours on end. (Arthritis would punish those feet for a lifetime of exertion when he was older.) In any case, piss-taking seemed to run on his side of the family. The term he and his relatives used for it was a piece of obsolete market trader’s slang: chi-iking. At work, and socially, my dad was forever chi-iking – bantering, winding people up. At home, though, the showmanship tended to go away and he was a rather broody, forbidding presence whom you did your best not to cross. He occasionally gave the impression that he didn’t much want us kids about. He adored my mother, though, and respected her, entirely aware that she was the brains that made the family work.

  So, to Mr and Mrs White, in the particularly cold February of 1940, a further son. Two further sons, in fact – twins. But only I emerged alive from the womb (or, as my mother would have put it, ‘the wound’). I was healthy, but my companion for those nine months simply hadn’t thrived. In the family version of these events, passed on to me as a child, I had been too greedy and eaten all the food. (Note how even this potentially sensitive area was not spurned as an opening for mild chi-iking.) The fact that I was originally one half of a duo would eventually give rise to a theory, much propounded in newspaper profiles over the years, that all my life since then has been a desperate effort to compensate for that stillborn brother. It’s a grand idea, though I fear the truth may be a lot more prosaic. After all, this incident, sad as it was, was something that dated back to the day I was born, about which my memories are bound to be a bit patchy. From my point of view, it was a distant curiosity, a piece of passed-down history. It was hard to feel it as a loss – or even as an event in my life.

  Still, the legend surrounding this biographical detail and its psychological meanings gained a further layer of decorative gilt after a pair of journalists visited my mother at home, late in her life, with flowers, warm smiles and open notebooks. Whereupon, over a pot of tea, my mother garrulously told her friendly visitors how delighted she was that I had taken the stage name ‘Jason’ in my twin’s honour. Furthermore (and here one can imagine the journalists’ biros starting to scribble especially quickly), the stringencies of the war, which saw so many public services suspended, had denied my twin the opportunity of a traditional funeral and so my mother had had no option, had she? She had buried him herself in the backyard.

  Well, I did mention that my mother liked to embellish a tale. I should also point out that she was, shall we say, well into her anecdotage by the point at which she gave this interview. (I remember her telling me over the phone, ‘I had a lovely chat about you with some journalists today,’ and thinking, ‘Uh-oh.’)

  So, just to straighten the record: I and my ill-fated twin weren’t born at home; we were delivered at North Middlesex County Hospital, as declared on my birth certificate. My mother, to the very best of my knowledge, buried exactly no bodies in our back garden, during wartime or any other time. And my twin, being stillborn, was unnamed. I owe my stage name to another source of inspiration altogether, as I shall relate.

  Now, it may well be that my parents were troubled by the baby they lost, and the life that never was, in ways that I wasn’t, and in ways that I never knew. I assume, at least, that they weren’t preparing for twins: in the absence of ultrasound scanning, the first they would have even known about my mother carrying two babies, rather than one, would have been at the birth. Did that make it easier to accept? I don’t know. I can only say that they always seemed entirely sanguine about what happened. Perhaps the times taught them to be so. After all, there was a war on. There was a lot of death about. People like my mother and father did what they could, and got on with being alive. And so did I.

  * * *

  NO BAD TURN-UP, of course, to have a fishmonger in the family during wartime. And no bad thing, either, to have an uncle who was a butcher. The war brought food shortages and strict rationing. Apparently, as a baby – in the absence of anything sugary or even a traditional dummy – I was given a carrot as a pacifier, so they must have been cheap and readily available. But like everyone else, my parents had to scrape and scratch to get what provisions they could, and anything extra was welcome. Which is why, one morning, after an air raid, Mrs Pressland called across the fence to my mother in a state of some excitement. ‘Mrs White,’ she shouted, ‘you’ve got a dead chicken on your roof.’

  Now this was quite a coup. The unfortunate piece of poultry had obviously been flung up there during the night’s destruction – manna from the skies. It seemed unlikely that the chicken had been innocently blasted from a nearby coop – this was London, after all, where not a lot of people kept chickens. But maybe a butcher’s shop had copped it, or just some unfortunate household’s larder. Didn’t matter, really. The point was, a whole chicken would provide our family with at least two decent meals, and stew from the boiled-up bones – and with no resort to the ration book. (My mother, incidentally, made the world’s greatest stews, sometimes from almost no recognisable ingredients whatsoever, and proudly and defiantly took her recipe’s secrets to the grave with her.) So my mother eagerly rushed upstairs to the room my cot was in, looked out and begin to devise a plan to get this heavenly delivery down.

  Except, as closer inspection from my bedroom window revealed, it wasn’t a chicken. It was part of a human arm. I’m not sure even the Presslands would have been hungry enough to boil that up.

  I was too young to know, but I often wonder what must have bulked larger in my mother’s mind at the moment she realised what had come to rest on the tiles: the sheer horror, or the disappointment at not getting a free roast. In any case, the local Air Raid Patrol was called and the warden turned up with a ladder and quietly bagged and removed the offending limb.

  The Luftwaffe never did manage a direct strike on 26 Lodge Lane, but they did manage to take out a stretch of three houses down the road. The assumption was that a German plane had got hit, and the pilot dumped his load in desperation as he struggled to get back across the Channel. There were strikes on Nether Street, Percy Road, Lodge Lane – you could follow the track of these discarded bombs across a map. Two hundred yards to the right and the despairing bomber would have taken down, at the very least, our outside toilet and anyone who happened to be in it.

  A nar
row escape for the Whites, then, and a cautionary illustration of the thinness of the thread by which all of us held our lives in those dark and tremulous days. Although, of course, had the bomb dropped two hundred yards the other way, it would have been nowhere near us. But that’s not as good a story, nor as good a cautionary illustration.

  So, the German armed forces failed to get me, and so, too, did my seven-year-old brother, although he also had a go. My mother checked on me one night, when I was just a few months old, and found Arthur slumbering in the cot on top of me and in grave danger of smothering me. He said he’d got frightened of the dark and had clambered in for company.

  A few years later, Arthur was again almost successful in seeing me off, this time by using an old canvas army shoulder bag, which we normally used to hold wooden play bricks, to strap me to the coat hook on the rear of the back door in the kitchen – with my compliance, I should add, because we both agreed that if he spun me round in this position until the bag was tight, I would then, when released, spin back and amusingly resemble a tangled parachutist up a tree. (Look, I was seven, right? I was just delighted to have my older brother condescending to play with me.)

  Actually, we were wrong about the parachute impression. As it turned out, my proximity to the door prevented me from spinning and unwinding in any way, and, accordingly, having turned blue, I didn’t resemble a parachutist at all, but, more closely, a hog-tied Smurf. Kids: don’t try this at home. The entertainment continued when, in what could almost have been a scripted moment, my mother entered from the other side of the door on which I was hanging, and obliviously asked, ‘Where’s David?’ At which point, my brother straightforwardly reported, ‘He’s on the back of the door.’ My mother shut the door to reveal me, bright blue, gasping my next-to-last breath.

  Obviously Arthur had some productive impact on my childhood, too. He spent a lot of time wheeling me around the streets in a wheelbarrow, like some kind of nobleman in an eighteenth-century litter. And he was the source of my early wardrobe – lots of hand-me-down clothes that I was sincerely assured I would ‘grow into’. In fact, I was assured I would ‘grow into’ a lot of things, including the large bike I received for Christmas, aged ten, to the pedals of which my father had to attach wooden blocks so that my feet could reach them. For a while there, I was touring the neighbourhood on what was, in effect, an orthopaedic bike. I didn’t exactly look suave and sophisticated. Then again, I had a bike: the joy of that fact overwhelmed any embarrassment.

  As it turned out, I was to get most of my growing done by about the age of fourteen when I reached five foot six and my body decided it had had enough of lengthening and left it at that. We shall have cause to return, periodically, to the advantages and disadvantages of my less than statuesque height in the course of this narrative.

  Around the age of eight or nine, though, I did become the proud owner of a pair of perfectly fitting wellington boots – a fantastic breakthrough if only because this meant I could now clamber down into the brook without soaking my socks. The brook was in the nearby park, and my big childhood mates Ronnie Prior, Ray Jeffers and I would head there to spend long afternoons building dams, prior to appointing ourselves fighter pilots and bombing those dams to bits by throwing stones and making all the appropriate noises while we did so. The war was over by then, but it lived on in our imaginations and our games – how could it not?

  Incidentally, in case, dear reader, you still have the appetite for this kind of thing: find a building site that has a large pile of soft sand – not sharp sand, but soft sand. Then push some house bricks around the sand to form a network of mountain roads. Then wet some of the sand and mould it to form tank turrets. Push twigs into the turrets to make guns. Now position these sand-tanks on the mountain roads and, from a distance of fifteen to twenty feet, attack the tanks with thrown stones. Hours of amusement can be yours. And no batteries needed.

  Lodge Lane when I was growing up was a quiet backstreet, mostly made up of houses, though it also included Smith’s the cobblers, and a greengrocer’s run by a family called the Olivers, who owned a horse and cart and would deliver the fruit and vegetables door to door. Every year they would decorate the cart and dress up the horse and set off for a rally in Hyde Park and would often return with prize rosettes, to the widespread pride of the neighbourhood.

  Also using a horse and cart, but to less popular effect, was the window cleaner, a largely cheerless soul who, as was the tradition, carried a bucket with him to collect up anything the horse left behind on its way through. I often found myself wondering – as you do – what would happen if you were to insert a firework into that bucket, when it was full, and then if you were to light the touchpaper on that firework and retreat. And one day, entirely in the interests of science, I found out.

  What would happen is this: there would be a muffled bang, followed by a really quite magnificent fountain of horse shit, much of it eventually attaching itself to both the window cleaner and his recently completed work. A splendid result. Except for the window cleaner, obviously. And I don’t suppose the horse was all that happy, either. Still. Nobody much liked that window cleaner. Or his horse, frankly.

  Lodge Lane also had an off-licence, Chubbs, where jugs of beer could be filled from taps. The railings outside the shop had been commandeered for the war effort and you could easily climb up and lean over into the backyard. If you were lucky, there would be a crate of empty pop bottles within reach and, with a willing accomplice behind you on the pavement, you could lift a few of them out and pass them back, and then take them into the shop to claim (or, in fact, re-claim) the deposit – though I think Chubbs wised up to that little racket eventually and started stacking the crates further from the wall. It was from Chubbs, incidentally, that I got my first Jubbly – a pyramid-shaped carton of frozen orange juice, and a complete treat. As the advertising slogan used to say, ‘Lubbly Jubbly.’ I would get to hear those words again, a lot further down the line.

  Then there was the street’s tiny shop-cum-cafe with four tables and chairs and, on its little counter, a battered tea urn and a dingy stove with a greasy, blackened frying pan. It was run by an ancient bloke called Harry, who was forever in a pair of exhausted, shiny-kneed corduroys and who had a wounded foot which prompted him to go about with a proper shoe at the end of one leg and a carpet slipper at the end of the other, held on by half a dozen elastic bands. I used to go into the shop on an errand to buy my mother’s cigarettes for her and find Harry grimly making tea and egg-and-bacon sandwiches for the local builders – salmonella on legs, you would have to assume, and unlikely to pass muster with the hygiene inspectors these days, but a key community service in any case.

  I was also responsible for bringing back my father’s Daily Mirror and, on Sundays, his News of the World, and running round to Radio Rentals, the electric appliance shop, to swap the battery for his radio set. No electricity, remember. For my father to listen to the Home Service of an evening, he required two electric ‘accumulators’ – unwieldy glass jars which enabled you to peer in at the metal plates, steeped in their mysterious liquid. You’d have one accumulator wired up to the radio, and the other on charge at Radio Rentals. For my part, I would eventually acquire a crystal radio set, which miraculously required neither batteries nor electricity. I kept it in my bedroom, twitching the whisker of wire to find voices or music, and lying in bed in the dark, me with one earpiece, Arthur with the other, listening to the great wide world.

  There wasn’t much to keep us off the streets in those days, although when I was about seven, my mother took me to church a few times – or, as she referred to it, ‘the House of God’. She wanted me to be religious. She wasn’t particularly religious herself, but she clearly believed it would be nice if I was. Perhaps she thought of it as an accomplishment, like playing the piano – something her son might do to make her proud. Anyway, on none of those trips to the House of God did she stay. She pushed me in through the door and left me there for the service while
she walked home. One Sunday, after depositing me, she had just got into the kitchen and was probably about to make herself a cup of coffee (or Camp chicory essence, more like, which was what passed for coffee in our house in those days), when lo and behold I turned up behind her. (This was easily achieved as the key to the front door always dangled on a string, fixed by a nail to the back of the front door, so you could simply reach through the letter box and pull it out. This was as good as asking burglars to come in and help themselves. But as there was very little for burglars to help themselves to, it didn’t seem to bother us much.)

  Seeing me, my mum said, ‘What happened? Why didn’t you stay in church?’

  I said, ‘I’ve come home. I’ve had enough.’

  She said, ‘What do you mean?’

  I said, ‘Well, I’ve been going to the House of God all these weeks, and every time I go He’s never at home.’

  To my seven-year-old mind, it stood to reason. Why wasn’t He home? If you went to Auntie Win’s, my dad’s sister’s, as we would for Sunday tea sometimes, Auntie Win was actually there. And you’d get a piece of cake if you were lucky. God, on the other hand, was never in. And as for a piece of cake, forget it. On top of that it was always so cold in there. So why would you go? Disillusion with religion set in right there.

  I probably figured my time was better spent playing Knock Down Ginger – that classic game where you rap on someone’s front door and run away, a sport, alas, with very few takers these days, in the PlayStation and Xbox age. A shame, really, because clearly Knock Down Ginger promotes a healthy, active lifestyle, especially if – as once happened with me – you have barely finished knocking when a bloke throws open the door and comes out after you.

  I promptly turned and scarpered, only to swivel my head and discover that this bloke was still coming. Normally blokes would just open the door and shout. So I put my head down and ran a bit faster. He was still on my tail. I went over a wall. He was still there. I ran and ran. He ran and ran. There was no losing him. Finally – at a point where London began to give way to open countryside, or so it seemed to me – I realised that I simply couldn’t run any more. I had to stop. This would mean getting a belt round the ear, I knew, but at least I wouldn’t die an agonised death by exhaustion, which seemed to be the alternative. So I leaned against the wall, trying to recover, and awaited my fate. My pursuer soon reached me and I braced myself for the clobbering that would surely follow. In fact, he leaned there too, breathing heavily for a while. And eventually, when he had composed himself, he said, ‘Well run, son. Bloody good run.’ And then he turned and walked back the way he had come – followed, eventually, at a slightly bemused and wary distance, by me. Needless to say he was taken off the list for Knock Down Ginger.