by David Jason
* * *
HOLIDAYS BEAT SCHOOL, of course. I attended Northside Junior School and then Northside Secondary Modern, as they called it, without noticeably raising the bar, scholarship-wise, at either – and certainly not at the former. At primary school, Miss Kent read us the Greek myth of Jason and the Argonauts in daily instalments, and that fired my imagination. But that was pretty much where my interest in the classroom started and ended. Learning wasn’t really my thing, and it was fairly clear from an early stage that I would be unlikely to be troubling the scorers at Oxford. In tests at primary school, I routinely finished third from bottom of the class. If I told you that the person who finished second bottom was called Richard Moron and, moreover, that Richard Moron devoted the best part of his school days to drinking the ink out of the inkwells and chewing reflectively on sticks of chalk, then you might begin to get a sense of where I stood.
Bottom of the class? That was Pidgy Saunders, who, bless him, couldn’t write his own name. Not even with a stick in the ground. So, there you have it: the line of descent went White, Moron, Saunders, strictly in that order – and that was also the case after the test to decide which stream (A, for the intelligentsia, and B, for the rest of us) we would go into at the secondary school.
Being in the B-stream wouldn’t have mattered much to me, except that Tony Brighton, my best friend throughout primary school, and a fellow Lodge Laner, scored high enough to go into the A-stream. That hit me for six. I thought we should have been together, me and him, fighting the world. But suddenly, he was the brains and I was the laggard. It was very divisive, and not a little irritating. (I should add that Tony and I did continue to fight the world together, despite this academic wedge so cruelly driven between us. At fourteen, the lucky benefactor of a cigarette machine at Finchley ice rink that had a fit and disgorged its entire contents of Capstan Full Strength into his waiting hands, Tony gave me my first cigarette, thus commencing a habit which was to stay with me for many happy years.)
My main problem was that I lacked confidence – couldn’t stand the thought of thrusting myself forward in lessons. And that inadequacy continued for some time after I moved across from the primary school to the secondary school. With my male peers, self-assurance was less of a problem. If anything, I was a touch on the cocky side. I made two particularly firm mates in these years – Micky Weedon from two streets away in Grange Avenue, and Brian Barneycoat – and all three of us were the same height. The Shorthouses, we used to call ourselves. Otherwise, though, in a social hierarchy where power and influence naturally gravitated to the big and the strong, I sought to compensate for the relative slightness of my physical presence by the classic method of being the clown. I don’t recommend this as a fail-safe scheme for the avoidance of bullying. Sometimes it’s the short ones trying to be funny that get picked on worst of all. But it worked for me.
My comic speciality was mimicking the teachers. There was a teacher at Northside Secondary Modern called Mr Winter who was tough – not nasty, but tough, and when he talked, you listened. He had quite a deep voice and was very well spoken, but I could do a very convincing Mr Winter. So when there were children monkeying around with the caretaker’s equipment in the bike shed at break time, I would wait my moment and shout: ‘You, boy! Get off those ladders!’ People would freeze, jump away – much to everyone else’s hilarity and increasing my own kudos.
Academically, though, I struggled and was quite close to useless for a very long time. Because I couldn’t do many of the things I was asked to do, I was gripped by the thought that I couldn’t do anything at all. That kind of attitude feeds on itself very quickly and is the curse of many a school career. What mainly turned it around for me was the arrival, as my form teacher, of the appropriately named Mr Joy – the new, all-singing, all-dancing, fresh-out-of-the-teacher-training-school-showroom Mr Joy. Mr Joy was also the school gymnastics master. And gymnastics was the one area of school life where I genuinely could do things – and do them better than others. Maths might have been a problem, but if you wanted someone who could stand on his hands, or execute a perfectly rounded somersault, I was your boy. The epiphany came during a rope-climbing lesson in my early teens, when, for the first time in my school career, I was singled out as an example: ‘White – show them how to do it,’ said Mr Joy.
For a moment, I looked around on the assumption that another White had turned up in the class without me knowing. But no. He meant me. So I was up that rope like lightning. If Oxford had offered a degree in rope-climbing, they would have been begging me to come – and I would have been weighing their offer against a number of attractive and equally firm propositions from the top-ranking American universities. But they didn’t.
Mr Joy, though, through many such moments, gave me the confidence that I could do things. And that confidence started to filter through to other areas. I’m not saying I became Harvard material overnight – not unless Harvard is particularly drawn to students whose final school report relates that they have ‘considerable ability’ in woodwork – but I did OK, even blossomed a bit, and won some prizes for my work. That same report for English says: ‘Reads with intelligence, fluidity and understanding.’ I owe that to Mr Joy because I think he did something no one else had thought to do: he told me I was good at something.
And let’s not knock woodwork, in any case. At home, I still have, and use to this day, the magazine stand that I made in that Northside woodwork class with Mr Bradshaw. That’s craftsmanship: built to last. Eat your heart out, IKEA.
As for school drama, I wouldn’t have touched it with any length of bargepole you could have found, had not a special set of circumstances contrived to force this alien subject upon me. Northside Secondary was readying itself for its annual production. This was a new idea, courtesy of the new headmaster. The chosen play was set in Cromwellian times and entitled Wayside War. However, a week away from curtain-up, the boy in the leading role went down with the measles. Panic for all concerned, of course – but not for me. I couldn’t have cared less, having nothing to do with the production whatsoever. At least, I had nothing to do with it until the headmaster, Mr Hackett, approached me in the corridor one afternoon and told me they needed a volunteer to replace the bloke with the measles – and that, moreover, I was the volunteer they had in mind.
Why me? Perhaps my playground reputation as the world’s leading mimic of Mr Winter preceded me. Perhaps I just happened to be in the wrong corridor at the wrong time. Whatever, fate’s finger had pointed. Or certainly Mr Hackett’s had.
‘What do you say, White?’
Now, I wanted to act the lead in the school play about as much as I wanted to poke myself in the eye repeatedly with a burnt stick. My mate Micky Weedon had somehow got himself caught up in this production, and he had heard nothing but ribbing about it from me. Acting was, to my feckless, boyish mind, girly, sissy, highly likely to involve the wearing of embarrassing clothing, and completely certain to bring down on one the sniggering scorn of one’s peers. Having worked so hard to counter the effects of my diminutive stature and ensure at least some degree of social standing among my larger fellow students, the last thing I wanted to do was blow it all entirely by revealing myself to be, of all ridiculous things, a thespian.
‘I’d really rather not, sir,’ I muttered.
At which point the headmaster said, in a quiet but distinctly steely tone: ‘Don’t make me have to tell you to do it.’
It took me quite a while to unpack that sentence. But I eventually got the gist of it: in simple terms, I had no choice. I was volunteered, whether I liked it or not.
I should stress that, at this point in my life, the full extent of my theatrical experience amounted to exactly one primary-school production, at around the age of nine, playing a monkey. The drama in question was a piece of vaguely organised chaos entitled Around the Town – one of those plays written to involve as many children in the school as possible. When I say I played a monkey, in fact what I played was an
actor who was trying to get to his theatre, but who was running late and becoming sidetracked and needing to ask for directions all the time. None of which would have been all that remarkable but for the twist that, in this play-within-the-play, the actor was due to represent the aforementioned monkey and had, for unexplained reasons, chosen to spurn the changing facilities at his intended theatre and don the full monkey outfit at home, prior to setting out. As you do. Consequently, the people he meets along the way, ‘around the town’, think he actually is a monkey … with predictably hilarious consequences.
I’m sure there was some wholesome message at the heart of it all, about appearance and reality and accepting people for what they are, or some such – or perhaps a simpler moral about the virtues of punctuality and the general inadvisability of going about dressed as a monkey in a built-up area. But my abiding memory is of wearing what was, in effect, a baggy brown fur bag, poking my head through the window of a badly painted paper backdrop and asking, ‘Can you tell me what the time is?’ – and thereby causing mass, and badly acted, panic.
This, you could convincingly argue, was scant preparation for the more serious proposition of a leading role in Wayside War – a one-act play about espionage during the English Civil War, featuring exactly no people dressed as monkeys. Nevertheless, my part required me to wear the full regalia of a seventeenth-century cavalier, including a giant foppish hat with a feather in it and floppy boots – a prospect which pretty much froze my liver with embarrassment.
But, of course, I was without a choice in this matter. My number had been called and there was no time to wish otherwise. I got my lines learned in short order and, come the night, drew a deep breath and clumped out onto the school stage, reasoning that if I was going to die, then at least I would die with my floppy boots on. Ditto, my foppish hat.
As it happened, though, I didn’t die. On the contrary, under the lights and with the attention of the room upon me, I found I rather enjoyed myself. I found I enjoyed, too, the accolade of the audience afterwards. OK, so a roomful of parents at a school play isn’t the hardest audience to wow, even in north Finchley on a Friday night. Nevertheless, it felt good. And the headmaster coming up afterwards to tender his congratulations … well, that felt good, too.
And what felt even better was when two West End producers, who happened to be in the audience on the second night, came round to the dressing room afterwards, said the show had absolutely knocked them to the floor, and positively begged us to allow them to transfer the production to the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, just as soon as a slot became available.
OK, not really. But there was, at least, a consensus in the school that we should enter Wayside War into the East Finchley Drama Festival – a totally new concept on me, and not an event to which I would previously have given the time of day: a drama competition where, over the course of a fortnight or so, local schools and amateur groups vied for supremacy by running their best efforts past a panel of judges. And blow me down if Wayside War didn’t get through to the final Saturday, where it faced off against two other productions for prize play of the festival – and won. Glory upon glory. Not only was drama a bit of a lark, I now realised, it was a competitive lark, and that certainly appealed to me.
And through all this, my peers didn’t spurn me and cast me out into the social wilderness, never to return: on the contrary, they turned up to see the play with their parents and watched and applauded. Also, along the way, it was impossible not to notice that the rehearsals were getting me off a few lessons, and that could hardly be accounted a bad thing. We even had to leave school one day and travel into London to Nathan’s, the costumiers, for our outfits – and then take them back when the production had finished. Permission to travel out of school on a school day … this was living very high on the hog.
All things considered, then – the larking around, the applause, the bunking off – I came quite rapidly to the conclusion that I rather liked the cut of acting’s jib. Superficial of me to see it in those terms? Actually, I would stand by that summary of the theatre’s advantages, as a profession, even now: it’s quite fun, people applaud if you’re lucky, and it gets you off work.
* * *
THE LETTER WAS dated 1 April but it was not, sadly, a prank. Nothing I could do but hold my hands up. Just like in Cluedo: it was me, in Woodside Park Road, with the lead piping.
Our defence, m’lud: the resale value of the said and formerly affixed piping was of no interest to us, the juveniles in question (Masters White, Prior, Jeffers), being not so much unlawfully concerned with the making of a quick ten bob on the sly, but rather with the melting down of the aforementioned lead and the forming it thereafter into soldiers to play with, in all innocence, as young boys, if it so please the court.
Was that true? Both the passage of time and due respect for the processes of the law insist that we draw a veil over this element of the proceedings. Let us merely note, before moving swiftly on, that, after a morning in court with a very tidy head of hair, a very well-knotted tie and a decidedly less than impressed father, I was ‘discharged, subject to the condition that he commits no offence during the period of twelve months next ensuing’.
So, was I, at this point in my life and about to leave school, on the slippery slope towards a life of petty crime? Or was I just a north London lad with a little bit too much time on his hands who needed occupying?
Either way, it didn’t matter. I had found something to keep me off the streets and out of mischief. I had a new hobby.
CHAPTER THREE
Going Incognito. Adventures in electricity. Further lasting scars. And why you should never go in the lift shaft of an incomplete block of flats.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE historic victory of Wayside War in the hotly contested East Finchley Drama Festival of 1954, my mate Micky Weedon and I were standing around, soaking up the glory and generally feeling rather smug about ourselves, when a man in a cravat came up. His name was Doug Weatherhead and he was the director of one of the other plays that we had defeated in the final. He offered his congratulations and said a few kind words, roughly amounting to ‘Darlings, you were marvellous’. And then he asked us if we would like to join his amateur theatre club.
This would have been the Incognito Theatre Group, based not far from Finchley in Friern Barnet, for which this bloke Doug ran the junior section. And, clearly, his offer was of no interest to us whatsoever. Less than no interest. Do amateur dramatics outside school – in your own time? This man must have taken us for fools. Micky and I smilingly declined.
‘Well, that’s a pity,’ Doug said. ‘We could do with a couple of boys. We’ve got about twenty girls and no males so it’s getting hard to find plays we can cast.’
Imagine here, if you will, a short silence in which the sudden whirring of cogs in the minds of two fourteen-year-old boys is almost audible. Imagine too, perhaps, the sight of those two fourteen-year-old boys exchanging a look of dawning comprehension.
An abundance of girls? A shortage of boys?
‘What time does this group of yours meet?’ I asked.
A week later I became an active member of the Incognito Theatre Group and stayed that way for the best part of eleven years until I became a professional.
Would amateur theatre have lured my boyhood self eventually, of its own accord, without this additional ‘abundant girls’ aspect? Perhaps, with enough encouragement and enough prodding from external sources. But what I can say for sure is that Doug Weatherhead had caught me and Micky at a very vulnerable moment. By this point in our lives, puberty had begun to wreak its steamy havoc. Yet, of course, in those days, in 1950s Britain, puberty had an extraordinary amount of difficulty wreaking anything at all. Even on into my later teens, sexual activity was an exotic, remote and highly tentative thing. Girls, assuming you had access to them, tended to be extremely reluctant to help your puberty along its way, and the opportunity to get even as far as ‘first base’ seemed like the rarest of blessings.
The morals of the day, certainly in working-class communities, had set themselves firmly against sexual experiment, and certainly against experimental intercourse. A terrible stigma was attached to getting pregnant outside marriage, and that stigma extended also to children born out of wedlock. Unwedded conception spelled nothing less than social ruin, for you and your family, not to mention the poor soul that you brought into the world. Girls had to bear the most formidable brunt of that, of course, so if they came across as cautious, or even prim and proper, who could blame them? Boys, for their part, trembled in the knowledge that, nine times out of ten, a slip-up would mean marriage. And marriage was forever, and forever was a very long time.