by David Jason
Another seminal theatrical experience: in late 1958, my good friend Bob Bevil and I found ourselves putting in some sockets in a flat in Hyde Park Square Gardens and getting into conversation with the American guy who was renting it. And he said he was appearing in a show in the West End and asked us if we would like a couple of tickets. The show was West Side Story. It had opened on Broadway the previous year, and then transferred to London, with some of the original American cast. And, of course, it was stunning, especially for two working lads from north London – the songs, the choreography, the sets, the sheer punch of the orchestra coming out of the pit at you. It blew my mind away, and is still my favourite musical to this day.
And the bloke whose sockets we did? That was David Holliday, who starred as Tony. Holliday would go on to play many distinguished theatre roles, singing and non-singing, and (truly impressive, this) to be the voice of Virgil in the first series of Thunderbirds. But I’m sure he would concede that he would have been nothing without Bob’s and my sockets at that pivotal moment in his career.
Back at work, Bob and I found ourselves doing a rewiring job on a big house in Highgate that was being renovated. This substantial and well-appointed property, we came to realise, was the home of Billy Wright, the footballer, and Joy Beverley, one of the Beverley Sisters singing group. They had married in 1958 and that union of ultra-famous England captain with ultra-famous pop singer made them the Posh and Becks of their day. Of course, I wasn’t expecting to meet either of the residents in the course of these labours, realising that both of them probably had better things to do than stand around watching an electrician run a length of copper wiring up the side of their yet-to-be-decorated sitting room.
But that only goes to show how wrong you can be, because one day, while I was up to my shins in wiring, in walked Joy Beverley. And not just Joy, either. She was accompanied by one of her sisters – either Teddie or Babs. I didn’t know which one it was. But that’s the tricky thing about identical twins, of course: what you’ve got to understand is, they look alike. It’s why we call them twins. Still, whether it was Teddie or Babs, or Babs or Teddie, just to be in the presence of these people – just to be said ‘hello’ to by them, as they crossed the room – was excitement beyond words. I think my eyes must have become dinner plates. I felt like I had come into contact with a world as far removed from mine as it was possible to imagine, a world of glamour and stardom and wealth.
Opposite the cul-de-sac that the house was situated in was a little park on the edge of a hill, with a bench in it, and come lunchtime, I sat there on my own with my chips, my milk and my bread and stared out across London.
* * *
IN 1958 I was in trouble with the law again – this time for riding a motorbike without learner plates. Or, rather, as the summons put it, ‘without displaying in a conspicuous position on the front end or the rear of such vehicle the distinguishing mark’.
Stood to reason, though, didn’t it? If you hadn’t passed your motorbike test, you weren’t allowed to carry anyone with you. Therefore, if you wanted (as I frequently did in those days) to sling your mate Micky Weedon or Brian Barneycoat on the back and zoom off to Southend for a day on the beach, there was nothing for it but to get rid of the L-plates.
Result: a steep, ten-shilling fine. But no ban, fortunately.
I had always planned to have a motorbike. Cars were an unattainable dream at this point – way out of our price range. It was the motorbike that was the working-class man’s vehicle of escape. And as soon as I had a little money coming in, I could make the motorbike plan a reality. But even then, for me, it remained a luxury item. When Ernie Pressland from next door was called up for national service, he flogged me his drop-handle push bike, and that’s what I continued to go to work on. The motorbike was for weekends and for pleasure.
In 1957, when I was seventeen, a cousin’s boyfriend had a friend whose friend’s friend was friendly with a friend who had a cousin whose boyfriend had a repair shop up at Muswell Hill, and he pointed me the way of a bloke who was selling a bike from his garage at home. It was a 350cc BSA B31 – a bit of a beast, in all honesty, and certainly a much more powerful machine than I was looking for. But the bloke selling it was very persuasive. He said, ‘You’ll only want a bigger one when you get used to it. You might as well start with a proper bike that’s going to really look after you.’
He had a point. Besides, the bike had taken on a romantic lustre in the half-light of the garage and I was already smitten. I parted with all the money that I had been stashing away in the Post Office and took him up on his generous (and quite cunning, as it would turn out) offer to ride the bike home for me.
Nobody taught you to ride a motorbike in those days. You gleaned what you could from people who already had bikes, and the rest you discovered for yourself by trial and error. And if you happened to be a little short in the leg, your trials and errors were made no easier. You had to learn how to climb aboard, and how to throw your full eight stone down onto the kick-start. If it didn’t kick back, the bike started. If it started, you rocked it forward off its stand. If you could get it off its stand, you could start feeding the power in as you let the clutch out. And then you could stall it and start all over again. And once you’d mastered that end of the business, all that remained was to discover how to travel forwards on two wheels without falling off. (The almost total lack of traffic on the roads in those days definitely played into one’s hands here.)
All went swimmingly for a few days, my pride surging as I coolly piloted my new machine around the neighbourhood, fancying myself very much the liberated bachelor – until one morning, at the bottom of our road, a worrying noise started up, as if someone were clinging on to the bike’s underside and attacking the engine with a hammer.
I climbed off to have a look. The downtube that came from underneath the petrol tank and held the engine in beneath the crossbar had come apart and the engine was waving about like a flag in the wind. In a state of nearly tearful distress, I wheeled the crocked bike back home, and then returned to see its former owner for an explanation – or, better than that, the return of my hard-earned savings. He was, as you might guess, less than helpful. ‘Nothing to do with me, guv,’ he said. ‘Sold as seen, mate.’ And with that, the door closed.
I was mortified. All my savings! Gone! Evaporated! Stolen! After a few days of wandering around in despair, I lashed the engine on with wire and pushed the thing to a repair shop on the high street, where I was told that I’d been flogged a grade-A pup. The bike had been in an accident which had entirely broken its frame, and the owner had welded it back together and painted over it. It would take weeks to make the thing roadworthy again. Collapse of super-stud’s ego.
Still, that was my first motorbike – little beloved by my mum, who naturally feared, as mothers will, that I was destined to end up killing myself on it, and who also deeply resented my habit of stripping the engine down and performing running repairs in the kitchen. She certainly didn’t like the way I would boil up the chain in a lubricating solution of molybdenum disulphide in a saucepan on the stove, while de-coking the cylinder head on the dining table.
A year or so later, with some more hard-earned money salted away, I was able to trade up, chopping in my historically damaged B31 at Slocombe’s on the North Circular Road at Neasden. What I swapped it for was a long-coveted 495cc BSA Shooting Star – sometimes known as a Star Twin and the first BSA model to go into production after the war. That wonderful piece of machinery was to take me all over Britain – east to Clacton, west to Cornwall and north to the Lake District. I still have a copy of it which I have restored to look like the original – again, after salting away some hard-earned cash.
In the summer of 1960, I used that bike to head out to Essex. We North Met electrical apprentices were dispatched to a training centre at Harold Hill for a month-long course on metalwork and welding. I was put up in digs with a family nearby for five nights a week, and went in each day to t
he brazing shop, where I found myself in a class of lads from all over the south of England, all sent to learn metalwork and its associated arts, including one or two East Enders who looked like they would have your innards out with a welding iron, if you weren’t too careful. Still, we all seemed to rub along well enough. In fact, a camaraderie swiftly developed, with the trainees ranged against the instructors, who wore brown coats and were largely stern and humourless, patrolling the workshop and barking orders: ‘Stop talking! Back to your station!’
You were in a big hall, with two long rows of desks, lathes to one side and, behind glass screens, the brazing area, with its forges and giant anvils. Everyone had his own station, where he had a vice, a metal block and a drawer full of tools. It was a scene ripe for undermining and for nefarious practices of all kinds, and my good friend Bob and I rather ended up running the place in this regard. We’d send the word around: ‘At eleven o’clock, two minutes of banging.’ Come the moment, the room would abruptly explode into a cacophony of ringing hammers, while the instructors buzzed around in confusion: ‘What’s going on? Stop this!’
We came to think of ourselves as prisoners of war, with the instructors as the prison guards. At lunchtime, we would solemnly form up in two lines, and, on the command from Bob and myself (‘Atten-shun! By the left …’), march across the tarmac to the canteen – or, as we preferred to think of it, the cookhouse – whistling ‘Colonel Bogey’, just as we had seen it done in the movies, although, in this case, watched by the girls from the secretarial course, who would come to the windows to see what the noise was about.
Incidentally, the canteen had two sets of doors, sandwiching a small box-like entry hall to keep out the draught, about six feet square and eight feet high. It was the tendency of our febrile minds to imagine that this area was an airlock, and that you could only open the inner doors when everybody was inside the foyer and the outer doors were closed. So, at the conclusion of our march from the brazing shop, and on the command ‘Fall out!’, we would open the outer doors and then squeeze into the hallway before advancing. How many apprentice electricians can you fit in the entrance to a technical college canteen? This was a question we answered most lunchtimes – the answer being, a lot more than you’d think, especially if you double up and hoist a few onto your shoulders.
We eventually had a mock judicial system up and running, too. Offenders – those perceived to have acted in ways contrary to the ethos of the workshop – would receive a summons from the Brazing Shop Court, and be required to attend a hearing at the appointed time during a given lunch hour. At first we hand-wrote the summons, but as the judicial system grew more sophisticated, we had them typewritten by a girl on the secretarial course in her spare time. (Think of it as our version of prisoners of war forging passports.) I still possess one of these documents, issued, it would appear, to a Mr J. Davies.
In court, we would hear from the prosecution and the defence, with me frequently playing the judge, deploying my metalwork hammer as a gavel, and handing down such sentences as ‘last in line for the canteen next Thursday’. This managed to keep us entertained until the course ended, although I should probably point out that we did find time in our busy day to learn a few things as well.
All in all, my life seemed to be coming together in this period – or, at any rate, settling into a rhythm. I was learning a steady trade. I had some steady money coming in. I had a steady hobby – the amateur theatre. I had a steady motorbike. I had even started seeing a girl quite steadily – Sylvia Cunningham, whom I had met at a party in 1959. During our apprenticeship with the Electricity Board, Bob and I had been doing some wiring in a flat opposite the swimming pool in Finchley. The daughter of the people who owned the flat was going to be engaged to a guy called Tony and was throwing an engagement party. She invited Bob and me along. There, I was smitten from across the room by the sight of a beautiful woman with jet-black hair and a figure to die for, whom I eventually managed to pluck up the courage to speak to, and whom, by the end of the evening, I was desperate to see again. It turned out that she lived with her parents, on the other side of London from north Finchley, in Lee Green, south of Blackheath – a fifteen-mile trip. But, of course, that was no barrier to an apprentice electrician with ardour in his heart and his own motorbike.
And I must have been serious about Sylvia because I took her to the West End on occasion for a wide-screen Cinemascope film presentation – and not just that, but also a meal afterwards at the Golden Egg on Tottenham Court Road. The Golden Egg was a chain restaurant, and a rung or two down from the Angus Steakhouse, I will admit, but it still served notice of a man’s firm and reliable intent. As the name would tend to indicate, it allowed you to have any form of egg – egg and chips, double egg and chips, omelette and chips, double egg omelette and chips, double egg omelette and no chips, and even egg with no chips. And it had window seats where you could sit and look out at the world going about its business, and the world could look in at you going about your business – eating egg and chips. In terms of high-living, this place clearly took the egg and chips.
Sylvia and I ended up going out for a number of months, and she was, it seemed to me, at the oh-so-experienced age of nineteen going on twenty, the love of my life. That said, in conversations with her during the course of our relationship, when I once or twice gently floated the notion of perhaps one day devoting my life to acting, it never went down particularly well. Sylvia made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want to end up with a thespian. She found it a very unsettling thought. She wanted, as she put it, a ‘steady’ man. And fair play: no actor, to my knowledge, has ever been described as ‘steady’ – at least, not in the opening sentence.
Sylvia had her own ideas about the future, and she often voiced them: a nice little house, two-up and two-down, with a Morris Mini Minor in the drive. That was the dream. She was quite specific about the Mini, which was brand new then, and all the rage. And, to a large extent, I could see the appeal of it all, and shared it. It was the comfortable, conventional place towards which our relationship was probably headed. The electrician and his wife, their house and their car and, no doubt, in due course, their kids.
And then, one night in July 1960, during the month I was staying in Harold Hill on the Electricity Board’s welding course, Sylvia invited me over to her place. Her parents were going to be out – off at the cinema. The house would be empty for a couple of hours – just the two of us. I can’t deny it: heading south by motorbike and anticipating this extremely rare evening of isolated togetherness, visions of intimacy danced in my head. Alas, though, those visions were not realised. The house was, indeed, achingly void of all others for the evening. It was a bungalow as well, so we wouldn’t have had to go far to get to the bedroom. But the telly was on in the sitting room and we watched it in near silence, pausing only to sip tea. There was no intimacy, rare or otherwise, nor any mention of the possibility of intimacy. Not so much as a peck on the cheek, let alone a snog on the sofa. Sylvia, engrossed by the telly, sat in her father’s large and comfy chair while I was marooned in misery on the sofa. What seemed like an ocean separated us.
Time wore on. Her parents were due back. Disconsolately, I got up to leave and stood by the sitting-room door.
‘Well, I’d better be going. I’ve got a long ride ahead,’ I said.
A pause.
‘Goodbye, then,’ I said.
A pause.
‘Goodbye, then,’ said Sylvia, not moving from her chair. I don’t think she even moved her eyes from the television.
I went out into the hall and completed the fairly lengthy task of re-donning my motorcycle gear. No expensive leathers for me, alas, but, rather, some cheapskate protective kit of a plasticky rubber construction. These items weren’t the best for insulation either: in the winter, you had to stuff an extra layer of newspaper down your front to protect your stomach from icing over in the wind. The trousers ballooned, the shoulders were uncharismatically square. I looked like
a miniature Darth Vader.
Thus rubberised, I reappeared in the door frame of the sitting room.
‘Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?’ I said, sounding somewhat plaintive.
There now ensued an odd kind of Mexican stand-off. Sylvia clearly felt that if I wanted a kiss I should go over to her chair to receive it. My feeling was that if Sylvia deigned to get up and cross the floor, it would at least partly make up for the evening’s unexplained coldness, and its failure to serve up those visions of nirvana that had been with me on my long bike ride over.
A perhaps not especially adult impasse followed.
‘You come over here,’ said Sylvia.
‘No, you come over here,’ I replied.
‘No, you come over here.’
This was threatening to go on for quite some time.
‘I’ll meet you halfway,’ I said diplomatically.
‘OK,’ she said.
There were about six paces between us in total. I now took three of them.
‘So now you come your half,’ I said.
‘You’ve come halfway,’ she said, still not moving. ‘You might as well come the whole way now.’
‘No, you come halfway.’
‘No, you come the rest of the way.’