by Roger Moore
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
Michael O’Mara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ
Copyright © Miramont Investments Limited, 2017
All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78243-861-8 in hardback print format
ISBN: 978-1-78243-862-5 in ebook format
Illustrations from the author’s private collection unless credited otherwise
www.mombooks.com
CONTENTS
Foreword by Deborah Moore
Introduction
A Sense of Ninety Years
Wartime Memories
The Joy of Travelling
What Might Have Been
Family
The Old Grey Matter and Technology
Things That Annoy Me
Things They Never Tell You to Expect
The World of Work
On Final Reflection
Afterword
Acknowledgements
FOREWORD
by DEBORAH MOORE
Not so long ago Dad and I were having a laugh about the pros and cons of getting older. He was complaining, which he seldom did, about his knees and the tingling he would get in his feet that would drive him mad. Those two ‘cons’ of old age he managed because of his unbelievable zest for life and the totally optimistic approach he had to everything.
‘I still feel as if I am in my twenties,’ he told me. ‘But when I look in the mirror I say, “Who the hell are you?!”’
My father was not a vain man in the least and his childlike sense of humour meant that he embraced getting older with such dignity and fortitude.
For Dad, the ‘pros’ of getting older were seeing his grandchildren grow and spending time with his family, for whom he had so much love and time to give.
He was, as he himself would be the first to admit, somewhat of a hypochondriac: chemists were to him what Jimmy Choo is to those daft enough to love walking in high heels. My apologies, ladies!
He always had the best doctors and so, when he became ill just after Christmas 2016 and having embarked on writing this book, he never for a minute thought that he would not live to see it published.
With the help of his trustworthy and favourite co-star/PA Gareth Owen, he did finish this book of memories and funny incidents he experienced throughout his life and I hope that you the reader will laugh with and at the antics that my beloved Dad got up to – and away with.
I am sure he is telling his naughty jokes to all his mates up in the heavens and giving the angels something to flutter their wings about.
I love you, Dad.
Deborah
INTRODUCTION
The poet Dante believed old age starts at forty-five. The United Nations suggests it begins at sixty. Meanwhile, in 2016, the Daily Express newspaper reported that Britons do not see themselves as elderly until they are nudging eighty-five.
Well, as I write, I’m in my ninetieth year. Ninety! Where did those years go?
But what is ‘old age’? Does it define us? Does it inhibit us? You can’t escape it, you can’t avoid it – well, you can, but the alternative isn’t to be recommended – so you just have to embrace it. Mind you, ‘Old Folks’ Home’ doesn’t exactly sound like a place you want to add to your bucket list, does it? It has a ring of finality about it, and that’s why the graceful Dame Judi Dench says she doesn’t allow the word ‘old’ to be spoken in her house, as it suggests she is past it – and that is quite clearly not the case.
Do I feel old? Not at all! Though my body may creak and groan a bit more now than it used to.
It always amuses me that children measure their years in fractions: ‘I’m three and a quarter’ or ‘I’m four and a half!’, before rounding it up as soon as possible. Later on in life, you’ll find people do the reverse, insisting that they’re not almost ninety-five, but ninety-four-and-three-quarters. Better still, in middle age, we don’t use fractions; we use euphemisms such as ‘fifty-plus’ or the ‘third age’. While children and teenagers long to grow older and acquire the greater freedoms and privileges that come with ageing – it used to be your twenty-first birthday but now it’s your eighteenth – the cosmetics industry and the anti-ageing market has extended at both ends, with endless products and potions for ‘mature’ skin, but also anti-ageing creams for twenty-somethings …
When my publishers reminded me I am going to be fairly ancient this year, they suggested I might once again put finger to keyboard and come up with a tome to tie in with my upcoming celebration. I started reflecting and thinking about age, people, places and the good fortune I’ve enjoyed across these past decades. This is a book about some of those memories, many irreverent, along with some thoughts of what might have been, some sideways glances, and a few grumbles. You see I’ve lived through so many landmark events – ranging from the introduction of television, World War II, the first man on the moon, the start and end of the Cold War, the birth of the internet ... and so very much more. I suddenly realized that yes, I really am that old.
Then, there are some of the absurdities advancing age brings with it. For example:
• When you still feel twenty-one inside but wonder who the old fart in the bathroom mirror staring back at you is.
• When you thought ‘sick’ meant someone was ill.
• When you tune into the radio and hear they’re playing ‘a golden oldie’, only to realize it’s from 1988.
• When you realize ‘easy-open tin’ is the very definition of an oxymoron.
• When you look at a bathtub and wonder, if you get in it, will you ever get out?
With my tongue firmly placed in my cheek, it’s now time to get on ...
With my older cousin Doreen who liked to keep me firmly grounded with tales of our youth together.
A SENSE OF NINETY YEARS
When contemplating how to start this book I thought I would cast my mind back to my earliest memories, which is not as easy as you might think. It was then that I realized that so many recollections are not in fact linked to places or dates, but rather to smells and sounds. I shouldn’t be too surprised I guess, as, after all, we humans have five main senses: sight, touch, taste, plus the all-important smell and hearing. Yet rarely do we appreciate just how intrinsically those last two are linked to our most treasured memories.
Whenever I picture my parents I instantly get a waft of my mother’s favourite perfume and my father’s trusted aftershave lotion. These fragrances are etched onto my brain and, along with other childhood smells, hold a privileged status in my memory bank, conjuring up all sorts of happy thoughts. Some experts say that smells trigger memories because our ancestors were more dependent on their noses to avoid poisonous plants, rotten food or enemies about to attack … I prefer to think they just evoke happy memories!
I still feel very comforted whenever I think of my parents. They were there throughout my formative years, teaching me, guiding me, caring for me and loving me. Whenever I drift back in thought to the family flat in 1930s Stockwell, south London, I can clearly picture my mother in the kitchen – she was always cooking something tasty. Now, the merest sniff of cooking apples takes me right back to standing at her side as
she opened the oven door and produced a golden-brown apple pie. Despite having consumed hundreds, if not thousands, of apple pies over the years, not one ever tasted as good as Mum’s, especially if she added a dollop of cream or a glug of Bird’s custard over the top. If ever I catch sight of a food programme on TV and steak and kidney pudding is mentioned, I’m right back there in the kitchen, watching Mum mixing the ingredients for her pastry. Like the Bisto Kid, my nose would cock and sniff the air when I arrived home from school and, I hoped, might report back that there was a rice pudding, or a sponge cake, or perhaps raspberry-flavoured blancmange being prepared – and if I was lucky I’d be able to lick the bowl! That was the best bit, and what a treat. One thing is for sure, no restaurant could ever conjure up a home-cooked meal that tastes as good.
Mum’s apple pie, seldom bettered but often improved with a dollop of custard.
The smell of Mum’s food staying with me betrays my greedy streak – I can quite often make a pig of myself with comfort foods. Meat and two veg, sometimes three if we were flush, was the typical and staple diet of my formative years. Mind you, it wasn’t all Delia Smith. The aroma of boiling cabbage was pretty dreadful, but the smell I loathed most was the fish heads being boiled up for the cat’s dinner. That smell lingered around the flat for days and was the most unpleasant, if not rotten, thing your airways could possibly encounter.
On the other hand, carbolic – or coal tar – soap which many people say smells like leather, is hugely nostalgic and pleasing to me. I was obviously an odd child who rather liked the bleached, antiseptic smell of doctors’ surgeries and hospital corridors and carbolic was what you might call the ‘signature smell’ of such places. It was very effective, and many was the bath night when I had a good scrub with a bar of it to eliminate all dirt marks, bugs and germs.
Consequently, I’d like to think I was a very clean child, who dutifully always washed behind his ears – when being watched, at least – though imagine the horror when Nitty Nora used to descend on our school to examine our hair for head lice. I’m sure she was a very kindly person in real life, though her bedside – or deskside – manner left a bit to be desired as she roughly rifled through our follicles before dispatching any diseased boys and girls home with a note: ‘Your child has hair lice.’
An early ad – once again, cleanliness was my watchword!
You can’t help getting older, but you don’t have to get old …
GEORGE BURNS
My mother would reassure me by saying that the lice only liked living on clean heads, before producing a bar of what I think was some sort of foul-smelling paraffin-based soap, whipping it into a lather and smothering it all over my hair, leaving it on overnight to form a sort of crusty, sticky mound. (I’m really selling this to you, aren’t I?) Next morning, it could be brushed out with a special comb, and more than a little force, the hope being that it enshrined all the trapped lice in its plaster-like texture.
WHAT IF …?
Percy Shelley (1961)
Back in 1961 a cutting from the Evening Standard from 24 July stated, ‘[Roger Moore] having given up TV and taken on the status of an independent actor, is anxious to do more serious things. He is proposing to appear in a film of the life of the poet Shelley.’ Needless to say the idea of me becoming a serious actor convinced no one, and playing a major English romantic poet was maybe stretching my range. It fell to the BBC a decade later to make a TV film with Robert Powell in the lead.
As a child I spent a lot of time at the cinema, and cinemas also had a peculiar smell all of their own – usually featuring a mixture of stale cigarette smoke, mixed with a whiff of damp and a bit of orange peel. Those were the days when you’d see the projection beam mid-air between the box and the screen because of the huge amount of smoke rising in the auditorium, tarnishing the walls and ceiling with a disgusting brown nicotine. But did we care? Certainly not! Saturday mornings and the ‘Tuppenny Rush’ were magical times for me and my pals, passive smoking or not!
In the streets, you could always smell fresh bread coming from the door of our local bakers on the corner, who had to change their German name, Aichroth, to the more Scottish-sounding Kerr at the outbreak of war. On some Saturday mornings they offered me the chance of helping them out, carrying the trays of buns and bread, for the reward of as many buns as I could eat. The butcher’s shop had a completely different appearance and smell, of course: raw meat mixed with the sweet smell of the sawdust on the tiled floor to help absorb the blood and fat and stop people from slipping over.
Monday was always washday, and you’d hear washtubs bubbling away, mangles creaking and then a dazzling display of white hanging from washing lines as proud housewives showed what good, clean houses they were running. If it was raining, wooden clothes horses would be stood indoors, next to the fire, to dry the clothes while giving off a whiff of damp. You’d also hear the whirring grind of the mincer machine on Mondays, as any meat left over from the Sunday joint would be minced up to make another meal, perhaps with some bubble and squeak plopped on top, all fried up with a knob of lard.
Where did the mangle and the mincer go?
I’ve always loved swimming and aside from the local baths and lido, as teenagers my mates and I used to head up to swim in the Thames around Richmond. It always seemed clear, clean and fresh there – ah, that lovely fresh water smell. The river’s posher at that end, so perhaps it was less dirty, though you still wouldn’t want to swallow too much of it and risk getting an upset stomach. I know they’ve cleaned the Thames up in recent decades, but when David Walliams did his 140-mile charity swim in the river in 2011, I did wonder if he might suffer any side effects from ingesting the odd mouthful. When we met he told me that ‘Thames Tummy’ had given him diarrhoea, vomiting and low energy levels. Perhaps it’s still not quite that clean?
In ancient times, river water was so contaminated that the staple drink was beer. I don’t know whether I was around in another life back then, but one of the stranger things I enjoyed as a youngster was visiting a pub first thing in the morning. No, not to get a drink but rather because I had an uncle who ran a pub in the village of Ramsey, near Peterborough, a village of two streets, a post office and about fifteen pubs. Whenever I stayed there, I would join my uncle early in the morning as he went downstairs into the bar: as soon as he pushed the door open, the smell of beer-soaked wood, polish and old shag tobacco would hit my nostrils. There was something oddly comforting and homely about it.
I was a strange child at times.
School had drinking fountains, though under no circumstances should you drink the water in the toilets. Well, no, not the toilet itself, but from the washbasin taps. Yet again, thinking of a particular thing brings back the smells of polished parquet floors, carbolic-saturated corridors with the odd whiff of glue and paint from the art rooms mixed in, and, finally, the highly bleached toilets. Why do I persist in turning my mind to the smallest room? For the very simple reason that my mind is etched with the memory of the glossy toilet paper in the cubicles, which was more like tracing paper. Quite what absorption properties or benefits it offered remain a mystery to me, but I do know it likely contributed to many cases of haemorrhoids in later life.
I was always told not to drink too much before bedtime. It was a lesson I heeded while touring in my early career, as quite often the only bathroom would be down several flights of stairs or, heaven forbid, down the garden path.
During my time in the forces – not in the war but just after, during the two years of National Service – my first six weeks of basic training were spent in Bury St Edmunds. There, thirty young recruits were housed in a hut with fifteen bunk beds. National Service was compulsory and all young men were, sooner or later, obliged to enrol, whether they wanted to or not. I soon learned, as a willing soldier, that you should always try to get the top bunk because if there was somebody less willing, they would inevitably try to ‘work their ticket’, that is to say, get a medical discharge, and the favoured way
of achieving the first step in a discharge was by proving you’d lost control of your bladder. Many was the time those on the lower bunks woke up to the delights of a urine-soaked blanket.
Later, when I was working as an actor on foreign film locations, we were often warned about drinking the water, and told that bottled water was the only option. Well, in principle, that’s all well and good but you’d always find that the local caterers would wash the salad and make ice cubes from the said undrinkable H2O.
With a pal in Copenhagen during National Service.
I often wished I had the constitution of John Huston and Humphrey Bogart, who only ever drank whisky when they were on location in the deepest darkest jungles on The African Queen (1951). All the crew fell ill with awful waterborne bugs and parasites, all bar the director and star who seemed immune.
It often amuses me when visitors to our chalet in Switzerland ask, ‘Is the water OK to drink here?’
‘Just down the hill, they’re bottling and selling it all around the world,’ I reply.
Buses, underground trains and trams have their own distinct aroma. It’s partly pollution, I now realize, but the unique blend of fumes, dust, engine oil, tarmac and cast iron all hit you as a train coming in to a platform pushes all the blended smells in front of it, in a warmed-up wall of air, usually coupled with the ‘singing’ noise that the train makes on the tracks as it approaches – totally unique. I recently read that, today, the pollution underground is eight times greater than above ground – and people breathe it in!
In my formative years we had coal-powered steam trains, and the soot they pushed out was phenomenal. What with them and all the factory chimneys bellowing out smoke, it’s no wonder London was often under a smog.