by Alan Davies
The medical profession, at the time of my mum’s terminal illness, was divided on the issue of how much to tell the patient. She was not told how ill she was. She didn’t have the chance to say goodbye to her children or her sister, and her children and her sister regretted that hugely.
Male doctors deciding what’s good for the weak and vulnerable female patient. There’s something patronizing about it. She’d better not be told, she has three young children, she won’t be able to cope. She’s only a feeble woman. Hazel would have flown to England to be with her, but she wasn’t told either.
At Claybury my dad told my gran what the doctors had told him:
‘Complete breakdown. Mental and physical.’
Gran said she felt as if it were her fault, her weakness.
When she left England we assumed we’d never see her again. She was so frail and beaten down. I thought she’d die within a year.
She revived, with her daughter and her Aussie grandchildren, living in a granny-flat on the side of the house, feeding her cat, Fritz, on leftovers from her lunch (which was likely to be a saucer of cup-a-soup; no wonder Fritz was so grumpy all the time).
Me and my sister would go in to see her, sometimes together, or one at a time, and she would talk to us about our mum and anything else she could recall, until she was tired, or the memories became too much and the tears would come and she would then prefer to be on her own so as not to make it worse.
Many of the stories had her chuckling, though. A gentle chuckle and a hummed tune from the distant past, these were the sounds you heard before she came into view. Her warmest chuckle came when she described living in a flat as a younger woman. In the flat above lived two other young women. They had a lot of ‘gentleman callers’. She was telling me about the time she lived beneath two hookers, 1930s hookers, with a quiet suburban residence and no one, other than my gran, any the wiser. She said they were nice girls, very funny, with a few tales to tell.
She told me she was surprised that it had been my idea to come to Australia, that I’d been a terrible handful as a boy but that she was so pleased that we’d come to see her, so pleased, and she missed us very much. She told me she wished she’d been allowed to tell us all about my mum at the time, but was told not to, that my other grandma had said, ‘Least said, soonest mended.’
At teatime she’d come in and join the family. Sitting down, her back bent, so she was barely seeing over the table, she would witter and twitter away, saying: ‘Wassat, dear?’ in her still-Walthamstow accent, whenever anyone spoke to her. Every now and then she’d share the benefit of her wisdom on some issue of the day, banging the palm of her hand down:
‘It’s the pill, that’s the trouble, people can go around willy-nilly and it’s all because of the pill.’
‘What about all the unwanted pregnancies without it, though?’ said Hazel. ‘All those girls with babies on their own.’
‘What about all the coat hangers up them in the backstreets, Gran?’ said my cousin. Some Australians are quite frank.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ said Gran, and winked at me.
After tea she’d go next door, have two paracetamol tablets for her back pain (‘I’m only allowed eight of these a day. Not enough’) and then have a Bailey’s. She always wiped round the inside of the glass with her finger to reach the dregs.
In the evening, Geoff would pour me a ‘black and tan’ and tell me more stories about London in the ’50s and about Hazel and Shirley. I tried to commit it all to memory.
After ten days we were to fly to Sydney and then on to Hong Kong. These sightseeing parts of the trip didn’t interest us now and we wished we could have scrapped them for a few more days with our gran. Sitting on the plane at Adelaide airport, my sister was crying next to me.
‘We’ll never see her again.’
‘Yes we will,’ I said.
I wasn’t sure though. My dad had bought these tickets for us, since we wanted to visit so much. We wouldn’t be able to afford tickets of our own for years and gran was already eighty-two.
Three years later I managed to save up enough for another visit. I made a futher two trips after that, always with a bottle of duty-free Bailey’s in hand. I cherished every minute and felt for my sister, who couldn’t afford the flight. She never saw her gran again.
Dolly Price passed away in 1995 at the age of eighty-nine. She was doubtless relieved, since every time I went to see her, she’d pour a little finger of Bailey’s, reach out to take my hand, and say:
‘I want to be in my box, Alan, I want to be in my box.’
Steffi Graf
Epping High Street is quite pleasant on a nice day, a few old buildings and a market if you’re lucky. Like any shopping street, though, it’s less appealing when it’s raining, and less appealing still when it was my job to walk up and down it, come rain or shine (or just rain, actually, lots of it), with two heavy, flat pieces of plywood banging into my legs and two lengths of gnarly, knotted, old string cutting into my shoulders. There was a girl working in a travel agent’s who caught my eye, sitting there all day, meaning I could swing by for another look, and maybe catch her eye. I stopped outside the window and looked in at her. As I did so, I caught sight of my own reflection in the glass. She hadn’t noticed me and I was glad. There was no way she would want to speak to this dripping, bedraggled, hopelessly optimistic, sandwich board man. I moved on before someone called the police.
I was peddling antiques and, with hindsight, perhaps the antique dealer who had advertised in the local paper for someone to carry a sandwich board for a full Saturday for fifteen quid, had acquired the board itself as an antique. Despite some nice calligraphy on the front (and back of course), it was yellowing, old and weather-beaten. As I ambled back up the High Street, past the branch of Curry’s outside which I used to meet the rest of the Garnon Rangers under-15s every Sunday morning before we’d go and be soundly thrashed somewhere in Upminster, I was approached by a burly man. He wanted to hire me to promote the Epping Flea Market the following Saturday. I said I would, since I was desperate for money, having recently graduated with an overdraft. He also had a scheme to generate publicity by having customers at the flea market keep an eye out for a ‘mystery man’. If they found him they would win a prize.
‘You can be my mystery man,’ he said.
The following Saturday I drove up to Epping from Loughton, having moved back home after graduation. My dad was still paying for the running of my car, and his question of four years previously, about what sort of job a drama degree would lead to, was coming back to haunt me.
As I approached Epping there were temporary signs on the lamp posts saying:
I was found after less than five minutes. He’d told some of the stall holders what I’d be wearing, and as the place had only just opened, and there weren’t many customers around, I was a sitting duck. I felt a failure, but my attempt at anonymity was crucially undermined by the marketing expert’s decision to issue a Crimewatch-type description, right down to:
‘He will have a blue jacket over his shoulder.’
The deal was that I would go on to sandwich board duties after I was discovered. I was hoping for a half-day of it but no such luck.
‘Where’s your sandwich board?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have my own board,’ I told him.
‘But you’re the sandwich board man!’
He was really grumpy now. He hurriedly made a sandwich board out of stiff card and string and I was sent out on to the High Road looking glum and, if anything, a deterrent to would-be customers. I looked even more ridiculous than the previous week and so avoided the travel agent’s as, in my lonely imaginings, this sight could tarnish what me and the girl had built up the previous week.
I was not rehired as a sandwich board man and, with that avenue closed off, decided to fruitlessly apply for jobs from the Guardian Media section, along with thousands of other graduates, without usually receiving a reply, never mind an interview. I tried
for BBC radio producer trainee but had no chance.
Then a fellow graduate said that a few Kent students were going down to the Wimbledon Tennis Championships on the first morning of the tournament, because if you went to gate four at 6 a.m. (or was it gate six at 4 a.m.?), the catering company would hire a few people. So we did, and we all were given jobs, starting work immediately. With no waiting or bar experience I was eventually assigned general dogsbody duties and given a white coat.
Walking through the grounds we could see players practising on the outside courts. A few courts away, a blonde ponytail was bobbing around in a blur of perpetual motion. She was eye-catching, even with Martina Navratilova, the most famous and greatest women’s tennis player of them all, practising in the foreground with her entourage. Martina had a ghetto blaster the size of a Vespa and a couple of cool-looking friends with her, making encouraging noises over the music, as she hit back and forth with her coach. She was the reigning champion, having defeated the ponytail the year before, but the ponytail was on the march in 1988, winning the Australian Open (against Chris Evert in the first final not played on grass), and retaining the French title. Now Martina was in her teenage sights at Wimbledon. Beneath the ponytail, of course, was Steffi Graf.
Most boys only had eyes for Gabriela Sabatini, the raven-haired Argentinian beauty in the women’s draw, but Steffi did it for me. Despite Adidas insisting on clothing her in T-shirts designed for junior boys, and netball skirts, her mile-long pins and flowing blonde tresses marked her out as a duckling heading swanwards.
Each morning, after a two-hour drive from Loughton, I’d keep an eye out for the tell-tale ponytail bouncing around as she rifled forehands low across the practice courts. She walked back to the baseline urgently, with short steps and no flighty tossing of the hair or look-at-me posturing. She was all business, all work, and apparently self-contained. Would she somehow find the time for a suitor from the catering company? Would she stop hitting and tell her coach to –
‘Take five. There’s a young man in a white coat who’s caught my eye every time we’ve been out here in the morning. I simply have to talk to him.’
This was an even more unlikely scenario than an Epping travel agent coming out on to the High Street to say:
‘I’m on my lunch break at one, why don’t you ditch your board and come to Gregg’s for a real sandwich. I like wet-look hair.’
I couldn’t stand and watch Steffi for long; I had to head for the Food Village, which was a big marquee with various different stalls including a bar, a donut stand and a fish-and-chip counter. The staff swapped jobs each day. It was not too bad when the weather was good, because the Food Village was for ordinary punters, not corporate hospitality freeloaders. Real punters watch tennis and don’t hang around marquees that smell of batter and donuts.
When it rained though, it was chaotic. Thousands of people would come in to take shelter. It could become a dispiriting place then. Fortunately, in our midst we had a handsome young Dubliner called Jim Byrne, who had an exceptional talent for making the most of each day, for sweeping you along on a tide of laughter, pranks, and banter. He liked everyone and everyone liked him. Every day, several times a day, he’d say:
‘What’s the crack?’
The crack, it turned out, was actually the craic. It meant the mischief, the fun, the scam at each moment. The craic with the refrigerated lorries at the back of the Food Village was to go inside and pinch a few donuts, without anyone noticing you do it, or spotting there were any missing. To do that, without being shut in the lorry and freezing to death, was the craic all one afternoon.
The craic with the bar was to disappear for ages collecting glasses. People would buy drinks from the bar and then wander off to the outside courts with them. Going out to find empties meant being out of sight, and if you were sly you could skive off and watch some tennis. Some of the forces personnel, on the entrances to the show courts, would turn a blind eye to catering staff in white coats sneaking into matches, while the hospitality tents were heaving with people stuffing their faces and not taking up their free tickets.
The craic with the free programmes dished out to corporate customers was to sneak into the tents, find unwanted programmes, then sell them to punters for 50p each. With a white coat you looked like a programme seller. Sell a few of those and you could up your take home pay, from £16 to as much as £20 a day.
The craic behind the refrigerated lorries was to climb up the tarpaulin fence concealing them from Court 14, which always had top matches on it, and peer over to watch. This was quite high up and precarious but the view was good. One day we were up there watching women’s doubles. The fence was swaying a bit and me and Jim were giggling like schoolboys, though we didn’t realize how loud we were because of the noise of the lorries. Then we realized that play had stopped on Court 14. All four players – Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, Gabriela Sabatini and Steffi Graf – plus the umpire were staring up at us. Then Martina was pointing in our direction. Without so much as an ‘I love you, Steffi’ we dropped like stones on to the grass below and rolled around in hysterical laughter before quickly busying ourselves with some jobs while Jim worked out what the craic would be next.
When Wimbledon finished, a few of us signed up for the next event the company was doing, the Farnborough Air Show. Sadly Jim wasn’t going to come. We swapped addresses and he smiled his big smile at us all as he left. He was off to Florida to train as a pilot with Aer Lingus.
I stayed in a tent at a campsite near to the airfield but there was no craic at Farnborough other than watching the Red Arrows every day. I was on washing-up duty and needed Jim to lighten the mood.
I never saw Steffi again. She went off to the Seoul Olympics, having bashed Martina in the final at Wimbledon, and Sabatini at the US Open, to achieve the coveted Grand Slam. She then converted that into a Golden Slam, by winning at the Olympics too. Her achievement, though, like everything else in Seoul, was overshadowed by the astonishing men’s 100 metre final, which lifted the watching billions out of their seats, as Ben Jonson smashed the world record, only to be caught out by a drugs test. Flo-Jo Joyner was the Queen of Seoul, not Steffi, as she obliterated sprint records and won three golds, but she never raced again and died young with a cloud of suspicion hanging over her.
Some months after Wimbledon, a letter arrived for me. I didn’t recognize the handwriting. It was from Jim’s girlfriend. She said she was writing to all the people in his address book to let them know that he had been involved in a training accident. A plane had gone down with Jim, another learner, and an instructor onboard. All three had been killed.
Jim was an inspiring character and it still saddens me that he is gone, someone who could light up every day, with optimism, and humour, and a love of the craic.
John Hegley
Time Out magazine listed all the comedy clubs in London in its cabaret section in the 1980s. Their rival listings magazine, City Limits, also listed many of the same places. There were only about twenty-five venues in London running cabaret nights. After I graduated I wrote to all of them, asking for gigs, based on the strength of my scrap of material, road-tested only once at the Whitstable Labour Club. Only one of them replied, the Black Cat Cabaret in Stoke Newington. I didn’t know it but this club was run by my old drama teacher, Piers Gladhill.
I hadn’t seen Piers for four years so it was great to receive his letter, which began:
‘Hello, it’s me!’
He said he was running a heat for the ‘Allcomers Talent Show’ being staged by the Hackney Empire, in August, as part of the Hackney Performers Festival 1988. Theoretically, this was only open to people residing in the London Borough of Hackney, not at their dad’s house in Loughton, but Piers turned a blind eye and encouraged me to enter. He ran the Black Cat once a week, in a room above the Rose and Crown on Stoke Newington Church Street.
I was as nervous before going down to Piers’s gig as I had been the first time I’d done stand-up the pr
evious March. The anxiety started early in the day and thickened as the event came closer. Standing in front of my bedroom mirror, with a broom handle stuck in the back of a chair to simulate a microphone stand, I practised my routine over and over again. All the way over to Stoke Newington in my car, I was running routines out loud, gibbering away at traffic lights, to the consternation of people in other cars.
I was profoundly anxious and it’s difficult to understand why I put myself through it. The satisfaction and improved self-esteem I enjoyed after the gig in Whitstable made that worthwhile, but to do that again was unnecessary, surely? I had conquered the crippling fear and made some people laugh, so now I could go and find a job. Except I didn’t want a job, I wanted to be onstage. One hit of appreciation wasn’t enough. I needed more validation, more affirmation, more self-esteem. So I went down to the Black Cat with my new act, tweaked a bit to remove the more obscure Whitstable jokes.
It goes without saying that my act would have to be entirely self-penned, non-racist and non-sexist. This didn’t mean anti-racist or anti-sexist. The choice was to omit cheap offensive references. I’d learnt well at the Reconstructive Cultural Training Camp that was the University of Kent, Humanities Faculty.
Piers asked how I was and I told him I was very nervous. He said,‘What’s the worst that can happen? You’ll have to walk from there’ – he pointed at the stage – ‘to there.’ He pointed at the door at the back of the room and smiled broadly.
It was disappointing not to receive any replies to my letters to the clubs but it worked out well that my first gig was going to be at Piers’s place. He filled me in on how to approach people about gigs. Don’t write, since most clubs are only in the venue one day a week, so you can’t be sure they will even receive letters. Instead, ring them repeatedly until they offer you an open spot and then do your best to be funny. At which point you may or may not be booked to do a twenty-minute set.