The Life of Lee

by Lee Evans

  For as long as I can remember I’ve been out of step with everyone and everything that’s going on around me. It’s the void where I feel safest. That day in Mrs Taylor’s class, I just did what came naturally. I wasn’t even aware I was doing it.

  All I knew was that suddenly I was accepted, regarded. I didn’t understand it at the time, but comedy by sheer accident would become the vehicle into which I would channel all the stuff I saw and felt. It would be a zone I could visit where no one could tell me I was doing something wrong. Comedy would become the one place where I was able to fit in. I found real life a struggle. Only on stage did I feel at home.

  5. The Early Days

  The Lawrence Weston was the only constant in my life. We’d go back there after every summer season and it was the place where I did a lot of my growing up. The estate backed on to a wide, barren piece of scrubland, interspersed with parking facilities for lorries, allotments, ditches and streams. But mostly it was wasteland awaiting developers’ careless drawings. Sandwiched between this vast space and the sky was a huge chemical works. Beyond that was the point where the M4 motorway – which went from east to west – met the M5 – which went north to south. It was known throughout the estate as ‘the gift shop’, for reasons which will become clear.

  When I was nine or ten, I would sit for hours at night staring out across the blackness of the field at the sprawling chemical works, which was lit up like a giant fallen Christmas tree. I would pick out cars’ tiny headlights travelling along the motorway and follow them, trying to predict which way they might go. I was able to tell whether they were going north or south by the fact that their lights either turned red or remained white – hey, there wasn’t much on the TV back then! But I’d also invent the people who might be in the cars, where they were going and for what reason. I would even act out the conversations that might be going on inside the car while sitting on the windowsill of my bedroom.

  One whiff of snow would always cause a large crop of road accidents – I never understood why no one ever did anything about that treacherous junction. Every year, without fail, I would watch from our bedroom window the distant blue flashing lights of the police, fire brigade and ambulances. Clustered around a smoking heavy goods vehicle, they would be cutting some poor bugger out of the cab, always at the exact same black spot, the lethal Avonmouth turn-off. That was the junction the heavy goods lorries took to get them down to the docks, either to drop off their loads or pick something up from the foreign container ships.

  There was never a long gap between the accident actually happening and the alarm being raised. Someone had a constant eye on the motorway in the winter months, particularly when black ice was on the road. For the usual suspects prowling around the estate, this made conditions ripe for potential booty.

  There was no siren or alarm bell – somehow we just knew, we felt the buzz across the estate. It was like a gold rush: grown men still in their slippers, young boys trying to get there before anybody else, a few women with hair still in rollers, a horde of residents all shapes and sizes running full pelt across the back field, jumping over the tall scrub grass towards the motorway, desperate to see who would grab the first pickings from the over-turned load scattered across the carriageway.

  To be honest, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the stuff that came off those trucks. The most I ever got was a big box of over-sized men’s Y-fronts that Mum used to clean the flat with for more than a year. So my full-speed running was more of a ‘let’s take a wander over and see what there is’. By the time I got there, anyway, it was usually too late. Like a bunch of hyenas, the locals had by then well and truly stripped the carcass of any real meat.

  As you approached the scene, you would pass a line of men, women and kids, all walking back across the field, each one enthusiastically clutching their bounty. A young boy would be struggling towards us fighting to hold on to an industrial-sized tin of something with no label on. ‘Pineapple chunks!’ he would shout as he passed, face all flushed with excitement.

  ‘What are you going to do with that? It’s massive!’ I’d say.

  ‘I don’t know yet, but I’ll find something. Perhaps pineapple pie,’ he’d reply as he staggered back to the estate.

  Now more curious to see what the truck was actually carrying, I walked to the edge of the field. From a sloping embankment there, you could look across at the full extent of the accident on the motorway. A lorry would be lying on its side like a dead whale. It had obviously come around the turn-off too fast, hit some black ice and kept on going till it hit the barrier, turned over and strewn its load. Its now-empty boxes were sprawled across both sides of the motorway and the driver’s cab was surrounded by the blue flashing lights of the emergency services trying to free the poor truck driver. They were all far too preoccupied to bother with the scavengers foraging around the trailer for loot.

  ‘Bollocks.’ I turned round and looked down. At the bottom of the bank, a young man was stamping his foot on the soggy grass in anger. Surrounded by boxes of cigarettes, he was frantically scratching his head as he tried to figure out how to carry the pile he’d made of about two hundred packs of fags.

  ‘What’s that?’ I shouted down to him. It was just to make conversation really – I could see he was hacked off.

  ‘Piss off, Evans, you runt. They’re mine!’

  The flashing blue lights and a crashed truck on the motorway always interested people on the estate. Yes, they wanted to see if there was anything of value to nick, but they were also curious about the accident itself – maybe they could do something to help. It might sound morbid, but I think it brought a bit of excitement to an otherwise uneventful day.

  But on one occasion there was an accident that stopped me going across the field ever again.

  It was about seven o’clock in the evening – I remember the time because Space Nineteen Ninety-Nine was on the telly. I loved it, but not enough to miss a lorry crash. When the word went out that another one had toppled over, I made my way across the field, as always a little late in getting to the scene. But this time it was different. As I approached the usual large cluster of flashing blue lights, I could hear the muffled sounds of the emergency services barking orders to each other in the distance.

  I was puzzled. There wasn’t the usual mischievous giggling from the looters. No one had even passed me with anything. Perhaps there was nothing on the truck. I could only see the outline of people silhouetted by the white floodlights set up by the fire service. Everyone just seemed to be standing at the edge of the field looking down the embankment. Eager to see what was going on, I ran the last few yards, squeezed through the crowd and peered down.

  The lorry had been travelling so fast, it had smashed through the barrier and rolled down the bank into the massive ditch between the motorway and the field. The emergency teams were desperately trying to cut the driver from the smashed and dented cab.

  Unfortunately, the cattle trailer the truck had been pulling wasn’t getting the same attention. It lay on its side, having been violently twisted. The whole back panel had peeled away like the lid of a tin can. Cows lay dead or dying in all sorts of odd shapes around the scene. They had obviously been thrown from the trailer.

  I was only about ten at the time, and it was difficult for me to fathom. As I watched the emergency services busy concentrating on the driver in the cab, I was confused as to why they were completely oblivious to the desperate, stomach-churning cries from the animals. Couldn’t anyone else hear that blood-curdling noise?

  One cow lay on its stomach, struggling to stand, but was too injured, and so it just bobbed its head back and forth. Meanwhile, there were cows still packed in the cattle trailer. Their body heat and panicked breathing spurted vapour and steam out through the air slits along the sides of the trailer. It merged with the rest of the heat generated by all the bodies and hung in the air above, creating a sort of dry ice. It was a dramatic, intense scene.r />
  I looked around at all the people just staring down at the poor animals and found it difficult to understand why no one was being affected by the sound of their crying. I couldn’t help myself. I tentatively began taking small steps down the grassy bank towards the trailer. I didn’t know what I would do exactly, but I thought maybe I could go and hug one of the animals and talk to it.

  But as I stepped forward, a car screeched to a halt on the motorway, and two huge men dressed in lumberjack jeans and boots jumped out of a plain white van. The driver shouted down to me, ‘You, get back!’

  Then, as he turned to a policeman and began talking, the other man efficiently opened the doors at the back of the van, took out two long cases and began walking down the embankment towards the cattle trailer. In a workmanlike fashion, he placed the two cases side by side on the grass and flipped open the lids. He revealed – and this was quite obvious to me as a boy obsessed with comics and American cop shows – the two parts of a gun. He took the pieces out of their cases and began assembling them, checking the barrel and trigger system as he went.

  Now I knew what was going to happen. The other man descended the grassy bank and was handed the gun by his friend. He swung it under his arm, cradling it on his wrist, pointed at the ground. He inserted the pack into the gun and slammed it in with the palm of his hands. It was loaded. I knew, as I’d seen them do it on the TV.

  It was a shock to me at ten years of age to watch that man with the gun stand over the first cow that lay in front of him. There was panic and fear in the animal’s eyes, and the others back in the trailer started to get restless. They were moving and shifting around.

  They knew.

  As the man lifted the gun and cocked it, I turned my head one way, then the other. All the people were just staring down at what was going on. Why weren’t the grown-ups going to do anything to help that cow?

  The cow looked up in terror at the big man. It began trying desperately to get to its feet but, because of its injuries, it was impossible. My gut wrenched, and I wanted to run down the embankment, but I knew I wasn’t allowed. I didn’t know what to do.

  The man pointed the gun at the cow’s head. Its eyes widened with fear.

  It knew.

  I knew.

  I turned and ran. I ran as fast as I could, stumbling over the knobbly grass, a huge shadow in front of me cast by the floodlights back where the crash was. I didn’t want to hear the sound of the gun.

  I just kept seeing the look of helplessness in the cow’s eyes. My lungs began to burn, I was running so fast. But still I wasn’t able to run fast enough. I heard the crack of gunfire. It stopped me in my tracks. I was confused. It didn’t sound like the guns you hear on the TV. This was a small pop. I knew it was the gun, but I couldn’t help thinking, ‘What a crap gun sound.’

  I stood silently in the middle of the field, trying to make sense of what had just happened. The twinkling yellow lights of the motorway stretched out before me. The bright full moon gave the dark, ominous clouds that sailed across the sky a silvery-blue silhouette. I looked towards the flats, our flat, on the estate. I was in no hurry to run home. All I could do there was sit in my bedroom and think about what I’d just seen and heard. I felt content to stay where I was, on my own in my remoteness in the middle of this field.

  I looked back at the illuminated, surreal scene of the accident, the tiny outlines of people moving around the top of the embankment and looking down into the ditch.

  ‘Pop!’

  I jumped. I’d heard another one. I put my fingers in my ears, so I couldn’t hear any more and tried to make myself feel better by thinking I wasn’t a part of it, like I was looking down from a distant Olympian height. But then I rolled to my knees and began crying uncontrollably.

  ‘Why couldn’t I have done something? I didn’t do anything!’

  It was some time before I could go to bed at night without staring up at the ceiling partially illuminated by the distant lights of the motorway and without thinking about the plaintive look in that animal’s eyes.

  Another childhood incident that had a profound impact on me happened soon after, and it was an experience that rammed home to me the fact that my family appeared to hail from an entirely different planet.

  People often ask me the same question: what was your first break in show business? Well, it might not surprise anyone to hear that it was in actual fact a ludicrous, completely voluntary appearance in an item which topped the bill of the local evening news in Bristol.

  It was 1974, the time of the industrial action that swept through the country faster than Arthur Scargill’s hair on a motorbike. It was bad enough coping with the power cuts inflicted on us by one lot trying to get their own back on Ted Heath, let alone having to deal with the rotting stench of waste after another lot – the rubbish collective – voted for an all-out strike.

  So, after some cursing and ranting about how if he ran the country he could do it a damn sight better than those bastards in Downing Street, Dad came up with the cock-eyed idea of taking the rubbish to the local dump ourselves.

  The bins downstairs on the estate were bulging over with stinking refuse, and everyone in our flat was gradually losing their upper-arm strength from continually pushing the well-packed rubbish down into our kitchen bin.

  There were no bin bags then, so we emptied as much stinking waste as possible into carrier bags, boxes, even our pockets, then loaded it into Dad’s Ford Cortina and headed over to the tip. It wasn’t far away, about three minutes in the car – I could walk it in fifteen.

  We arrived at the gate to a small but vocal welcoming party. A few members of the transport union were picketing the gate. A local news crew was there, too. Reporting on such a small-scale demo didn’t exactly push back the boundaries of investigative journalism, but the way they were acting you’d have thought we’d just arrived at the gates of the Gaza Strip.

  As soon as we pulled up, the bloke with the microphone was banging on the car window, shouting at my dad: ‘Will you be going in, what’s your name, are you local, are you fed up with the unions?’

  ‘Who the bloody hell’s this clown? Piss off, you twat!’ Dad didn’t even give him any eye contact.

  The bloke with the microphone hustled towards the picket line. ‘We think he will try to cross the picket line,’ he shouted down the lens of the camera.

  Dad turned and stared down at me for a moment through his trademark thick bottle-end glasses. I could see that journo bloke had riled him. His eyes widened with mischief. They looked huge. ‘Wait ’ere, son. I’m just going to have a quiet word with the nice man on the gate.’

  He got out of the car and I watched him barrel up to the small crowd of protesters standing around a burning oil drum, some with home-made placards calling for more pay. I saw Dad standing in front of the men. As he delivered a flurry of jabbing hand movements and lots of pointing at the gates then back at the car, I could hear his muffled shouting – something about ‘I’ll kick your something head in and I will stuff it where I can’t quite remember.’ Dad was still working at the docks at the time, so perhaps the bloke in charge knew him. But wherever Dad was offering to stuff it, he obviously thought it worth opening the gates.

  Dad bowled back to the car and got in. ‘Everything all right, Dad?’ I enquired fearfully.

  He laughed and did an impression of W. C. Fields. ‘Son, we’re goin’ in.’ He proceeded to sing ‘The Dambusters’ as we pulled off at full pelt through the gates and into the tip. We bobbed and bounced at speed along rows of piled-up waste, followed by the man with the microphone and the crew of one in their ATV van. We came to a stop and the news van pulled up alongside us. The man with the microphone and his crew jumped out and began setting up their tripod.

  ‘Take no notice, Lee. Whatever he says, just ignore him,’ Dad muttered.

  I began unloading the rubbish from the car. The camera was set up and the man with
the microphone began talking into it, as Dad and I carried boxes round the back. Dad began doing funny walks and pulling faces over the reporter’s shoulder, while I just kept my head down.

  That night after tea, Dad gathered us all round the TV to watch the local news, just to prove to Mum that we were telling the truth and that we were actually filmed at the rubbish dump that day.

  The news began and we all got excited during that little teaser bit at the beginning about the forthcoming stories on the programme. There was that man with the microphone and, sure enough, Dad and I could indeed be glimpsed in the background, stumbling around amongst the rubbish, holding boxes. ‘’Ere we are. Look, there’s us!’

  Every time an item came on the news, Mum was unable to cope and kept running out of the room, a nervous wreck. ‘I can’t watch, Dave,’ she would say, flying out with a tissue to her face.

  We had to wait until right at the end of the news, but it did come on. Unfortunately, it wasn’t what we were expecting. It was an item about the state of the country and how there was an emerging underclass of deprived people who were relying on the discarded waste of the poorest neighbourhoods. It went on about how we were turning into a Third World country, how the most disadvantaged people were suffering so badly that these blighted beasts had begun to scavenge among the disgusting waste grounds of our rubbish tips.

  I didn’t really know what my first ever TV appearance meant. It certainly didn’t indicate that one day I might have my own BBC series. But Dad seemed angry as he got up to leave the room and kicked the dog on the way out.