Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  Kenneth Tynan observed that, in his experience, far from coming from harsh backgrounds, actors generally had supportive, applauding families and were ‘brought up to be the centre of attention’. Geraldine James, who is a proper actor, disputed this. She told me that she had become an actor to hide. Suddenly she was given the right words to say.

  She was able to disappear and become someone else. That’s why Geraldine is such a wonderful actor. Me, I’m one of Tynan’s babies. I just liked showing off. I was just as pleased to win the junior elocution prize (well, it was Essex) or tell elephant jokes to some old ladies’ club (‘How many elephants can you get in a mini?’) as to gurn and gibber as Scrooge in Mrs Wiltshire’s lavish production of A Christmas Carol at Epping Junior School. (I had to fall asleep convincingly, have my dreams and wear a funny hat.)

  From an early age, I had decided it would be fun to be a famous actor. I liked the frisson that ran through Hartland Road when we discovered that the people up the end had an uncle who was the man who was Maigret on the telly: Rupert Davies. The grown-ups earnestly discussed his career dilemmas. ‘He had become so famous for that role that he was “type-cast”,’ they said knowingly. They certainly never talked about Harry Kopelman, my father’s colleague at the hospital, like that.

  I equated acting with riches, prestige and esteem. My father watched Roger Moore on the telly and told me that if I wanted to be a proper actor I would have to be able to raise one eyebrow, so I went back to the bathroom mirror and, by physically holding down one half of my face, perfected the trick of letting the other half rise in an all-purpose, querulous tic of mystery. I can still do it, even though I probably shouldn’t.

  But unlike today’s proper actor friends, who joined amateur troupes and were taken frequently to the theatre, the Rhys Joneses were not a cultural family. We had our own children’s books, but my father was a typical doctor. He read his BMJ journal and his boating magazines and kept vast hoards of both stashed about the house. He had a shelf of medical text books, but they weren’t much help, although there was one dusty volume that my friends and I discovered in the garage: An Introduction to Forensic Science. The local gangs used to make appointments to open the book at a black and white photograph of ‘the baby half-eaten by rats’.

  I read everything knocking about, including a complete set of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia, with its coloured plates of the flags of all nations, and its ‘Ten Small Tales to Treasure’, and its grainy photographs of statues of worthy exemplars, like Nurse Cavell. Having gobbled up my own approved literature (C. S. Lewis and Arthur Ransome), I was even discovered by my father, one rainy afternoon, leafing through our Complete Works of Shakespeare. What pater’s heart would not lift with pride? I apparently ruined it for him when he found me on the same rug the following day stuck into The Green Lantern. I read to combat tedium.

  Alice Thomas Ellis pointed out that childhood is full of long periods of utter boredom. But that was then. Not any more. My own children were bombarded with more visual spew in the first three years of their existence than we had experienced by the time we were twenty.

  Television was a novelty for us. It arrived in our house as a flickering fuzz the size of a paperback, and must have taken at least five minutes to dominate our lives. But we were only ever allowed to watch the BBC, and the BBC, of course, had only one channel. Even then, the class-based quarantine was extended to certain specific programmes. My father refused to allow us, under any circumstances, to watch the blameless Dr Kildare. He resented the way that his patients arrived suffering imaginary symptoms and demanding instant miracle cures.

  Today by jumping channels, any sentient nine-year-old can watch programmes deliberately aimed at their tastes from six in the morning until, well, six the following morning.

  But in the early sixties, television went grown-up after Muffin the Mule, Blue Peter and Doctor Who (which was considered so complicated that the first episode had to be shown all over again the following week). If we wanted to stay up late, we had to watch Panorama. There was nothing else on. My kids just turn over and carry on watching more exciting adventures of real people being moronic. We only had one telly and no remote control, and usually a supervisor in the shape of my father snoring in ‘his’ chair, a brown-covered wing-arm chair, only otherwise allowed to be occupied by the dog, Harold.

  By the age of eleven, however, I had an hour and a half’s homework a night, which, if of a scientific nature, would take me three. I would sit scowling at equations, tormented by my father’s gibbon-like laugh from below, as he howled at Dad’s Army or Steptoe in the sitting room. I couldn’t see him, nose up, his belly shaking, his head thrown back, but I could certainly hear him: a high, whistling ‘hee-hee’, followed by a prolonged, hooting whoop. Bah. Sometimes I would creep down to find out what had been so funny and hang about until I was told to get on with my homework again, and then his tormenting braying would start all over. He loved television comedy: Morecambe and Wise, Alf Garnett, Hancock, The Frost Report. Eventually we both sat down in front of Monty Python. He encouraged me to watch it, in fact. My mother resolutely refused to find it funny. It became a thing for us. Even if he never read the TLS my father had an intelligent bloke’s judgement. How could the man who played the Dame in the hospital panto not have?

  Cultural education was pretty much left to ‘Aunty’ Gwen Powell, my brisk, no-nonsense godmother and a friend of my parents from their early years. Or at least, she felt it was.

  Poor Gwen, she was as concerned about the moral responsibilities of art as my father was indifferent to them.

  The vicar at her funeral, where I embarrassed everyone by sobbing in the pulpit when I was supposed to be reading the lesson, told me that, on Remembrance Day, all the veterans in the village had been taken aback to see Gwen, the fiery old lady from the old people’s home, marching up to the church gate, straight-backed and bearing the weight of a massive display of medals on her bosom. Gwen had been a matron on hospital ships in the Atlantic convoys. She was a formidable woman.

  She asked me in her slightly imperious way one evening, as we left for dinner after I had been performing at the Lyric Hammersmith, whether I was short of money.

  ‘No, not particularly,’ I replied.

  ‘So you don’t have to advertise cat food, then?’

  As well as improving books on birthdays, she took me to art galleries and to St Fagan’s Museum near Cardiff, to Cambridge (long before I understood the concept of going to study there), to archaeological sites and to the theatre. We went together to Stratford to see David Warner play Hamlet. Gwen encouraged me to think I could be an actor.

  David Harris had an indirect effect as well. David Harris Senior was our dentist. David Harris Junior was my bicycling friend. They lived in a modern house like the ones in American films, built in an immature wood near Harlow and matching their American family structure with big plate-glass windows and white sofas smelling like the surgery: vaguely clean and antiseptic. They were a spare family too. June, the mother, had a slightly vague, pop-eyed expression, and her son shared it. Dad was equally reserved but more direct. There was always a slight dour playfulness in his eyes, as if the only proper reaction to young boys was one of quizzical wariness. But then adults have to do something. Dr Kopelman was a barker — head back for pompous generalizing. Dr Hayden was a stooper — cautiously playful and one of the boys. I am abrupt, brook-no-nonsense. I can’t help it. Adult males struggle to. retain control with adolescents. We all do it. But Mr Harris was ‘Go on, impress me, you garrulous twerp,’ though he would never have said anything as coherent. Most of the time, he seemed to tick along slowly, as if his whole metabolism had been slowed down by the frozen process of dentistry.

  He was one of our family’s new friends when we first got to Harlow, a fellow health professional. On one visit, in my early teens, after he had counted off the teeth and poked around with a broad, flat-ended finger in his American— looking surgery, in what must -hav
e been a specially planned, dental surgery zone of Harlow New Town, he summoned my mother to take a look. I had a crowded mouth, he explained, in his slow non-committal manner. He pointed to my canines, two sharp teeth. They had detached themselves from the top row and wandered off to some higher point on my gums, one on either side. I also had an under-hung jaw, inherited from her, apparently. The combination of the two meant I looked like a Cro-Magnon Dracula. I rather liked it, but it was decided that I should have orthodontic treatment to fix my bite.

  This had its plusses. Every three months I would take an afternoon off from my big school. My mother would accompany me on the Central Line tube: Epping, Theydon Bois, Debden (where they made the banknotes) Loughton, Woodford, South Woodford. I have to stop there. Once I could- do the lot — at least as far as Oxford Circus, including Leytonstone, Snaresbrook, Stratford, Liverpool Street and Tottenham Court Road. If there were singularities connected with any of these places I never knew them. They were just stops along the jiggling way, through the immense outskirts of London — miles of flat-backed yellow houses, linked by the skein of pipes that runs alongside the track on posts, until Stratford. Then the Underground finally lived up to its name and plunged into the darkness, and the pipes looped and soared alongside in the dirty tunnel, sometimes up six feet, sometimes dropping down to run alongside the windows — always snake-like and always caked with what must surely be ‘grime’.

  For a twelve-year-old, central London meant the fixed determination of the anonymous crowd, bustling off the carriage with practised purposefulness, knowing which exit to take, which side of the escalator to stand, where to stick their ticket, when to get up for the stop. Even then, I could sense the collective pride in being a skilled native Underground traveller and I sought to emulate it. After the long, boring ride through the deserted midday platforms, the stations in the black heart of the city were always exciting warrens of expectation. The platforms had sudden gusts of hot wind blowing up them in front of hidden trains. There were thrilling advertisements for corsets and brassières all up the escalators and brightly lit heel and key bars in the concourses. All of them seemed to be comprehensively ignored by the passengers hurrying up to the light. London was far from being a meaningless jumble. We very rarely went there by any means other than the tube, and its uniform, slightly out-of-date spirit linked everything. London was the clanking mahogany doors of the lift, the big red sixpence signs on the blue ticket machines, the tiled octagonal ticket spaces, the wrought-iron bridges and white on dark blue station names, whether we were emerging in Westbourne Grove for skating at the Queens Ice Rink or in South Kensington for the museums or Holborn for the Eastman Dental Hospital.

  My teeth were fixed up in this giant shop-floor of dentistry on the Gray’s Inn Road off to the north of High Holborn. Dozens of dental chairs were arranged in ranks. It seemed a factory of pain. The pinkish consultant came and played around with a plaster cast of my gnashers, before leading the inspection of the real thing. It was a status deformity. All these people may have been focused on my teeth, but I was definitely the centre of attention. They had clearly never seen anything like it. Then the consultant paraded on, and my jaws were left in the hands of supernumeraries.

  Orthodontic treatment seemed to be based on the most rudimentary of medical principles. Since my teeth were crooked they would be yanked into line. To make room, a couple of back teeth would be heaved out first. The straightforward physical effect was achieved through the most complex of in-mouth engineering. The remaining teeth were encased in sheaths of metal and fixed up with hooks and wires. I wore a plate, made of the same startling shiny pink plastic as my grandfather’s dentures, which slotted around my upper teeth and rested up against my palate, where it collected a gooey mat of whatever I ate. After meals I was supposed to take it out and wash it, but I was twelve. If I could be bothered, or if the food was particularly suety or even tasty, I would lever the thing off the roof of my mouth and suck the residue off. Otherwise, it stayed in and hurt. It hurt because it was designed to force my teeth into new positions. I was given plastic bags of minute elastic bands. One end of the rubber was attached to a hook on the back of my plate and the other around a projection sticking out of the front of my teeth. These projections sometimes caught in the inner flesh of my cheeks, but were supposed to act as a grappling hook for a steady, medieval, rack-like torture of the elastic, pulling the teeth into a new angle in their sockets.

  Every three months I got another morning off school and paid another visit to the tooth factory, and out would come a selection of ingenious miniature pliers and spanners. The dentists would tighten up their diabolical machinery, and I would fail to sleep for a few nights, groaning under the relentless stretching of my gums. Finally, even this was not enough, and a scold’s bridle was constructed from black garter elastic and wire. It had two loops on projecting prongs at the front. I had to wear it at night. The loops went over two minute hooks attached permanently to my upper teeth, the elastic went around the back of my head and all night long it pulled agonizingly hard. Sorry for me yet? I was a boy, so I had no particular vanity, but apart from Nichols I seemed to be the only one in my year put through this torture. Every American kid in every TV series or Hollywood film appeared to be similarly afflicted so I didn’t have to explain to anyone why I had a mouth like the inside of a clock, but my school mates all grew up buck-toothed and proud of it. Nichols, despite wearing short trousers and polishing his shoes, took his plate out and stuck it in his pocket as soon as he got to school. He eventually resorted to accidentally treading on it. His treatment was abandoned — a hopeless dental recidivist — but I was an obedient child. When it came to professional medical advice I had to be. There were too many adults prepared to gang up on me, including Mr Harris.

  After eighteen months the consultant returned. He fiddled with my plaster casts, peered into my mouth and told the assembled experts that the problem was hereditary. Tenderly chucking me beneath my prognathous hamster cheeks, he explained that they’ had been wasting their time. The only recourse was surgery. He offered to cut out a section of my jawbone on either side of my mouth and set the whole thing back a couple of inches. This way I would have a perfect bite. I would also look like a selectively inbred Hapsburg with an Adam’s apple bigger than my chin. He added, idly, that the operation was tricky (a lot of nerves and blood vessels to negotiate) but I would boast a standard chomp, so the dentally critical would be satisfied.

  I was relieved that they didn’t take advantage of me there and then with their miniature buzz saws. This was before All New Cosmetic Surgery Live became a mid-evening television favourite. People are made of sterner stuff now Then, it seemed a bit radical, and I backed off down the corridor clutching my mummy’s hand and making her promise that I wouldn’t have to have it done.

  She would have taken me to Gamages as a treat. Somewhere in High Holborn, not far from the bright-red castellated Flemish fortress that belonged to Prudential Insurance, was a department store with a similar rambling, gothic provenance. It was a country-house emporium, with echoing back staircases and hidden annexes up in the attics, which is where I went, to the make-up department. I don’t know how I fond it. Perhaps my mother took me there to look at toys. I think it was just beyond and behind the toy department, but it sold proper, Leichner, theatrical make-up. I developed a fascination with the stuff which would have frightened Michael MacLiammoir. I still have some of the sticks of greasepaint I bought then because as far as I can tell you can never use up a stick of carmine.

  I can remember the long, slimy bars of colour, like lipstick, wrapped in gold paper with black printing. I must have had an instruction book too, because I knew that you had to smear the lot over the face, then paint wrinkles, moles and shadows to mould a new you — dab a tiny dot inside the corner of the eye, to make the whites shine brightly, add a half black line under the eyelashes for a bloke, a full line for a woman and finally add loads of powder to ‘hold’ everything in
place. When did I do this? What for? Who did I show? I must have gone downstairs eliciting approval, and I think the intention was to create something ghoulish rather than camp. I bought long pigtails of crêpe hair and glue. I had both grey and black woven into ropes. I pulled out a lump for use, but I never steamed it to get it straight. So I bought some complete false moustaches instead. At one stage, I had a stick of nose putty which required endless kneading to make pliable and I made myself a false nose, added pirate whiskers, blackened my teeth and stuck some convincing warts on my still protruding chin. But the biggest hit was the packet of blood capsules. These were lozenges made of clear plastic which contained some sort of red sherbet and when chewed frothed and bubbled with a convincing approximation of a tubercular haemorrhage, particularly effective in the middle of Brentwood High. Street on a dull Wednesday afternoon. At some point I got hold of a convincing severed thumb as well, but I’m not sure if that came from Gamages. It was just normal, healthy, attention-seeking exhibitionism. I was quite convinced I would become an actor.

  As soon as I arrived at senior school, I decided I wanted to be in plays. Mr Baron was in charge. He organized his ‘Winter Theatricals’ on a model seemingly derived from mid-period Tyrone Guthrie, with a bit of Donald Wolfit thrown in on the side. He had no truck with modish ‘ideas’. Only Shakespeare was ever performed — in period costume, with sets derived from page six of his Penguin copy. Executed by Mr Featherstone, the head of the school art department and a fencing-champion enthusiast for heraldry, but not, thank goodness, for modish ideas, they consisted of painted flats depicting battlements, towers and gothic entrances of a flexible, not to say wobbly, nature.

  Mr Baron jealously guarded his dominance of school theatricals. In my second year, for example, almost every boy who could stand up was dragooned into the junior school play: Christopher Fry’s The Boy with the Cart. It was an excruciating Christian parable, delivered in blank verse with uplifting songs (‘Boy with the Cart, where are you going to, Boy with the Cart, where have you come from?’). Even we tiny ones sensed that the sophisticated French master (who wore a bowler hat like Jeremy Thorpe and could sometimes be spotted sneaking into school from the direction of the station, looking a little rough, at one minute to nine) was a director rather given to modish ideas. He wanted energy (‘lots of energy, boys!’). He wanted light (‘more light!’), and he wanted big white blocks as a set. ‘Spud’ Baron was not impressed. He called it ‘Boy with the Fart’.