Paul Daniels

by Paul Daniels

  Next door but one to them lived my Auntie Louie and her husband Connie, short for Cornelius. They looked just like Jack Spratt and his wife from the children’s nursery rhyme. Auntie Louie was very overweight and I used to dread having to kiss her, which happened every Christmas. She would engulf me in her arms, her bosom cradling me on either side and my face would vanish into her cheek. I was always convinced that I would die of suffocation in there. Years later, I found out that my brother felt exactly the same way and that we both grew up with a fear of fat women.

  Granny Lloyd’s concern for the community stretched well beyond her activities with the Mission Hall when she doubled as the local undertaker. Her main task was to ‘lay out’ bodies. When somebody died she would get a call to come and prepare the body for the funeral. It was quite a busy time for her during the war. One day she asked Uncle Eddie and Uncle Connie to help get a body down the stairs and into the front room of a house nearby. Neither of them really wanted to do this. Both were filled with a superstitious fear of the dead. Granny told them not to be so stupid. ‘He’s dead. He can’t harm you now.’ They took quite a bit of convincing but Granny Lloyd was a forceful character.

  Eddie took the head end, supporting the corpse under the armpits. Connie had the feet. All was going well, albeit with a struggle, until they came to the curve in the stairs. As they struggled to get the body around the corner they bent it almost double. Wind, trapped inside the corpse, came out as a loud and rude raspberry. Connie immediately dropped his end. ‘If the bugger can do that then he can bloody well walk downstairs!’ Off he went and he wouldn’t come back.

  Connie didn’t seem to have much luck with the dead, especially when he got his hands on some ducks one Christmas and didn’t know how to prepare them for the oven. He eventually chopped off their heads and pegged them by their webbed feet upside down on a clothesline in the back yard to drain the blood. He came in white as a sheet as the bodies were still flapping and the heads on the floor were still quacking.

  Granddad Daniels was not very tall but, like Aunt Louie, very, very fat. He was a shunting engine driver at the steel works and I used to wonder how he got through the narrow open door on to the footplate. Everyone said that he had a great tenor voice and apparently, on some works outing, had stopped the shopping in the marketplace in Richmond, Yorkshire, by singing from the hill that many years later I was to march up and down as a soldier. The entire marketplace burst into applause as he finished ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’. A phenomenal voice to match his size.

  Grandma Gertie, his wife, was quite the opposite. I remember her being tall and gaunt and a bit frightening. She played the piano in pubs to earn extra money; her party piece was lying down, crossing her arms above her head and playing the piano through a towel that she had laid on the keys. She got big tips doing this, though I was never allowed in the pub to watch a performance.

  Her daughter Maureen was Dad’s half-sister or stepsister, I was never sure. Tall, gorgeous, with raven black hair, she was in showbusiness. She was part of a double act called Kizma and Karen. Wow. Maureen tap-danced on steps that were made for her by my father. They had to fold away small enough to go in taxis and on trains, so it was quite a feat of ingenuity. Occasionally, she would come to our house and rehearse on a new set of steps that Dad had made and I fell madly in love with her long, long legs. She taught me how to do a riffle-shuffle with a pack of cards and would probably have taught me a few other things had I been a little older.

  Mam didn’t like Aunt Maureen or Grandma Gertie. At some time in the past there had been a major disagreement and although I never discovered what it was about, I do know that Dad had suffered a bad childhood with Gertie. He was never given any Christmas gifts and one day the man next door, taking pity on him, gave my dad a fort that his son had been given the year before and no longer played with. Gertie seized it immediately and used it as firewood. Maybe that was why Mam didn’t like Gertie. She also seemed to think that her daughter, Aunt Maureen, was a bit promiscuous.

  In those terrifying days of conflict, the people of the community were more than just living closely together. If any woman was sick, for example, the neighbours would take over the house. One would do the cleaning while others cooked or looked after the children. Doors were always open to everyone and visitors would make a cursory tap or, more commonly, shout a brief ‘Hellooooo’.

  During the war, nothing was wasted that could be recycled, especially as there wasn’t a lot of money about. The wives not only did war work previously done by the men, they also knitted, crotcheted, sewed, repaired and kept households ticking along. Clippy mats were the big thing and they all seemed to make them. When the women got together every Saturday night, old clothing was cut up into strips about 4in long by about 1 in wide and then sorted into colours. A piece of canvas was stretched across a wooden frame and the material was poked through the weave and pulled back again with a small hook. It was then knotted and the next piece poked through. Eventually the pattern in this rag carpet took shape and when it was finished the ‘clippy’ mat would adorn the floor of someone’s house.

  On Saturday nights there would be a radio programme called The Man in Black. There was no television in those days, so radio was the number-one source of entertainment. These were horror and mystery stories told by Valentine Dyall, who had a wonderfully deep, resonant voice. The problem was that the stories would frighten the women and my mother had to walk them all back to their houses. Brave Mam at less than 5ft and playing the Great Protector.

  One day, a strange thing happened in 10 Lower Oxford Street. From somewhere, I didn’t know where, someone delivered a baby to our house. He arrived just before Christmas, on 23 December and I remember my dad came home. He must have been given compassionate leave, or ‘passionate’ leave as they called it in the Navy!

  As usual in those days, the baby was delivered at home. The bed was moved downstairs into the front room and the crib was a drawer from a chest of drawers. A member of the family had discreetly removed me until the event had taken place. Sadly for me, that was the only Christmas I remember as a child. Like most four-year-olds, I awoke very early on the day and crept downstairs to see what Father Christmas had brought me. Normally, that would have been all right as the family would have been asleep upstairs but, as Trevor, my new brother, had just been born, they were all snoring together in the front room alongside the very chimney that Santa had come down. Standing in the centre of the room, he had left me a metal machine-gun, on a tripod, with grip handles and triggers. I grabbed the handles and pulled the triggers and the gun made a wonderfully realistic rat-atatatat-atat noise as sparks flew out of the end. I was enthralled, but Dad fell out of bed half-asleep thinking he was under attack, Mam screamed, the baby yelled and I hadn’t the sense to let go of the gun. I shot them all dead three times over before Dad grabbed me. Merry Christmas everyone!

  The one big thing that I remember about Christmases then is that it was the only time of the year that we ate chicken. This made Christmas dinner into something very special and I feel a bit sorry for everyone today because marketing men have now given us chicken all year round so there is nothing really all that different about Christmas meals. Nowadays, Debbie and I have whisky porridge for Christmas morning breakfast and it is the only time of the year that we have it. It starts the day wonderfully and I guess, if you had enough of it, you wouldn’t worry about the rest of the day.

  Dad returned to the sea battle a few days later and was posted to India. I missed him the moment he walked out the door. Perhaps it was this sense of melancholy churning away inside me that made me quiet and shy. I was still involved in the street games but mostly I would stay in and read comics, magazines and books. I loved reading.

  My first school was Princess Street Junior School and it amazed me. The primary room had a set of tall French windows that opened on to a lawned garden. I had never seen a garden and I honestly don’t believe that I saw a tree until I was five – sc
rubby bushes, but not trees. The terraced houses in our part of the town just did not have the space for such large vegetation to grow. Mrs Strickland was my teacher, a warm, loving, but strict woman whom we all grew to like very much. I loved reading and I put it down to her encouragement that gave me a window through which to escape into all sorts of fantasy worlds.

  One winter it snowed and kept on snowing. To us, it was wonderful. I rushed out of school into falling snow and immediately began to roll a snowball, patting it all the time to make it compact and firm. The ball got bigger and bigger and more kids joined in rolling it about. That was OK, it was still my ball. Eventually it grew so big none of us could roll it so a runner was sent to get more help. My Uncle Eddie came and so did more men and they rolled it and rolled it until it was directly outside our house. It was not an exaggeration to say that it blocked the street. Off we went and rolled a smaller (but still very large) one, and somehow the men hauled it on top of the other using ladders. The following day, Lower Oxford Street was in the newspapers with photographs of the Giant Snowman. That must have been my first unconscious attempt at publicity.

  Early school memories are few. I can remember finding a thousand ways to try to get out of drinking the free milk, which was always left standing in the warm sun and would go off before it was served to us. I would pretend to go home for lunch, as school dinners came nowhere near my mother’s cooking. I used to use the dinner money to buy a small crusty loaf from Sands bakery and save the remainder as pocket money. Maybe this interrupted any social activity I might have had in the playground, as I became quite a loner.

  Being a lonesome boy, I cannot recall having any real friends, and the only ones I enjoyed playing with were Catholics. My street and the one next to it were like a little Northern Ireland. For some reason, birds of a feather really do flock together and our street was mostly Protestants and the next one mostly Catholics.

  It always amused me that on Friday night, pay night, they would all get drunk out of their brains, knock seven bells out of each other and on Monday morning all go to work together without a second thought. Many years later I noticed the same thing in Belfast when I started to appear in the clubs there. They would all have this great fight on the Friday and be back at work without a murmur on Monday. One day a newspaper reporter got hold of this story, blew it up out of all proportion and three months later when I went back they had guns on the roofs. I blame the media for a lot; it has not been used for our good and it should be. It should lead us towards a better life, not stir up trouble.

  When I was seven years old, Dad eventually came back from the war. I must have changed a lot in the two years he’d been gone, but he had changed, too. He now had a full nautical beard and I didn’t recognise him. Now that I am an adult I can imagine how he felt when, not having seen his wife for years, he was not allowed to get into bed with her because his young son kept hitting him and telling him to get out of his mother’s bed.

  Huge street parties were quickly organised to celebrate the homecoming, with long tables stretching down the middle of our street. Balloons tied to chairs bobbed about and the multi-coloured bunting fluttered in the breeze. Jelly was the mainstay of the menu and was probably the only thing there was plenty of at the time. I wondered how those who had lost loved-ones in the war coped with this celebration.

  Dad quickly went back to being a cinema projectionist at the Hippodrome in South Bank. This had been erected in 1910 as a temporary building but it lasted until the 1960s. Its exterior consisted of corrugated metal sheets with flat metal panels on the façade. As a young boy, I was never allowed to visit my dad at work because of our strict bedtime regime. Dad would already have left for work when we were washed and dressed in our pyjamas by 6.45pm ready for Dick Barton, Special Agent on the radio as we ate our supper. We were ushered into bed as soon as the closing music played at exactly 7.00pm. ‘Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.’ Did your mother come out with stuff like that? Stuff like ‘You’ll stay like that’ if you pulled a face; ‘You’ll laugh on the other side of your face when I’m finished with you’; ‘don’t do as I do, do as I say …’ Later in life, you find yourself saying all these things to your own children.

  The fact that central heating was not yet available meant that we would automatically rise early in the cold and scratch our names on the frost which had collected on the inside of our windows before brushing our teeth in the freezing tap water. I was always loosing my front teeth. As a small child I fell down some stone stairs in a cinema, teeth first. For most of my early years I had a huge gap in my smile. It seemed like I went to the dentist every other week and that meant that from the age of ten I held no fear of dentists. I would not have any anaesthetic to dull the pain and hated the thought of being knocked out cold with gas. I just gripped the side of the chair as the drill bored deeper. Eventually, my teeth grew back again.

  When I was starting to display my new teeth in the playground one morning, ‘Happy’ Bates jumped off an old wartime shelter and leapt on to my shoulders. As my head hit the concrete, I could see pieces of tooth flying off in all directions from under my nose. My mother was devastated that my new teeth were lost once more and the dentist cried.

  It was decided that the dentist should ‘carve’ what remained of my front teeth until they looked like tiny fangs, to wait until my teenage years before they could be successfully capped. I was so proud that my new jaws shone like the toothpaste advert. I must have been busier exercising my new smile rather than looking where I was going, because a few days later I jumped over a wall. I made it all the way over, except for my feet. They gave me a great pivot point as I swung down on to the pavement again and smashed the whole top row. Fang the Wonder Boy had done it again. Sorry, Mam!

  Over the road from us lived Mrs Grant. Now she was very old, or so we thought. She was also very strange and spooky – a spiritualist. At first I was frightened of her, but she turned out to be a nice old lady. I told her I didn’t believe in ghosts and she said that when she died she was going to come back and pull my ears. Years later, when she did die, I used to sit quietly at night and will her to pull my ears, which was a very risky thing to do because they were already rather big. She never did, of course.

  Trevor and I shared the same bedroom and spent all night singing songs. Of course, we got to see more movies than most kids because we didn’t have to pay. Even though we had our differences, we would stick together in an emergency. If, in the middle of a row, anybody stepped in between us, it would be the intruder who would suffer. Because we were brought up in such a loving, disciplined relationship, we enjoyed the stability and safety of each other’s company. No one in our house ever touched alcohol except on very special occasions and it was extremely unusual for our parents to row.

  Leisure times were always arranged according to what was left in the budget, but as Dad worked for a regular wage and Mam kept the family accounts brilliantly in little red exercise books, we could afford a few enjoyable trips into the country. We grew up having wonderful holidays going camping or on the Norfolk Broads, renting boats and sometimes even a converted windmill. It nestled on a bend in the river miles from anywhere and only accessible by boat or on foot through the cornfields. It was so secluded that Trevor, Dad and I would be stark naked on the front lawn, playing shuttlecock, of all things, which is particularly hazardous if you are male!

  Every time a boat came round the bend we would all run like hell, only to appear moments later when the danger had passed. The other problem was the massive dragonflies. Those blue monsters must have had a breeding ground close by for they would suddenly appear from nowhere and start to dive-bomb us. We would jump from side to side to avoid being bitten, with male parts dangling like worms to a fish.

  The family name for the male organ was ‘cuckoo’. I never found out why, but we all had ‘cuckoos’. Apparently, I had already disgraced myself at a church tea party by proudly announcing that my father had ‘
feathers’ round his ‘cuckoo’.

  It was my dad’s ‘cuckoo’ that was in jeopardy now as three or four dragonflies took a fancy to him and started to plunge and swoop at his genitalia. Trevor and I were in hysterics rolling around the floor as my dad swerved to avoid contact and disappeared into the windmill shrieking. He was a very funny man, my dad.

  Visual comedy was what he particularly enjoyed and he could easily have been a performer. A regular visitor to our house was Mrs Gillings, my Granny Lloyd’s friend. One scene in a Laurel and Hardy film constantly fascinated her – Stan Laurel produces a flame from the end of his thumb. Later, this was to be made even more famous by British Gas, but at the time this was an amazing miracle. Having discussed this phenomenon once more, Dad offered to show Mrs Gillings how the effect was really done, before disappearing into the yard. I don’t think he had any great insight into the world of special effects; he just seemed to have the sort of brain that could work things out in a logical fashion.

  Arriving back into our kitchen with a bottle of methylated spirits in his hand he carefully unscrewed it and put his thumb over the opening. With a running commentary, he explained the whole process in great detail as he tipped the bottle up to ensure a good soaking of meths on his thumb. Grabbing a match, he proudly announced, ‘… they stop the film and start it again after you simply set light to it like this!’ With those words, the whole of his arm shot up in flames. He had soaked his thumb so that the meths had run down to his elbow. Mrs Gillings shrieked in alarm as Dad ran around the room on fire. At first I was so shocked I didn’t know what to do, but the laughter in Dad’s eye told me everything was under control.