by Paul Daniels
One night, just after World War II, a woman in the audience screamed out as she thought she recognised her missing, presumed dead, husband right in front of her, coming down the gangplank of a ship on the newsreel. Dad stopped the film and after finding out what the problem was, announced that the film would be run again, in order for the woman to identify her man. The clip was repeated three times and sure enough the woman pointed him out. From this piece of film, they were able to trace her husband to a hospital where he was suffering from serious amnesia and they were both joyfully reunited. It was a wonderful story that made me realise how useful the media could be when used properly.
By now I was doing OK for pocket money. Not only was I showing the films but I was also delivering groceries by bike for Rogers Fruit and Vegetable Shop on Nelson Street. I could balance five or six boxes on the front and back carriers if I rode leaning to the side so that I could see around them. It also increased my productivity, as I didn’t have to keep going back to the shop to re-load quite so often.
When I was about ten years old, we moved to a ‘prefab’ in Middlesbrough Road East, number 39. Why do we remember such trivialities as a house number we will never use again? Prefabs were the Government’s answer to the need for quick housing and to us it was wonderful. It had such an impact on our lives that my mother still says she would live in one again. The integrated design was very clever. Even the walls separating the bedrooms were, in reality, wardrobes, some of which opened into one room and some into the other. The kitchen, as another example, had a plate and pan rack set into the wall over the cooking area that jutted out over the bath in the normally wasted space in the bathroom. Although intended only as temporary homes, many of these cleverly designed properties were still standing 50 years later. As the Government managed the massive rehousing programme, families were shuffled from one town to another. Fortunately for us, we were not moved very far and soon found ourselves in a home that was clearly superior to our previous residence in Lower Oxford Street.
Interestingly, it was another form of ‘soap’ that became an essential ingredient in our new house. We now lived directly opposite the steelworks, literally a street’s width away. As I meandered home from school each day, I would check out the amount of soot collected on each set of windowsills as I passed. South Bank was maintaining its reputation for pollution and a gigantic slag tip overshadowed our house.
A few years earlier, complete with bottles of water and sandwiches, some small friends and I had walked for miles and then climbed a mountain to play on the large flat grass field on the top. Now I was older I realised we had walked half a mile and climbed the sloping sides of a slag tip. To appreciate just how big it was, bear in mind that it took years, literally years, to dismantle and eventually to be used as a sort of gravel base in road making.
We lived now, as I said, on Middlesbrough Road, which was the main road of the town, running through the rapidly growing conurbation from Stockton-on-Tees, through Middlesbrough, Cargo Fleet, South Bank and Grangetown before becoming the trunk road to Redcar.
A lively town of about 150,000 people, Middlesbrough was proud of its industrial heritage. In 1830, the tiny hamlet of less than 30 inhabitants changed dramatically when the world’s first railway was opened in 1825. It was used for transporting coal from the South Durham pits to Stockton, the port on the River Tees, which was then shipped to London. When the larger coal ships arrived, the Tees was not navigable so far inland and so in 1830 a group of Stockton businessmen decided to build another port around the village of Middlesbrough. As a result, the area rapidly developed and prospered as shipyards, coal works and iron foundries sprang up, to be joined later by engineering works, chemical plants and oil refineries.
It was a pretty busy place to be and consumed more beer than any other part of the country because of the heat from the steelworks. The labourers in the smelting plants had to have some way of putting the liquid back in their bodies after sweating buckets in temperatures of over 100°F all day long.
The unique Transporter Bridge spans the Tees and passengers and vehicles are carried across the river on a large platform suspended from an overhead gantry mechanism. It’s probably the only one in the world. The Bottle of Notes sculpture outside the town hall commemorates the area’s most famous inhabitant, the explorer Captain James Cook. A short distance away from the town, you can cross the rugged beauty of the Yorkshire Moors where there are medieval abbeys, a white horse carved into the hillside and several picturesque villages nestling in the dales.
We had our own explorer visit us at home one day, when we all jumped in surprise as a terrific ‘thump’ hit our front door, followed by frantic banging on the knocker. Dad went to the front door and found a man trying with great difficulty to speak English. He turned out to be a large Dutchman and he was so animated that Dad thought there must have been some sort of accident. After calming him down, Dad discerned that his emotional state was not due to fright, but to excitement. Slowly and in faltering English, the Dutchman explained that he had been trying to grow black tulips for many years without success. Driving down our road, he had noticed with great surprise that we had some in our small front oblong of a garden. That’s how well we were doing now in South Bank – we had a garden. Dad quickly destroyed the poor man’s hopes of a new discovery by pulling one out of the ground and running it under the tap. The black soot washed off the flower and it was yellow. Now that’s pollution!
If we ever mistakenly left the small quarter-window open for any more than ten minutes, the top of our net curtains would be sporting a large rectangle of black grime. The air was that quick to contaminate everything around it, including us. Our clothes had to be washed constantly, not to mention our skins, but at least we had a proper bathroom now.
Besides a real bath, our new home had all manner of new aids to living, including a fridge. When our fridge eventually broke down one day, my dad, as resourceful as ever, dug a hole at the bottom of the garden. Into this he lowered a biscuit tin containing our milk, finally covering the opening with a paving slab. It’s a fact that even in the height of summer, our milk was always icy cold.
Not that I liked milk, in fact I hated it. I am still unable to see any gastronomical pleasure to be gained from milk churned into a block and passed off as cheese. Why does anyone enjoy eating solid sour milk? The only curdling I experienced was that of my stomach rejecting the stuff. You probably like it but I can’t stand cauliflower cheese.
Come to think of it, being ten and eleven was a major time of my life. I changed house, changed school and found magic. Way to go, Paul, although I was still Ted then.
I always had an affinity with words and as my education led me to the end of my junior years, I took an exam to see how big my brains were. To everyone’s surprise and joy I was the only boy in my year to qualify for Sir William Turner’s Grammar School in Coatham, a seaside suburb of Redcar on the North Yorkshire coast. Not only this, but I was also one of the first boys to enter this prestigious school on a scholarship as previously all the other parents had emptied their pockets to provide this privilege for their sons. I was confused, and still am, when these institutions are referred to as ‘public’ schools which means they are private!
Nevertheless, with Grammar schools regarded as the best form of secondary education, and they are, the ability to declare that I went to Coatham became something of a status symbol for myself and the other boys and I wore the uniform with some pride, but not in South Bank where they thought we were ‘pansies’. Although compulsory, I enjoyed dressing up in my grey shorts, replaced by long grey flannels in the winter or when reaching your second year. A smart black blazer complemented a black and red striped tie and, being in Inghams house, one of four school groupings, our uniform was finished off with four red pennants surrounding the little silver lion on the front of my cap, all of which Mam had patiently, and very proudly, sewn on.
Memory tells me that I went off to Mrs Gillings in Old Byland, ne
ar Helmsley, just before I started my new school and for some reason I was there without the rest of the family. I wonder if someone was ill, or perhaps I was getting over some illness. All I know is that I found myself in a completely strange environment of fields and cows and hens and eggs in haystacks that had to be collected. Mrs Gillings herself kept house for someone rich in a beautiful converted mill on Kaydale Beck. The old mill wheel had been sawn in half and carved by the famous ‘mouse man’, Thomson, into two semicircular fireside seats. He carved a mouse on everything he did and on these seats the mice were warming their paws by the fire. Lovely.
Replacing the old mill wheel was a metal one that spun in the water and generated electricity in this dwelling far removed from any kind of electrical services. Mrs Gillings and I would walk along the top of the hill from her little stone cottage and follow the long pathway down to the mill. Once, when I was on a world tour and flying over Japan, I saw that the mill was for sale in a magazine I was reading and was surprised at the power of the emotion the picture generated in me.
One day it rained. It sounds strange to say that, but all I can remember of Old Byland is glorious sunshine and sitting on grass. On this day, however, it was not just pouring, but bucketing down and, looking up into the black skies I accepted the fact that an outside visit would not be possible that day. For a ‘townie’ kid, there was nothing to do and somehow, my entertainment had to come from within. The obvious answer to my problem was books and with the rain still battering against the windows, I began to explore the house and came across an old bookshelf containing a number of volumes. One title immediately caught my eye and my imagination. In Victorian times, families entertained each other instead of letting television do it for them. This book was all about puppets and plays, mime and magic.
The old leather-bound book was swiftly removed from its position and, after a quick thumbing, was deemed good enough to read. Settling down on to the huge sofa in Mrs Gillings’ front room was like taking my seat on a magic carpet of discovery. As I devoured each page, my eyes grew wider at the seemingly unattainable feats this book was suggesting were possible: making one playing card disappear from the pack, only to appear elsewhere in the room; being able to predict which card the spectator would choose; or with the use of a set of numbers, having the ability to guess correctly the age of a member of the audience; all were skills now within my reach. That, in fact, was my first trick – the Age Cards. I copied it out number by number because, when I had tried it on myself, it worked first time. I still, from time to time, carry a set of these cards and the trick is still a good one.
As it was, I didn’t actually have an audience. It was Mrs Gillings herself and then some of the locals in the village. From the moment I set eyes on this book, I was captivated and entranced. There is no other way to describe my feelings at that time other than to say I was totally hooked. A rhythm within my life had ‘kicked in’. I had seen my first magician at one of the Sunday school Christmas parties, but the strange thing is, I can’t remember anything about him. It obviously didn’t have much of an effect on me, maybe because I never imagined such skill to be within my grasp.
After that, I was grateful for any rain as my holiday crept slowly by, giving me the excuse to indulge in my readings and rehearsals from my manual of magic. This new art was an attractive antidote to my shyness and the insecure part of me had found a ‘bridge’ that would enable me to communicate with people in a way that I would not have found possible by any other means. When I got back to South Bank, I was in the public library all the time and the librarians were wonderful to me as they embarked on wide searches for magic books for me to borrow. I really must get around to taking them back.
It soon occurred to me that my audience did not want to know the secret. I instinctively knew that those to whom I revealed my technique would be far from delighted and would even be disappointed. They were much happier allowing themselves to be deceived and walking away with the puzzle still active in their minds. People need to have some magic in the world. Seeing the look of absolute wonder in the eyes of a local villager after witnessing one of my tricks filled my little boy’s heart with such gladness and from that moment on, all I ever wanted to become was a magician. I was just 11 and I had to go to my new school.
That meant a long journey each day on the bus, but it was worth it. Mam and Dad hoped that my attendance there would open the doors to a proper profession as an architect, solicitor or even the medical world, and I tried not to disappoint them. Small, quiet and shy, I still tended to hide behind books and this opened the way for plenty of ribbing on being a very short ‘bookworm’. Despite trying to explain the positive side of being short, ‘When it rains, we are the last to get wet,’ tall boys continued to point out what they saw as my inadequacy. Kids are cruel.
Accepting bullying as a natural part of school life, I avoided it as best I could, but some days were particularly painful. It was probably my church background that was responsible in disarming my ability to fight back against this discrimination. I took the Biblical principle of ‘turning the other cheek’ literally one day when a group of boys surrounded me and one of them hit me across my face. I honestly believed that I should sit there and do nothing, even when one by one they proceeded to deliver their best swipes and I was left battered and bruised.
I refuse to believe that the ‘do-gooders’ will ever eradicate this problem as, in my view, it’s all part of growing up and an essential ingredient in the young animal’s training for life. However, I don’t underestimate the value of being able to talk about the subject openly at school, as I believe happens in many places today.
Coatham had ancient traditions. One of these was that at the end of the first sports afternoon, new boys were thrown into the shallow pond at the bottom of our cricket field. I hated cricket. I could see no excitement in it and would stand there wondering why I was there watching those guys run up and down a strip of grass.
‘Oh goodie, an hour has passed so it must be my turn to touch the ball!’ I think cricket is the slowest, most boring game on the planet. Even as a spectator, I could never understand its attraction, as one is always too far away to see the nuances and subtleties of the match anyway.
My main concern was my hands. I was starting to play around with a hobby that was to have the most significant effect on my life. I was worried about having the tools of the trade, my hands, damaged by a rock-hard cricket ball. I wasn’t viewed as a ‘pansy’, though, because I loved rugby. I played in a position at the time called wing-three-quarter because I was one of the fastest sprinters in the school. Not that I was particularly fit, but I was scared of the other guys catching me and tearing me to shreds! I never had any bones broken.
So, having finished playing the most boring game in the world and being unaware of the school’s strange rituals, I stood aghast as several of my peers were grabbed by hand and foot and hauled into the mud. I tried to make a run for it, deciding that there was no way I was going to let them throw me in, particularly after my parents had skimped and saved so hard to buy the uniform. Dressed in gleaming white flannelette trousers, jumper and shirt, I was not exactly camouflaged for the great escape and was soon spotted by two boys who put me in a head and arm lock. As I fought back, they called for their mates to help and I was eventually dragged away by half-a-dozen boys while I screamed and struggled every inch of the way. Once out of the mire and looking like a wet mud wrestler, I knew I would be in even deeper trouble when Mam saw the state I was in.
At school, bullying was sometimes dished out under the respectable guise of punishment as Prefects and Monitors could exercise their right to ‘tan’ other boys using a gym-shoe. This piece of innocent-looking rubber and cloth could cause immense pain in the wrong hands and was often wielded in the name of ‘retribution’ rather than ‘education’. Offences such as talking in the lines; having your hands in your pockets; not wearing your cap or uniform properly; and eating sweets in public were all considere
d un-gentlemanly things to do and being caught would result in ‘six of the best’. Prefects had made their journey up through the ranks of the earlier years and it was their job to help maintain the discipline of the school.
In our present-day, free-thinking society, ‘discipline’ seems to be a forgotten word and ‘respect’ part of a lost language. Do-gooders and freethinkers have changed the world but they have only seen one side of the coin. If you haven’t experienced both discipline and lack of discipline how can you possibly know? I have had both and I know which one I prefer. Discipline. It’s certainly helped me to control myself. We all need some sort of moral framework to keep us in check.
Being thrashed by a gym-shoe was nothing compared to the instrument of torture that the Masters wielded. Mostly, the Masters ruled by respect, not by capital punishment. It was an inbuilt reverence for their wisdom that kept me away from the cane. They had earned the right, through the education system, to wear their own particular uniform. Those black mortar-boarded and cloaked figures demanded respect for an insight and knowledge that we didn’t have and offered a visual reminder that they were more intelligent than us.
The Masters, including the Head, exhibiting their obvious superiority, kept the school to a very high standard of discipline and achieved terrific academic results for the boys under their care. I cannot understand how a teacher today can wear a floppy sweater, frayed jeans and dirty shoes and expect the same respect from the pupils.
Every Master was distinct with his own special character. Pietrowski, Polish by birth, French by education and English by choice, walked with a kind of hunched shoulder. One of the boys took the mickey out of his physical condition as he followed him down the corridor one day. Pietrowski happened to glance behind him and saw the boy copying him. The Master swiftly grabbed the pupil, ramming him against the wall and quietly explaining that as a member of the French resistance he had been shot and buried alive. Having waited hours for the Germans to leave, he had then dug himself out from his own grave. His wounds had festered and had resulted in a deformed shoulder. We all stood in horror as, having finished his gruesome description, he dropped the boy and carried on walking down the corridor.
