by David Jason
We’d probably still be there now if I hadn’t turned round, unkissed, and walked out.
I headed down the garden path to the little gate, as purposefully as a man can who’s wearing several pounds of cheap black rubber. There at the kerb stood my faithful steed, my BSA 495. I mounted up. By this point, Sylvia had come out of the house and down the path.
She said, ‘But what’s the matter? You didn’t even kiss me goodnight.’
I said, ‘You didn’t seem to want me to.’
And with that, I kicked the bike into life and drove away.
What a journey that was. Hell hath no fury like a man spurned and on a motorbike, and on the long ride back to my digs in Harold Hill, frustration and humiliation duly boiled up. Yet somehow, instead of yielding blind anger behind the handlebars, leading to a dangerous lack of lane discipline at roundabouts, it appeared to produce clarity and conviction and a whole new self-certainty. Accordingly, I may be one of a very limited number of people to have experienced a Damascene conversion in the Blackwall Tunnel. At least, it’s that portion of the journey home that I particularly recall – things clicking into place, a firmness of purpose cohering in my mind despite the noise of the bike cannoning off the walls. I swear that in that unlovely, grubby and actually rather unsuitably narrow passage beneath the Thames, under the electric lights, the scales fell from my eyes.
By the time I got back, I was fully and absolutely resolved. Stuff it all. Stuff the steadiness. Stuff the two-up, two-down and the Mini on the drive. Stuff the conventional path I’d slowly been drifting up. That wasn’t my future. I was going to do the unsteady thing. I was going to become an actor. I didn’t know how, but there had to be a way, didn’t there? And even if it took me a while (which it would – several more years in fact), I was going to find it.
While on the course, I had been loyally phoning Sylvia from the phone box opposite my digs. Now I stopped. After a few more days, I returned to Finchley and I didn’t phone her from there, either. It was as abrupt as that. It alarms me now to think how easily my twenty-year-old self shut down on someone. But it was like a thrown switch. Some moments alter the course of the rest of your life, and that was one of them.
CHAPTER FOUR
The rejection of a promising career as a pirate. Some slightly questionable business involving bongos. And a change of name.
IN LATE 1959 the period of my apprenticeship with the Electricity Board came to a finish – and not, alas, a triumphant finish. The EB informed me that they were declining the opportunity to take me on into full-time employment. They declined the opportunity to take on Bob Bevil too, so at least I wasn’t the only one. Was that because the pair of us had spent such a large part of our apprenticeships mucking about, forcing ourselves into imaginary airlocks, staging mock trials, stapling people to the floor through their boiler suits, etc.? I wouldn’t care to speculate. All I know is, when our term had run its course, the Board somehow felt able to let us go.
But I had at least got some training and a certificate under my belt. So, Bob Bevil and I decided to go into business together as electricians. We must have been serious because we had our own business card printed up – one with a fold in it, none of your cheap nonsense. On the top flap was my name – David J. White – and then the card opened up to reveal the legend ‘B. W. Installations & Co. – Electrical Contractors, Intercommunication Engineers’, along with the address and telephone number of our head office: my parents’ house at Lodge Lane, Hillside 3526. (Finally, regular use was found, beyond Christmas and royal visitations, for that neglected front room, which became our headquarters.)
Intercommunication Engineers? Oh yes, most certainly. In the course of going about our business, Bob and I had met an Irish subcontractor who was installing door-answering equipment imported from Italy – the buzzer and two-way intercom system which is absolutely standard and unremarkable now but represented an exotic leap forward for technology in those days. ‘What? You mean I can lift this receiver and find out who’s at the door without coming down thirty-four flights of stairs? Why, it’s an electric-powered miracle.’ And loads of blocks of flats were going up in the holes left by the Luftwaffe, so this was something of a boom area at the time, meaning that our Irish contractor friend had lots of work to pass on to me and Bob – ripping us off royally in the process, we would eventually work out, but for the time being we were absolutely delighted. B. W. Installations & Co. was up and running. Which wasn’t acting, of course. But it was a living.
Meanwhile, the acting was going well and my reputation in the small but slowly expanding corner of amateur dramatics that I occupied was continuing to grow. And my attitude towards it had decidedly changed. When I looked around at my fellow amateurs at the Incognitos, and in the various other am-dram companies that I was hooking up with in the early 1960s, I realised that there were distinct groups. There were some doing it because they loved it and because it was sociable. These were people who would probably have taken offence if you had asked them whether they had further aspirations in the theatre – like you had accused them of having some kind of ulterior motive, when, in fact, they were in it for pure fun and pleasure. I could sense that, although I had been a part of that group in the beginning, I no longer was.
Then there were others who wanted to be professional and were hoping for a break – that some day they would be discovered. It was only a matter of time. Someone from the West End or the movies would find their way up to Friern Barnet and be utterly staggered by what they saw from the old cinema seats. Then they would be waiting for you with a contract at the stage door, and the following day, or certainly within the week, they would make you a star. It seemed to me that, for quite a while, I had been quietly moving into that group. I had been one of those people who didn’t quite have the courage or the knowhow to take the future into their own hands, but who were waiting for it to happen – waiting to be discovered. And waiting to be discovered wasn’t necessarily going to work. You needed to find some way to make it happen, or you needed something, or someone, to give you a shove.
In my case, a big old push came in 1962. I was twenty-two and I represented the Muswell Hill Players at the Hornsey Drama Festival. I won Best Supporting Actor that weekend – the first time I had ever won an individual award for my acting. I still have the trophy – a medallion of an angel waving some laurels around, attached to a simple wooden plaque, about four inches tall. The head judge at the festival was André van Gyseghem, a very distinguished man of the theatre who did lots of television work in the sixties. (Among many other things, he appeared in The Saint with Roger Moore and was Number Two in the great Patrick McGoohan series The Prisoner.) And in his commendation during the prizegiving, he stood up and told the room that, hesitant though he always was to encourage people to take up acting for a living, he would have absolutely no hesitation recommending me for a career as a professional. Such a public endorsement from such a qualified source really boosted my confidence.
Who would have thought that twenty-five years after André van Gyseghem gave me his blessing, I would know the glory of hearing my name called from the stage of the Grosvenor Hotel ballroom, of rising from my seat, dressed in black-tie finery, and of working my way through tables crammed with the great and good of British entertainment? And then of climbing the steps, with my legs almost giving way underneath me, to receive the 1987 BAFTA TV award for Best Actor, for my role as Scullion the Head Porter in the drama Porterhouse Blue?
Yet that simple small plaque, presented in those far humbler circumstances in Hornsey, will always mean … well, quite a lot less, actually, now I come to think of it.
But you’ve got to start somewhere – and to be honest, it was a good start. That prize in Hornsey was definitely another coin-drop moment.
After the festival, the Muswell Hill Players returned in glory to the town hall at Friern Barnet for a reception in our honour – a cup of tea and a piece of warm cheese on a stick. And there, as I stood about, ra
ther self-consciously cradling a saucer and trying to look as though receptions in my honour were given at town halls most weeks, a tall, neatly suited woman who was among the occasion’s hosts introduced herself.
She explained that she had a prominent job on the local council, and asked me what I did. I told her I was an electrician. She then asked me if I had ever considered going to drama school to study. I told her I hadn’t given it much thought, principally because it wasn’t something I ever imagined being able to afford. She said that money didn’t necessarily have to be a barrier. There were such things as grants. If I ever applied, she felt very sure that, in the circumstances, the council would be able to provide me with one.
Now, this set my brain whirring. I had been getting all these nudges that I should take acting seriously – and it could hardly get more serious than going to drama school, could it? No doubt many people would have prescribed this as the best way forward. An acting qualification would give me a proper grounding to lift off from.
So it was with much enthusiasm that I reported my conversation with the councillor to my mum and dad, back at home. ‘I think I should do that,’ I said. ‘I think I should apply for drama school.’
Their reaction? They couldn’t have been less enthusiastic if I’d just proposed setting up a commercial newt-breeding operation in the bathroom.
It wasn’t that my parents had anything against actors. They already had one of those in the family, remember – my older brother Arthur. Arthur had delighted Mum and Dad by settling into a respectable, steady job as a butcher – only to come home after his national service and declare that he fancied being a thespian instead. He had then duly won a scholarship to go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London and, to my parents’ gradual relief, his gamble had paid off. He was making a living as a professional actor. He was finding plenty of theatre work and, moreover, had played Caradoc Owen in Mrs Dale’s Diary, the long-running drama serial on BBC radio. I can remember the family crowding round excitedly at home to listen to his debut appearance. Shades of the scene in front of the television at Ronnie Prior’s house for the Coronation a few years earlier, although, of course, on this occasion, being personally involved, we were that much prouder.
Still, there was no question that my mum and dad had been made uneasy by the sight of their cherished firstborn swapping a steady trade for a wildly unpredictable one. And now here was their second son threatening to do exactly the same thing. It was déjà vu. (Not that that’s the expression my parents would have used.) By now they were used to having a bit of extra income on the table from the keep that I provided. If I jacked in work, I would once more become a financial burden to them – one they really couldn’t afford.
My parents weren’t unreasonable about it. My mum made it abundantly clear that, if this were my heart’s desire, I could apply to become a student, write off for a council grant, abandon my job as an electrician and head off for any drama school that would have me. But there was no way I would be able to live at home ‘sponging off us’, as my father might gently have put it. I’d be on my own. And as I was a person who rather liked his home comforts, that rather kiboshed my little plan.
So how did I respond? I was too old to go stamping up to my bedroom and slamming the door, of course, though I’m sure the thought occurred. I was extremely frustrated. I was trying to be young and thrusting and my young thrustingness had been thwarted. On the other hand, I knew my parents would have found the money if they could, but the money genuinely wasn’t there. So what could I do? Get on with being an electrician was probably the best idea, and come up with another plan for the acting.
Did I resent my brother? How could I? He got there first, seven years earlier – at a different time and in different circumstances. And I would have cause to be extremely grateful that he did. As we’ll see in due course, it was my brother who got me my first proper break.
In the meantime, Bob and I got on with building our electrical business. For the first two years, it was quite a struggle. There were some periods when we couldn’t find work and were obliged to sit around at home, scratching ourselves and staring out the window. But we didn’t give up. We kept at it. We became very industrious about seeking jobs, going round to builders’ yards, and even builders’ houses, and knocking on the door and trying to beg, blag or charm a contract out of them. Eventually, through a bloke called Derek Hockley, we latched on to quite a bit of work with Ind Coope breweries, doing the electrics in refitted pubs. We also got a contract to do the Redbridge Hotel at Redbridge, and we found we could get quite a lot of business rewiring private houses.
That was often quite grubby and uncomfortable work. Getting wires from one side of a room to the other could require cutting two trap doors in the floor and then climbing down into the claustrophobic cavity under the floorboards and sliding across with the wire in your hand. Just to make it more complicated, you might have to cut a further hole through a dwarf wall along the way. You found all sorts down there: dust, spiderwebs, rat droppings, mice piss and, just occasionally, the rat who left the droppings and the mice who did the piss. You soon learned the key tricks: buttoning your overalls to the neck and tucking your trouser legs into your socks to keep out unwanted intruders. At the end of the day, I was quite often entirely blackened, like some poor Victorian kid who’d been sent up a chimney.
I had eventually traded my motorbike in for my first car – a second-hand Ford Zephyr 6 saloon with crimped fins and shiny chrome wing mirrors. I thought that was going to be the passport to international jet-set pleasure with members of the opposite sex. In fact, I mostly ended up playing taxi driver for all my carless male mates, ferrying them around London and beyond. But the Ford soon had to go, anyway, because Bob and I needed a more practical vehicle for the business and for tool-carrying purposes. I swapped it for a Standard Companion, the magnificently named estate version of the Standard 10 and essentially a chunky van with windows. That served us well enough until some wally ploughed into the back of it at traffic lights on the North Circular at Ealing. I glimpsed this car, thundering towards us, in the rear-view mirror and just had time to say to Bob, ‘Brace yourself.’ A split second later there was an almighty crunch and a lurch and we were lying on our backs staring at the car’s ceiling. On impact, the Standard’s tubular metal seats had collapsed underneath us like deckchairs. I got out and went round to the other side to help Bob, whose head had taken a bit of a thump on the windscreen. He was able to clamber upright, and stood, dazed, on the road. He was wearing this wonderful cheapskate car coat at the time, far too tight for him, with four big leather football-style buttons on it. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ I said. Bob nodded gently and drew in a deep breath to compose himself. At which point, one by one, the buttons popped off the coat – pop, pop, pop, pop – like something in a cartoon. We laughed about that for years afterwards.
Goodbye, Standard Companion, however. The car was a write-off. Still, we got the money from the insurance and put it down on a pair of Mini Vans – one each, kind of ‘his and his’, if you like. Bob’s was black with a white roof, and mine was grey with a white roof. I loved that Mini Van. It was just the job for work, and just the job for whipping up to the Athenaeum Ballroom in Muswell Hill of a Saturday night, as was our wont. The Athenaeum was an old cinema which had been converted into a giant dance hall, spread over two floors with a huge bar. Only Colin Quinton, among our number, really knew how to chat up a girl. The rest of us just did a lot of standing around, stretching out a pint and watching the girls dancing with each other. I do remember one monumentally bold occasion when the night wore on and Bob and I stepped towards a pair of dancers to make our move. ‘Can we break you up?’ said Bob. One of the girls looked at me, and then looked at Bob. ‘Nah,’ she said, flicking a dismissive thumb in my direction. ‘He’s too short.’ Bob, bless him, was most put out on my behalf. ‘You can’t say that in front of him!’ Frankly, my dear, comments about my height were water off a not very t
all duck’s back by that point in my life.
On the nights when we did get lucky (and, reader, I profess that, despite our general lack of proficiency in this area, there were one or two of those), the Mini Van came in handy for lifts home and for moments of privacy, especially if halted by the kerb in the appealing, sylvan quietness of Gypsy Lane in Barnet.
My twenty-first birthday came and went during this busy period, marked by a zinging party at Lodge Lane – sandwiches, cake, a keg of beer and a soundtrack of Buddy Holly and Lonnie Donegan hits which I had painstakingly taped off the telly and the radio onto my valve-operated Grundig reel-to-reel tape machine (bought on the never-never, of course. If you played it for a long time, the rubbers got hot and stretched, and everything, even Lonnie Donegan, started sounding like Hawaiian guitar music).
Well, I say the party was zinging. It would have been a darned sight more zinging if my mother hadn’t come down in her dressing gown at midnight, crossly shut the music off and turned everyone out into the cold February street. The humiliation of that stung for a long time.
By 1964, B. W. Installations was doing pretty well. We had taken Johnny Dingle on board as a permanent assistant. Joyce Dodd from down the road was coming in to type up our estimates. (Joyce had a crush on Bob, if the truth be known, but, alas, much to my puzzlement, Bob wasn’t interested.) The work was flowing in, nice and steadily. But I knew, and Bob knew, that the real dream for me was acting. I felt time creeping on. I couldn’t bear the idea of getting to thirty-five and not having given it a shot – and then maybe living with the regret and the sense of ‘what if?’ for the rest of my life. And at least the electrical business was solid now, so it wouldn’t be like leaving Bob in the lurch. It was as good a moment as any. Late in 1964, I told him I was going to quit.
He couldn’t have been more magnanimous about it, nor more encouraging. We did a deal whereby, in exchange for giving Bob my share of the business, I could keep my prized Mini Van. He also promised me that if the acting didn’t come through, or there were periods of downtime with no money coming in, he’d give me work to do. It was a nice bit of security to fall back on.
