The Life of Lee

by Lee Evans

  I remember on one occasion, some smart-suited commuter driving a flash motor made the terrible mistake of inadvertently cutting Dad up at a roundabout. That was it. Dad was instantaneously livid. His anger went from nought to sixty in about two seconds.

  For Dad, that perceived slight was like a gauntlet thrown at his feet – there was no way he’d let anyone get away with that. ‘I’m gonna kick that bloke’s teeth in as soon as he stops,’ he muttered, with barely suppressed rage.

  As Wayne and I cringed in terror on the back seat, Dad became consumed by the idea of following this commuter all the way back to his house and having it out with him. After half an hour of frantically pursuing the guy home, we watched on in horror as Dad jumped out of the car, his blood still boiling. The innocent commuter parked up on his drive, only to be confronted by a snarling Dad leaping out of a nearby privet hedge.

  ‘Who are you?’ the guy asked.

  ‘Never mind who I am, who’s this?’ Dad replied, holding up his fist threateningly.

  The poor, unsuspecting commuter – whose only mistake in twenty-five years’ driving back and forth to work had been unwittingly to cut up this nut case – then received a punch up the pinstripe on his own driveway. Blood dripping from his nose, he was only able to mumble, ‘What was that for?’ as Dad stormed back to our car.

  ‘Nobody gets away with cutting me up!’ replied the Incredible Hulk – sorry, Dad.

  But just ten minutes later, he would be back to being riotously funny. He would spot a helicopter overhead and take on the guise of a policeman, pretending to talk into his crackly radio or swerving on to a grass verge as if in pursuit of a rogue terrorist.

  He also had a very loud laugh – you couldn’t sit with him in public because it was too embarrassing. Round the Horne, The Goons, Hancock’s Half-Hour and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were always on in our house – like they were on a loop – and he would sit in the lounge laughing uproariously. Then, a click of the finger and – boom! – he would explode again.

  That was life with Dad. It was always lively, and you never quite knew where you were. It was like living on the slopes of Mount Etna. It was beautiful and sunny at times, but you were constantly living in the shadow of the volcano and you could never quite be sure when it would next erupt and engulf everything in its path. No wonder I grew up a nervous wreck!

  The other huge character who bestrode my childhood was my elder brother, Wayne. Although he is only two years older than me, he would always fearlessly spring to my defence – and sometimes get a beating for his troubles from much bigger lads.

  Wayne and me in Prestatyn, North Wales.

  But we were very different characters. I was constantly on edge and would always think of the worst-case scenario, whereas Wayne was the life and soul of the party – he had much more of a ‘live and let live’ disposition. He has always been a very funny man to be with and would constantly play jokes on me when we were growing up.

  For instance, when we were teenagers and Dad was out working the pubs and clubs in the evening, Mum would like to go with him, leaving us alone in the flat. One time, Wayne got hold of a copy of the film The Exorcist. After watching it together, unbeknownst to me, he sneaked into our shared bedroom and loosened the legs of my bed. Then, when I got in that night, my bed shifted violently across the room, just like the girl’s in the film. After the bed finally settled, all I could hear through the darkness was Wayne giggling uncontrollably.

  Then there was the old ‘Lee, look out, there’s a car coming!’ gag he used to love to pull. He’d shout that to me every time we crossed an empty road together, ensuring that I would always leap into the air with shock while he would fall about clutching his sides with mirth. It usually had the desired effect.

  Feeling flush one day when we were about twelve and ten, Dad bought us a couple of small fishing rods, as well as all the bits and bobs one might need for a spot of angling. Not a massive fan of fishing, I did ask if I could have the money to spend on something else – like a giant bag of sweets – but was outranked by Wayne’s more elevated position. Wayne and I got on pretty well, we always liked to banter and laugh together. But there was never any doubt about who was the senior partner in our relationship.

  Early the next morning, the decidedly more excited Wayne and I quietly slipped out of bed and began preparing for the day’s fishing with the newly purchased kit. Wayne readied the rods out in the hall, priming them with floats, hooks and weights. ‘It’ll save messing about when we get there,’ he whispered through gritted teeth.

  As Wayne set up the rods, I was ordered to make sarnies for later on in the day. I made Wayne the snack he liked best, cheese and onion crisp sandwiches, and then prepared my own favourite: a thick layer of tomato ketchup between two hefty slices of bread. But I had no intention of waiting till lunchtime to eat it. I was eager to have it for breakfast. Once the intoxicating scent of that ketchup had wafted up my hooter, I just had to start munching on it as soon as possible. There was no thought about what I might have for lunch. Once the olfactory receptors in my nose were stimulated and sending signals to my belly, it was curtains for that ketchup sandwich.

  Closing the back door carefully, so as not to wake Mum and Dad, we loaded up for the long walk across the vast field to the reservoir. As usual, I seemed to be the designated packhorse, the one who had somehow ended up having to carry most of the stuff. ‘Come on, hurry up,’ Wayne groaned at me, before disappearing off carrying only his rod. He left me looking like a walking display stand at a fishing show, with a tackle box, two fold-up chairs and a fishing rod all hanging off me. But, at the same time, my hand conveniently slipped into a carrier bag and located my tomato sauce sandwich. There and then I decided I would have a chew on it during the long walk across the field.

  I rattled around the flat to where Wayne was already waiting impatiently to cross the road over to the field on the other side. With the beautiful-smelling sandwich bobbing around in front of my face, I staggered along the short front garden path, weighed down with all that stuff. I joined Wayne at the kerbside, and he held his arm across to stop me – Mum and Dad always told him, ‘Whatever you do, look after Lee.’ We looked both ways, up and down the road. Nothing coming. But I wasn’t paying much attention. I was too busy concentrating on taking a bite out of my delicious sandwich, so I left the Green Cross Code to Wayne as we stepped off the kerb.

  As we reached the middle of the road, right on cue, Wayne turned to me and did his customary ‘Lee, look out, there’s a car coming!’ joke. As usual, for dramatic effect after shouting, he darted off to the other side of the road and the safety of the pavement. I, of course, by now knew his little game and decided this time I wasn’t going to fall for it – after all, how could I run anyway with all the weight I was carrying? So I stood my ground in the middle of the road, looking at Wayne and triumphantly taking a big bite from my sandwich. With a mouth full of ketchup, I laughed at him, waving the slices of bread in front of my face, scoffing at his little game.

  ‘Buuuuuttttt … Theeeeerrrree’s aaaaaa caaaaaarrrrr, Leeeeeee …’

  BAM!

  I had never heard the story of ‘Cry Wolf’.

  And I never saw it coming. The car thudded into my side, and everything went black. According to Wayne, I bounced off the front of the vehicle, flew ten feet into the air, completed a full flip, then swallow-dived to the ground. I landed with a crash, like a sack of spuds, on my back twenty feet away from the car.

  Wayne looked on, stunned. He was rooted to the spot as the driver, an elderly man with white shoes, grey hair and beard, climbed distraught from his car. Stumbling along the middle of the road towards me, he began crying out, ‘Oh my God, sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going, I’m so sorry.’ He reached down to where I was lying on my back in the road, surrounded by fishing tackle and with my eyes firmly shut. Suddenly he stopped, pinned to the spot, and his jaw dropped open. Wayne told me later
that the poor man’s heart must have skipped a few thumps. My face appeared a terrifying mess, completely soaked in blood.

  The man fell to his knees. Crouching over me, he began swaying, moaning and wailing, ‘What have I done? Oh God, look what I’ve done!’

  Wayne snapped out of it, ran over and stood looking down at the man knelt over me. Wayne was angry with him. ‘All right, mate, give it a rest. Lee? Lee? You all right, mate?’

  I flapped my eyelids open, the blue sky and clouds came into focus and there was a white-haired man hunched over me, raving and rambling on about God and stuff. I looked down and saw that his palms were facing the sky. ‘Oh my God, oh my God, what am I going to do?’ he shouted. For a moment, I thought I must have died and gone to heaven.

  I remember thinking, ‘Oh no, if I’m dead, Dad’s going to kill me!’

  I began frantically feeling parts of my body, checking to see if I was all in one piece. My face felt cold and wet. I wiped it with the back of my hand. Then I held my hand to my face to take a look.

  Blood! Lots of it!

  A cold chill ran right through me. My face must be mushed, I thought, that’s what this bloke is moaning about. Alarmed, I sat bolt upright in the road, stared at the man and screamed for my life. The man looked at me for a moment then began screaming back at me. That scared the living daylights out of me, because now I didn’t know who or what he was screaming at. I thought that maybe my face was in an even worse mess than I’d thought, puréed perhaps. So I screamed even louder back at him.

  While we yelled at each other there in the road, instinctively I brought my hands back up to my face and felt the cold blood dripping down it. Reacting instantly, I pulled my hands away and looked down at them, drenched in bright red liquid. Wait a moment! Ever so gingerly, I licked the end of my fingers. Ketchup!

  I stopped screaming and looked up towards Wayne for help. He had already twigged about the ketchup and smiled knowingly. He dropped his fishing rod to the floor and buried his face in his hands, perhaps out of relief that I was OK, perhaps to hide his giggles. The man looked at Wayne, then at me. Puzzled, his screaming petered out into a small whimper and then fizzled out into silence. He knelt there for a moment, quietly scrutinizing my face. Then his big grey bushy eyebrows locked together in the middle of his forehead and his tiny ice-blue eyes narrowed to the size of pinheads. He dipped one finger into the ketchup covering my hands and licked it. A look of fury suddenly crossed his face, as he realized he’d been duped.

  But I didn’t wait around for his reaction. Knowing I would be in trouble, I jumped to my feet and ran home at full speed, leaving a trail of fishing tackle, fold-up chairs and a rod behind me.

  Wayne said the old man got even more angry after that, clambering back into his car, ranting on about bloody kids not crossing roads properly and smearing themselves in ketchup and giving decent citizens like him a right old shock.

  I never went fishing again.

  But for days afterwards, Wayne couldn’t stop laughing about it.

  So that was the environment I grew up in. A place full of anger and hardship, of scrapes and accidents, but also of love and laughter. We scrabbled around on the margins of society, but we also had terrific fun – just as long as no one cut Dad up when he was driving.

  4. The Outsider

  As Dad slowly became more established in the world of show business, he left his job at the docks and began to travel all over the place for bookings. We went with him, frequently having to move schools before returning once more to Bristol. One year, he was doing a long summer season in Blackpool, and Mum managed to blag Wayne and me into the local school for the last two months of Dad’s run.

  Me and Wayne waiting for Dad in Blackpool during the summer season.

  As we were hauled up in front of the local education authority in an oak-panelled room, Mum pleaded on our behalf with one of the tweed suits. He sat there, resting his leather elbows on the desk and looking down his nose in dismay at these oiks who had somehow talked their way into his office.

  Irene Handl-style, my mum adopted a fake posh accent and said, ‘Ah, for the life of me, I think school places are vital for their education.’

  Wayne and I looked at each other thinking, ‘Education? What’s she on about? There’s not a brain cell between us!’ I was eight years old, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

  Anyway, we got into a school. The second day I was there, the teacher, Mrs Taylor, set the class a test, but a test on work I had no idea about. As Mrs Taylor gave out the test and all the kids around me fell into silence with eyes down, I just dipped my head so no one could see me, and I began crying.

  The next day, Mrs Taylor gave out the results. A scary cross between Ann Widdecombe and Miss Ewell, the terrifying teacher from Please, Sir!, she called out one by one the names of all the children in the class, followed by their marks. Filled with dread, I waited with a knotted stomach, willing her not to call out my name. She called out the last person’s name and mark, but didn’t mention my score, which I knew must have been atrocious. To my great relief, she just carried on with the lesson.

  But then an interfering busybody of a boy put his hand in the air. ‘Yes?’ enquired Mrs Taylor, smiling and exposing teeth stained red by the generous amounts of lipstick smeared on to her thin crimson lips.

  ‘You forgot the new lad.’ He pointed at me.

  I wanted to run, and to keep running all the way home to where Mum was. I didn’t want to tell her that I’d failed, that I wasn’t liked, that I didn’t fit in – she would have told me to go back, to stop being stupid – but I just wanted to be with her, where I felt safest. When she wrapped her arms around me, I felt like nothing could hurt me and in those moments nothing else mattered.

  I began sweating. I felt alone.

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Taylor said, smug, calmly rising from her seat. She swaggered around her table, nose in the air. Without looking at me, she demanded I come to the front of the class.

  I rose nervously and quietly walked up to her.

  ‘Stand up there, Lee Evans, let us all see you,’ she demanded, pointing at the top of her desk.

  I stepped hesitantly on to her chair and on to her table at the front of the class, head down, hands clasped in front of me, and waited.

  ‘What you are looking at,’ she began, strolling magisterially between the desks towards the back of the class, ‘is a disappointment, a failure in every sense of the word.’ She turned back, staring at each child as she passed. ‘This young man …’ she carried on.

  I don’t know why I did it – it was an automatic reaction – but I began miming, mouthing her words as she spoke and impersonating her swagger behind her back.

  The class began to giggle. Mrs Taylor swivelled round and looked daggers at me. I immediately reverted back to my submissive little schoolboy act. She stared briefly at me with suspicion, then resumed from where she had left off. ‘This young man is a prime example of a failure …’

  I began imitating her again, this time with more exaggerated movements. The other kids couldn’t help themselves; they knew they shouldn’t, but the whole class burst into laughter. I got carried away. I didn’t know it yet, but this was a good crowd and I was going well.

  I was so intoxicated by their laughter that I didn’t notice Mrs Taylor standing next to me, glaring. Then, all of a sudden, I felt her beside me. I stopped and slowly turned. There she was, looking up at me. Face clenched, eyes raging and blood-shot, prim, lacquered hair waving about like the wild woman of Borneo, she exploded hysterically. ‘Get to the headmaster’s office now!’ she shouted, straining the last words out of her empty lungs.

  I got the cane that day, but I learned a very useful defensive tool that would stay with me for the rest of my life. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but one day I would even get paid for it. That’s not to say it’s right – if everyone did it, there would be anarchy. But I realized that
at last I’d found something at which I could excel.

  I never really conformed at school. I had so few positive learning experiences as a pupil that I can more or less recall each and every occasion I was stimulated. When my interest was piqued, it was as if I had awoken momentarily from a comatose state. I felt enthused, excited, but then we would have to change schools and move on. And just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over and I was out of kilter again.

  The problem was, Dad’s job meant we were always on the move. As he got busier as a performer, we were constantly shifting from place to place. I was at school in Bristol one term, Southport the next, then Eastbourne, Blackpool, back to Bristol again, then eventually to Billericay. So I got used to thinking that things were always going to be temporary – friends, school, where we were staying.

  Me, on the far left, during a cookery class at Lawrence Weston School, Bristol.

  There was never any time for teachers to include me in what was going on, show me how their system worked. How could they? I was never around long enough. So I kept safely out of the way, reclusive, sitting at the back of the class, the new boy, retreating, wandering around in my own imaginary world.

  Agonizingly shy, I would sit there all day in the classroom, heart pounding away, face flushed and sweaty, head bowed, trying not to make any eye contact, just staring blankly at the workbook that was put in front of me, in complete confusion and terrified of being mocked. I’ve always been odd. I’m just not part of the system, the mainstream, the establishment, the norm. I’ve always been the weird boy at the back of the class.

  But if you point me out, the focus is thrown without warning towards me, and I will play the clod, the goofball or the klutz, stumbling in at the wrong time from the sidelines to disrupt. So used am I to being the oddball, I actually feel safer there. On the edge is good. It’s a nervous reaction, I think, a kind of physical, mental, automatic form of self-defence. If I am suddenly thrust out in front of some lights, I’m like one of those Duracell battery-operated rabbits. I’m off. I never stop.