Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill

by Gervase Phinn

  Grandma Mullarkey opened a door in my early childhood and changed my life for the better and, when she died, she left a great gap. When I was sixteen, I accompanied my mother to Doncaster Gate hospital where my grandmother, aged 81, was dying of stomach cancer. She told me not to look so miserable. ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘a smile will gain you ten years of life.’ She died the following day, clutching her rosary beads.

  Penny for the Guy

  As a youngster I looked forward to Bonfire Night with great anticipation. My friends and I would scavenge for combustible material and gradually build the pyramid of wood and old carpets, rags and cardboard boxes, on the allotment at the back of my house. We would keep a watchful eye on our construction, for other boys were known to steal what others had spent weeks collecting. The evening before the big night, we would keep vigil until we were summoned indoors by our parents. My father agreed to become a sentry when I had gone to bed.

  We would make a Guy out of old clothes, stuff screwed up paper in the arms and legs, and paint a face on a piece of cardboard. He would be wheeled through the streets on a trolley made of pram wheels and two planks, and we would ask passers-by: ‘Penny for the Guy?’ With the money we collected, we would buy fireworks. Recently, I read about the two young lads with their Guy who had been moved on by the police for begging. It’s a funny old world.

  In October, fireworks were for sale at the newsagents and could be freely bought by children. I would buy a thin rectangular box, on the front of which, in garish reds and blues, was the caption, ‘Light up the Sky with Standard Fireworks’. This small collection would be added to over the coming weeks, up to the Fifth of November. There would be Catherine wheels, blockbusters, squibs, jumping jacks, traffic lights, penny bangers, Roman candles, golden fountains, silver rain and rockets in brightly coloured cardboard tubes, with a cone on the top and a thin wooden stick down the side.

  I remember my first Bonfire Night vividly, and it was not a happy memory. I must have been six or seven at the time, and walked from home with my father on a cold, clear night, with the air smelling of woodsmoke. We arrived at Herringthorpe Playing Fields in Rotherham to find crowds of people gathered around the great wigwam-shaped stack of wood. My father sat me high on his shoulders, and I watched the dancing flames and the red sparks spitting in the air. It was magical. Fireworks banged and rockets lit up the black sky, showering bright colours, and the fire was lit. My face burned with the heat. And then I saw him – the figure sitting on the top of the bonfire. He was forlorn and misshapen, and dressed in old clothes with a floppy hat perched on his head. I screamed and screamed.

  ‘There’s a man on top!’ I cried. ‘A man in the fire!’

  Everyone around me laughed.

  ‘It’s just a Guy,’ my father told me. ‘He’s made of rags and cardboard. He’s not real.’

  But I was sad and scared to see those clinging fingers of fire scorch the stuffed body, cracking the arms and swallowing up that wide-eyed pitiful face.

  To this day, I still feel uneasy at the sight of a human form, albeit a dummy, placed on the top of a burning bonfire. I am not against Bonfire Night; it is an enjoyable occasion particularly for children, though I guess that the light-hearted festivities have little connection in most people’s minds to the fanatical men who plotted the downfall of the Government in 1605. It is just that I do not like to see that burning figure on the top.

  You might guess then that I am not that keen on the famous Bonfire Night celebrations in Lewes in East Sussex, where figures of the infamous – or just the famous – are set alight each year. In 1994, effigies included Margaret Thatcher, John Major on a dinosaur, taken from the film Jurassic Park, and the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, in the week of the unpopular Criminal Justice Bill, as well as a Guy Fawkes. On one bonfire, an effigy of the Pope is burnt annually.

  I have an ally in a good friend of mine, who is a former scholar of St Peter’s School, York, the alma mater of the most notorious of the powder treason conspirators – Guy Fawkes himself. The school, he tells me, retains the long tradition of interest in, and even has a certain affection for, their best-known former pupil, who was once tactfully described by a head boy at a school speech day as ‘not exactly a role model’.

  I guess my old history master, Theodore Firth, shared this fondness for his fellow Yorkshireman. I found my old history book the other day and have to say that Guy Fawkes doesn’t sound, from the notes I took from the blackboard, like the villain most people think he was.

  Guy Fawkes was, without question, a courageous, charismatic, if misguided, man, of impressive appearance. Slender, muscular and handsome, with long red hair, a full moustache and a bushy beard, he was a distinguished soldier and a good-humoured companion. He was also well read, intelligent and interested in discussion and debate. A fanatic he may have been, but he was exceptionally brave and capable of amazing stamina and endurance. He died a horrible death, which he faced bravely, after terrible torture on the rack.

  So, next Bonfire Night I shall pop a penny or two for the Guy in the tin the little boy holds out when I pass him in the street (that is if he is not moved on by the police), I shall enjoy the spectacle of the fireworks and the sparklers, the over-cooked sausages and the sticky bonfire toffee, but I shall turn away when the figure on the top of the bonfire is consumed by the flames.

  Bully for You

  No childhood, it is said, is entirely happy. All children at some time in their young lives experience disappointment, failure, loss and hurt, and some have truly miserable and sometimes tragic upbringings. Bookshop shelves, under the heading ‘Tragic Life Stories’, are stacked with the heart-rending autobiographies of unbelievably unhappy childhoods – nightmare families, loveless homes, brutal parents – all described in vivid detail; of children beaten and starved, rejected and abused, bullied and tortured. Such accounts, where the authors describe how they have overcome the huge disadvantages of miserable upbringings, have become instant best-sellers, and the reading public appears to love them. Perhaps in doing so, the readers’ own lives seem less wretched and more bearable. Perhaps they are heartened by these sad stories of children who have a shining spirit to survive, cope and forgive. For me, such memoirs are painful to read, for mine was a very happy childhood. I did not suffer from great poverty as a child, nor was I born into an affluent and privileged home. I was not smacked or told I was an unwanted child. I was not bullied by my brothers or told by my parents I was a disappointment to them. I felt loved and cherished. There was a short time in my young life, however, when I was desperately unhappy – the time I was bullied.

  A couple of years ago, I met the bully again. He approached me after I had spoken at a formal business dinner in Sheffield. I had spotted him earlier, with a group of other men sitting directly in front of the top table. It was the laugh I recognised first, and it brought back unpleasant memories. As a lad, I remember this tall, fat, moon-faced boy with lank black hair and a permanent scowl, who developed an obsessive dislike of me. In primary school, I was a biddable, easy-going child. I enjoyed the lessons and readily volunteered answers and did as I was told. I was small for my age, not good at sports and of average intelligence so, I guess, I was vulnerable and the ideal victim for the bully.

  I little thought that my behaviour would antagonise the large moon-faced boy, who was frequently outside the head teacher’s room for misbehaving. He would delight in mispronouncing my name, much to the amusement of his two sidekicks. ‘Gervarse! Gervarse!’ he would shout, and mince down the corridor. He and his two fellow bullies would stop me going to the toilet, tip everything out of my satchel and spit at me when my back was turned. I had a dreadful two months until I moved to secondary school and thankfully never saw him again – until, that is, I attended the dinner. He hadn’t changed much, except that he was now almost entirely bald.

  ‘I was just telling those at my table we were at school together,’ he said to me as he approached. He was smiling inanely.

/>   ‘Yes, I know,’ I replied.

  ‘Really,’ said the president of the association, who was sitting on my right at the top table. ‘An old school friend?’

  ‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘He bullied me.’

  ‘I . . . I . . . don’t remember that,’ blustered the bully.

  ‘Well, of course you wouldn’t,’ I said, looking him straight in the eye. ‘Bullies forget but the bullied never do. You were vicious, cruel and you made my life a misery for two months and I have no wish to speak to you.’ My heart was thumping in my chest.

  He stared at me a moment, shuffled with embarrassment and opened his mouth about to speak, but he thought better of it. He then strode away angrily.

  Bully

  He shouts and swears and smokes and spits,

  Pummels, pinches, pokes and nips.

  He likes to kick, he likes to punch,

  Call you names and steal your lunch.

  But, have you ever wondered why

  He likes to make another cry?

  What makes a child turn out like you?

  You see at home he’s bullied too.

  His father beats him, black and blue.

  Having a Laugh

  One afternoon, just before Christmas when I was ten, my father took me to see the pantomime at the Leeds City Varieties. We caught the train from Masborough Station and walked through the city, crowded with shoppers. It was one of the few very special occasions when it was just me and my father, no brothers or sister. The City Varieties is the oldest extant music hall in the country; an intimate, colourful and atmospheric little theatre, hidden between two arcades. All the greats of variety theatre have performed here: Charlie Chaplin and Houdini, Tommy Cooper and Hylda Baker, Marie Lloyd and Les Dawson and, of course, the legendary Ken Dodd, who takes some persuading to leave the stage once he’s started.

  I appeared there myself in 2006, in my one-man show. Before my performance I stood on the empty stage looking down at the empty stalls and recalled a small boy sitting on a plush red velvet seat with his father, his eyes (as we say in Yorkshire) ‘like chapel hat pegs’, entering a magical world of the pantomime.

  It was at Leeds City Varieties that I first saw the great Sandy Powell, who hailed from my home town of Rotherham, and when I heard his famous catchphrase: ‘Can you hear me, Mother?’ For a few weeks afterwards, I would imitate this catchphrase at home, much to the irritation of my family, until my father put his foot down and said: ‘That’ll be enough!’

  Sandy Powell’s comedy was clever, clean, inoffensive and hilariously funny. Part of his act was when he appeared on stage dressed in a soldier’s scarlet tunic, pill-box hat askew on his head, and holding a particularly ugly dummy, which was dressed identically. He was a hopeless ventriloquist and his dummy would often fall apart in his hands. His act was interrupted by a posh-sounding member of the audience, in real life his wife, Kay.

  ‘Tell me sonny,’ he asked the dummy in a deep throaty voice, ‘where do you live and where were you born?’

  ‘I vass born in Volchergrankon,’ replied the dummy.

  ‘Where was he born?’ asked the woman.

  ‘Wolverhampton. Oh, I wish I’d have said Leeds. I’m glad it wasn’t Czechoslovakia.’

  My first sortie onto the stage was when I was thirteen and, at a school concert, I performed a song, an old Yorkshire verse, which Sandy Powell made famous. I was accompanied on the piano by Mr Gravill, the music master. At Christmas, I insist on singing this ditty at family gatherings, much to my children’s embarrassment.

  When I was a right young lad

  My father said to me:

  ‘Seems to me tha’s growin’ up,

  Now what’s tha goin’ to be?

  It all depends upon thyself,

  It’s only up to thee,

  I won’t say much to thee ageean,

  But tek a tip from me.

  ’Ear all, see all, say nowt,

  Ate all, sup all, pay nowt,

  It’s a long time, remember,

  From January to December,

  So ’ear all, see all, say nowt,

  Ate all, sup all, pay nowt,

  And if ever thy does summat for nowt,

  Always do it for theeself.’

  When I watch the present-day comedians on the television, and hear their acerbic, cutting-edge and supposedly entertaining humour, usually peppered with expletives, how I wish a Sandy Powell would make a return. ‘The golden age of British comedy has passed,’ said John Cleese. How right he is.

  I was attending a gala charity function the other week. The ‘star’ of the evening was one of these ‘cutting-edge, alternative’ comedians, who was ‘guaranteed to make us roll in the aisles’. Well, I stayed firmly in my seat until I could stand no more and departed for the toilets. The material was, to my mind, uninspired, vulgar and relied for its dubious humour on poking fun at others who were in some way different. Of course, there was the usual string of inane and predictable Irish jokes.

  One of the highlights of my holiday in Blackpool when I was a child was an evening at the pier show. I looked forward most to the appearance on stage of real comedians, and I laughed until my sides ached at the very best of the crop. Nearly all the stars at Blackpool came from the music hall tradition: big hearted Arthur Askey (‘Hello Playmates’), Tommy Cooper (‘Not like this, like that’), Richard Murdoch, Al Read (‘Right Monkey’), Jimmy James and Eli, Dickie Henderson, Freddie Frinton, Beryl Reid, Arthur Haynes, Joan Whitfield, Norman Evans, Professor Jimmy Edwards and Chick Murray (‘I’m taking the dog to the vet to have it put down.’ ‘Is it mad?’ ‘It’s no too pleased.’). There was Frankie Howerd, who managed to have people doubled up with laughter and he said nothing, but just spluttered and ‘Ooed’ and ‘Aahhd’, jettisoning any script he might have had and departing on some wild fantasy of his own.

  My favourite was the great Hylda Baker, with her gormless and silent stooge, Cynthia. This small woman (four foot, eleven inches) characterised the fast-talking gossip and her catchphrases (‘She knows, you know,’ ‘“Be soon,” I said,’ and ‘You big girl’s blouse’) became household phrases. It is reputed that when she appeared at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, Noel Coward observed after the performance he had ‘endured’ that, ‘I would happily wring that woman’s neck – if I could find it.’

  In her moth-eaten fox fur, ill-fitting checked jacket, large handbag over the arm, and misshapen hat, she had the audience rolling in the aisles with her facial contortions and mangling of the English language. ‘I don’t think you’ve had the pleasure of me,’ she told the audience as she came on stage, wriggling her small frame as if she had chronic worms. ‘I can say this without fear of contraception,’ she would continue. ‘I went to the doctor and he was standing there, his horoscope around his neck. He said I’d got the body of a woman twice my age. “Get away,” I said, “you flatterer, you.” I was so excited I nearly had a coronary trombonist and fell prostitute on the floor.’

  Then she would look up at her silent friend. ‘Ooo,’ she would mouth, ‘Have you been with a fella? Have yooo? Have yooo been with a fella?’ Cynthia would stare into the middle distance with a blank expression. ‘She knows, you know,’ Hylda told the audience. ‘Oh yes, she knows, you know.’ Simple, innocent, clean, inoffensive, silly material, but hilariously funny.

  Hylda Baker was a direct descendant of Mistress Quickly and Mrs Malaprop and the precursor of Connie, the character who appears throughout my Dales books. She was one of those people who mangled and murdered the language with malapropisms and non sequiturs to great comic effect. She could mince words like a mincer minces meat.

  Aged ten, I waited in the rain on the pier after a show to get Hylda Baker’s autograph. She arrived at the stage door. ‘Have you been standing there in the rain, you little tinker, you?’ she said as she scribbled her name across the programme which I still have to this day.

  I was enthralled when I attended a brilliant performance by the character
actress, Jean Ferguson. In her one-woman show she was uncanny in recreating the comic genius of Hylda Baker, capturing the voice and mannerisms, the body wiggling, the facial contortions and handbag adjustments.

  Sadly, Hylda Baker spent the last years of her life in a nursing home for retired variety performers and died alone in Horton Hospital in 1986, aged 81. Only eleven people attended her funeral. This great comedian has been largely forgotten, but not by one of her greatest fans who, as a child, remembers waiting in the rain outside the stage door on a wet Saturday evening in Blackpool for an autograph.

  Stage Struck

  On a recent Saturday visit to my home town of Rotherham, I met Miss Greenwood, my former infant teacher, in All Saints’ Square. She is now over 80 years old, but still possesses the shining eyes and the gentle smile of the great teacher she was. I loved Miss Greenwood and those early years at school. I moulded little clay models, dug in the sand pit, played in the water tray, counted with little coloured beads, sang the nursery rhymes, danced with bare feet in the hall, made models with toilet rolls and cardboard boxes, splashed poster paint on large sheets of grey sugar paper, chanted poems, listened to stories and learnt to read. And how I loved those stories she read in the reading corner.

  That Saturday I took Miss Greenwood for afternoon tea, and we reminisced.

  ‘And do you remember when you wet yourself, Gervase?’ she asked with a twinkle in her eyes.

  ‘Of course I do. How could I ever forget?’

  The time will remain ingrained in my memory. The curtains had opened on the Christmas Nativity play and there I had stood, six years old, stiff as a lamppost. I was the palm tree, encased in brown crêpe paper with two big bunches of papier mâché coconuts dangling from my neck, and a clump of bright green cardboard leaves in each hand and arranged like a crown on my head. My mother had knitted me a pale green woollen balaclava, through which my little face appeared. I had stared at all the faces in the audience and wriggled nervously. Then someone had laughed and it had started others off laughing too. It was the first occasion anyone had laughed at me and I had felt so alone and upset. I had looked for my parents and, seeing them in the second row, I had focused on them. They, of course, were not laughing. I had begun to cry and then, frozen under the bright lights and frightened, I had wet myself. It had seeped through the brown crêpe paper leaving a large dark stain in the front. The audience had laughed louder. I had been devastated. On the way home, my face wet with tears, my father had held my small hand between his great fat fingers and he had told me that I had been the best palm tree he had ever seen. My mother had told me that I was the star of the show. I knew full well at the time that they had not been telling me the truth, but it had been so good to be told. I felt so secure and so loved.