‘I get a pain in the back of my neck,’ I said.
I quote this sketch in full again because it has gone down as a classic, and because John Law deserves to be remembered.
I’ve sometimes been asked if I think that sketch represented any truth in the relationships between Ron, myself and John Cleese. There was a sense in which Ron and I felt like natural allies. Not that we didn’t get on with John; there was no enmity, none whatsoever, but there was a feeling that there was a kind of fence between him and us. Was this due to class? I don’t actually think so. Class isn’t very important in our profession. I think education was the significant factor.
Ronnie and I had not gone beyond grammar school, while John Cleese and most of the writers had been to university. There was a feeling that people like John and Graham Chapman had got nice degrees on other subjects and were rather playing at our game, seeing how they liked it: ‘We may stay on or we may go back to medicine or something.’ Later I think they all got more serious about it, but at the time it was just slightly annoying to Ron and me; we thought, ‘Hang on a minute. This is our livelihood, which we’ve been working at for seventeen years.’
I think the relevant fact about the class sketch, from the point of view of my relationship with Ronnie, was that it would have been possible for John Cleese to have looked down on us (I’m not saying that he did, I don’t think for a moment that he did, I’m only saying that it would have been possible), but it wouldn’t have been possible for either Ronnie
or me to have looked down on each other. Our backgrounds were too similar. We had too much in common.
It’s time to look at our backgrounds. I’ll start with mine, because obviously I know it in more detail, and, sadly, Ron isn’t around to fill in the details about his.
3
I was born in Edinburgh on 4 December 1930. The only unusual thing about this event was that they left a swab in my poor dear mother. I was told about this so often that I almost began to believe that it was my fault.
All my grandparents were Scottish, although my maternal grandparents emigrated to London in search of work. My granddad was a policeman, a station sergeant in Upper Norwood and Gypsy Hill, not far from where I live now. I never met him or my grandmother, who was cook-housekeeper in a big house in Upper Belgrave Street. She loved the theatre and used to queue for the cheap seats at West End theatres, so maybe I got some of my desire to be an actor from her.
They returned to Edinburgh just before my mother, Anne, was born. She was educated at Boroughmuir School, where she was in the same class as that brilliantly funny character actor Alastair Sim. Before her marriage she worked on the switchboard and in the accounts department at the head office of John Menzies, the bookseller. She was quite bookish and loved poetry. Whisper it softly, but I think there was a feeling in her family that she married slightly beneath her. There was a lot of that sort of whispering in those far-off days.
My dad, who was called William, was a baker. He had tremendously high standards. Everything had to be just so, and he would make extremely detailed preparations before he began baking. There is more than a bit of him in me. In fact I thoroughly enjoy making bread and cakes, and when I do I set my stall out just as thoroughly as he did. I like to feel that he would approve if he could see me. He was a short man – just five foot six – and he had great energy. He was strict, even a bit severe, but never intimidating. He instilled in me a great desire to impress him, and a knowledge that it wouldn’t be easy to do so. But he also had a great sense of humour, the tough Scottish kind that stared disaster in the face and laughed at it. He was very gregarious and loved to blether (a great Scottish word) with friends on street corners. He was also a very keen and pretty good golfer. I inherited the enthusiasm, but was never as good as him. Golf, baking, humour, pride and high standards – not a bad legacy to leave to your son.
I always felt close to my dad, but he was fundamentally reserved, despite his chattiness on minor matters, and there was one thing about which I never spoke to him in depth. He lied about his age in order to fight in the First World War, and actually took part in the Battle of the Somme at the age of sixteen and a half. He came back from the war without injury, but I have often wondered what effect it had on him mentally. It was over twelve years before I was born, and although he spoke occasionally about the terrible things that he had seen, I don’t think he was able to let me fully into his heart about them.
I had a brother, Allan, six years younger than me and much taller, and a sister, Margaret, ten years my junior. Allan studied law at Edinburgh University and then went into the restaurant business, ending up running a very successful fish restaurant in Leith with his wife Jen. Margaret married a dentist from the US Air Force, and went to live in Florida.
I would say that on the whole I had a happy childhood, but my very first memory is far from happy. It was of almost drowning when I was three, in a paddling pool at the Step
From left to right: Allan, Margaret and me.
Rock in St Andrews, one of those natural pools which the water comes into at high tide. I very clearly remember the feeling of being under the water and seeing somebody coming to my rescue. I can still see the reflection of people through the crystal-clear water. I wasn’t under for long, but it was quite frightening. My mother and father must have been in a terrible state because I was the first and they’d been married for six and a bit years and thought that perhaps they couldn’t have a child until I came along. Anyway, it hasn’t left me with any fear of water whatsoever and the area around the Step Rock was soon to be the scene of an altogether happier memory.
I took part in a pierrot show, when I was five and a bit, at the nearby Step Rock Pavilion. There was a pierrot show every afternoon, in the open air, outside the Pavilion, with a talent contest, and I sang a Bud Flanagan song and won first prize. It always seemed very odd to me that at St Andrews, so close to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, the prize was a cricket bat.
I felt as though I made no mark at all at my first school, the James Gillespie School for Boys. When I moved on to the Royal High School, I did rather better, showing enough spirit to join the literary society and the debating society and go to all the school dances. Unfortunately, though, that’s where my initiative ended. I joined, I went, but I didn’t speak or dance.
I have to say that where girls were concerned, my height was a problem. It takes courage to approach girls who are much taller than you are. I used to try to judge, as I approached a line of seated girls, which ones would be the shortest when they stood up, but most of the time it was irrelevant, as they refused to stand up. I suppose it’s the opposite of being stood up. I was constantly sat down by girls.
James Gillespie School for Boys. The class of 1936. I’m sitting fourth from the left on the front row.
I felt that nobody wanted to dance with me, that they dreaded my approach.
Apart from that, strangely enough, I don’t recall my height being a problem. I don’t remember ever being bullied or mocked because I was so short, so maybe I was a bit stronger or a bit funnier or a bit more popular than I thought. I don’t think that, apart from those wretched dances, I was as sensitive about my height as could have been expected. It was my Aunt Nell, not me, who paid two guineas and sent away for a course on How To Become Taller. This involved stretching exercises and positive thinking. I had to recite, ‘Every day and in every way I’m getting taller and taller.’ It was a waste of Aunt Nell’s two precious guineas. Well, you can see that. All we were left with was a series of marks on the kitchen wall, each much too close to the preceding mark. I simply stopped growing at five foot one and a half inches. I was examined by doctors, who found that there was nothing wrong with me, I was just little. And perfectly formed, I’m tempted to add.
Aunt Nell was a lovely lady. She was beautiful, and she was kind. She married late in life and hated it. The marriage lasted less than a year. After it had ended she devoted her life to us and became like a second mo
ther to me. She used to call me ‘my little Rodie-Podie’. She may not have succeeded where my height was concerned, but she was very influential in another way. She was a tailor, and she made, or altered to my size, all my clothes, almost all of which needed altering, because I was so small. She gave me an interest in clothes and she taught me how important it was, because I was small, to look immaculate at all times. My uncle was also a tailor, and my father was a bit of a dresser too. He knew the value of buying a £25 suit, because it would last thirty years, whereas the £8 one wouldn’t last two minutes. I learnt that lesson well. I am always careful about my clothes. It’s not so easy to mock a small man if he looks smart and stylish. I have always felt that I know what clothes suit me, that I have a very clear idea of what style and what colours to wear – I particularly like pastel colours, light blue, duck-egg blue, although I sometimes enjoy wearing really strong colours. I dress in my own style, virtually unaffected by the passing trends and fashions.
How different life was in Britain in the years before and during and indeed immediately after the Second World War. How much narrower were our horizons. For our holidays we went to St Andrews almost every year. Ten days before the holiday, our huge trunks would be packed and roped up and sent on to the digs where we were to stay. We shared our holiday with other families, and our entertainment in the evenings would consist of taking a wee walk round the old town and, if we were very lucky, having a pennyworth of chips. I can still see myself going to church on Sundays in my Royal Stuart kilt, lovat-green sweater and brown brogues, and walking in the afternoon, still in our best clothes, over the Braid Hills, with their wide views over the Firth of Forth. I can picture, as if it were yesterday, the maroon and grey crocodile that walked from our school to the baths for our swimming lessons.
I was growing up, yet I was still a child. In my teens I took to going on tough adventure holidays, but I didn’t always stick to the toughness and the adventure. I went on a skiing course in the Cairngorms, long before skiing was a popular pursuit in Britain. I went youth hostelling until I found that my bike was too heavily laden for me to be able to push it up hills. One winter four of us rented a miner’s cottage on Raasay, a small, thinly populated island off Skye. I think we intended to test our stamina hiking in rough country in harsh weather, but in the event we spent most of our days huddled round a peat fire eating buttered toast.
A car was still a luxury, and Dad didn’t have one until 1948, when he was fifty. In fact we both learnt to drive at the same time, taught by his brother, Geordie. I passed my test first time, but he didn’t. I tried not to look too smug, sitting beside him as he drove with his L-plates on. We were stopped by a policeman, who asked Dad for his licence. It was provisional of course, and I must have looked about fourteen. The policeman was naturally very suspicious. It was a great moment as I handed him my full licence, and saw him pass it back to me shame-facedly and walk away without speaking.
The worst memory of my childhood involves my dad. He had been baking manager at McVitie and Guest. He had run Mackie’s bakery. Then he ran the Lothian school meals service. The service was reorganized, and he found himself redundant. He became a caretaker in a big school, and he did that until he retired. I don’t know why his career ended so ingloriously, but I do know that it hurt him very deeply, so deeply that he destroyed all his recipe books, all twenty-eight of them, each one written in his fine handwriting, and containing all the secrets that he had learnt. It wasn’t exactly that he was embittered. That’s too strong. The correct word to describe his feelings is, I think, that he was scunnered. That’s a great Scottish word, and like all the best words there is no exact translation, but I suppose it means that he was sick to the back teeth with the world of baking. He would still bake in later life when it suited him, and when he came to stay with us for a fortnight we couldn’t keep him out of the kitchen, but it was sad that he felt this professional disillusion. I think the experience and my memory of it has helped me never to count my chickens.
The best memory of my childhood, on the other hand, was when I was given the part of the wicked aunt in the St Catherine-in-the-Grange church youth club production of Babes in the Wood. I had performed before. I had won my cricket bat at St Andrews. I had appeared in a concert for the war effort – to be more precise, for the Spitfire Fund, wearing a dressing gown and carrying a candle and singing a Christopher Robin song. At the Lyceum Theatre? Not quite. On the flat roof of the air-raid shelter in the communal garden at the back of our tenement. I don’t want to boast, but I seem to recall that I raised almost £9. I was aware of having at least a bit of musical talent. I had taken piano lessons, eventually becoming good enough to play the organ in church.
But this was different. This was the real thing. I loved it. The minister, Tom Maxwell, told my mother, ‘I think you ought to know that something quite remarkable is going on at rehearsals. Little Ron is being wonderful as the wicked aunt.’ I can sense the surprise behind his use of the word ‘remarkable’, but he was a kind man, and I can’t resent it, and it was, in a way, my very first review. I wish they had all been as flattering.
This single event changed my life. I knew now what I wanted to be. I wanted to be an actor. It wasn’t just a case of being stage-struck. It was far more precise than that. I knew, in an instant, what kind of actor I wanted to be. I wanted to be a comic actor. I wanted to be a sophisticated light comedian, who would appear in Noël Coward’s plays wearing a Scotts lightweight felt hat, which seemed to me to be the acme of sophistication.
I began going to the Lyceum and the King’s Theatre every week, regardless of what was on. My mum and dad, unlike so many mums and dads, didn’t recoil from my strange ambition. They didn’t say, ‘Listen, lad, baking’s your destiny. You belong in the world of yeast. There’s wholemeal bread and eclairs in your blood.’ They encouraged me to join the Glover Turner Robertson School in George Street in Edinburgh, where I began to learn my trade and was taught how to lose my Scottish accent – a necessity in those days when BBC English still ruled.
I hung around stage doors, hoping for autographs. Sometimes I even managed to walk alongside quite well-known actors on their way back to their hotels. The word I used for this is ‘escort’, but I have a feeling that their description might have been ‘tag along’. I’m amazed now that I had the cheek to do it and amazed that they didn’t all tell me to buzz off. Among those actors who failed to shake me off was Kenneth Connor, later to star in the Carry On… films.
I left school at seventeen with seven Higher Leaving Certificates. My father would have liked me to go to university, and my younger brother did go, but I’d had enough of school and learning in that way. I didn’t feel there was any point in it for me, since I knew now what I wanted to do with my life.
It was all very well knowing what I wanted to do, but doing it was another matter. I had to earn a living, and started applying for jobs which I no longer really wanted. I sat a Civil Service exam, to try to be an officer in the Civil Service, and I missed it by about two places, so I found myself working as a clerical officer in the Ministry of Agriculture in Edinburgh. I don’t think it would have made much difference to my life if I’d passed the exam. I had no intention of making a long-term career in the Civil Service.
Even animal foods were rationed in those austere days after the war. We issued coupons for proteins and cereals for farrowing sows and milk herds, and organized the wages for Polish ex-servicemen who helped farmers in the Borders with their harvest.
During my eighteen months with the Ministry of Agriculture
On the front row again, third from left.
I made no attempt to turn my theatrical dream into reality. I decided that I needed to get National Service out of the way first. I was actually looking forward to it. I had been very happy growing up in Edinburgh, but now I wanted to get away and begin to explore the world. I passed the medical despite a deviated septum and attacks of asthmatic bronchitis and I am so pleased that I did. I was one
of those people who got enormous benefit from National Service.
I joined the RAF in 1949. I applied to be trained for a commission, was accepted for officer selection and passed out as a pilot officer at Spitalgate, near Cranwell. My military career may not have been startling – the only time I stepped into a plane was when a fellow officer took me for rides in a Tiger Moth, and because I was five foot one and a half inches the station commander at RAF Weeton suggested that I wear my full number-one dress at all times, for fear that experienced old hands might mistake me for a cadet – but being accepted as an officer despite my lack of height, not to mention my deviated septum, gave me a confidence which I had never felt before and have never lost since. I can’t say that I had yet realized that my lack of height could be a great advantage to me, but I can claim that, while I might still on occasions be sensitive on the subject, I would never again be seriously worried by it.
I had my first real romantic encounter during my National Service, with a nursing sister whom I met when I was in hospital with asthmatic bronchitis. It was a very innocent romance. Those were very innocent days. Well, for me they were, anyway. I can still see her auburn hair but I can’t remember her name. We both went on leave at the same time, and our train split up at Carlisle. My bit went to Edinburgh, and hers to Blackpool. My brief encounter was very touching, very painful, but nobody ever made a film of it. I blame the title – Uncoupling at Carlisle. Besides, we did actually meet up again after my demob. I took her to the Palladium to see Danny Kaye. We had a lovely evening, but that was the end of it. Reality was not as exciting as memory for me, and probably for her as well.
I suppose the most exotic place I got to during my National Service was Hornchurch. Not, on the face of it, much use socially. ‘When I was in Hornchurch’ doesn’t trip off the tongue of an old military man very impressively. But my time there was in fact important to me. I made friends for the first time, real friends, lasting friends, friends who didn’t give a damn about my deviated septum. One of them was the actor Edward Hardwicke, son of Sir Cedric Hardwicke, one of our great theatrical knights. Edward introduced me to a glamorous London world, and it was to London that I went, in 1951, after my National Service, with £97 in my savings account. He also introduced me to his mother, the actress Helena Pickard, known to everyone as Pixie. She opened doors for me, doors into glamorous society and doors into much less glamorous work. I had small parts in films, often small in both senses. My very first proper job was as president of the Glasgow University students’ union in You’re Only Young Twice. This was followed by Top of the Form and Fun at St Fanny’s, which was about as good as the title suggests.
And It's Goodnight from Him . . . Page 2
