David Jason: My Life (2 page)

Oh, stuff all that. Here’s the fact: I don’t want to die alone on a rock. I don’t even want to die in company on a rock, given the choice. I want to be alive. I’ve got stuff I still want to do. I’ve got Gill somewhere back on that shore. Reasons to live.

But what’s this? A dot on the horizon, growing larger, getting closer. The instructor has returned to the shore for help, that’s what she’s done. There are figures in the boat. They’re searching for me. I wave and shout and wave and shout. Someone in the boat lifts his head and sees me. Now the people in the boat are shouting and waving and the boat is coming to the rock. I’m saved.

True story, dear reader. And like the tale you’re about to read, not one I have told before, though now, looking back at seventy-three, seems as good a time as any. Looking back, I should say, in a state of boundlessly grateful and sometimes puzzled wonderment at the unlikelihood of the journey that took me from where I started to where I’ve got to.

It’s a story of immense good fortune, I have to say. But with scrapes, and a few things worse than scrapes, along the way. For, as we’ll see, that day in the Virgin Islands was not the only time in my life when I thought the boat had gone and the boat came back.

CHAPTER ONE

Life during wartime. A long-standing mystery resolved. And sundry near-death experiences, one involving a tomahawk.

WHAT I REMEMBER
is being extremely young and hearing thunder and feeling the walls of the house shake and the floor beneath us tremble and fearfully asking my mother what was going on. And my mother holding me close and saying, ‘It’s nothing to worry about. It’s just God moving His furniture around.’

It wasn’t, in fact. It was Hitler moving London around – something the German Chancellor seemed to be particularly keen on at that point in his career. I was born on 2 February 1940, five months after the outbreak of the Second World War, and even though those five years of global conflagration quite clearly had nothing to do with me, the Luftwaffe nevertheless pursued me from aeroplanes, with impressive enthusiasm, for all of my tenderest years. Which is why I associate my earliest days with the smell and taste of brick dust.

My brother Arthur, seven years my senior, was eventually evacuated to the safety of the countryside, like half a million other London children. But I was too young for that, so my
infancy was spent in war-torn north London, where, upon the sounding of the air-raid sirens, I was periodically strapped into a government-issue gas mask, an infringement of my liberty which, apparently, I bitterly resisted. Then I was made to lie down with my parents in the Morrison shelter – essentially an indoor wire-mesh cage which doubled as a stout dining table and which gave you a fighting chance of surviving in the event that your house collapsed around your ears. As the printed letter that had come round from Mr G. Beach, Air Raid Precautions Officer for the Borough of Finchley, had kindly explained: ‘Protection in your own home is an excellent alternative to communal or public shelters, and it conforms to the principle of dispersal which experience has proved to be a wise one.’ Excellent and wise, indeed. So, there, amid the distant and not-so-distant crumps and crashes and all the awesome noises of destruction, my mother would lie with me, dutifully honouring the principle of dispersal, and doing her level best not to transfer her fear. It was just God, moving His furniture around.

We kept my infant gas mask in the house for many years; it was like a rubber deep-sea diver’s helmet, but designed to hold the baby’s entire body, with drawstrings at the bottom. Long afterwards, I used to get an eerie feeling just looking at it.

We were the White family and for some reason the target of Hitler’s frustrated anger included our tiny terraced house at 26 Lodge Lane in Finchley – so tiny that when you opened the front door, you almost fell up the stairs, which were right in front of you. It was a three-up, three-down. There was a front room, which we were never allowed to go into except at Christmas and, presumably, in the event of a member of the royal family happening to drop in, although, in my recollection, this rarely happened. Beyond that was the middle room, where the open fire was and where the whole family sat and listened to the wireless – and where, much later, we gathered to watch the television. Beyond the middle room was the kitchen, and
beyond the kitchen, out in the backyard, in a lean-to, behind a latched wooden door, was the lavatory – all mod cons. But no electricity, of course: electric light didn’t come to Lodge Lane until the early 1950s. Until then, it was gas lamps, with their fiddly mantles and constant hiss.

And then upstairs were three bedrooms, although one of them was really just a box room – a box room suitable only for a very small collection of boxes. That was where my sister June slept, after she came along, seven years after me, in 1947. I shared with Arthur, a cosy arrangement which prevailed for nearly a decade until he left home.

My mum, Olwen, worked as a maid in a big house in the well-to-do suburban part of Finchley. Her employer, always spoken of with great reverence in our house, was Mr Strathmore, a portly judge. Mum had found work with him when she left Wales as a young teenager, fleeing her drunken and violent father – not a passage of her life that she was much inclined to speak about. At first Mr Strathmore employed her as a live-in maid, and even after she met my dad, married and began renting a house of her own, she still went there in the day to clean.

She took me with her to work one day and I remember, as she unlatched the gate, being staggered by the grandeur of this place – a detached house in its own garden, of all things, with its own drive. I went back and looked at it many years later, and, comparatively speaking, it wasn’t all that grand. But at the time, to a kid from Lodge Lane, it was a place of unimaginable richness – something from another world entirely. When my mother eventually retired, Mr Strathmore gave her a Japanese silk print of cherry blossoms – again, a rare and exotic item in our terms. It hangs in my house to this day.

There were no books in the family home, but my mother was a bright and talkative woman who loved a gossip and a story, embellished or otherwise, and was given slightly to malaproprisms: family lore has her leaning over the fence and solemnly
informing Mrs Pressland from next door that the woman over the road had gone into hospital to ‘have her wound out’. And she was Welsh so, of course, she sang. One vivid vignette in my mind: being cuddled up with her on the sofa in the dining room on a dark winter afternoon, just the two of us in the house, the fire lit, her singing me Christmas songs as snow fell into the yard. In truth, physical affection and displays of emotion were rare, and moments of intimacy, too. But that wasn’t just my parents: that was how people were. It didn’t feel like a lack. We knew we were loved.

My father, Arthur, was a porter at Billingsgate market. His brothers were butchers – indeed, if you climb back through my family tree, butchers crop up a lot. It turns out that I come from a long line of people who knew how to wield a meat cleaver. There was a notable exception in the form of my great-great-great-great-grandfather (roughly speaking), back in seventeen-hundred-and-frozen-to-death, who owned a brick-making business in Sussex and was apparently an extremely wealthy man. But no sooner had the White lineage finally come into some money than one of the sons immediately blew the fortune away – drink and women, no doubt, and the rest of it, I’m sure, he wasted. And after that, everyone went back to being butchers again.

Anyway, my father had courageously stepped to one side of the family tradition of butchery and he was a fishmonger – firstly at Billingsgate and later behind the counter of the Mac Fisheries fish shop in Camden Town. He moved on from there to serve in another Mac Fisheries branch, in the Jewish community in Golders Green. A practical and resourceful man, he knew how to save a bob or two. He cut up an old bike tyre and stuck lumps of it around the front of his work shoes to form an improvised bumper against wear and tear and the cold water that fishmongers spend their lives sloshing around in. Thus rubberised, and making sounds like a pantomime horse, he
would be up at four and trot off to work on his bike. Of course, 1940–45 were the years of the wartime blackout, making night-time cycling a potentially risky business. Sure enough, one dark morning soon after my birth, so the story goes, my father, his shoes and his bike dropped into a freshly made bomb crater. The bomb had dropped on the London side of the bridge at Archway, right in the middle of the road. It was so deep that it must have stunned him momentarily. He was down there for some time until the morning light dawned and some passing air-raid wardens heard his cries for help. They hauled him up to the surface, whereupon, as he stood dusting himself down, they could only express their astonishment. ‘Look at this bloke: he’s had a bomb drop right on top of him, and he’s still alive!’ My father did not correct them. He straightened the front wheel of his bike, smoothed down his hair and rode on to work.

By all accounts, my father was something of a showman in the workplace, joshing with the customers, whom he loved, giving them a bit of a routine as he wrapped the haddock and the hake, messing about with the scales and the weights. It was probably his way of making the job tolerable, because a lot of the time he’d have been frozen and wet and on his feet for hours on end. (Arthritis would punish those feet for a lifetime of exertion when he was older.) In any case, piss-taking seemed to run on his side of the family. The term he and his relatives used for it was a piece of obsolete market trader’s slang: chi-iking. At work, and socially, my dad was forever chi-iking – bantering, winding people up. At home, though, the showmanship tended to go away and he was a rather broody, forbidding presence whom you did your best not to cross. He occasionally gave the impression that he didn’t much want us kids about. He adored my mother, though, and respected her, entirely aware that she was the brains that made the family work.

So, to Mr and Mrs White, in the particularly cold February
of 1940, a further son. Two further sons, in fact – twins. But only I emerged alive from the womb (or, as my mother would have put it, ‘the wound’). I was healthy, but my companion for those nine months simply hadn’t thrived. In the family version of these events, passed on to me as a child, I had been too greedy and eaten all the food. (Note how even this potentially sensitive area was not spurned as an opening for mild chi-iking.) The fact that I was originally one half of a duo would eventually give rise to a theory, much propounded in newspaper profiles over the years, that all my life since then has been a desperate effort to compensate for that stillborn brother. It’s a grand idea, though I fear the truth may be a lot more prosaic. After all, this incident, sad as it was, was something that dated back to the day I was born, about which my memories are bound to be a bit patchy. From my point of view, it was a distant curiosity, a piece of passed-down history. It was hard to feel it as a loss – or even as an event in my life.

Still, the legend surrounding this biographical detail and its psychological meanings gained a further layer of decorative gilt after a pair of journalists visited my mother at home, late in her life, with flowers, warm smiles and open notebooks. Whereupon, over a pot of tea, my mother garrulously told her friendly visitors how delighted she was that I had taken the stage name ‘Jason’ in my twin’s honour. Furthermore (and here one can imagine the journalists’ biros starting to scribble especially quickly), the stringencies of the war, which saw so many public services suspended, had denied my twin the opportunity of a traditional funeral and so my mother had had no option, had she? She had buried him herself in the backyard.

Well, I did mention that my mother liked to embellish a tale. I should also point out that she was, shall we say, well into her anecdotage by the point at which she gave this interview. (I remember her telling me over the phone, ‘I had a lovely chat about you with some journalists today,’ and thinking, ‘Uh-oh.’)

So, just to straighten the record: I and my ill-fated twin weren’t born at home; we were delivered at North Middlesex County Hospital, as declared on my birth certificate. My mother, to the very best of my knowledge, buried exactly no bodies in our back garden, during wartime or any other time. And my twin, being stillborn, was unnamed. I owe my stage name to another source of inspiration altogether, as I shall relate.

Now, it may well be that my parents were troubled by the baby they lost, and the life that never was, in ways that I wasn’t, and in ways that I never knew. I assume, at least, that they weren’t preparing for twins: in the absence of ultrasound scanning, the first they would have even known about my mother carrying two babies, rather than one, would have been at the birth. Did that make it easier to accept? I don’t know. I can only say that they always seemed entirely sanguine about what happened. Perhaps the times taught them to be so. After all, there was a war on. There was a lot of death about. People like my mother and father did what they could, and got on with being alive. And so did I.

* * *

N
O BAD TURN-UP
, of course, to have a fishmonger in the family during wartime. And no bad thing, either, to have an uncle who was a butcher. The war brought food shortages and strict rationing. Apparently, as a baby – in the absence of anything sugary or even a traditional dummy – I was given a carrot as a pacifier, so they must have been cheap and readily available. But like everyone else, my parents had to scrape and scratch to get what provisions they could, and anything extra was welcome. Which is why, one morning, after an air raid, Mrs Pressland called across the fence to my mother in a state of some excitement. ‘Mrs White,’ she shouted, ‘you’ve got a dead chicken on your roof.’

Now this was quite a coup. The unfortunate piece of poultry had obviously been flung up there during the night’s destruction – manna from the skies. It seemed unlikely that the chicken had been innocently blasted from a nearby coop – this was London, after all, where not a lot of people kept chickens. But maybe a butcher’s shop had copped it, or just some unfortunate household’s larder. Didn’t matter, really. The point was, a whole chicken would provide our family with at least two decent meals, and stew from the boiled-up bones – and with no resort to the ration book. (My mother, incidentally, made the world’s greatest stews, sometimes from almost no recognisable ingredients whatsoever, and proudly and defiantly took her recipe’s secrets to the grave with her.) So my mother eagerly rushed upstairs to the room my cot was in, looked out and begin to devise a plan to get this heavenly delivery down.