Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (38 page)
Read Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography Online
Authors: Danny Baker
God, but we had a sublime time there. Stone in love, on the other side of the world and walking the beach at night beneath palm trees festooned with multicoloured paper lanterns. The Hawaiian alphabet, I learned, has only thirteen letters, that’s why it’s all Waikiki, leis, luau and Honolulu. Waikiki Beach itself is not a real beach at all but a man-made structure with the sand barged over from Australia just to attract the tourists. Hawaii once tried to deal with a chronic rat infestation by shipping in hundreds of mongooses who, they’d been assured, would keep the numbers down. Sadly, somebody forgot to do their homework and it was only when they found the rat population increasing that it was discovered the mongoose is nocturnal, the rat isn’t, and so the two species had never actually met. Suddenly Hawaii had a rat problem
and
a mongoose problem. These things are why I love Hawaii. However, it was also where, as Wendy looked on, taking photos, I very nearly died.
We had ventured into part of the island’s lush jungle area and found the most beautiful meandering river that led to a waterfall straight out of a Dorothy Lamour movie. Needing little encouragement, we jumped into the river to swim. Actually, let me refine that sentence. Needing little encouragement,
I
jumped into the river to swim. Wendy didn’t join me in this spontaneous expression of joy at nature because she doesn’t swim well and really hates getting her hair wet if there’s not a very good drier within reach. I on the other hand was keen to show her that my reckless can-do personality could sometimes find outlet in the physical, so in I went.
Even today, if people ask me whether I can swim, I will tell them that I am a strong swimmer. By this, I mean that I can swim. Not amazingly, not for any prolonged amount of time, but enough so I don’t drown or flap about hopelessly like my friend Stephen Saunders. However, one aspect of the aquatic life that I’ve never really mastered is simply treading water. I’m useless at it. I was reminded of this quite brusquely the second I surfaced from my leap into the icy depths of this waterway. The current in this river was moving faster than an Aloha jet and immediately I felt everything below my neck start heading off strongly toward the waterfall without first informing my head of the trip. You know that expression ‘go with the flow’? Well, how it ever came to mean taking things easy is a mystery to me. Dear Lord, I may as well have tried to do the Hucklebuck between the carriages of a moving express train. Whoosh, off I went. But so as not to alarm Wendy, I rotated my arms to create the illusion that I was not only a powerful swimmer but apparently could circle the globe in under an hour. On and on I was carried, with Wendy running along the bank laughing, ‘Come back!’ as though I was goofing around, pretending to get away. Little did she know! I felt as if I’d been fired out of a cannon.
By this time I’d arrived at the little lake before the waterfall and the current eased off as the waters widened. Wendy, unaware that I was both terrified and exhausted, started shouting, ‘Swim up to the waterfall! I want to get a picture!’ Weak, rattled and cross-eyed, I found myself doing as I was told. However, and I don’t understand how any of these things work, now the pull of the maelstrom seemed to be forcing me the other way, back out of the lake. It took every ounce of strength I had to go forward half an inch. It shows how strong my love for her was and how much I didn’t want to shatter her image of me as a ‘proper bloke’ that I struggled on with the task, every muscle screaming at me to stop and let my body sink out of sight to become dinner for the bottom feeders. My one goal, the only thing that gave me hope, was the thought that when I got to the waterfall I could cling to a rock and, while pretending to pose artfully beside one of the many rainbows that shimmered in the spray, get my fucking breath back.
Maybe I should have checked that there were rocks to cling to in the first place. When I arrived at the churning, swirling torrent, drained of every last scintilla of energy and fight, I reached out for purchase – only to discover that the rockface had been worn sheer and shiny, not to mention slick with a super-slippery coating of lichen and moss. My hand slid straight off the granite and I sank below the surface. Worse yet, I could feel the tumbling waterfall keeping me down. At this point I have to drop all comic reflection and say I really, actually, properly thought I was going to die. It’s entirely possible that I did die, and the rest of my life has been nothing but a dream. Thankfully, a kick of my leg connected with an underwater outcrop of stone and the pain of this made me snap into the foetal position, which, I’m guessing, altered the flow of the water over me. The next thing I knew I was shooting back out to one side of the cascade. Here there was a boulder of sorts and I hung on to it as though my life depended on it – because it did.
My lungs and ears felt as if they were going to burst, but I managed to peer through the sopping hank of hair hanging in my eyes – ah, those were the days! – and saw Wendy, fifty yards away, smiling broadly and waving at me to stay where I was because she was framing up a good one. I hung on to that rock for a good ten minutes before making for the bank a few yards beyond.
My normal speech patterns returned approximately two days later. When I told Wendy that I’d nearly died and tried to inject as much terror into the telling as I could, she just smiled indulgently. ‘Well, you didn’t look like it,’ she trilled. ‘I got some nice photos.’ She still doesn’t believe how close I came to drowning that afternoon. And the kicker is, her photos were lousy. Two or three fuzzy off-kilter shots of a generic water mass with, in the distance, a possible waterfall and what looks like the crescent of a puce beachball lost in the deluge and struggling to remain above the surface.
When we got back from Hawaii, my dad came around.
‘London Weekend been trying to get hold of you. Rung about five times. I told ’em you was away, but they didn’t listen. What do you reckon they want?’
My mum and dad’s number was for years my default contact if people needed me urgently. I knew why my dad was so keen to pass this message on. He hadn’t said as much, but he’d really liked my appearance on the
Six O’Clock Show
and it had even been seen by friends of his. After the show went out, he said,
‘Saw that last night – was all right, that one, wannit? Gonna do any more?’
This was a good deal more than he’d ever said about
Twentieth Century Box
and his enquiry about possible further spots showed he wanted to nudge me along that road. Now, grudging or withheld parental approval has famously been known to either exquisitely torture or demonically drive performers throughout history – sometimes both – but I can’t follow that line of thought at all. I never wanted my old man to praise or even particularly acknowledge how ‘well’ I was doing. Such a longing strikes me as babyish. He went out and earned his way in the world and I have too, and if at any time he’d put his arm around me and gushed about how proud he and Mum were, I think I’d have died of queasiness. Would my brother and sister therefore have been seen as less spectacular because they toiled in plainer, more unglamorous fields? Ugh. Frankly, thumb-suckers needing validation through Mom and Pop’s approval, or who use their families to measure, justify or glorify their achievements or even
talk
about their work indoors want locking up in a giant crib full of mirrors.
Still, when the old man told me later, ‘Wally Shaw saw you on that thing the other night too. And a couple up the pub asked me about it . . .’ I was glad that he was getting a kick out of it for his own sake. My mum, on the other hand, has never ever mentioned a single word about what I do for a living, other than occasionally asking where I’ve been all week or commenting, ‘What was that bleedin’ thing I saw you on the other night? Couldn’t make head or tail of it.’
I rang Greg Dyke back. He asked me if I’d been seeing the show much lately. It had been three months since its debut. I said I hadn’t and he then asked me if I fancied ‘a bit more work’. Of course what I heard was, ‘a few more five-hundred-pound notes’. Well, if I did, I wanted my ears cleaning out, because Greg now offered me £750 to be on the show every week and even come into the studio to talk alongside Michael and Janet. Quite why I was suddenly so necessary to the show after this lengthy gap I still can’t fathom. But starting that very next week I became a babbling, ebullient fixture for Londoners every Friday night at six.
For the first couple of shows, in which I investigated the minute world of beekeepers followed by an exposé of pie-and-mash shops, I still considered it all to be a happy distraction from getting out on the road with rock bands and trying to keep up with the bear-pit competitiveness of the
NME
writers’ room. Except, though only twenty-four, I felt a bit past it to be still banging away about gigs and hot new vibes. I’d been at that racket for a long time now and the eighties were shaping up musically into a synthetic angular nuisance of a decade in which the underground counterculture I had so loved was looking a bit spare and exhausted. More than this, Wendy and I wanted children. Lots of them. And being Daddy Hard Rock did not strike me as a dignified way to enter life’s second act.
Then once more, the wheel turned. I was in Southwark Park Road, known locally as The Blue, coming out of the bread shop when I saw a woman standing on the pavement right in front of me. She looked at me and her mouth sort of wobbled as if she was nervous about something.
‘Hello, I’m sorry to bother you,’ she started, and I honestly thought maybe she was going to ask for a few quid or something. ‘But I watch you on the telly and I wondered if you’d sign this?’
What? Who did she think I was? I laughed lightly and asked her if she was serious.
‘Oh yes, it is you, isn’t t it?’ she said shyly.
‘Me?’ I responded.
‘Yes, you’re Danny Baker, aren’t you?’
I said lamely that I suppose I must be and, at last taking the pen from her, I signed my name on the paper.
‘Thanks so much. Love you on the show,’ she said, and off she trotted, still looking at what I’d written.
I remained frozen to the spot for quite a while.
Wow. So. I’m Danny Baker, eh?
Well. This was new.
10. Mum and Dad in the kitchen, 1970.
13. West Greenwich Secondary School, Form 1b, 1968. Front row, four from left.