I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (14 page)

‘You leave that woman alone. She must have put a spell on you.' I was not deterred and I still made a habit of saying hello and goodbye to Fola whenever I saw her, until one day she even invited me into her home. When I went in, I saw that it looked nothing like ours. Where we had bin bags full of old newspapers she had nice wooden furniture and paintings. All over the walls there were photographs of Fola and her hands were always covered in jewels in the pictures.

‘Let's go to the kitchen and we'll have some tea,' she said. I was under strict instructions from Mum and Dad never to accept food from her in case she had put something in it to bewitch me. I could never be 100 per cent sure when they were joking, but tea seemed safe enough, so I followed her in.

I went into her kitchen and there was a big wooden sculpture on the gas hob. ‘Apparently that is for cooking,' said Fola, gesturing towards the cooker. It was spotlessly clean like it had never been used. She put the kettle on and told me to get some milk from the fridge. I didn't have to worry about accepting any food from her as there was no food at all in the fridge. There was just a carton of milk and a lot of funny-shaped wine bottles that said ‘Moët' on the front. I asked about them and she said they were a kind of French wine that she had bought because her husband was going to come and stay with her soon.

We sat together for a long time and she told me about what it was like to work in a theatre. It sounded like a big confusing mess, with all the different people she described coming and going backstage to make the show perfect for the audience. She told me about the huge wardrobes full of clothes and the props and the orchestra pit. She told me about being nervous in the wings and about how it felt when the light hit you on stage. She said that when you were acting you forgot your nerves and you forgot who you really were. The way she described it made the whole thing sound a lot like magic and I thought that Mum might have been right about Fola bewitching people. It sounded like she did it every night for a job.

When I asked her about her husband she said that they'd met in Paris and she told me all about France. She'd studied there for a long time she told me, with a famous Frenchman who taught her how to be a clown. I thought she was joking and I laughed at this, but she looked at me like I was the biggest idiot she'd ever met. Fola said that after you have mastered the art of being a great clown then everything else is easy. And then she pulled a funny face and told me to get home before my mum missed me.

Not long after that her husband arrived from France and he was one of the most weird looking people I'd ever seen. He was the tallest, skinniest person and he had a huge ridiculous moustache. Set against her voluptuous figure, the two of them couldn't have looked more different. But there was something in the way that he moved that was just as graceful as his wife. When he walked down the street, he looked like he was constantly about to fall over or trip up but just at the last minute his body would right itself and start falling in another direction.

I bumped into them at the shop one day and Fola introduced me. This guy was also very flamboyant and after we met he insisted that I come and see the show. Later that night he came around to the house with a ticket for the following Saturday. I explained that Mum wasn't keen on my going but he was so charming that he managed to win her around. Either that or she was just anxious to get this broomstick creature off the front step and would have agreed to anything.

So on Saturday I took the bus into the West End. I got there hours early and spent the evening wandering around Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue staring up at the huge gilt theatres. I found the show hilarious, with all of these grown men and women running around the stage in costumes so ridiculous that I could barely recognize Fola. She invited me backstage afterwards and I watched in awe as the actors stripped off their costumes and ran around half naked, laughing, drinking and hugging each other.

I received so many random kisses from the cast that by the time I left I was on cloud nine. When the bus driver looked at me like I was a madman I figured it was the goofy smile on my face, but when I got home Mum screamed, ‘Look at your face! Are you a clown now?' I checked in the mirror and my cheek was covered in different-coloured make-up and I really did look like I'd escaped from the circus.

Fola was the first black performer that I had ever met up until that point. Until then I just hadn't considered the stage as a decent place for a black person to be seen. Years later, when I decided to go into comedy, my parents asked me in distress (once again), ‘What do you want to waste your life for? Are you a clown?' I remembered what Fola had said back in her kitchen with a cooker that had never been used and a fridge full of champagne and thought that if it was good enough for her then it would be good enough for me.

I
T
'
S FUNNY HOW OFTEN
seemingly innocent things can develop a mind of their own and just run away from you completely. You can tell just one little white lie and before you know it you're on
The Jeremy Kyle Show
hooked up to a lie-detector test. I'm intrigued by that show, but the only way it could be improved is if you got rid of the lie-detector test and just hooked the guests up directly to the mains. They say that the body gives away subtle signals when you lie. Like if the person you're speaking to is staring at you without blinking, keeping their hands and legs unusually rigid then he's probably lying to you. Or he's about to have a seizure.

But everyone's guilty of the odd little white lie. I don't mind telling a lie to spare someone's feelings. Especially if the person whose feelings I'm sparing are my own. Is honesty really the best policy? When you say to someone, ‘Hi, how are you?' what you want them to ay is, ‘Fine thanks', not talk your ear off for half an hour about their bad knee and swollen eye.

The habit of telling lies starts as a child. Mum used to sing me that famous nursery rhyme ‘Hush, little baby, don't say a word, Mama's going to buy you a mockingbird. And if that mocking bird don't sing, Mama's gonna buy you a diamond ring. And if that diamond ring turns brass, Mama's going to buy you a looking glass' and it goes on and on. How sweet, you might think, but I can tell you that was the most disappointing birthday ever.

If you have a younger brother or sister I can tell you that you will probably lie to them just for fun. For instance, my brother Albert used to always tell me that the people on TV could see you as well. I could never watch
Baywatch
again after that. He also told me that the tooth fairy gave you more money if it was somebody else's teeth. Well, I believed him and to this day my sister Cordelia still can't speak to me. Well, she couldn't speak to anybody then. Not without dribbling.

But the problem is kids don't know how to tell plausible lies. I used to write little sick notes to the teacher to get out of sports lessons and sign them from my mum. The power of the note at school was like having a get out of jail free card in your back pocket. The only problem was I just knew the names of a lot of the diseases from old books and TV, but I didn't know what they actually were. So I started with ‘Stephen's got the flu', which seemed pretty safe. But after a while I had to choose another illness: diarrhoea worked well because nobody really wants to dwell on that. The teachers were suspicious when I got over appendicitis in an afternoon. When I said that I had Bell's palsy so I couldn't play rugby they knew something was up.

I wasn't the only one in school who got caught out telling stupid lies. I had a classmate who told all of us that his dad had the car KITT from
Knight Rider
. All day long he was Mr Popular until it came to the end of the day when everyone asked him where KITT was. Suddenly, the lie came crashing down around him. He actually went to the gate and talked into his lapel ‘Uh, school's over now. You can come and get me.' He's in a home now.

Lies are everywhere. Annie Lennox sang ‘Would I lie to you? Would I lie to you honey?' She also said, ‘Of course not, Dave Stewart, I have no intention of going solo. We'll be together for ever.' In fact, lies are so prevalent that most of us can just translate them to truth in our heads. ‘I lost your email' means ‘communicating with you is not important to me'. ‘At least I've got my health' means ‘my life has been a total failure'. ‘I can't believe we reached our thirtieth wedding anniversary' means ‘I can't believe I haven't killed you yet'. ‘A for effort' means ‘you talentless loser'. And ‘Can you keep a secret?' means ‘I expect you to post this on Facebook within the next ten minutes'.

When you start afresh in your life, for example if you get a new job, move to a new city or change schools or colleges, you can reinvent yourself. In other words you can tell bold-faced lies about who you are and where you come from. I had to move schools very frequently as a kid and the main effect on me of moving so much was that I constantly had to make new friends repeatedly. Some of the schools I was in for such a short amount of time that I could literally have told them anything and been out of there before anyone had time to fact-check. The problem was that the frequent moves always came out of the blue. So I never knew if my new school was the kind where I could get away with the ‘I am the Prince of Nigeria' type of big lie or if it was more of the ‘of course I have a girlfriend but she lives in Whitstable and doesn't have a phone in her village' kind of little lie situation.

On one occasion I got badly caught out with a fib. What began as a little white lie grew into a monster whopper and it cost me a lot to get out of it. It was when I was sixteen and I had just started at sixth-form college. I told all of my new classmates that I was related to 5 Star. I told them that Denise, Stedman, Doris, Lorraine and Delroy were all my first cousins. Looking at those names I thank God that it's not the eighties any more. Who would call their child Doris these days and expect them to reach super stardom? Names in show business are important. With a name like Whitney Houston a star is born. Gene Pitney ditto. But what if they were to get married? Whitney Pitney would never have worked on stage.

Naturally, with 5 Star appearing on
Top of the Pops
all of the time, my friends were huge fans and they all asked if we could get tickets to see them when they came to town. I said, ‘Yeah sure,' hoping that everyone would forget about it or I'd have to move again before I'd have my hand forced. Unbelievably only a couple of weeks later someone came into college saying 5 Star would be playing at the Wimbledon Theatre and that it would be the perfect time to go and see them. I was seriously in the shit. Sixteen years old, at a new college and trying to make friends. There was the potential here for a kind of social catastrophe that would have meant changing my name to Whitney Pitney and moving to Brazil.

I decided that there was nothing for it but to try and style it out. I actually went to Ticketmaster and bought five tickets for the concert, marched proudly into school and gave them to my friends. My entire life savings to date gone in one fell swoop. But then what's a sixteen-year-old going to do with money if he hasn't got any friends to hang out with? What made it worse was that this was the very first concert I'd ever been to. So not only had I been forced to spend a fortune on tickets for my new ‘friends', but I wouldn't even be able to relax and enjoy the concert because I'd be so busy having to keep up the pretence. 5 Star really were my favourite band and I'd have loved to go with Stella. But that wouldn't have worked because she is incapable of lying and would have just laughed in my face if she found out the predicament I was now in, and told everyone what an idiot I was being.

So the magical night came around and we were all at the front of the theatre dancing away and everyone was having a great laugh. Except for me who had to spend the whole time making eye contact and waving at the singers. After a while they even acknowledged me. Not by waving back or smiling at me but more by making eye contact with their security and motioning in my direction. I stopped waving for a bit at that point.

After the show finished, my friends were all trying to get me to take them backstage to meet the band. I even approached the roped-off entrance to the VIP area, but as the security guard saw me approach he physically turned me around and pushed me away. I had to go back to my friends and tell them that there wasn't a backstage area at all and that the band had gone home. I just hoped that they'd failed to notice the raucous music emanating from behind the door and a steady stream of sexy young hipsters funnelling in behind us to party the rest of the night away.

So I'd managed to get away with it and if anyone guessed that I was bullshitting they never said anything to me about it. I stayed friends with those guys until I finished my A levels, so it was £75 well spent. However, from then on I learned to keep my mouth shut.

That wasn't the first time that I'd claimed a famous person was my relation. It always seemed like a good way to get attention and I even tried it at primary school. This was less to make friends and more to stop the kids from making fun of me and pushing me around. Being the only black kid (except for my sister) gave me a certain notoriety.

The James Bond film
Moonraker
had just come out at the cinemas and everyone was raving about it. Although we were all too young to get into the cinema, everyone had bootlegged copies of the film since most of the other kids' parents were market traders (or in prison). I didn't get what the fuss about Roger Moore was all about – he was nothing compared to Sean Connery – but I always thought the character Jaws was really cool with his big smiley face full silver teeth and his ability to eat metal. In fact for years I thought the Steven Spielberg film
Jaws
was going to be a feature-length movie about the big friendly giant who wanted to eat Roger Moore, and was disappointed at Christmas time when I tuned the TV in to catch
Jaws
only to be confronted by a long movie about a big fish.