Paul Daniels (2 page)

Of course, the family was bigger than Mam and Dad and I was never short of company. At that time I had two grandmas and one granddad. The closest family was on my mother’s side. My mam’s mother, Granny Lloyd, was very like my mother, small and dynamic. She would have a go at any ride in the fairground and was full of life. Together with her friend Mrs Gillings, later to play a very big part in my life, she managed to persuade a local benefactor to provide the funds to build the South Bank Mission Hall on North Street, opposite her house. They were concerned about the number of kids playing in the streets and the threat from some of the bullying gangs that were starting to emerge. If she could keep some of the children occupied in a safe environment whilst teaching manners, respect and morality, then that was a good reason to have it, she decided.

Managing to get the funding, she organised the purchase of the land and the building of the mission hut, which was to have a central focus for many families in the area. Every weekend I would be off to Sunday school to learn about Jesus and the Bible stories and ‘right’ from ‘wrong’. Pastor Ingledew was a white-haired preacher who enthralled me as he could recite whole passages of the Bible from memory. I could read him a verse and he would be able to tell me exactly where it could be found. His ability was awesome and his technique of reading and memorising fascinated me.

John Fisher, another member of the congregation, was a source of wonder to us kids. He sang with such passion that when he strained to reach the top notes, his neck quivered so much that we would all look at him in amazement and think that he was going to burst. Singing spiritual songs must have made quite an impression on me as 50 years later I still remember all the words and all the actions. My wife Debbie
wondered what she had let herself in for when I started to sing them one day shortly after we were married, and when working on the Isle of Man recently, I dumbfounded an evangelistic beach group when I joined in with ‘sunshine corner/Oh it’s jolly fine/It’s for children under ninety-nine …’ followed by:

Granny Lloyd lived just around the corner from us with her son, known to me as Uncle Eddie. He loved a drink and was a tough but happy man. Granny, being so involved with the Mission, asked him to stop many times, once insisting that he should say, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan.’ That night he came home stoned out of his brain, claiming that he had done exactly as she asked but that the Devil had indeed ‘got behind him’ and pushed him straight into the pub!

Next door but one to them lived my Auntie Louie and her husband Connie, short for Cornelius. They looked just like Jack Spratt and his wife from the children’s nursery rhyme. Auntie Louie was very overweight and I used to dread having to kiss her, which happened every Christmas. She would engulf me in her arms, her bosom cradling me on either side and my face
would vanish into her cheek. I was always convinced that I would die of suffocation in there. Years later, I found out that my brother felt exactly the same way and that we both grew up with a fear of fat women.

Granny Lloyd’s concern for the community stretched well beyond her activities with the Mission Hall when she doubled as the local undertaker. Her main task was to ‘lay out’ bodies. When somebody died she would get a call to come and prepare the body for the funeral. It was quite a busy time for her during the war. One day she asked Uncle Eddie and Uncle Connie to help get a body down the stairs and into the front room of a house nearby. Neither of them really wanted to do this. Both were filled with a superstitious fear of the dead. Granny told them not to be so stupid. ‘He’s dead. He can’t harm you now.’ They took quite a bit of convincing but Granny Lloyd was a forceful character.

Eddie took the head end, supporting the corpse under the armpits. Connie had the feet. All was going well, albeit with a struggle, until they came to the curve in the stairs. As they struggled to get the body around the corner they bent it almost double. Wind, trapped inside the corpse, came out as a loud and rude raspberry. Connie immediately dropped his end. ‘If the bugger can do that then he can bloody well walk downstairs!’ Off he went and he wouldn’t come back.

Connie didn’t seem to have much luck with the dead, especially when he got his hands on some ducks one Christmas and didn’t know how to prepare them for the oven. He eventually chopped off their heads and pegged them by their webbed feet upside down on a clothesline in the back yard to drain the blood. He came in white as a sheet as the bodies were still flapping and the heads on the floor were still quacking.

Granddad Daniels was not very tall but, like Aunt Louie, very, very fat. He was a shunting engine driver at the steel works
and I used to wonder how he got through the narrow open door on to the footplate. Everyone said that he had a great tenor voice and apparently, on some works outing, had stopped the shopping in the marketplace in Richmond, Yorkshire, by singing from the hill that many years later I was to march up and down as a soldier. The entire marketplace burst into applause as he finished ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’. A phenomenal voice to match his size.

Grandma Gertie, his wife, was quite the opposite. I remember her being tall and gaunt and a bit frightening. She played the piano in pubs to earn extra money; her party piece was lying down, crossing her arms above her head and playing the piano through a towel that she had laid on the keys. She got big tips doing this, though I was never allowed in the pub to watch a performance.

Her daughter Maureen was Dad’s half-sister or stepsister, I was never sure. Tall, gorgeous, with raven black hair, she was in showbusiness. She was part of a double act called Kizma and Karen. Wow. Maureen tap-danced on steps that were made for her by my father. They had to fold away small enough to go in taxis and on trains, so it was quite a feat of ingenuity. Occasionally, she would come to our house and rehearse on a new set of steps that Dad had made and I fell madly in love with her long, long legs. She taught me how to do a riffle-shuffle with a pack of cards and would probably have taught me a few other things had I been a little older.

Mam didn’t like Aunt Maureen or Grandma Gertie. At some time in the past there had been a major disagreement and although I never discovered what it was about, I do know that Dad had suffered a bad childhood with Gertie. He was never given any Christmas gifts and one day the man next door, taking pity on him, gave my dad a fort that his son had been given the year before and no longer played with. Gertie seized
it immediately and used it as firewood. Maybe that was why Mam didn’t like Gertie. She also seemed to think that her daughter, Aunt Maureen, was a bit promiscuous.

In those terrifying days of conflict, the people of the community were more than just living closely together. If any woman was sick, for example, the neighbours would take over the house. One would do the cleaning while others cooked or looked after the children. Doors were always open to everyone and visitors would make a cursory tap or, more commonly, shout a brief ‘Hellooooo’.

During the war, nothing was wasted that could be recycled, especially as there wasn’t a lot of money about. The wives not only did war work previously done by the men, they also knitted, crotcheted, sewed, repaired and kept households ticking along. Clippy mats were the big thing and they all seemed to make them. When the women got together every Saturday night, old clothing was cut up into strips about 4in long by about 1 in wide and then sorted into colours. A piece of canvas was stretched across a wooden frame and the material was poked through the weave and pulled back again with a small hook. It was then knotted and the next piece poked through. Eventually the pattern in this rag carpet took shape and when it was finished the ‘clippy’ mat would adorn the floor of someone’s house.

On Saturday nights there would be a radio programme called
The Man in Black.
There was no television in those days, so radio was the number-one source of entertainment. These were horror and mystery stories told by Valentine Dyall, who had a wonderfully deep, resonant voice. The problem was that the stories would frighten the women and my mother had to walk them all back to their houses. Brave Mam at less than 5ft and playing the Great Protector.

One day, a strange thing happened in 10 Lower Oxford
Street. From somewhere, I didn’t know where, someone delivered a baby to our house. He arrived just before Christmas, on 23 December and I remember my dad came home. He must have been given compassionate leave, or ‘passionate’ leave as they called it in the Navy!

As usual in those days, the baby was delivered at home. The bed was moved downstairs into the front room and the crib was a drawer from a chest of drawers. A member of the family had discreetly removed me until the event had taken place. Sadly for me, that was the only Christmas I remember as a child. Like most four-year-olds, I awoke very early on the day and crept downstairs to see what Father Christmas had brought me. Normally, that would have been all right as the family would have been asleep upstairs but, as Trevor, my new brother, had just been born, they were all snoring together in the front room alongside the very chimney that Santa had come down. Standing in the centre of the room, he had left me a metal machine-gun, on a tripod, with grip handles and triggers. I grabbed the handles and pulled the triggers and the gun made a wonderfully realistic rat-atatatat-atat noise as sparks flew out of the end. I was enthralled, but Dad fell out of bed half-asleep thinking he was under attack, Mam screamed, the baby yelled and I hadn’t the sense to let go of the gun. I shot them all dead three times over before Dad grabbed me. Merry Christmas everyone!

The one big thing that I remember about Christmases then is that it was the only time of the year that we ate chicken. This made Christmas dinner into something very special and I feel a bit sorry for everyone today because marketing men have now given us chicken all year round so there is nothing really all that different about Christmas meals. Nowadays, Debbie and I have whisky porridge for Christmas morning breakfast and it is the only time of the year that we have it. It starts the day
wonderfully and I guess, if you had enough of it, you wouldn’t worry about the rest of the day.

Dad returned to the sea battle a few days later and was posted to India. I missed him the moment he walked out the door. Perhaps it was this sense of melancholy churning away inside me that made me quiet and shy. I was still involved in the street games but mostly I would stay in and read comics, magazines and books. I loved reading.

My first school was Princess Street Junior School and it amazed me. The primary room had a set of tall French windows that opened on to a lawned garden. I had never seen a garden and I honestly don’t believe that I saw a tree until I was five – scrubby bushes, but not trees. The terraced houses in our part of the town just did not have the space for such large vegetation to grow. Mrs Strickland was my teacher, a warm, loving, but strict woman whom we all grew to like very much. I loved reading and I put it down to her encouragement that gave me a window through which to escape into all sorts of fantasy worlds.

One winter it snowed and kept on snowing. To us, it was wonderful. I rushed out of school into falling snow and immediately began to roll a snowball, patting it all the time to make it compact and firm. The ball got bigger and bigger and more kids joined in rolling it about. That was OK, it was still
my
ball. Eventually it grew so big none of us could roll it so a runner was sent to get more help. My Uncle Eddie came and so did more men and they rolled it and rolled it until it was directly outside our house. It was not an exaggeration to say that it blocked the street. Off we went and rolled a smaller (but still very large) one, and somehow the men hauled it on top of the other using ladders. The following day, Lower Oxford Street was in the newspapers with photographs of the Giant Snowman. That must have been my first unconscious attempt at publicity.

Early school memories are few. I can remember finding a
thousand ways to try to get out of drinking the free milk, which was always left standing in the warm sun and would go off before it was served to us. I would pretend to go home for lunch, as school dinners came nowhere near my mother’s cooking. I used to use the dinner money to buy a small crusty loaf from Sands bakery and save the remainder as pocket money. Maybe this interrupted any social activity I might have had in the playground, as I became quite a loner.

Being a lonesome boy, I cannot recall having any real friends, and the only ones I enjoyed playing with were Catholics. My street and the one next to it were like a little Northern Ireland. For some reason, birds of a feather really do flock together and our street was mostly Protestants and the next one mostly Catholics.

It always amused me that on Friday night, pay night, they would all get drunk out of their brains, knock seven bells out of each other and on Monday morning all go to work together without a second thought. Many years later I noticed the same thing in Belfast when I started to appear in the clubs there. They would all have this great fight on the Friday and be back at work without a murmur on Monday. One day a newspaper reporter got hold of this story, blew it up out of all proportion and three months later when I went back they had guns on the roofs. I blame the media for a lot; it has not been used for our good and it should be. It should lead us towards a better life, not stir up trouble.

When I was seven years old, Dad eventually came back from the war. I must have changed a lot in the two years he’d been gone, but he had changed, too. He now had a full nautical beard and I didn’t recognise him. Now that I am an adult I can imagine how he felt when, not having seen his wife for years, he was not allowed to get into bed with her because his young son kept hitting him and telling him to get out of his mother’s bed.