Paul Daniels (6 page)

Even in early teens nothing got under my skin faster than a demand that was morally unfair. When I came across a situation that I felt was unjust, I simply dug my heels in. One such occasion happened on one of the few days when Mam was unwell and I had to join the other boys for lunch in the large boarding house hall attached to the school. The following story is like a mirror of a scene from the film Oliver.

‘Red Barns’ had long wooden dining tables at which 20 or so pupils sat waiting with a Master at the head of each table. We sat in silence as waitresses arrived with stacks of plates, which we passed down the line from one boy to the next and back up the opposite side. I wondered how long everything would stay hot if this long process was repeated with the arrival of the food. My fears were to be proved even worse when a huge dollop of fatty stew suddenly arrived on my cold plate. My stomach started to retch as I stared down at the globules of fat that were bobbing around in the thin liquid. I knew that if I tried to eat any of it, I would vomit. I hate fat more than I hate cheese sauce.

Trying to work around the mess on my plate, I ate the vegetables and even the occasional piece of meat, but I was acutely aware that the Master’s eyes were viewing my struggle. He who shall be obeyed was sat on my immediate right and was the most unpopular teacher in the school. Now, out of the corner of my eye I could clearly see him frowning at my attempts to avoid further embarrassment and hoped his fiery attention would not be awakened.

I continued to navigate my fork around the six-inch cubes of solid fat which looked up at me from the bottom of my plate when two words were abruptly shot into my ear: ‘Eat them.’

Looking up at his harsh face, I was acutely aware for the first time of what happens to me when I’m in danger. I felt icy cold and everything seemed to slow down.

‘No, Sir. I am not able to, Sir.’

‘Eat it,’ came the cold reply.

‘No, Sir. If I eat that I will be sick,’ I reasoned. ‘You will eat everything on your plate!’ came the demand, now raising his voice a little.

‘No, Sir, I won’t eat it.’ During the unfolding drama, the table had been cleared in readiness for dessert, but I was left staring at my plate with the lumps of fat floating like white boats on a brown pond.

‘Your parents have paid for you to eat it.’

To which I calmly replied, ‘therefore I am responsible to my parents and not to you.’ The whole table was instantly enveloped in a deathly hush as the Master mentally reviewed his options.

‘You will eat it!’ came the increasingly agitated response.

‘No, Sir, I cannot.’

Just at that moment, a large tureen of rice pudding arrived in front of him, ready for him to serve it down the lines of nervous-looking boys. ‘If you do not eat it, you will not have dessert,’ he announced.

My response was quick, sharp and justified. ‘My parents have paid for me to eat the dessert.’ With the words now out of my mouth, I resigned myself to the fact that I was about to die.

‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that! Eat your dinner this instant! If you don’t you will have no rice pudding!’ he screamed.

‘In that case,’ I retorted, moving incredibly slowly, ‘neither will anyone else.’ With that, I stood up, grabbed hold of the edge of the bowl and tipped it into his lap.

The Master screamed. The rice pudding was hot. So was my
backside when I immediately received six of the best cane strokes he had probably ever delivered in his entire career. It stung severely and made my eyes water, but I didn’t care. For a while, I was a hero amongst my mates.

I spent most of my time at school minding my own business and getting on with my work, but there was another occasion when I felt I was being treated unfairly. It happened when a tall prefect walked down the morning assembly line and falsely accused me.

‘You were talking, Daniels. Six of the best in the break!’

‘But, Sir, I wasn’t …’ I spluttered.

‘Shut up! Six of the best,’ he threatened angrily.

Having already experienced ‘six of the best’ for a ‘crime’, there was no way that I was going to bend over a chair and allow this big kid to strike me on my bottom for being innocent. I had honestly not talked in the line and felt it quite reasonable not to go to his room at the break. So I didn’t. At lunchtime the prefect came looking for me and, by the look on his face, was obviously not a happy bunny.

‘Straight after school, you will come to the Prefects’ room, Daniels!’

‘But, Sir, I wasn’t…’

‘Be quiet and do as I say, Daniels!’

The same scenario was repeated without giving me an opportunity to speak and, instead of visiting his room after school, I went straight home. Upon arriving back at school the next morning, a very hot, red-faced prefect pulled me out of the line and shouted for me to go straight to his room. I was aware of 100 eyes following me as I walked down the corridor to the sound of my own footsteps. Instead of turning left into
his room, I turned right, made a short cut through the cloisters, picked up my satchel from the form room locker and strolled straight out of the gates. I boarded the next bus home and arrived while Mam was in the middle of the washing.

Extremely hesitant to tell Mam at first, she eventually persuaded me to give her the full details and I held back the tears as I made my way through the story.

‘Do you mean to tell me that other boys are allowed to smack you?’ was her first comment. I had assumed that this was normal and acceptable.

‘Yes, Mam.’

Despite being 4ft 10in when her socks are wet, my red-haired matriarch could have an extremely fiery temper. ‘What?!’ she shouted. With eyes widening, she immediately ran to get her coat with my appeals to calm down completely drowned by angry mutterings. We travelled the six miles back on the bus together, with steam coming out of Mam’s ears. Every inch of the way I tried in earnest to dissuade her from taking up the gauntlet, but it was pretty obvious that nothing would stop her now. My pleas fell on deaf ears.

Once through the school gates, she dragged me in her wake as she burst into the school via the door that was out of bounds to me. Storming straight past the astonished male receptionist, she stomped her way down the echoing corridor until arriving outside the headmaster’s office, whereupon she did a wonderful impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger (who hadn’t been heard of yet) by kicking the door open. The headmaster, who had been quietly studying some papers, stood up as if a bomb had been placed under his backside. Barker had never seen such a small woman make such a big entrance!

By this time, I was in a state of nervous shock, but Mam proceeded with her mission which I was convinced would end with even more retribution being meted out upon me. All I
could think of was that this man Barker was ten times as big as the prefect and probably had a strong right hand to match. Now, as his tiny visitor, trailing an even tinier boy, moved up to his desk, he calmly and politely greeted her with, ‘Yes, Madam, how may I help you?’

‘Are you aware of the fact that my son is allowed to be publicly beaten by another boy?’ she bellowed.

‘Well, Madam, you see, I have only recently joined the school. There are certain traditions here and although they have been here for over 100 years, I don’t entirely agree with them either, but they take time to change.’ I was flabbergasted at his apparent acceptance of Mam’s position and listened as he continued. ‘However, I’m sorry but your son has to be punished.’

My heart sank again as vastly exaggerated pictures of his ability with a cane flashed through my terrified mind. I stood incredulous, as Mam not only proceeded to agree, but suggested the worst thing my small boy’s mind could have imagined. ‘You can punish him, but the other boys must not touch him.’

The words didn’t reach my lips, but my face must have read like a book. ‘Mother! This is a stupid decision; he’s bigger than the prefect! This guy has just come out of the Army, just look at his muscles!’

As I started to shake, Barker turned to me and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Daniels, you must be punished. You will write me an essay on what is wrong with this school.’

Shock, astonishment and relief must have been written across my forehead in the beads of sweat that had begun to drip on to my collar. I wrote my essay and over the next two years everything that I had suggested was changed. Discipline and respect, including touching your hat as a Master walked past, I felt should remain, but many of the other ‘traditions’ should not. I had discovered that standing firm for fairness eventually brought its just rewards.

A
s 1953 approached, Europe quietly celebrated the demise of one of its most infamous dictators, Stalin. As well as the Russian leader, country singer Hank Williams, composer Sergei Prokofiev and poet Dylan Thomas also died. Even as 1953 was a year of death, it also heralded the key to life as two scientists at Cambridge University unlocked the mystery of DNA.

My days were filled with catching buses to and from school, reading magic books and struggling with homework that would have been easy if I hadn’t spent so much time on magic.

I tried to avoid sports as much as possible and looked like the skinniest white wimp of all time, well, at least to me. One of my worst fears was of going to the swimming baths. I couldn’t swim. Some people can’t and some people have negative buoyancy. I have it, my dad had it and my brother Trevor has it. We could sit on the bottom of the pool with lungs full of air with no problem at all, as long as we could stand up when we ran out of air. Dad should have been able to swim – he had six toes on one foot and they were webbed. Really.

Anyway, not being able to swim was a real pain. One day, in one of those small advertisements that you get in the Sunday papers (Are they still there? I haven’t taken a newspaper in years. I’ve read so many lies about me I can’t believe what they write about anybody any more. Shame, isn’t it?) I saw an advertisement for a ‘SECRET SWIMMING AID – Your Friends Will NEVER Know’. Wow, that’s for me! I sent off some of my earnings, and eventually a smallish, brown paper parcel arrived. What I told my mother it was I can’t remember, but I got it up to my room and opened the package.

This thing
might
have been secret when Victorians wore full-length bathing suits, but it certainly wasn’t going to be very secret now. It was a very wide rubber belt that came from above my waist to half-way down my thighs. Running up and down around the belt was a rubber tube, with a non-return release valve at the rear in the middle of your back and a mouthpiece that came up from the front.

God help me! I went to the beach with this thing rolled up under my normal bathing costume. ‘Your Friends Will NEVER Know’ – if they were blind, perhaps, because here was this skinny white kid with the most bulbous bathing costume ever around his loins. I walked out into the sea. The North Sea is very cold, even in summer. I walked out further. I had to get this thing underwater. Once the grabbing iciness had got to my waist I turned my back to the shore, rummaged around down the front of my briefs. I wonder what my friends, who would never know, would
think
that I was doing. I found the pipe. No, not that one,
that
one. I pulled it up and, still standing facing the sea, bent my head down and started blowing.

The sensation under the water was very strange. Very strange indeed. As the tubing filled with air it straightened itself out, pulling the belt both upwards and downwards out of my costume. ‘Flip’ up on to my stomach. ‘Flap’ down one leg, up my back,
down the other leg. I wonder whether the guy who designed this ever used it. He was selling this contraption and risking a manslaughter charge if it didn’t work and I got drowned.

With one sudden, last big blow into the mouthpiece, which of course emptied my lungs, the belt became fully inflated and lifted my backside clean out of the water, thrusting my head under the waves. I was very aware that my Friends Will Never Know. They might have looked out to sea and wondered what the large black bum was bobbing about on the water, but I could rest assured that they would not connect it with me.

The advertisement was true! I was swimming! Well, I was flailing my arms around under the water trying to get my head back to the surface before I drowned but I couldn’t argue with the fact that I was afloat. A lucky wave arrived at the same time as I moved my arms in the same direction and I flipped briefly above the water, grabbed a breath and went under again. It might be of great interest to the designer to know that now I was bent over backwards, legs and head underwater, crotch floating upwards, and that the waves were carrying me nearer the shore. Again, that was lucky because I was able to grab the sea floor and stand upright. Fighting the gadget’s desire to flip me again, I found that the only way to get it off was to take off my swimming trunks, something that I was loath to do, so instead I fought my way around to the release valve situated in the middle of my back, grabbed it and pulled. The air started to come out in bubbles. As the bubbles rose in a direct line from my arse I can only assume that, although My Friends Would Never Know, they might well have got the wrong idea altogether as to what I was doing. I never used the SECRET Swimming Aid again.

The learning of magic continued and I could think of being nothing other than a magician. The problem was that I had no idea how you became a professional magician. I shared my
thoughts with my parents who tried to dissuade me with the old argument about getting a ‘proper’, secure job. Their brushes with showbusiness had all been through my father’s stepsister, the infamous Auntie Maureen. The family rumour was that apparently she had had eight husbands, and none of them were hers! With my parents’ insistence that magic should remain a hobby, I had to content myself with showing my tricks to school friends.

I had left the Mission Sunday School by now and joined the Normanby Road Methodist Chapel for the highly religious reason that it had a better youth club facility. On my very first visit there, I watched other members running up to a vaulting horse and diving head first over it into a forward roll aided by a springboard.

‘I’ll try that,’ I thought. I ran. I hit the springboard. I flew through the air. I forgot to roll and landed right on the top of my head and invented the ramrod landing. What a natural athlete I am.

One evening I could not attend the club and that was the meeting when they organised a concert. Various members were assigned to perform and, in my absence and because I was always doing tricks, they put me down to do a magic show among a few other acts.

In true Variety style I was to appear singing as one of ‘The Bold Gendarmes’ and then dressed as a baby with ‘Sisters, Sisters’ before my solo six minutes to prove my conjuring worth. I was determined to do well and spent several weeks sorting out what to do, rehearsing and honing my craft. Up until this time, I had only performed magic from the pocket. Now I was being asked to do a spot in a hall, which was quite different. Being able to purchase props was out of the question, so everything I used was created from cardboard boxes and steel coat hangers. A lot of searching through notes and magic books
helped me choose what to do. I had stopped reading any other books by this time anyway. Looking back I am amazed at my choice of magical effects. The act would work for me now, if I chose to do it.

Then, nervously standing in front of the mixed crowd, I began to perform the multiplying billiard ball manipulation routine. The balls appeared and disappeared between my fingers and I was delighted as the mums, dads, grannies and granddads laughed and clapped in all the right places. My assistant, complete with fishnet tights, was Margaret Dawkins, a young girl who had been cajoled into helping me. With a hat in one hand and a pack of cards in the other, Margaret went down into the audience and invited a member to shuffle them and throw them into the hat. Bringing the hat back on-stage, I did a routine called ‘Seeing with the Fingertips’ and with the hat held above my head, pulled out the four Aces.

My grand finale was the production of a full goldfish bowl from an empty box, complete with two goldfish. By the time I was 14, my mind had already started to extend the tricks in the books and look for ways to make them more entertaining. I also wanted to adapt the tricks to my own style of presentation. I had bought the plans for what was called ‘the Inexhaustible Box’ for one shilling and sixpence from the Boy’s Own Magic Club in Prestatyn, North Wales. My dad made it for me and I produced the goldfish bowl from that. I was to use this box in all shapes and sizes for the rest of my career. What an investment that was!

Once the applause had subsided, I reached inside the bowl to grab one of the fish by its tail. The audience looked on in wonderment as I held the wriggling orange fish in my hand and quickly slipped it straight into my mouth. I ate it. The audience grimaced and groaned.

‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ I announced. ‘Because there are
children in the audience’ – remember, I was only 14! – ‘I will show you how this trick is done. What you didn’t know was that I had swapped the real goldfish for a piece of thinly sliced carrot.’

I showed them a carrot and took a small slice off it. I shook it about to make it look real.

‘This was what I swallowed.’

The audience laughed. I then dropped it into another bowl
and it swam away.
A gasp of surprise superseded the applause and I left the stage as high as a kite.

Twenty years later, I did a fund-raising show in the same hall and a young woman came up afterwards and said she remembered that I was ‘the man that had swallowed the goldfish’. We stood there for a moment and between us worked out that she must only have been two years old when she saw the show. This demonstrated to me yet again the power of the entertainer and his medium. When people say that violence in films and television doesn’t affect kids to a degree they are right. It doesn’t affect all kids, but it affects quite a lot. So why bother affecting them badly?

I went on to perform lots of shows in that club room, not only for the Youth Club, but also as a guest on the Young Wives Concerts as well. I can only remember what I did on the very first show, however, and none of the dozens of tricks that followed.

My parents continued to voice their concern at my seemingly addictive hobby. Doing my homework was an unavoidable evil that had to be completed before I could spend the evening developing a new routine.

Grammar school held a natural audience in the form of my peers who began to respect me for what I could do. I never bullied friends into watching my tricks, but developed the knack of drawing a crowd in. Sometimes this was done simply
by practising an effect which others would be inquisitive enough to watch, and even Pietrowski, our Polish war hero, loved magic. If he walked into a classroom while I was finishing a trick he would join in. On more than one occasion, we did magic for the rest of the lesson and didn’t bother learning French. I became a linguistic ignoramus.

Mam and Dad were not all gloom and doom and were concerned not to discourage my love of magic. They took me to see the famous Australian illusionist, The Great Levante, who was on tour and visiting the Middlesbrough Empire for a few days. I can’t remember much about the show. I know that he vanished a nun in an organ pipe; he did the ‘One Thousand Pound Trunk’ trick which most magicians know better as the ‘Substitution Trunk’, and one of his great claims to fame in those days was the disappearance of a kangaroo. It would lie in a suspended net hammock with Levante’s beautiful assistant Esme one minute, and then they both instantly vanished as the net fell to the floor. This amazing illusion was always rewarded with a great ovation, to which Levante would make his exit.

This great magician was not only a master of his craft, however, but a clever manipulator of the press as well. Each time he visited a town he gave the local newspapers the story that his kangaroo had escaped. There was an abundance of free publicity to be gained from this story, but no one ever seemed to ‘twig’ that the animal was always found just in time for the first house on Monday night, accompanied by a whole range of celebratory articles in the press once again. I thought he was wonderful.

A strange thing happened during my early teens. Do all children have nightmares? I certainly did. There was the witch who chased me from the back yard toilet and, in my dreams, caught me as I woke up in a sweat. Another involved being
chased by a lion and it pulled the skin off my back in one piece, again at the moment of waking. There weren’t too many lions in our area so maybe the Tarzan films were getting to me.

The most persistent of the nightmares were completely different to those two. In my dream, I was ‘floating’ along a lane and seeing everything through my eyes, rather than watching myself. When I got to the top of the lane on the left there was an old lych-gate that led into an old churchyard. Ancient, leaning gravestones surrounded the old church and, as I floated towards the main door, the L-shaped church offered another door on my right. I knew, in my dream, that the door in front of me led into the church and I knew, with increasing horror, that the door on my right hid Death. I could not stop myself. Against all my wishes I opened the door and woke up screaming. I never got to see Death but I knew it was there. This nightmare was with me for most of my young life and continued into my early teens.

One beautiful summer’s day a friend, Colin Mason, and I decided to go for a bike ride. We set off out of the Tees Valley and headed south. A car would do the trip nowadays in half-an-hour but the climb out of the valley is steep if you are only using your legs and bikes were not as light as they are now. We came to a village and Colin, who had been there before, told me that he wanted to show me something really interesting. We turned off the main road and set off up a lane. I stopped. I knew this lane. This was the lane of my nightmare.

Colin could see that something was wrong and I told him about the lych-gate at the top. He asked if I had been there before and I said ‘no’. I just couldn’t tell him about the dream and I couldn’t stop myself from seeing this through even though I was icy cold and terrified. We went up the lane and there was the gate, exactly as it was in the dream. We went through the gate and walked along the narrow church path to
the building. I wanted to go in the main door, of course, but Colin said that what he wanted to show me was in ‘here’ and headed for the side door. I wanted to scream and I don’t know how I didn’t.