Paul Daniels (8 page)

Having discovered a little green hard-back book in my dad’s wardrobe entitled
The Techniques of Sex
, I realised I had found the true object of my quest. I was sure that Havelock Ellis’s
book would reveal all. Thumbing through the strange technical drawings, I would regularly lock myself in our toilet and study, for this was a subject to be learnt. Once, having exhaustively examined the mysterious cut-away diagrams of genitals for the umpteenth time, I made my way downstairs and hoped Mam didn’t notice my sweating.

‘Ted!’

As soon as I heard Mam’s call, I realised I had accidentally left the book on the lavatory windowsill. Mothers can say your name in so many ways and convey a whole paragraph in a single word. As her voice floated down the stairs, fear instantly clutched me from within.

‘Have you been reading this book of your father’s?’

There was no point in lying; I was the only one in the house at the time.

‘Yes, Mam.’

Then came the sentence that has struck terror into many a boy’s heart.

‘Just you wait till your father gets home!’

I was scared sick. Ashamed of the sexual awareness and the invasion of my father’s territory, I couldn’t imagine what was to come and the hours that passed as we waited for him to return from work were the longest in my life.

Only having experienced a beating from my father once, it was something that I hadn’t forgotten and was anxious not to repeat. He’d slapped me on my bottom all the way up a street when I was about seven years old. It was fully deserved of course, as I was being a little shit.

‘I wanna go to the fair; I wanna go to the fair; I wanna go to the fair!’ I’d repeated incessantly until my father gave in. Having got to the fair: ‘I wanna go home; I wanna go home; I wanna go home!’

Dad got mad, really mad, and belted me all the way back
down the street. Once inside the front door, he picked up a shovel and threw it at me. I knew that I was going to ‘get it’ good and proper the moment I arrived back, so as soon as I got through the front door I was off like a rocket, straight through the back room, turn the corner and up the stairs. I was very small, but boy was I fast, one of the big advantages being that I could run straight under the table. The shovel just missed me and years later Dad told me that he’d frightened himself enormously when he realised how much he had lost control. A clip on the back of the head or the backside was the most I ever got after that.

This was different though. I was a young man now and I should have known better. They say that the waiting is the worst part but I dreaded what was going to happen. Sitting in the front room wondering what the punishment would be for my latest crime, I heard the arrival of my father at the front door. As he came in and smiled my heart started to beat so loudly, I couldn’t hear the voices as he went through to the kitchen and started to discuss the latest situation with my mother. I got closer to the door to hear what was going on.

‘So what is it?’

‘He’s had that book of yours out of the wardrobe.’

‘Well that’s good, it’ll save me telling him, won’t it?’ I love my father. I love my father. I love my father.

T
he late Fifties gave birth to a new type of musical experience – rock ‘n' roll. Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Bill Haley and Buddy Holly were all exports from the USA and held the nation's teenagers in the grip of their unique brand of music. Nearer home, the tiny Morris Mini is launched and master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock keeps audiences in their seats with his new film Psycho.

Still fascinated by the art of magic and illusion in all its forms, I reluctantly agreed to leave all thoughts of show- business behind and live in the ‘real' world. I suppose it was the right decision. Looking back, I do believe that everybody would benefit from having another job before the one they are going to do for life. Most passionately, I believe this about teachers, as I don't think you can teach about life unless you have left school and gone and worked in the big wide world – most teachers never have! Teachers, vicars and Members of Parliament live in a very protected environment and are sheltered from the trials and tribulations of a commercial working life. Perhaps no one should be allowed into teacher
training college until they are at least 25 years old. By then you really want to be a teacher and it is, after all, one of the most exciting and important of all possible jobs.

Having joined Eston Urban Borough Council as a junior clerk, one of my first tasks employed my mathematical skills in balancing the rates books. The problem was that I had spent the last few years of my life doing algebra, trigonometry and geometry. Accountants add up and take away and, occasionally, do a bit of multiplication. I had forgotten how to add up. Computers were unheard of in 1954 so each one of the thousands of rent and rates records were kept by hand and, without the use of a ‘magic' wand, were accurate to the penny. Each page was self-balancing so you couldn't move on until you had balanced that page. As each page only had about twenty entries it was easy to spot an error. The totals of all the pages were transferred to the next set of records, again self-balancing, and so on until a final total was reached.

Not many people were employed to do this, considering the numbers involved, and at the end of the year all the records were filed together for future reference. I don't think computers have improved on that. When our new machinery came into the office, using punched cards, it was supposed to be able to speed everything up, but I'm not sure that it did and it cost a lot of extra money for the mechanics and service charges. It seemed to me that the hand-written system was working perfectly well and I couldn't understand why it wasn't left alone. ‘If it works, don't fix it,' I remember my dad saying.

So I found myself sitting on day one at work next to Mary Livingstone and trying to add up the columns of figures. Of course, she thought me very slow and I was. Miss Livingstone could add up the columns of hundreds of thousands of pounds, shillings and pence all at the same time. She didn't do the pence, then the shillings, then the pounds, she did them all at once. A
couple of years ago I came across a book on mathematics that taught you how to do this and it turned out to be easier than the way I was taught at school. I wonder why they taught us the wrong way round?

I also had to make the tea and coffee. This I did in the old kitchen. The building had, at one time, been a very large house and the kitchen was typically Victorian. At some time, someone had left behind some very large models of steam engines and trains. I wish I had taken them home as they were wonderful in their glass cases with external connections for pumping the steam in to make them work. They were probably dumped when that set of offices was closed down.

As a job-starting-cum-birthday-present, my mother and father had got me an NSU Quickly. That's a bike not many will remember but it was the epitome of mopeds and I was the envy of my pals. Late in my school years we had all messed about on those powered bicycles. Some had an engine fitted inside the back wheel. Others had an engine on the back of the seat and, having pedalled the bike up to speed, you literally dropped the engine on to the back wheel where a cog drove the tyre around. Tyres wore out quickly on that model.

The Quickly was the first fully integrated design for a moped, not that I believe you could have pedalled it far as it was heavy. It had a two-speed gearbox and was very streamlined. I picked it up at the shop, Uptons, on Nelson Street and they showed me how to start it. Off I went under the loving gaze of Mam and rode along the street with everyone watching me. They had never seen anything like it. I approached the end of the street where the market was in full swing when I realised I hadn't a clue how to stop it. Weaving amongst the customers in the open marketplace I tried everything I could and eventually I stopped it by switching it off. It had back-pedalling brakes. No wonder I couldn't find them, I'd never heard of them.

The machine was very useful, however, for collecting rents. I was enrolled as stand-by for rent-collecting duty, if any of the officers were on leave or off sick. I really enjoyed collecting rents. I was young and fit and used to jump the fences between the houses to save walking up and down the paths. I ran everywhere once I had ridden to the estate. The other rent collectors used to tell me off for making short work of their hours. ‘You just wait till it's raining or snowing and then you'll find out.' I didn't care. I was having fun. I had a couple of surprises on the job though.

It was quite usual for council tenants, or anybody, to leave their front door unlocked and open for visitors. The records book I took with me would often give instructions to walk straight through the front door and into the front room where the rent would be left ready for collection. People were very trusting in those days, but then again, most people didn't have much worth stealing!

It's a strange phenomenon but you can tell if there's someone in a house or not. It was certainly possible to feel the ‘vibes' of a body upstairs, or even detect if someone was hiding. When rent was in arrears it was pretty common for the tenant to try and avoid the collector and I saw more than one figure duck down behind the window as I approached. Even if you didn't see them duck, you would sense they were in there. An empty house feels different. If the occupant was having a tough time financially, we would often turn a blind eye for a while, but if they were simply skiving we would do all we could to collect the money from them. My ‘sixth sense' of ‘feeling' whether the house was empty or not came in very useful. That is, until one day, when I got it totally wrong.

In one of the houses, following the instructions in my book, I entered and yelled out my customary ‘Hello'. No answer, so I headed for the front room. It was the darkness of the room that
confused me as the curtains had been closed, yet the envelope containing the cash had been left on the sideboard as usual. I picked up the money and started to enter the money into the rent book. As I stood there in the darkness, my eyes began to adjust to the lack of light and various outlines began to appear. Suddenly, to my absolute horror, I spotted what I thought was a man lying on a table. Against my better judgement I moved closer, hoping he was all right. He wasn't. There in the middle of the tiny front room was a corpse laid out in its box. I fully understood how Connie felt when he dropped his end. I was out of the house much quicker than I went in and I was shaking like a leaf.

Another house but the same instruction, the rent is on the front room table. ‘Hello, hello.' And no reply. In I went, saw the money and I was bending over the table filling in the book when from under the table came a nasty, low, growl. My testicles went back into my body of their own accord. Never in the history of rent collecting has anyone backed out of a house more slowly. Nice doggy.

All the cash from the rents and the rates was kept in a huge safe fitted into the wall and was secured each night. Just before leaving for home one Friday, I happened to glance around and noticed that the chief cashier had left his bag full of bank notes on the floor by the safe door. He must have forgotten to secure it in the safe and when I opened it there must have been several thousands of pounds in there. It was an extraordinarily large amount of cash in those days, so, thinking quickly, I decided to take the bag home with me. After all, I couldn't leave it there all night and I had no key to the safe.

Placing the bag of notes on the wire clip on the back of my NSU Quickly, I arrived safely home and put the package under my bed. When Monday morning arrived, I happily sailed into work, only to find police cars and policemen everywhere. The place was lit up with flashing blue lights.

‘What's going on?' I innocently enquired of one of the clerks who wore an expression of complete bafflement.

‘All the rent money's been stolen,' came the swift reply.

‘Oh, that's OK, I've got …' but they wouldn't listen to me.

‘Please, son, we're very busy. Just get on with your duties,' was all I got.

Several attempts later, I approached someone else. ‘Excuse me. Are you looking for this?'

The official's eyes nearly rolled out of his head when he caught sight of me holding the bag open with notes stuffed to the top.

‘Where on earth did you get that?' he bellowed, as all hell broke loose.

I explained the whole predicament and defended my actions reminding him that I was only a junior clerk and didn't have anyone's phone number to contact them in an emergency. I was briskly thanked and told to get on with my work. Somehow I felt it was all my fault and yet I had tried to help.

When the council offices were eventually moved to new premises, a new security vault was built which was burglar, blast and tunnel secure. There was no way anyone could rob this safe we were proudly told, as we were taken on a tour of this new protection system. Walking past the double-skinned, triple-lock metal door, we were then led past a floor-to-ceiling grill with one-inch steel bars. Once in this impressive chamber, the safe itself stood on a raised platform and the council officials were delighted with the solid walls and floor. Looking up, I asked what the ceiling was made of. They hadn't thought of that and gave me a very dismissive glance to hide their embarrassment. Anyone could have just gone upstairs, lifted the floorboards and dropped down into the hyper-secure safe-room through the ceiling tiles. Whoops!

Councils seem to have the reputation for incompetence, but
I don't think they are any worse than any other major organisation. Local government is there, complete with all its little by-laws, to keep some sort of order in your district. You have to have your rubbish collected, your sewage removed and your pavements made safe, but because the council deals with so many people, a few problems are bound to slip through the net. These are the ones that get the publicity, ignoring all those who were perfectly happy.

I tried to pre-empt a few problems myself with all sorts of moneysaving ideas, which I thought were helpful. Some of my suggestions were even laughed at, but looking back they would have worked.

One thought was to place large tunnel-like tubes under all the roads in the new estates we were building. Each large tube would have a walkway along the bottom, above a tube that carried the sewage. Along the walls of the tube would be smaller tubes that carried all the services, electricity, telephone lines, gas and the like. There would be no need to ever dig up a road again. Each service would be able to access its own tube easily. If this had been taken up, it would have saved the nation millions, but then where would we be without our beloved roadworks!

At that time, and perhaps it is still the same now, we as a Council had to borrow the money to build anything, whether it was a swimming baths or council houses. Then the money we borrowed had to be repaid over a very long period of years, adding millions in interest rates. I could not for the life of me see why we couldn't levy a rate that would enable us to save up for a few years to build public amenities and that would have been a lot cheaper than the current system. Their argument was that you could not levy a ‘rate for something in the future as a ratepayer might die and not benefit'. As it was, we had ratepayers paying for buildings that had long been pulled down, so what was the difference?

By now I was 17 and living two lives. Since the non-excitement of the first kiss I had practised a bit more and, of course, I was filled with the knowledge of my dad's sex manual. In the Co-op Chemists on Lorne Terrace there was a blonde goddess (well, she was to me) called Jean Pagel and I used to go in there as often as I could. The cheapest things to buy were Horlicks tablets at nine pence a packet and I bought them by the hundreds. Eventually we dated and spent many a happy hour rolling about on her front room sofa. Nothing serious happened, damn it, only kissing and fumbling but I raged with passion. Meanwhile, from the Methodist Youth Club I had moved into the pulpit. On Sundays I was a lay preacher, the rest of the week I was a young man raging with lust. Things are different nowadays, of course – I am no longer a lay preacher!

To be honest, I wasn't a lay preacher for very long anyway. I had run the service in most of the chapels on the local circuit. It was a bit like working in the clubs and theatres later; you could do the same ‘act' in front of the different congregations and then you would have to come up with a new ‘script' for the next tour. My main problem came in my own chapel and from my sense of observation. There was one lady who never came into church in time for the start of the service. She was always about five minutes late and the other women in the congregation would then all be whispering about her new hat. Imagine, a new hat every week. So when it became my turn to run the service in the chapel I didn't start the service. With the brashness of youth I announced that we would all sit quietly as the lady would be waiting in the foyer of the chapel and when she arrived we would admire the hat and then get on with the real reason we were supposed to be there, worshipping and thanking God. When the woman did come in, she was livid. As she was the wife of a church elder I more or less got the sack. Neither did they like my idea of not doing the service in the
order it had been done for years. My idea was that if you didn't know what was coming next you might pay more attention to the words. It's funny that it was the old people who objected and the young people who liked the improvisations.