Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword
Part One
1. ‘Mummy’s out!’
2. ‘Very flat, Norfolk’
3. What I got for a chocolate bar
4. Noses Off
Part Two
5. ‘If you can’t move it, paint it’
6. ‘You never hear the one that gets you’
7. ‘It’s only malaria’
8. Nowhere to go but up
9. ‘It’s only a small part …’
10. Becoming Michael Caine
11. Understudying O’Toole
12. Raw steaks through the letter-box
13. The first screen test
Part Three
14. ‘When the magic happens …’
15. $1500 a week?
16. The two minutes that changed my life
17. Butch cooking
18. Alfie
19. Lemon and Micklewhite
Part Four
20. ‘If you want to be a star in America …’
21. The Elephant to Beverly Hills
22. Cannes
23. Otto’s Revenge
24. French hours
25. Bardot tries it on
26. ‘Oh yes – a Rolls Royce’
27. My worst location
28. Elizabeth and me
Part Five
29. Shakira
30. ‘Call me Larry’
31. Natasha
32. Gucci shoes
33. The Man Who Would Be King
34. Biting the customers
35. The Swarm attacks
Part Six
36. Welcome to Beverly Hills
37. Dressed to kill …
38. Ma in Beverly Hills
39. The Queen and I
40. How to lose an Oscar
41. Paradise Found
Part Seven
42. Working with Woody
43. Moving back
44. Scoundrels
45. In my own write
46. A sting in the tail
47. David
Acknowledgements
Picture Credits
Picture Section
Index
Copyright
About the Book
Michael Caine is the best-loved film actor Britain has ever produced. Here, for the first time, he reveals the truth about his childhood, his family and his hard-fought journey from London to Hollywood, bringing to life the lean years and the triumphs with astonishing candour. And with typical charm and humour he talks about the movies, about his relationships – on and off the screen – with other actors and directors, and about the memorable screen presence which is his hallmark.
About the Author
Michael Caine has starred in over one hundred films, and is one of only two actors to have been nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade since the 1960s. He lives in London and Oxfordshire with his wife, Shakira. He has two daughters.
To Shakira, my wife,
and Dominique and Natasha, my daughters.
All my love forever.
Foreword
Well – what do you think of it so far?
It’s not too heavy for you, is it? They told me not to write a long book or it would be too weighty and too expensive, so I’ve tried to keep the price and the bulk down. But there’s still a lot I want to say.
There have been something like 5,000 miles of newsprint and at least seven biographies on me. God knows why. So why add to all this? To set the record straight on my own record player for a change. I have long since stopped reading what is written about me; for the most part it has been wrong or misleading. I am not saying that I am a better or nicer person than I have seen portrayed and, heaven knows, this book is not a work of history or scholarship. But what you will read here is the real me – not for a change, but for the first time.
So what was it all about? I’m going to tell you.
Part One
1
‘Mummy’s out!’
I FIRST STARTED to act at the age of three. We were a very poor family and it was my mother’s idea to have me help out with her many outstanding bills. She wrote the script and directed the action. The cue to begin my performance was a ring at the door bell. Grasping my small hand, my mother rushed down the three flights of stairs from our small flat and hid behind the front door as I opened it. The unsuspecting third member of the cast – the rent collector – was standing there as I delivered my first lines: ‘Mummy’s out,’ I said, and slammed the door in his face.
I was a painfully shy little boy and terrified at first, but I became accustomed to the role and eventually got to play to a better class of creditor. One day I even played to the local vicar, who was collecting money to repair the church spire. As my mother was Church of England and my father was Roman Catholic, they had not been allowed to marry in either church so they had no reason to go there to thank anybody for anything. My mother was always a firm believer in God, but – like me – never went to church although she did have me christened into the Protestant faith. I asked my father one day why I was Protestant and not Catholic like him and his honest and practical reply was: ‘The Protestant church was just around the corner and the Catholic one was a bus ride away and we didn’t have the money for the fare.’ Of such earth shattering material is one’s destiny formed.
I read somewhere in a book on psychiatry that the basis of all our lives is that we become what we are afraid of. For although my performances at the front door continued up to the start of World War Two, I have never got over my initial fear of performing in front of strangers. The rent collector may have become a familiar face but I have never forgotten the time when following the same old routine I opened the door and stood there stunned in front of a man I had never seen before with a thick bushy beard – I had never seen a beard before either – shoulder-length hair and terrible piercing eyes. I stood rooted to the spot. He actually reminded me of someone. In the unaccustomed pause, he declared he was a Jehovah’s Witness and wanted to speak to my mother. ‘Mummy’s out,’ I mumbled, transfixed by those staring eyes. ‘You’ll never go to heaven if you tell lies,’ he hissed. As I slammed the door, I realised now that I knew who he looked like: the picture of Jesus my mother had shown me. ‘Where’s heaven, Mum?’ I asked as we clambered slowly back up the long flights of stairs. ‘I don’t know, son,’ she replied. ‘All I know is that it’s not round here.’
In 1985 I was asked by my friend Bob Hoskins to play a small guest part in his movie Mona Lisa. I sat in the car on the way to the production office not taking any particular notice of where we were going until we crossed the River Thames. The river divides London not just physically but socially: north of the river is the posh side, the south very definitely isn’t. I know this because I come from the south. As the car weaved its way through the grey depressing streets that I had known as a boy, I wondered where the hell we were going. Bob had told me that the film had a very small budget – I knew that from the amount that I was being paid – but how small was it if they had to have an office in such a crummy area? We drove deeper into dark valleys of decaying Dickensian warehouses and finally arrived at a depressingly ugly Victorian building which now housed Bob’s production office. As I was led through the long, dark, dank corridors I asked my guide what the place had been before it was converted. ‘It was originally built as a hospital years ago,’ he replied. ‘It was called Saint Olave’s.’ I stopped dead in my tracks and looked round me. So this was it. I had heard that name all my life but had never known exactly where it was. I was standing in the hospital where I was born.
It turned out that after the hospital was closed down, St Olave’s became a lunatic asylum for a while and then a couple of years ago was converted into offices. When I think about it, it seems a cruel joke on the progress of my life – a natural progression from my birth place to lunatic asylum to movie production office. And I bet I’m the only movie actor to have worked out of a production office in the building where he was born.
When I was a young man I used to read a lot of star biographies in movie fan magazines to see if there was anybody like me in them. (There never was.) According to the biographies, all actors had done menial jobs and had a rough life before they became successful. The girls usually claimed to have been waitresses or nurses and the men had dug ditches for a living. No matter what background they actually came from – children of millionaires, relations of the studio boss, boy or girlfriend of the producer or agent – the Hollywood machine would make these stars sound like one of the people.
But in my case it’s all true.
I was born in the Charity wing of St Olave’s Hospital, Rotherhithe on Tuesday, 14 March 1933 at a few minutes after ten o’clock in the morning. I weighed eight pounds two ounces and my mother later told me that the birth was easy – the last easy thing I was going to do for the next thirty years.
I was born with a mild, non-contagious but incurable eye disease called Blefora which makes the eyelids swell. Like many things in my life this problem turned out to be actually in my favour, as by the time I was a young actor my heavy eyelids gave me a rather sleepy and, more importantly, sexy look. Apart from my eyes being a bit dodgy, I’m told I also had ears that stuck out at almost right angles from my head. This time the deformity was curable with the aid of sticking plaster which my mother used to pin them back every time I went to sleep for the first two years of my life. The flattening of my ears was a two-edged sword because they are now so flat against my head that sounds often whiz past without hitting them at all which makes me slightly hard of hearing without being actually deaf.
Dodgy eyes and prominent ears. What else? Well, I was born with the vitamin deficiency known as ‘rickets’ which meant, when I eventually started walking, that my ankle bones were not strong enough to support even my meagre weight, and I had to wear surgical boots to keep me upright. I also developed an involuntary nervous tic in my face which was called rather frivolously ‘St Vitus Dance’. Not a very promising start for a future actor.
I sometimes have this vision of myself walking down the street as a small boy with heavy-lidded staring eyes, a nervous tic, ears pinned back with plaster and wearing Frankenstein boots laced up to just below the knee. I must have frightened the shit out of the other kids.
I was named Maurice Joseph Micklewhite after my father, who was 36 at the time. He had returned from seven years’ service in India with the Royal Horse Artillery to marry my mother and participate in my conception. A tough man with jet black hair and a strong hawk-like nose, he was only about five feet eight inches high but he was very thickset. Extremely intelligent and completely uneducated, like most of his class at the time he was conditioned to do only manual labour. For a couple of hundred years the Micklewhites had been porters in London’s Billingsgate fish market, so even though he was one of the three million unemployed at the time of my birth, at least he knew what job he was out of. He eventually got back to work there when things picked up again, which meant getting up at four in the morning and carting about crates of cold fish smothered in ice for eight hours. The thing he most liked about the job was the fact that he could get home by midday in time to get round to the bookies. Gambling was his one consuming passion and although he earned good money at the market, he was broke all his life, which is why I started my acting career at the front door.
Although my father was a very funny man, he was never truly happy and I think that he eventually realised his job was a dead end. In spite of this, jobs at Billingsgate were very sought after because of the pay and lack of qualifications needed but you could only get in if you had a relation who already worked there. I remember him saying to me as I grew up that when I went to work he could get me into the market. He seemed very proud of this and I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from telling him that I had absolutely no intention of following in his footsteps.
When they eventually began to mechanise Billingsgate, my father gave me the following advice: Never do a job where you can be replaced by a machine. Based on that advice I thought how clever I was to become an actor, little realising I’d be facing competition from a tin shark, a green frog and the Terminator. The only other advice that he ever gave me was never to trust anyone who wore a beard, a bow tie, two-tone shoes, sandals or sun glasses. Having believed him for many years, you can imagine the panic I was in when I arrived in Hollywood. Never say never.
My mother was an absolutely traditional working-class ‘Mum’. She was short, plump, rosy and cheerful, very funny – and as tough as nails. Her whole life was devoted to her home, her husband and her children and on top of this she worked all her life as a charlady. She was completely devoted to my brother and me, and I can’t remember her buying anything for herself that was not second-hand. The first new coat I ever saw her wear was one I bought her when she was fifty-six years old.
Although we were very poor, I can never remember ever being hungry, cold, unloved or deprived of anything that was important to a growing child – thanks to my mother.
My arrival brought about a move from my parents’ one room to a two-room flat in Urlwin Street in Camberwell. Number 14 was a tall Victorian terraced house, which had seen better days and was now converted into small flats. Our flat was at the top – three long flights of stairs up from the ground floor and five flights from the garden, where the only toilet for five families was situated. The location of this toilet was to take on major significance, as my weak legs meant that five flights of stairs were a tremendous obstacle for me, but as I grew and ran up and down these stairs my rickets eventually faded away and I developed very strong muscles plus a facility to control my bowels which has come in handy many times since, when filming in ‘exotic’ locations.
The flat consisted of two rooms: one was the bedroom with a big double bed for my parents and a little one for me, the other functioned as living room, dining room and kitchen combined. There was no bathroom. I was given a bath every Friday night in the tin tub which was used for the laundry. When my brother and I grew up, we always had a standing joke that we had a bath every Friday night whether we needed it or not.
The cooking was done on a gas stove, which my mother was always cleaning with lead. (I don’t know what this might mean and I have been too scared to find out.) The lighting for the flat was also gas – very dim and very inefficient with a mantle so fragile that if you so much as touched it with the match, it would immediately crumble into dust. My father always liked a drink in the evening – or any other time for that matter – and he could put it away without visible results, except for a slightly trembly hand. He was the only one who lit the light as my mother was afraid to do it in case it ‘went off’, as she put it. (She said the same about the telephone I gave her many years later. I watched her speaking on it once and she was holding the phone a foot from her ear. When I asked her why, I got the same reply.) My father’s trembly hand caused a high casualty rate in gas mantles and I was the one who always had to journey up and down the stairs to get another one.
One of the threads that winds its way through all my early memories is that of aching feet. Second-hand clothes were no great problem for me, but second-hand shoes certainly were. Trying to cram feet into someone else’s shoes even if they are the same size makes life very miserable and it was actually a pleasure to wear the special boots for my rickets. Discomfort comes in many forms and perhaps the most humiliating ritual of my childhood was the dosing of syrup of figs my mother gave us after our bath on Friday nights. ‘To keep you regular,’ she would say, with a significance that I did not then understand. All I knew was that next morning I would suddenly have to tear down five flights to the toilet, before I had what my mother called on the one occasion when I did not make it, ‘a nasty accident’. ‘Where do they make this stuff?’ I asked my mother one Friday, after I had choked down yet another teaspoon of the disgusting mixture. ‘California,’ she replied. One place I’ll never go, I thought. Never say never again.
When I was about two and half years old I noticed one day that my mother’s stomach was starting to swell up and I was scared she was going to die and leave me and my father alone. I remember watching her week after as she grew larger and larger until she was almost bursting through her dress. I wanted to say something but I did not want her to tell me that she was going to die, so I kept quiet. My father, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be worried at all – in fact he seemed happier than usual. Finally when I came into the room one day and found her being sick in the sink, I plucked up courage. ‘What’s the matter with you, Mummy?’ I asked through my tears. ‘I’ve got paint poisoning,’ she said, ‘from the fumes.’ My father had just painted the bedroom and the place reeked. ‘Is it the smell that’s made your stomach swell?’ I asked. ‘Yes, that’s it,’ she replied quickly. ‘Well I can smell it so why haven’t I got it?’ I demanded. She thought for a moment. ‘Only women can get it,’ she replied. I breathed a sigh of relief: ‘Thank God I am a man,’ I said.
The next day, when we got on the bus to go shopping there was a pregnant woman sitting opposite us. ‘Have you been painting the bedroom?’ I asked her, according to my mother who always went into hysterics when she told the story.
At around the time the smell of paint in the bedroom disappeared, my mother also disappeared and I was sent to stay with my Aunt Lil. When my mother came back, her swollen belly had gone and I had a new baby brother called Stanley Victor, who had been, I was told, found under a gooseberry bush. This sounded perfectly reasonable to me and I accepted it and my new brother immediately, although I was a bit put out when my bed was shoved into the corner of the bedroom and he was placed closer to my mother. My mother pointed out that he woke up a lot during the night, but then every time he woke up, so did I.
The impact of Stanley on my young life was nothing, however, compared with something that happened the following year. At around the age of four I was set on a journey of discovery that I haven’t finished yet. I was taken to see my first movie.
When I was a teenager I used to read a lot of biographies of actors to see if I had anything in common with them, because by now I had dreams of becoming one as well. My avid reading as a teenager taught me that I had little in common with any actor – particularly the British stage greats. In fact they sounded as though they actually came from another planet. All their stories seemed to start from the same point: the first time that they ever saw an actor was when their nanny took them to the theatre, and as the curtain rose and the lights went up on the stage they just knew the theatre was going to be their life’s work.
In stark contrast to this, the first actor that I ever saw was the Lone Ranger and it was at a Saturday morning matinée for kids, which in my area was a cross between an SAS training camp and the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. The first obstacle in the assault course was the queue, which developed into a full-scale riot as some of the bigger kids who came late tried to push in front of others. Once inside, another riot started as everybody rushed for the front seats. And even when we were all seated comfortably and it seemed that our troubles were over missiles started hurtling around and an orange hit me on the back of the head. My friends had told me that after the lights went out and the picture started everything would be all right, but when I was plunged into darkness it turned out to be an overcoat which had been thrown down from the balcony above on top of me. It was finally dragged off me and thrown back up, accompanied by a lot of words that I did not understand but had heard before when my father stubbed his toe on the bed legs.
At last the lights went down, the film started, and on came the Lone Ranger. I sat there as entranced as those privileged actors before me with their nannies and I knew that this was what I wanted to be. A half eaten ice cream cone suddenly landed in my lap but even this could not break the spell; I just wiped it up, without taking my eyes off the screen.
After a while I got cramp, so I put my feet up on the back of the seat in front of me and stretched my legs. At this point the entire row of seats that we were sitting on tilted back on to the knees of the kids in the row behind. Yells of pain and indignation filled the air as the unfortunate patrons behind us tried to extricate themselves, but we were lying in our seats half over backwards with our feet flailing in the air. The lights went up, the picture stopped and the usherettes came rushing down to sort things out. I was pointed out as the culprit (there was no mention of the boys who had unscrewed the seats from the floor before we came in) and given a hefty whack round the ear. The lights went down, the picture started again and I sat there and watched through a veil of tears as my future profession unfolded before my eyes. I wonder what nanny would have made of that outing.
2
‘Very flat, Norfolk’
AT THE AGE of about four I began school at The John Ruskin Infants’ School in John Ruskin Street. I was a very pretty little boy with blond curly hair and big blue eyes and my teacher mistakenly christened me ‘Bubbles’ which had the obvious effect on the other boys. After two or three days as a walking punch bag I informed my mother that I would not be going to school again and she very quickly realised what was going on. One morning she paid an uninvited visit to the school during our play break and asked me to point out the boys who had hit me. This I did and, much to my surprise, she beat the shit out of all of them. I always knew that she was tough, but that surprised me.
My father, on the other hand, took the view that if anybody hit me I should hit back even if it meant getting pounded. ‘There is no shame in losing a fight,’ he told me. ‘There is only shame in being a coward and refusing to fight.’ When I told him that I did not know how to fight he said with a twinkle in his eye, ‘I know, and I’m going to teach you how.’ With that he got down on his knees in front of me, put his fists up and said, ‘Hit me,’ and after a bit of persuasion I did. Pretty soon I had no more trouble at school and was renamed by common consent ‘Snake eyes’ which was a source of great pride to me.
I once asked my father what I should do if someone picked on me who I couldn’t beat in a fight. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘You bide your time, wait until he’s not expecting anything, and then you get a bottle and smash him over the fucking head with it. It’s very important,’ he went on, ‘that you never let anybody get away with an attack on you or you will become a target instead of a man.’ And although I hate violence of any kind I have never forgotten this.
When I was nearing six years old the atmosphere in our flat began to change. My mother and father and friends and relations who came to visit us were somehow not as cheerful as usual and sometimes they were downright miserable, especially when they listened to the wireless. It was 1939.
My first inkling that things were going to change was when my mother sat my brother Stanley and me down for a very serious talk. We were going to be something called ‘evacuated’ and we were going to be sent away to the country because someone that neither of us had ever heard of called ‘Adolf Hitler’ was going to try to kill us by dropping bombs on us. Stanley and I discussed this at great length and decided that it was probably a mistake, because if we didn’t know Adolf Hitler, he couldn’t possibly know us and therefore couldn’t know where we lived. We forgot about it until one day my mother asked me to go and get a tin of corned beef at the corner shop. I liked corned beef, so I asked her if it was going to be for dinner. ‘No,’ she said quietly, ‘it’s for your sandwiches when you go away to be evacuated.’ So that was it. My brother and I were going away to do this word that we didn’t understand. We both cried when my mother told us that she would not be coming with us, but we cheered up a bit when she said that all the school would be going.
Before we went, we all had to be fitted with a gas mask. When I asked what we wanted gas masks for, my mother told me that it was to protect us in case this man Hitler dropped bombs on us with poison gas in them. She said that the gas went everywhere on the wind and anybody who breathed it in without a mask would drop dead. At this point I started to take the whole thing seriously and became quite frightened. I pointed out to Stanley that if the gas travelled on the wind as my mother had said, this man Hitler didn’t actually need our address to kill us and I took a different and much more alarming view of things. My first experience with my new gas mask at school the next day was not very reassuring either. We were all lined up in the playground and the teachers came along and gave each of us a rather nice looking mask that was made to look like Mickey Mouse. We were told to put them on to see if they fitted, and were then told to run about the playground to make sure that we could breathe in them. Unbeknownst to me, the part in my mask through which I was supposed to breathe in was blocked and so there I was running around with the rest of the kids, only able to breathe out. Suddenly I keeled over like some miniature telephone pole and hit the deck. I was sent home early as some sort of weakling who had been the only one to let the school down. There it was again: injustice. The result of all this was that while all the other kids felt quite confident about surviving one of Hitler’s gas attacks, I was determined to die rather than put that thing on again. A longer lasting legacy has been my lifelong hate of the smell of rubber.
On the day of ‘Evacuation’ my brother and I were up early, eager to start our first great adventure. Stanley was three and I was six. We were both dressed identically: sensible shoes, long grey woollen socks held up with elastic bands just below the knee, and short trousers, which I already hated. For this special day my mother had bought us new shirts which were made of a wool that felt like wire and were the most uncomfortable garment I had ever worn until I joined the British army. To this she added something completely new in our young lives: a tie. This instrument of torture was drawn tightly around the prickly collar that was already causing a rash around my neck. I hated this tie so much that I have never worn one since unless it was absolutely necessary. (Today I own five restaurants and in none of them are you required to wear a tie.) On top of all this we wore jackets – not school blazers because they were too expensive – which carried a label with our names and addresses tied into the button holes – in case we got lost, my mother said. We had a cardboard suitcase each which contained three of everything that we needed: ‘One on, one clean and one in the wash,’ as my mother explained. The working-class attitude to hygiene always strikes me as strange when I think about it now. My mother’s other piece of advice in this area was: ‘change your underwear in case you get run over’. Many years later as a soldier in Korea I realised how pointless this particular tip was.
Our only other burden consisted of a small cardboard box each with a shoulder strap made of string that contained the offending gas mask. The fault in mine had been discovered and I had a new one, but I was not inclined to test it and crammed my corned beef sandwich in there instead. If there had been a gas attack, I would probably have died from inhaling bread crumbs. So, equipped for our new role in life and having kissed our dad goodbye (it was the only day off from work that he had ever taken) we set off, each holding one of Mum’s hands tightly.
The scene at the school was pandemonium with harassed teachers rushing about trying to get the children lined up into columns of three. I looked around for some coaches, but couldn’t see any. Were we going to march somewhere, I wondered? My mother had told me that the country was a long way away. Things weren’t looking too good so far. All along the line mothers were clutching their children and sobbing, some of them hysterically. My mother had done a real psyching job on Stanley and me and until this moment we had thought that this was going to be fun. Now it all fell apart, as it dawned on us that there must after all be something to cry about and we joined in the chorus which started my mother off as well. The teachers finally got a grip of the situation and off we started on what turned out to be a two-mile walk to Waterloo station. I held tightly onto Stanley’s hand as we marched, only relinquishing my grip as we turned the corner for one last wave at the band of weeping mothers flapping limp soggy handkerchiefs. We kept waving until, suddenly, they were gone and Stanley and I were on our own for the first time.
Almost immediately, with my head held bravely high, I stepped into a great pile of dog shit and consternation set in amongst the ranks as my classmates tried to identify the source of the terrible smell. When I was eventually identified as the culprit there was great jostling as the other kids tried to get as far away from me as possible and I was banished in tears to the back of the line, to walk on my own. One of the teachers took my brother’s hand and with a sneer walked on ahead leaving me in disgrace alone with tears streaming down my face. After a while another teacher took pity on me and came back to walk beside me. Seemingly impervious to the smell, she gave me a hug and said, ‘Stepping in that is good luck.’ ‘Is it?’ I asked, with considerable disbelief. ‘Yes,’ she said knowingly. ‘You’ll see.’ On the first day of shooting on the film Alfie, the opening shot was of me walking along the embankment of the River Thames by Westminster Bridge. Lewis Gilbert, the director, said: ‘Action,’ and I stepped into a pile of dog shit. ‘Cut,’ said Lewis. ‘We’ll go again.’ As we prepared for the second take, having changed shoes very quickly (you always have two of everything on a movie set), Lewis said, with a hopeful smile, ‘That’s lucky.’ ‘I know,’ I replied, ‘my teacher told me.’ He looked at me for a moment with a puzzled smile. ‘Action,’ he said, and I was off to make the picture that made me a star. You should always listen to your teacher.
When we got to Waterloo, my shoe was washed and I was allowed to join civilized society again. Although we were only going about forty miles out of London to Wargrave in Berkshire, the journey took hours, but we eventually arrived somewhere and were marched to a large village hall, where we were greeted with lemonade, sandwiches and large smiling country ladies with red rosy cheeks. Having stuffed ourselves sick with food we were made to stand in line and the local families came along and inspected us to choose the child they wanted to take care of for the duration of the war. Whatever type they were looking for it was not Stanley and me and after about an hour he and I were the only two left standing there, being circled warily by potential carers like farmers inspecting two mad bullocks. Suddenly there was a bustle at the other end of the hall, and it was obvious that someone of importance had appeared. Everybody seemed to straighten up a little as a wonderful-looking elderly lady with almost blue hair came charging towards us. She was out of breath and obviously late. ‘Are these the last two?’ she asked, not unkindly. ‘Yes,’ said the vicar in a hushed apologetic tone. He had appeared out of the blue to greet the new arrival who was obviously somebody important and rich because she spoke with a very posh voice. She looked down at the two of us. She had the most wonderful smile and a very kind face. I hope she takes us, I thought to myself and smiled my nicest smile back at her. ‘Take us,’ I was saying under my breath. ‘I’ll take them!’ she cried. Then she crouched down and gave us both a kiss.
The vicar ushered us outside and for the first time in our lives Stanley and I got into a car. This was bigger than any car that I had ever seen and very much like the pictures of the one the King drove in; it must have been a Rolls Royce. We were whisked away to a house so big it looked like a castle. There were servants all over the place, and our cases and our jackets were taken and we were each shown to lovely little bedrooms. Then we were told to wash our hands before being taken downstairs to a large dining room where we were offered a seemingly limitless supply of cakes and drinks until both of us were quite literally sick. I lay in the best bed and in the nicest room that I had ever slept in, relishing the luxury of a room of my own for the first time and thinking to myself that this was too good to be true. I was right. The next day an official came and said that according to regulations the house was too far from the school and we had to be moved closer. This was done with disastrous results all round. My brother and I were split up and were both placed with people where the milk of human kindness had run kind of thin, especially where children were concerned. I knew I was supposed to be protected from the Nazis, but being locked in a cupboard beneath the stairs for twenty-four hours seemed like overkill. My mother came and took us away back up to London, with the vow never to let us out of her sight again.
By 1940, the Germans began the Blitz in earnest and men came to build an air raid shelter in the garden of our flats. This consisted of a six foot deep hole dug in the ground and covered with sheets of thick corrugated iron which were in turn covered with a couple of feet of earth. They wouldn’t save anyone from a direct hit but they were protection from shrapnel and incendiary bombs. Gradually the bombs began to drop closer to where we lived and Stanley and I started to get very scared. Hitler was obviously no fool and he must have found out our address.
Despite the bombing we went to a sort of skeleton school made up from returned evacuees like us and children who had not been sent away from London. A strange phenomenon developed when Hitler started the daylight raids. The teachers told us that if the siren sounded as we were on our way to school and we were closer to school we should run there, but if we were closer to home we should run back. So at nine o’clock every school morning you would find groups of kids standing on the corner just out of sight of the school praying for the siren to go so that they could run back home for a day off.
As anyone who saw the Blitz first hand will know, there has been a lot of misunderstanding about it. It was not a continuous bombardment from the moment that war was declared and in fact it did not start for weeks afterwards. Once it started it kept stopping, too, as the Luftwaffe recovered from the severe maulings that they received from the RAF. There were also breaks after which they would come back with new and secret weapons that we had never seen before. When London was set on fire with blanket incendiary bombing on that infamous Saturday night during the Battle of Britain, my mother decided to take us to the country again, and this time to come with us. Even though we were to be gone for nearly five years we always came back during one of the lulls. A week after our first return the Luftwaffe hit us with the new Land Mine, a bomb on a parachute that exploded in mid air and spread the damage over as wide an area as possible. During the next lull we met the doodlebug or V-1, a pilotless aircraft loaded with explosives which wasn’t particularly effective from the Germans’ point of view. You could see it and hear its engine and it was an easy target, but it was very bad for the nerves, because the sound stopped just before it exploded and you knew that somebody was about to die. But the most terrifying bomb of all was the V-2 rocket which was launched in 1944. We had only been back a few days when in broad daylight, without the siren sounding, the street next to ours just disappeared. There had been no aeroplane, no anti-aircraft fire, no doodlebug, just a massive bang. An entire street and its people had gone for ever.
Eventually my father was called up to serve in the Royal Artillery and we left London with my mother to go to Norfolk on the east coast of England. Its main distinction is its flatness, made famous in Noël Coward’s play Private Lives when the hero asks his ex-wife where her new husband comes from and she says, ‘Norfolk.’ Noël’s reply is just: ‘Very flat, Norfolk.’ So there you have it from the master.
We were housed in a large disused farmhouse which had been refurbished to the standard to which country people expected we slumdwellers from London were accustomed. Which meant that it was very primitive indeed: oil lamps and wood stoves, and tin baths for Friday nights in front of the fire. There was one outside toilet for the ten families, who were divided between small two-room flatlets and a big main kitchen which was shared by all.
I had never been so happy in my life. This tower of Cockney Babel was attached to a wondrous place for a small London boy: a farm. I could not believe that I could get close enough to real animals actually to touch them and I worked unpaid at odd jobs on the farm whenever I could. It was an idyllic place for a scrawny little city boy. Although I had long ago lost my surgical boots, and the stairs in our London house and the trips to the toilet and the front door had strengthened my legs, I was still not strong. Here was a chance to run free in fresh air, away from the soot-laden fumes of London and get the sun on my face instead of the shade of dark buildings. For children like myself the war was lucky. We were taken out of our rotten environment and given a chance for a healthy life. There were no chemical fertilizers put on the food we ate, and so we were forced to eat organic food for five years. Rationing meant that butter, ice cream, cream and even milk were rationed so there was no chance of high cholesterol. Meat was rationed, too, so we ate a lot of chicken and fish but sweets, biscuits and anything made with sugar was almost unavailable. The government gave all the children free orange juice, cod liver oil, malt, and vitamins to supplement food shortages and so they were actually giving us forms of nutrition that we would never have had in our diet if there had been no war. In our house we ate a lot of fried food and always red meat which my father insisted on every day. He thought that any man who ate chicken was a ‘Nancy Boy’ or ponce.
The farmhouse was loaded with kids and I immediately formed a gang from the most unscrupulous-looking ruffians that I could find. This move had become necessary because the village lads had decided to protect their territory from invasion by the Londoners. The parents of the country children were terrified that if their children mixed with us they would catch lice or fleas or, worse still, our Cockney accents. We didn’t so much live in the village as infest it and our reign of terror began. The local Bobby immediately invested in a faster bicycle, but couldn’t keep up with us as we raided orchards, stole milk off people’s doorsteps, and nicked sausage rolls from the back of the baker’s van while one of us engaged the baker in conversation on the front of the van (a particularly sophisticated plan of my own that I was very proud of). We also arranged fights with groups of the local boys provided we outnumbered them and they were not too big; we were tough, but we were not stupid. But on the one occasion the opportunity for real vice came our way and we found some cigarettes and a bottle of beer, we were sick as dogs and did not add them to the list of items to be provided for our entertainment.
Not all of our enterprises were dishonest. In order to get extra meat for the family, we used to catch rabbits which were regarded by the war-time Ministry of Agriculture as vermin, as they could decimate a very valuable grain crop in a week. Since none of us were old enough for a shot-gun licence we did the next best thing and trained ourselves to outrun them, which you might think an almost impossible feat, but believe it or not I and several members of our band could do it. The meat of the wild rabbit back then was delicious, and I always felt very proud to bring one home to my mother who was often in despair at the lack of food. Another way we helped our mother with the rations was by getting moorhens’ eggs. These birds always built their nests out over the water on very thin branches to protect them from predators. As a relatively new predator surveying a nest one day I thought they had got me beaten until I devised a method of tying a dessert spoon onto the end of a long stick and just scooping the eggs out of the nest. Three years of our greedy harvesting resulted, however, in the moorhen being more or less extinct in that area.
After we had been in Norfolk for about six months my father came home on leave for a fortnight. We could not wait for him to tell us all the great adventures that he had had fighting the Germans, but we were very disappointed when he finally arrived. He didn’t seem like the dad that we remembered and looked very tired and sometimes very sad. He slept, it seemed to me, for the first week but he eventually brightened up and took us into King’s Lynn, the local town, to go to the pictures. When I asked him where he had just come from he said that it was a place in France called Dunkirk. I realise now of course what he had just been through, but at the time I thought that he probably didn’t like the country.
Dad’s arrival changed my life. He bought me an air gun, which steered my enterprises in a new direction: money. The Ministry of Agriculture had introduced a new scheme to get rid of more vermin which ran something like this: for every dead rat the inspector would give you sixpence, and for a dead starling, which is a very voracious bird which not only eats fruit but has the nasty habit of taking one bite out of every other piece of fruit on any tree, thus destroying the whole crop, he would give you threepence. I became a very good shot and, by my own standards, extremely rich. Rich enough to buy my own fish and chips when the travelling fish shop visited our village every Thursday.
When my father’s leave was up he was sent to North Africa to join the Eighth Army. We didn’t know it then, but we weren’t to see him again for four years. When the time came for him to go he took my brother and me aside and told us that we had to be good and look after our mother and he gave us a long lecture on behaving ourselves. The next day my mother gave the two of us a little lecture herself, which I have never forgotten. Instead of moaning and whining about being left on her own with two small boys to bring up, she told us that we were going to have to be the men of the family now and replace our father in looking after her. This was absolutely untrue, of course – she was as tough as nails and needed no looking after by anybody – but it did give me a sense of protectiveness and responsibility towards women that has never left me. It has got me into trouble lately with the feminist movement who seem to regard good manners and respect for women as some form of sneaky male chauvinism.
After Dad had left life carried on as usual for a while until suddenly our peaceful Norfolk life was brought slap bang into the frontline of the war. Bombs were dropped around us, aerial dog fights spattered the skies and the peace of the countryside was shattered by planes taking off and landing and crashing all day every day. The Americans had entered the war and we found ourselves living right in the middle of a ring of seven massive US Air Force Bomber bases. Whichever direction we looked, we could see either the war actually being fought as German planes followed our bombers home and met our own fighters, or the results as pilot after pilot, mortally wounded, crashed in the fields around us in their attempts to make it home. It was like living in the eye of a hurricane. From our little vale of safety and peace we watched the killing going on every day and every night. It was an extraordinary experience for a small boy and sometimes, if we reached the downed planes before the police or Home Guard, a shocking one as we saw dead bodies for the first time in our lives. It was also the first time I realised that our side died as well – in all the films I saw, only the enemy died – and I certainly didn’t connect it with my father fighting on the other side of the world.
Kids are hard-hearted, though. We eventually got an enterprise together to make Christmas and birthday presents for our mothers and little girlfriends which consisted of making rings and bracelets out of the cockpit glass of the crashed airplanes. The trick was to cut this stuff with a hot knife and paint in little jewels for our mums and the young ladies who were the object of our baser desires.
*
Every Saturday we went into King’s Lynn to get the week’s shopping with our mother. We always had fish and chips and we always went to the cinema in the afternoon. One Saturday when we arrived we found that the town had been invaded by men in strange uniforms with accents just like the Lone Ranger. They all seemed to be chewing something. ‘Who are they and what are they all chewing?’ I asked my mother. ‘Americans,’ and ‘Gum,’ she replied. ‘Where do you get it?’ I wanted to know. She pointed to a crowd of young kids following a group of airmen who were all shouting the same thing: ‘Got any gum chum?’ The airmen were passing out sticks to each of the kids. Stanley and I ran over to join the throng, and took up the cry, and we were eventually rewarded with a stick each which we put in our mouths and began to chew. It tasted great and I was hooked for life.
Over a period of time I got to know many of the guys from the air bases around the village and I was amazed at their generosity and their tolerance and good humour with all of us kids constantly begging from them. By this point I was besotted with the cinema and by the images of America that I had seen on the screen, but my life-long love affair with America and things American was clinched by the behaviour of these first real Americans that I had ever met. Their warmth, charm and generosity was so welcome and unusual in a country racked by shortages of everything and massive tension and fear. They would give us sweets which they called candy and biscuits which they called cookies and some of them were so generous that they even used to ask me if I had an older sister who would like some nylons. They always seemed very sad when I said that I had no sisters at all. Such generous people; we really missed them when they all went home.
The most exciting time of all in the farmhouse was Christmas. The kitchen was overcrowded with friends, all gathered round making decorations, preparing food, or chopping and fetching the stacks of logs in for the great fire that always burned in the winter. Our ration portion was doubled, including sweets which we rarely saw. Thick cream suddenly became available and, best of all, the government made sure that every child had an orange and a banana each. These were rationed to one a year so there was great excitement when they finally appeared. Watching the last sliver of orange or the pointed end of a banana disappear for another year was the only sad part for me.
One of my favourite memories of my mother is of her sharing out our sweet ration one Christmas. There was one very hard-boiled sweet left over and not wanting either of her sons ever to feel more favoured than the other one, she got a carving knife and proceeded to cut it in half. Even when the knife slipped and she nearly cut off her thumb she went away to bandage it and then came back and finished sawing until the sweet broke in half equally. Even in the middle of a war she made Christmas wonderful and it was always the same, which is just what us kids liked. We always had roast turkey, sage and onion stuffing with sausage meat, roast potatoes, brussels sprouts, Christmas pudding with lashings of custard and home-made Christmas crackers, usually full of the rings we had made out of the crashed aircraft glass. And if anyone was still hungry after that lot, there were mince pies and Christmas cake smothered in cream or custard. I always remember it snowing at Christmas in those days, too, which it rarely does now.
maths