Thank you to all my family and friends. I really appreciate your encouragement and support. I love you more than you know.
This book is dedicated to little Maxwell Evans – the sole inspiration for this story.
It wasn’t the greatest of starts. In fact, things were pretty rocky for me at the beginning. As if arriving on earth with a hole in the heart wasn’t enough already, when I was born on 25 February 1964 at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, I was also named Cassius Clay Evans.
Now, that’s fine if you’re a strapping lad from the Deep South who’s destined to grow up to be undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. However, it’s not so brilliant if you’re a scrawny kid from Avonmouth who’s fighting for something else altogether – his life.
Being an obsessive boxing fan, Dad was keen to mark in his own special way 25 February 1964, the day Clay knocked out the seemingly invincible Sonny Liston to claim the world heavyweight title. So passionate was Dad about boxing, the moment I was born he hot-footed it up the corridor from the waiting room where he had been glued to the TV, demanding that I be named after the new champ.
Luckily, Mum flatly refused, thank goodness. I’m not suggesting that Cassius isn’t a decent enough name, but even the great man himself changed it to Muhammad Ali a little later.
Fortunately, Dad’s other passion was rock’n’roll music, and so I was named Lee after Jerry Lee Lewis, the manic, piano-playing rocker. Looking on the bright side, I’m very glad he never listened to Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.
This is the story of how that small, shy, sensitive boy from a run-down council estate near the Avonmouth dockyards of Bristol and a travelling family of performers stumbled quite by accident into the heady world of show business.
Dressed in my best clothes – my first proper photo.
Regarded by anyone I came into contact with as hailing from a different planet, I had a simple longing to be accepted. Life for me always felt like an unexpected turn of events that merely conspired to exacerbate my bewildered state of mind. A naturally quiet, enigmatic, gangly, fuzzy-haired, goggle-eyed scruffbag, I just wanted to blend into the background as best I could. Ironically, trying to do so only made me stand out from the crowd.
My dad was a performer who worked the South Wales and West Country club circuit, eventually sharing the bill with some of the most famous and talented performers of his generation. As a child, I led a kind of secret, dual existence, flitting between show business and the real world. In the realm of loud, excessive, sometimes over-dramatic, insecure show people of all shapes, sizes and persuasions, I was always under strict instructions from my parents to be seen but never heard. I became The Invisible Boy.
All the while, stage folk would talk openly in front of me about all sorts of things that children shouldn’t normally hear. But, through it all, I was unwittingly soaking up everything I witnessed. A loner, I fostered a clandestine yearning to be noticed, to be a part of all the excitement that was going on around me.
At nineteen, I rushed into marriage and was immediately expected to provide. But faced with never really fitting into the conventional workplace, I was forced under pressure to fall back on what came naturally: show business.
Eventually, when my back was to the wall and all else had failed, I got an act together based on what I had seen as a kid and entered a talent show. To my astonishment, I found very quickly that it felt better out on stage than it did dealing with the harsh realities of bills and rent payments. I stepped on to a magical platform where, miraculously, all my troubles melted away and everything suddenly seemed possible.
Looking back at my adventures now, I have come to feel that, to an extent, I have triumphed over my background. I have hurdled quite a few barriers and undergone an amazing journey. I’ve got a beautiful wife and a wonderful daughter. And I’ve still got all my own teeth. But the truth is, all I have ever been looking for is peace and acceptance.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s go back to the very start, just after my parents wisely dropped the idea of calling me Cassius Clay.
Even though I now had a more commonplace British name, I was still blighted. Afflicted with that hole in the heart, I was for several years seen as the weakling of the family. I suppose that underlined to me the sense that life was going to be a bit of a struggle and that I would always feel a bit detached from everyone else. My illness only heightened the feeling that, from the very beginning, I was somehow different.
When I was tiny, of course, I didn’t know about the illness, having only just taken my first gasps of air. I was too young, only one step up from a sperm really, at the time. I could have died right there on the table and not known much about it, if it hadn’t been for the hefty ward nurse at the Bristol Royal Infirmary who promptly scooped me up and, with a face that could crack nuts, sternly informed my mum in a thick, unforgiving West Country accent that she was taking me away to let the doctors have a look because there was ‘something wrong’. With that, she swiftly left the room, leaving my mum in stunned silence, exhausted and confused as to what the problem could possibly be and feeling that her baby might not actually return. Eventually, I was returned to Mum, who was allowed to take me home. I still needed lots of monitoring, though.
My dad was the son of a very hard and tough Welsh ex-miner who later became a drill sergeant in the army.
And my granddad – Evan John Evans.
Dad complained that Granddad never really gave him any credit for anything. His attitude was, ‘If you get knocked down, you just have to get back up again.’ Even though Dad joined the army to please his father and signed up for the boxing team, that still didn’t cut it with Granddad. I think this informed Dad’s whole outlook on life. My mum shared his sense of not fitting in. She was the daughter of an Irishman who left her to be adopted in Bristol. Subsequently, she suffered constantly from feelings of abandonment.
So from a very early age, I realized things weren’t exactly going to be a bed of roses around here and somehow I always knew I was different. That feeling was only heightened by my parents, a couple who always seemed to be at war with the world.
Anyway, after the first few years, my condition slowly improved. But there were still the regular bus journeys every week to Bristol Royal Infirmary, a much-cherished day off school and away from the grey, dull housing estate, as the bus took Mum and me through leafy Fishponds and the excitement of the busy Bristol city centre. As a scrawny five-year-old, I relished the attention from what seemed like angels, the beautiful nurses with their crisp, clean, blue uniforms and tender looks of concern. Then there was the routine examination by the doctor, the cold stethoscope that made me jump every time he placed it on a new part of my chest. ‘Mmmm, mmmm? Mmmmm, Mmmm.’ I thought, ‘Surely I deserve more than “mmmm”? That’s a perfectly decent chest, that is.’
My height was taken, and my weight. Then, after the examination, the doctor would hand me a lollipop from a jar on his desk, smiling as if giving a chimp a treat. You could tell from his face that he thought we were an unfortunate family. As he told me I’d done very well, he’d ruffle my hair with his hand. Then you’d see him secretly check to see if it was now dirty while he gave some quick words of advice to Mum, never to me – after all, I was the one who was ‘ill’.
My illness was never mentioned around our flat. The only indication I got that something was wrong was whenever I decided to run around the lounge. Then Mum would quickly snap at Dad to make me stop. She would argue with Dad, accusing him of not keeping an eye on me. ‘Why?’ I wondered. ‘What could possibly happen?’
But I always knew there was something not quite right with me, and so did all the other kids where we lived. It’s funny, kids can smell a defect a mile off, and whenever there was a game of football on the green at the front of the flats, involving all the kids from around the estate, suspiciously, I would always be the first to be picked for a team, just so they could laugh at my ineptitude.
My brother Wayne would do his best to look after me. ‘No, come on you lot,’ he would remonstrate loudly, pointing meaningfully to his heart. ‘Let him go in goal.’ In response to which there were always lots of disappointed groans. The cruelty of kids knows no bounds.
I loved the England World Cup-winning goalie Gordon Banks and wanted to be just like him. I would dive all over the place. For no reason whatsoever, even when the ball was up the other end, I would go through a whole mock situation where I saved the ball by heroically throwing myself across the goal and tipping the ball round the post to the roar of the crowd. Then, of course, whenever the actual ball would come anywhere near me, I would miss it completely. I’ve always had the same effect on footballs whenever I go near them. They veer away from me as if we were two negative ends of a magnet being forced together.
Whenever the play went up the other end, a couple of the kids from the estate would get bored, and their attention would turn from the game to me. Adhering to the age-old stereotype of bullies picking on the weak, they would first of all check to make sure Wayne was up the other end of the pitch. Then they would find it hilarious to dare me to run around in circles. I would immediately oblige, knowing full well what would happen: my blood pressure would rise and mid-run I would suddenly grind to a halt and collapse, dropping like a stone on the spot, much to the amusement of the two lads.
I used to collapse all the time: on the way to school, during lessons, at break times. I was quite famous for it at school, and it became a bit of a challenge for other kids to see if they could get me to pass out. I did it so often, they called me ‘Rubber Legs’.
I was once dared to go and ask Emma Baker for a kiss. Desperate to please, I jumped at the chance. This was slightly nerve-racking, as she was a girl I fancied very much – well, who didn’t? Emma Baker was the best-looking girl in the whole of Lawrence Weston Junior School, easy, by a long chalk. Her sunny blonde hair danced around her perfectly smooth face and her massive deep-blue eyes were the size of the moon.
Goaded by a handful of giggling boys, I strutted across the playground towards Emma Baker in the extra-large school shorts that Mum had promised I’d grow into. Of course, I secretly relished putting on a bit of a show. I knew it was something they were scared to do, and that made it all the more enjoyable and risky. I was doing OK until I got to the point where I had to say something to her. When I actually stood face to face with Emma Baker, I suddenly came over all nervous. That raised my blood pressure, I felt my legs buckle and bend beneath me, and before I could even pucker up, everything went black. I slumped to the playground floor, not an unusual occurrence and a highly amusing one for the gathered audience of laughing kids. I lay there dreaming of Emma Baker.
Manic energy has been a characteristic of mine ever since. Indeed, it is a trait that has served me very well as a performer. But my whole life, people have constantly advised me to slow down or sit still – something I find impossible. If I ever have to undergo the torture of having to sit still for more than a second, I have a habit of jerking my leg up and down. It’s like an automatic spasm. I refuse to sit still, which is a constant frustration to my wife.
Over the years, she has tried desperately – without success – to get me to stop for just a moment, to take a break from working and relax. She has, thank God, given up on booking any more holidays. That became too stressful and demanding for her because of my inability to sit on a beach or lie by a pool. She would book a holiday to get some rest, but come back a nervous wreck, in serious need of a couple of weeks away. Maybe one day I’ll learn how to relax. But, for now, even thinking about it makes me feel anxious.
It was typical of my younger self that I would instantly agree to do whatever the bigger kids demanded of me. If they’d asked me to swim the Bristol Channel dressed as a sponge with a pocketful of bricks, I would – like some unquestioning nodding dog on the back shelf of a Ford Cortina – have at once assented to the request. When you think everyone is automatically against you, when you’re seen as the school’s resident idiot, you will do anything to be accepted. All the ridiculous things I agreed to do as a kid were in some way connected to this apparently futile quest for self-esteem. The problem was, the more I gave in to their ludicrous demands, the less they respected me. Being an outsider has helped my stand-up no end, but back then it was much more of a hindrance than a help.
I was desperate to be a dude, but was – sadly – always much more of a dork.
Welcome to the world of Lee Evans.
I always felt that our family never fitted in anywhere. When I was growing up, it seemed as if we were living in our own world; you might call it ‘The Evans Bubble’. There was never any money and somehow we always felt cut off from the people around us. Mum and Dad feared the outside world. We always had the sense that it was us against them. We were perpetual outsiders.
When I was a small boy, we lived on the very margins of conventional society. Part of the reason I always felt insecure as a child is that, because of Dad’s peripatetic job, our family was constantly on the move. We rarely stayed long enough for me to feel settled in one place, as we travelled from one town to another. The one location where we did spend a lot of time was Bristol, where I was born.
On my brother Wayne’s lap, in Bristol.
I lived there for eleven years, though there were frequent breaks when we followed Dad to his summer seasons all over the country. I remember, when I was little, we moved into a flat above a doctor’s surgery in the city. At that stage, Dad worked on the bins. We all shared a bedroom that overlooked a bus stop. Dad always had trouble with the curtains. They weren’t hooked on to the rail properly, and so one end would keep falling down. He hated it when that happened because the buses would stop outside, and he always thought the passengers on the top deck could see into our flat.
One morning he was woken by a familiar noise as, one by one, the hooks at the top of the curtain pinged off the rail. Angry and frustrated, Dad climbed out of bed and stomped in a rage over to the window. He picked up the curtain and climbed up on to the windowsill, attempting to hang the curtain back up. We all watched as Dad, mumbling obscenities, tried desperately to re-hang the curtain. He had just stuffed the last piece of curtain up between the rail and the pelmet when he stumbled and, to break his fall, grabbed both curtains, tearing them away from the rail and away from the window. Dad stood there in the window, holding fistfuls of curtain and completely naked, face to face with the passengers on the top deck of a bus that had just stopped outside.
We had no living room, so the doctor would let Dad, Wayne and me, still in my mother’s arms, sit in the waiting room to watch the TV, which was permanently left on for the patients. It was a ridiculous scenario. Here was this family sitting there, Dad stinking to high heaven having worked on the bins all day. We were surrounded by people who had come to see the doctor for all sorts of ailments, and Dad would chat to them all. A man might walk in, coughing and spluttering, and Dad would ask, ‘You all right, mate?’
‘Flu, I think,’ he would reply.
‘Well,’ Dad would advise, ‘it’s probably best you go home, take a couple of aspirin and stay in bed.’
‘You think?’ he’d ask.
‘Well, that’s all he’s going to say,’ Dad would answer, pointing towards the doctor’s door.
Or if Dad was trying to watch the news and someone entered the waiting room and started moaning because he’d hurt his arm, Dad would start tutting and giving him a look. He would put his ear closer to the telly, as if trying to hear what the newsreader was saying. Living there was not really what the doctor ordered.
Uncle John, Auntie Eileen, Granddad, Nan, Wayne, Mum, Dad and me, staring at Dad’s clarinet.
So, not long after, we left the flat above the doctor’s surgery and moved on to the Lawrence Weston Estate, a large housing estate in Avonmouth that was, to say the least, rough and ready. We were the dispossessed, continually ducking and diving in a generally hopeless attempt to make ends meet. We were trying to get by – by any means necessary. Potentially, we were the ASBO generation long before ASBOs were even a twinkle in an authoritarian Home Secretary’s eye.
As kids on that estate, we were like baboons at a safari park. If anyone left anything lying around, we’d have it. But our incessant monkeying about only alienated us further from mainstream society. These days, everyone goes on about middle-class this, middle-class that, but we didn’t know what middle-class people were or what they thought of us because we didn’t know any. There were times when we felt like travellers, moving from place to place without ever putting down roots. We never got any respect – and ever since then I’ve spent my whole life searching for it.
The Lawrence Weston Estate was like the Wild West. It was, for example, the sort of place where arson was an occupational hazard. On one occasion we were awoken in the middle of the night as a fire had started in the airing cupboard of one of the downstairs flats. Mum said it could have been started deliberately as residents would ‘accidentally on purpose’ set fire to their flats – ‘Oh dear, I’ve dropped me match on the floor. I must quickly run to the shops, and by the time I get back the flat will be well cooked. That’s a new lounge before Christmas right there!’
As long as you could prove it was an ‘accident’, then the council would come in and redecorate for you. That was nice if you liked woodchip wallpaper throughout and the whole place decked out in magnolia. But, if you ask me, that’s just asking for snow blindness. And if you brushed up against it, you could end up with a whole armful of splinters.
The residents of the devastated flat would be temporarily re-housed while the council went in to rip out all the fire-damaged items. Then the problems really began – a brimming skip was just asking for trouble. The workmen would fill it with the contents from the flat, and overnight it would all disappear. You’d see the amazement on the council workers’ faces; they filled the skip up with stuff, then when they returned the next day, like magic, it was completely empty. You could see them all scratching their heads and mumbling to each other, ‘I could have sworn I filled this thing up.’
‘Yeah, I saw you do it.’
You would look on in amusement as residents crept out after dark to see if there was anything of value in the skip, before they quickly darted back indoors, holding a slightly worse-for-wear picture or a table. Basically, the goods would be taken from the skip outside a fire-damaged flat and redistributed around different residences on the estate. Either that, or they were removed by the local kids, me included, carried round the back of the sheds and fashioned into ramps for our bikes to go over. A kitchen door on which to practise our Evel Knievel impersonations? Yey-ha!
Nothing was wasted on the Lawrence Weston. It was recycling before that word was even invented. Weeks later, you would call for a friend, his mum would ask if you’d like to come in and wait, and as you entered you’d be surrounded by stuff that you recognized from another flat. It was quite obvious that the picture of Prince Charles hanging on the wall had scorch marks all round the frame. Even Prince Charles looked confused by it all.
Like every close community which had no money, we would all come together on a big night. Someone would bring along illicit booze, someone else would come with fags that had fallen off the back of a lorry. We really knew how to party. It was great way of forgetting the daily grind.
Take New Year’s Eve, always a memorable occasion on the estate. It was the one night when everyone really went for it. The thing to do on that night was to go outside on the stroke of midnight with any implement and make as much noise as possible. All the residents would gather at the entrance to the flats in a small hallway just by two rows of bins. Everyone would grab a bin-lid and wait for the moment. It must have looked like the musical Stomp! just before a performance, with everyone holding bits of garbage, waiting for the off to smash seven bells out of any poor inanimate object. Then, suddenly, you would hear a faint voice wafting from across the estate.
‘Haaaapppy Neeeew Yeeeaaaar …’
It felt great to celebrate. God knows what we were actually celebrating, given that we had bugger-all! Nevertheless, it was good to feel like part of the community. Perhaps that’s what we were celebrating – the fact that we all seemed to be in it together, helping each other whenever we could. It may have been considered by some as a shit-hole of a council estate, but it was our shit-hole of a council estate – and we were going to revel in it together!
And we would go nuts, banging our makeshift instruments and shouting at the top of our voices. Mum would be right in front of me, smashing a bin-lid on the concrete floor with one hand, fag in the other, shouting, ‘Happy New Year!’ I loved it. There was a genuine sense of belonging, of being one big (more or less) happy family, celebrating together. It was a rattling good show.
Then everyone would end up at someone’s flat for a drink and a knees-up. We kids would be either still out on the street or gathered in another room, playing. Even when it got to the early hours of the morning, and I was physically exhausted, I refused to admit I was tired. When I was five or six, I’d be asked constantly if I’d like to go up to our flat to bed, but there was no way – I might miss something! Even after all the other kids had either fallen asleep or collapsed and been carried off to bed by their parents, I’d be sitting quietly in the corner of the kitchen, listening to all the grown-ups chatting. I learned so much about life from just staying there inconspicuously, observing the adult world.
By now, they would be very drunk and at the stage where local grievances began to surface. One particularly memorable New Year’s Eve, I was watching with interest as two neighbours begin to get more and more irritated with each other – nothing major, just the usual ‘You don’t keep your piece of the landing as tidy as everyone else’s’. At that moment, I caught sight of Doreen, another neighbour, a short, hunched, scruffy woman with small, beady eyes and a pointy nose. Doreen liked a drink, I think, and was already unsteady on her feet. She suddenly flung her arms in the air and announced: ‘Bollocks to this. I’m off to the toilet.’
Nobody took any notice, but just carried on arguing. After a minute or two, there was an almighty scream from the direction of the toilet. Everyone stopped what they were doing and listened, a look of concern on their faces.
‘Doreen?’ enquired Mum.
Everyone rushed out of the kitchen. I followed and found them all gathered around the toilet door. ‘Doreen? You all right, love?’
‘Mo, I am MOT aff might!’
‘Have you got a problem in there?’
‘Me teeff aff gom bown the bog.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
‘Well, how can you fee from vere? The frigging boor’s shut.’
‘Then open the door. Silly cow.’
Doreen opened the door with some embarrassment and stood in the entrance, swaying and hanging on to the handle to steady herself. Poor Doreen had lent over the toilet at the same time as she pulled the flush, and her teeth had fallen into the bowl and been whooshed away. Looking at her face, I personally thought they’d jumped ship.
‘Quick!’ shouted Dad, taking charge. Everyone bundled down the stairs and out into what was now daylight, and over to the manhole cover that serviced the flats. Dad lifted the cover as everyone gathered round.
‘You lot,’ he ordered a couple of us kids. ‘Go and pull all the flushes and turn on all the taps.’ We raced off. Beginning at the top flat, we started turning as many taps and pulling as many flushes as we were able. We then ran back downstairs to the waiting crowd at the drain hole.
Doreen emerged from the flats and staggered over, swearing all the way. ‘Buddy peeth! They’re too loose anyway, ssshhhlipping all ober me gob.’ She arrived at the hole and squeezed through the crowd. Looking into the gaping maw, she moaned through her gums, ‘Sssstufff em, they’ll be in the Avon by mow.’
Everybody watched in nervous expectation as the water gushed from the pipe into the T-junction that took the waste and sewage away. ‘I think they might be halfway to Avonmouth by now, Dor …’
Doubt was seeping into the gathered crowd. ‘Put the lid back on,’ said Doreen, disconsolately. People began filing away dejectedly, back into the flats.
Dad picked up the lid and was about to drop it back into place. ‘Wait!’ he shouted. Everyone ran back to look down the hole. And there, poking out of the gushing outlet, were the smiling teeth – or were they in fact grimacing, having been apprehended trying to make good their escape? Either way, they were edging themselves slowly out and about to fall into the T-junction. With no concern for health and safety – we had never heard of those words back then – Dad reached down and snatched them up.
Picking off the debris and wet toilet paper, he handed them to Doreen, who, without hesitating, popped them back into her mouth.
‘Cheers. Now where did I put me drink?’
And, with that, she staggered quite nonchalantly back through the crowd and into the flats, leaving everyone stunned.
That kind of incident was commonplace on the Lawrence Weston. We existed on not much at all. I suppose some people might have seen us as outlaws or even crossed the street to avoid us because of what we looked like. But they didn’t know anything about us – we did our best with what we had. We had no knowledge of any other way of existing. Life may have been tough, but we just got on with it.
And if we picked up a painting of Prince Charles along the way, so much the better!
That feeling of being excluded from the mainstream was drummed into me from birth by my dad, a man who gave the impression that he was constantly at odds with the world. In those days, his favourite gesture was to look up the sky, tut and say, in tones dripping with sarcasm, ‘Thank you very much … for nothing! Someone up there doesn’t like me very much!’
Nan, Granddad, Dad and his brother, John.
At times, he was not an easy person to have around. He was forever fuming about the hand fate had dealt us. He wrestled with the feeling that he would never be accepted and constantly railed against his lowly status. He felt that everyone else was having a fantastic time at a party to which he had not been invited.
The trouble with Dad was that because he was constantly expecting to be attacked, he was forever on his guard. Convinced he was always being persecuted, he carried around an almighty chip on his shoulder. He also lived with an overwhelming fear and loathing of authority. An ex-teddy boy, he would refuse to back down if he believed he was right.
But then, in the blink of an eye, he could be your best mate and a funny, loving father. He was hilarious at times. The problem for Wayne and me was knowing how to tread that tightrope. We could never tell which way Dad was going to turn.
When he wanted to, he could charm the birds off the trees – although there weren’t many birds, or trees for that matter, on the Lawrence Weston. When Wayne and I were small, Dad was still working on the docks. But he gradually started to pick up more paid work in the evenings, singing in pubs. Like the two generations before him, he had the Evans singing gene. When my granddad belted out ‘Land of My Fathers’, tears would fill his eyes. ‘Hear that,’ he would wail, ‘that’s proper music, that is.’
Wayne, me and Granddad.
My great-great auntie was also an amazing singer, who played on the Welsh and English music-hall circuits. Performing was in the Evans blood. Even though it took me an age to twig, I suppose it was really no surprise that I eventually ended up on stage.
Late at night, Dad would come back from his shows, burst into our bedroom clutching a handful of pound notes and regale us with tales of that night’s performance. It may only have been a show in a pub or a club, but to us it seemed like an impossibly glamorous universe that existed only on the telly. At those moments, the glittering world of showbiz briefly entered our grotty flat. We felt that, just temporarily, we were touched by magic. It seemed as if there might be a way out of the drabness of the estate. It felt like there was hope.
The glittering world of showbiz might have seemed light years away from our humble council flat but, strangely, it kept knocking on our front door. The two apparently irreconcilable worlds collided – one dark and desperate, the other seemingly shiny and out of reach for us mere mortals. It may have appeared impossibly remote, but I suppose I was already getting a glimpse of the glitter.
I still vividly remember the first time I saw Dad perform. I must have been six or seven. Wayne and I stood clutching Mum’s hand at the back of a pub as he came on stage. Suddenly – kapow! – he started singing and we were mesmerized. We couldn’t believe how brilliant and how powerful he was onstage. He was like a force of nature, a second Tom Jones. He could blow a crowd away with the sheer potency of his performance. It was as if he was saying to the audience, ‘You’re going to have this and there’s nothing you can do about it. We’re going to blast the roof off!’
Dad appeared to be releasing all his pent-up anger. It hit you in the pit of the stomach with a rare energy. It was electrifying. To see all these people transfixed by Dad was an extraordinary experience and such a departure from the mundanity of our daily lives. His word was law at home, and his magnetic performance only added to the potent myth of his god-like domestic status.
Granddad, Dad and Nan in Rhyl, Wales.
But then, on other days, the mood in our flat could be decidedly dark. Often, reality would bite the morning after a show. There was never enough money and Dad would soon be worrying about bills again. His simmering sense of resentment often boiled over into the most fearful rages. He had a ferocious temper – and unfortunately, probably because of her background, so did Mum. When they went at it like cat and dog with helmets on, Wayne and I would cower in the corner. We wanted to be anywhere other than in the midst of that horrendous row.
When aroused, Dad’s temper would possess his whole body. He was like the Incredible Hulk – although he turned red rather than green. It was like living with an angry traffic light. Then, just as quickly, the rage was gone, leaving him exhausted, wondering what had happened and apologizing, as if the fury had gripped someone else entirely. We lived in a state of constant fear about when he would next blow his top.
Dad’s rages only added to our sense of being outsiders. Because of his insecurities, he would drill us never to ask for anything. Whenever we met someone new, we were taught to say ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and – above all – ‘sorry’. We were never allowed to connect properly with anyone, and that made us feel cut off from the world. That’s why I kept myself to myself as a child, terrified of stepping out of line. I would play the fool, but only to mask my innate shyness. I lived in mortal terror of standing out from the crowd, in case I was doing something wrong. I was a textbook misfit. If there was an instruction booklet on how to be one, I could have written it.
Dad was never far from snapping. When he was at home in Bristol, he was unable to relax properly. He was always irritable, always fretting about where the next meal was coming from. His mind was constantly plagued by anxiety. He would sit in the chair bouncing his leg up and down, biting his nails, moaning or shouting at the telly. In his presence, you were constantly treading on eggshells.
Whenever I was out and about with him as a kid, I always felt things could flare up at any moment. His mood fluctuated wildly. Sometimes Wayne and I walked down the street with him having the time of our life. But it would only take one tiny incident for him to explode. He had no blue touch paper – he was a spontaneously combusting rocket. He would never just let it lie. He was like a Jack Russell; once his teeth sank into you, they were never going to let go. That was the prevailing storm force in the house when we were kids – and it left us feeling bewildered and bedraggled.
Dad in the army, stationed in Bristol.
Dad viewed the world through cynical, angry eyes and had a sardonic way about him that could be hurtful. It was not nice to witness in those days. But, seen from afar, his rages must have seemed quite comical. So people would often be doubled up with laughter at his desperate, self-defeating attempts to gain respect.
You knew when he was about to blow a fuse because his whole body would change. A spasm of irritation would cross his face and he would stretch his neck forward, pulling his shoulders back. Then he would bunch up his fists so tight that his knuckles would turn white. At the same time, his wild glare was magnified by thick glasses that made his eyes look like rolling hubcaps on a clown’s car. The final tell-tale sign he was about to blow was that he would calmly push his glasses back up his nose with his finger. Then – boom! – ‘Right, that’s it!’
And he was off.
Terror would permeate every part of my body at those moments. It wasn’t just Dad’s fury that scared me, but the sounds that always accompanied his eruptions. Hearing Mum desperately screaming his name over and over a few feet away – as if she were the increasingly unhinged corner-man standing behind the ropes at a prize fight – only seemed to inflame his demons even more.
These outbursts would always come out of nothing. A perfectly innocent remark would set Dad off on an expletive-laden excursion into the land of the red mist. It was as if I had pulled the pin from a hand grenade or flicked an angry switch. Nowadays I would find it really funny, but back then it was pretty scary.
If we went anywhere by car, for example, there was always the risk of an explosion. Once behind the wheel, in an instant Dad could metamorphose into a raging bull. As we drove along, we would watch him change from a mild-mannered, hilariously funny man into a shrieking maniac. Mum would sit, terrified, in the passenger’s seat next to him, living in fear of the next flare-up.
I remember on one occasion, some smart-suited commuter driving a flash motor made the terrible mistake of inadvertently cutting Dad up at a roundabout. That was it. Dad was instantaneously livid. His anger went from nought to sixty in about two seconds.
For Dad, that perceived slight was like a gauntlet thrown at his feet – there was no way he’d let anyone get away with that. ‘I’m gonna kick that bloke’s teeth in as soon as he stops,’ he muttered, with barely suppressed rage.
As Wayne and I cringed in terror on the back seat, Dad became consumed by the idea of following this commuter all the way back to his house and having it out with him. After half an hour of frantically pursuing the guy home, we watched on in horror as Dad jumped out of the car, his blood still boiling. The innocent commuter parked up on his drive, only to be confronted by a snarling Dad leaping out of a nearby privet hedge.
‘Who are you?’ the guy asked.
‘Never mind who I am, who’s this?’ Dad replied, holding up his fist threateningly.
The poor, unsuspecting commuter – whose only mistake in twenty-five years’ driving back and forth to work had been unwittingly to cut up this nut case – then received a punch up the pinstripe on his own driveway. Blood dripping from his nose, he was only able to mumble, ‘What was that for?’ as Dad stormed back to our car.
‘Nobody gets away with cutting me up!’ replied the Incredible Hulk – sorry, Dad.
But just ten minutes later, he would be back to being riotously funny. He would spot a helicopter overhead and take on the guise of a policeman, pretending to talk into his crackly radio or swerving on to a grass verge as if in pursuit of a rogue terrorist.
He also had a very loud laugh – you couldn’t sit with him in public because it was too embarrassing. Round the Horne, The Goons, Hancock’s Half-Hour and The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were always on in our house – like they were on a loop – and he would sit in the lounge laughing uproariously. Then, a click of the finger and – boom! – he would explode again.
That was life with Dad. It was always lively, and you never quite knew where you were. It was like living on the slopes of Mount Etna. It was beautiful and sunny at times, but you were constantly living in the shadow of the volcano and you could never quite be sure when it would next erupt and engulf everything in its path. No wonder I grew up a nervous wreck!
The other huge character who bestrode my childhood was my elder brother, Wayne. Although he is only two years older than me, he would always fearlessly spring to my defence – and sometimes get a beating for his troubles from much bigger lads.
Wayne and me in Prestatyn, North Wales.
But we were very different characters. I was constantly on edge and would always think of the worst-case scenario, whereas Wayne was the life and soul of the party – he had much more of a ‘live and let live’ disposition. He has always been a very funny man to be with and would constantly play jokes on me when we were growing up.
For instance, when we were teenagers and Dad was out working the pubs and clubs in the evening, Mum would like to go with him, leaving us alone in the flat. One time, Wayne got hold of a copy of the film The Exorcist. After watching it together, unbeknownst to me, he sneaked into our shared bedroom and loosened the legs of my bed. Then, when I got in that night, my bed shifted violently across the room, just like the girl’s in the film. After the bed finally settled, all I could hear through the darkness was Wayne giggling uncontrollably.
Then there was the old ‘Lee, look out, there’s a car coming!’ gag he used to love to pull. He’d shout that to me every time we crossed an empty road together, ensuring that I would always leap into the air with shock while he would fall about clutching his sides with mirth. It usually had the desired effect.
Feeling flush one day when we were about twelve and ten, Dad bought us a couple of small fishing rods, as well as all the bits and bobs one might need for a spot of angling. Not a massive fan of fishing, I did ask if I could have the money to spend on something else – like a giant bag of sweets – but was outranked by Wayne’s more elevated position. Wayne and I got on pretty well, we always liked to banter and laugh together. But there was never any doubt about who was the senior partner in our relationship.
Early the next morning, the decidedly more excited Wayne and I quietly slipped out of bed and began preparing for the day’s fishing with the newly purchased kit. Wayne readied the rods out in the hall, priming them with floats, hooks and weights. ‘It’ll save messing about when we get there,’ he whispered through gritted teeth.
As Wayne set up the rods, I was ordered to make sarnies for later on in the day. I made Wayne the snack he liked best, cheese and onion crisp sandwiches, and then prepared my own favourite: a thick layer of tomato ketchup between two hefty slices of bread. But I had no intention of waiting till lunchtime to eat it. I was eager to have it for breakfast. Once the intoxicating scent of that ketchup had wafted up my hooter, I just had to start munching on it as soon as possible. There was no thought about what I might have for lunch. Once the olfactory receptors in my nose were stimulated and sending signals to my belly, it was curtains for that ketchup sandwich.
Closing the back door carefully, so as not to wake Mum and Dad, we loaded up for the long walk across the vast field to the reservoir. As usual, I seemed to be the designated packhorse, the one who had somehow ended up having to carry most of the stuff. ‘Come on, hurry up,’ Wayne groaned at me, before disappearing off carrying only his rod. He left me looking like a walking display stand at a fishing show, with a tackle box, two fold-up chairs and a fishing rod all hanging off me. But, at the same time, my hand conveniently slipped into a carrier bag and located my tomato sauce sandwich. There and then I decided I would have a chew on it during the long walk across the field.
I rattled around the flat to where Wayne was already waiting impatiently to cross the road over to the field on the other side. With the beautiful-smelling sandwich bobbing around in front of my face, I staggered along the short front garden path, weighed down with all that stuff. I joined Wayne at the kerbside, and he held his arm across to stop me – Mum and Dad always told him, ‘Whatever you do, look after Lee.’ We looked both ways, up and down the road. Nothing coming. But I wasn’t paying much attention. I was too busy concentrating on taking a bite out of my delicious sandwich, so I left the Green Cross Code to Wayne as we stepped off the kerb.
As we reached the middle of the road, right on cue, Wayne turned to me and did his customary ‘Lee, look out, there’s a car coming!’ joke. As usual, for dramatic effect after shouting, he darted off to the other side of the road and the safety of the pavement. I, of course, by now knew his little game and decided this time I wasn’t going to fall for it – after all, how could I run anyway with all the weight I was carrying? So I stood my ground in the middle of the road, looking at Wayne and triumphantly taking a big bite from my sandwich. With a mouth full of ketchup, I laughed at him, waving the slices of bread in front of my face, scoffing at his little game.
‘Buuuuuttttt … Theeeeerrrree’s aaaaaa caaaaaarrrrr, Leeeeeee …’
BAM!
I had never heard the story of ‘Cry Wolf’.
And I never saw it coming. The car thudded into my side, and everything went black. According to Wayne, I bounced off the front of the vehicle, flew ten feet into the air, completed a full flip, then swallow-dived to the ground. I landed with a crash, like a sack of spuds, on my back twenty feet away from the car.
Wayne looked on, stunned. He was rooted to the spot as the driver, an elderly man with white shoes, grey hair and beard, climbed distraught from his car. Stumbling along the middle of the road towards me, he began crying out, ‘Oh my God, sorry, I wasn’t looking where I was going, I’m so sorry.’ He reached down to where I was lying on my back in the road, surrounded by fishing tackle and with my eyes firmly shut. Suddenly he stopped, pinned to the spot, and his jaw dropped open. Wayne told me later that the poor man’s heart must have skipped a few thumps. My face appeared a terrifying mess, completely soaked in blood.
The man fell to his knees. Crouching over me, he began swaying, moaning and wailing, ‘What have I done? Oh God, look what I’ve done!’
Wayne snapped out of it, ran over and stood looking down at the man knelt over me. Wayne was angry with him. ‘All right, mate, give it a rest. Lee? Lee? You all right, mate?’
I flapped my eyelids open, the blue sky and clouds came into focus and there was a white-haired man hunched over me, raving and rambling on about God and stuff. I looked down and saw that his palms were facing the sky. ‘Oh my God, oh my God, what am I going to do?’ he shouted. For a moment, I thought I must have died and gone to heaven.
I remember thinking, ‘Oh no, if I’m dead, Dad’s going to kill me!’
I began frantically feeling parts of my body, checking to see if I was all in one piece. My face felt cold and wet. I wiped it with the back of my hand. Then I held my hand to my face to take a look.
Blood! Lots of it!
A cold chill ran right through me. My face must be mushed, I thought, that’s what this bloke is moaning about. Alarmed, I sat bolt upright in the road, stared at the man and screamed for my life. The man looked at me for a moment then began screaming back at me. That scared the living daylights out of me, because now I didn’t know who or what he was screaming at. I thought that maybe my face was in an even worse mess than I’d thought, puréed perhaps. So I screamed even louder back at him.
While we yelled at each other there in the road, instinctively I brought my hands back up to my face and felt the cold blood dripping down it. Reacting instantly, I pulled my hands away and looked down at them, drenched in bright red liquid. Wait a moment! Ever so gingerly, I licked the end of my fingers. Ketchup!
I stopped screaming and looked up towards Wayne for help. He had already twigged about the ketchup and smiled knowingly. He dropped his fishing rod to the floor and buried his face in his hands, perhaps out of relief that I was OK, perhaps to hide his giggles. The man looked at Wayne, then at me. Puzzled, his screaming petered out into a small whimper and then fizzled out into silence. He knelt there for a moment, quietly scrutinizing my face. Then his big grey bushy eyebrows locked together in the middle of his forehead and his tiny ice-blue eyes narrowed to the size of pinheads. He dipped one finger into the ketchup covering my hands and licked it. A look of fury suddenly crossed his face, as he realized he’d been duped.
But I didn’t wait around for his reaction. Knowing I would be in trouble, I jumped to my feet and ran home at full speed, leaving a trail of fishing tackle, fold-up chairs and a rod behind me.
Wayne said the old man got even more angry after that, clambering back into his car, ranting on about bloody kids not crossing roads properly and smearing themselves in ketchup and giving decent citizens like him a right old shock.
I never went fishing again.
But for days afterwards, Wayne couldn’t stop laughing about it.
So that was the environment I grew up in. A place full of anger and hardship, of scrapes and accidents, but also of love and laughter. We scrabbled around on the margins of society, but we also had terrific fun – just as long as no one cut Dad up when he was driving.
As Dad slowly became more established in the world of show business, he left his job at the docks and began to travel all over the place for bookings. We went with him, frequently having to move schools before returning once more to Bristol. One year, he was doing a long summer season in Blackpool, and Mum managed to blag Wayne and me into the local school for the last two months of Dad’s run.
Me and Wayne waiting for Dad in Blackpool during the summer season.
As we were hauled up in front of the local education authority in an oak-panelled room, Mum pleaded on our behalf with one of the tweed suits. He sat there, resting his leather elbows on the desk and looking down his nose in dismay at these oiks who had somehow talked their way into his office.
Irene Handl-style, my mum adopted a fake posh accent and said, ‘Ah, for the life of me, I think school places are vital for their education.’
Wayne and I looked at each other thinking, ‘Education? What’s she on about? There’s not a brain cell between us!’ I was eight years old, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
Anyway, we got into a school. The second day I was there, the teacher, Mrs Taylor, set the class a test, but a test on work I had no idea about. As Mrs Taylor gave out the test and all the kids around me fell into silence with eyes down, I just dipped my head so no one could see me, and I began crying.
The next day, Mrs Taylor gave out the results. A scary cross between Ann Widdecombe and Miss Ewell, the terrifying teacher from Please, Sir!