Paul Daniels (7 page)

He pulled the door open and …

NOTHING happened.

Colin wanted to show me a narrow wheelbase bier. This, he explained, was used to wheel the coffin from the hearse in the lane along the narrow churchyard pathways to the grave.

As I pedalled home, my head was full of wild thoughts; was I a reincarnation, for example? Was my former body buried somewhere in this village graveyard and did I have some strange mental connection with my previous life? How else could I have known the lane so well and dreamed my dream?

I got home to the greeting that all young people get when they have been out for hours. ‘And where do you think you’ve been ’til this time?’

I explained that we had been for a ride to a village called Swainby. There was something in the way my mother started to say, ‘Ah, Swainby,’ and I burst in with, ‘We’ve been there. We were on holiday there in a caravan on the bend of a river and Cousin Ada was with us and Dad came in the middle of the night and …’

Mam looked at me in amazement. Apparently, all this had happened while I was still being pushed around in a pram. According to her, I couldn’t possibly have remembered it at all, being that young.

It is my belief that the gliding up the lane came from the view from the pram and, over my head, the grown-ups had talked about the bier and what it was used for. At that age I didn’t understand in detail the word ‘death’ and somehow later in my young life my brain cells had put it together with something horrible and created my nightmare. Ever since this
realisation, I have always tried to talk in a positive manner to babies and young children. We learn at a very early age.

Meanwhile, back at the cinema, I was still showing movies and bobbing out of the tiny trapdoor of a door at the back of the ‘circle’ to watch them from the back row. I was sitting there one night, minding my own business, when a young man several years older than me, reached out and put his hand on my thigh. I never even thought about what happened next, it just happened. I can’t remember being told anything about homosexuality or warned, so what I did was just a reflex action. There was no fear, no excitement, no thought at all, I merely reached out with my left hand, grasped his wrist and with my right hand snapped his little finger. It cracked and he screamed, causing everyone to look round as he ran down the stairs and out of the cinema. Dad came running up the stairs and asked what had happened and I said I didn’t know, the man just ran out. Years later, in a working men’s club after a performance, a drag act sat next to me and ran his spectacles up and down my leg. Again, without thinking, I reached out, took them and broke them. I guess I wasn’t destined to be gay.

Dad decided to learn to drive with the help of my Uncle Eddie. The only problem was that Uncle Eddie had not been taught how to drive a car. His qualifying claim was that he had owned a motorbike sometime in the Twenties and the licensing authorities considered him to have the necessary road experience to enable him to teach others. He was, therefore, the proud owner of one of the new driving licences being issued by the Government. Dad was pleased to surrender his tandem bicycle with sidecar attachment for an old car that he had picked up from a friend for just a few pounds. With manual
dexterity beyond any textbook, Hughie would discover the secret of what was wrong with any part of a car and repair it. This mastery of mechanics was to be something my brother and I relied heavily on in later years, but for now I was content to see him transform the ordinary car into a smooth-running, luxury vehicle. Well, perhaps not luxury, but it was to us. He even re-upholstered it, Mam and him cutting out the foam and leatherette shapes and gluing it all together.

On his first trip, we all gathered outside our house and watched in amazement as Eddie and Hughie ran the coughing, jerking vehicle around the streets as Dad tried to come to terms with the clutch. A few moments later and they reappeared from the opposite direction with smiles and laughter echoing around the tiny saloon. Dad had obviously passed his first lesson, but would still have to wait for an official driving test in order to earn his licence. Dad decided that he needed more time than Uncle Eddie could give him for practising. He sat Mam in the front seat and told her to look as if she could drive. Off they went to Stockton, a nearby town, with Dad driving carefully, red ‘L’ plates mounted front and rear and Mam trying to look serious. These were the days of hand signals by drivers of cars and vans. You want to turn right? You stick your right arm straight out of the vehicle. You want to turn left? You stick your right arm out of the vehicle and make forward circles with your wrist and hand. Well, that’s the theory. If you are a young man in a bit of a state because you shouldn’t be there anyway, with an unqualified companion next to you, maybe you lose control a little. Dad did.

At a left turn in Stockton, Dad’s brain suddenly flipped back to being on the bike and nearly knocked Mam out as he signalled left by sticking his left arm straight out. Poor Mam. Amazingly enough, when it eventually came to his test, he passed first time. After that we were quite posh really. We had a car.

It was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II that started the serious decline of cinema. Television sets became the thing to own. Millions watched her crowning on the new-fangled machines, which could transmit pictures directly into your home. No longer did you have to brave the inconvenience of queuing in the cold and wet to get a good view, a front row seat was instantly available in your living room.

The coronation gave television a kick-start as millions of eager viewers bombarded their local radio shops in an attempt to purchase the new machine of the century. It didn’t seem to matter that the latest technology meant swapping a giant 20ft screen for a tiny 6in of black-and-white fuzziness. People thought they were getting the cinematic experience in their own homes, but they weren’t.

As local cinemas faced a slow, painful death, they did their best to fight back. Big-budget epics and monster movies were full of special effects, while 3-D movies offered one of the craziest gimmicks whereby the audience wore special red and green glasses to see the image burst from the screen. Unfortunately, most people left with a blazing headache. The pumping of scents into the building with ‘smellovision’ never really caught on either. As movie producers used the huge Technicolor screens of Cinemascope and Cinerama to tempt audiences back, it was obvious that the battle was already lost when viewers still preferred the black-and-white pictures of the miniature screen. The Hippodrome hung on for a long time and I can remember an interview in the
Evening Gazette
where my father was quoted as saying that the cowboy movies were keeping the cinema alive. It was a long column interview. The only problem was that no journalist had asked my dad the questions. Nothing changes.

Thanks to Mam’s careful housekeeping we somehow managed to save up enough to buy a TV set of our own. The
new technology was still in its infancy and, as a result, was extremely expensive. I sometimes wonder what personal sacrifices they made in order to purchase one for us.

Our Mullard TV was soon part of the furniture, literally so, as it was designed in such a way that the doors at the front of the cabinet could close, concealing its true identity. Its imposing size symbolised the dominance this new technology was to have in the home. Little did Dad know the consequences that this new medium was to have in the later years of my own life.

Transmissions were intermittent and programmes only aired for a short while – something we should consider reverting to today! It needed a lot of tuning with four huge dials sandwiched between the tiny screen and the metal grill, which protected the loudspeaker. The choice was focus, volume, brightness and contrast, with a huge brown bakelite knob on the back operating as the tuner. Why they designed the tuning system to be on the back of the set, when you needed it on the front to see what you were doing, must be one example of the quirkiness of being a British invention.

The engineer came and tuned it all in using the test charts that were transmitted all day long. He left telling us when the first programmes would be on air. We gathered around, switched it on and sat in hushed silence as the set warmed up. Suddenly, the screen burst into life with none other than a puppet show,
Bill and Ben
, the flowerpot men. They talked in gibberish. As the sounds of ‘flobalob’, ‘Er, Lubbalub’ and ‘little weeeeed’ filled our front room, Dad looked aghast at the screen.

‘All this money I’ve paid out, and they don’t even speak English!’

When the Hippodrome cinema finally waved the white flag, I was humiliated and angry as my dad went from Chief Projectionist to WonderLoaf deliveryman. The cinema that had given thrills and spills to thousands was eventually demolished
and bulldozed to the ground. It was a very sad day for us all.

Once again it was my father’s optimistic approach to life that moved us forward. I admired the way in which Dad never complained and immediately threw himself into his new job – so much so, in fact, that when turning sharply in his delivery van one day, the side door flew open and all his bread and cakes shot out into the road.

My time at Sir William Turner’s Grammar School was also coming to an end. As English had been my main subject at school, it wasn’t surprising that this influenced the direction I took when considering a career. Exams had never bothered me much and I managed to get five ‘O’-levels which was pretty good considering I had a kidney infection that intermittently kept me off school during the latter years of my education.

The opportunities for work seemed endless; perhaps the Grammar school grind really had paid off. One problem seemed to be which path to choose, which way should I go? Mum and Dad never pressurised me and, being a ‘werks’-based society, nothing artistic was ever considered. The local
Evening Gazette
offered me a job as a junior reporter on the basis of my school reports regarding my ability in English; a firm of accountants offered me a place as an articled clerk; a solicitors department considered me to be a suitable recruit; and as my technical drawings at school were regarded as high quality, a draughtsman’s role was proposed down at Smith’s Dock, and this was considered the ‘bee’s knees’ of an opportunity.

To be honest, I wasn’t interested in any of them. I wanted to be a magician. Magic was all that I was interested in, wanted to read about or do. For a while I considered going on to teacher training college to try to become a woodwork teacher. Instead of getting the boys to make furniture, I wondered whether I could get them to make tricks, even illusions. After thinking about all the options, I decided that becoming a teacher would have been
too great a financial burden on my parents. So for no other reason than because it was just around the corner and I could come home for lunch, I took a job at the local council offices.

It was about this time that I experienced my first kiss. A gang of us from Coatham used to hang around South Bank together and some girls from the local girls school used to join us. We would sit for hours on the wall of another local school and talk the evenings away. I can’t remember sex being a topic of conversation and, looking back from this great distance, I wonder what the devil we did talk about. Cars and bikes, I guess.

My big moment came after going to the Empire cinema, also in South Bank. The drama took place in the back alley behind Munby Street near the town centre and, as we walked hand in hand in the darkness, she made it obvious that she wanted me to kiss her. We had sat for a couple of hours with my arm around her on the back row, but I hadn’t plucked up the courage to do it then. Even having seen a great deal of osculation in the movies, I still had a bit of a hang-up about the art of joining two lips together, for I couldn’t figure out what happened to your nose. It’s further forward from your lips, so how could your lips meet when her nose would touch my nose and stop us moving any closer? Pondering the puzzle of being a double-nose width away from kissing used to keep me awake for hours.

The chance to kiss Pauline was a surprise, as she was a good friend and nothing more as far as I was concerned. As I tilted my face to the left so did she. I turned my head to the right and so did she. It was like meeting someone in the street who you can’t get past. Eventually I took her by the head, kissed her on the lips and waited for the sparks to arrive. They didn’t and I wondered what all the fuss had been about. Seeing a kiss on film with the orchestra and strings playing in the background, accompanied by heavy breathing and an audience in tears, I was somehow expecting more.

Once the deed was done we tried it a couple more times but it did nothing for me at all. We went home. Maybe I was with the wrong girl. At the time I was carrying a big torch for a girl called Irene Hewitt who was a member of the youth club. Madly keen on Irene, I would watch her avidly as, together with her friend Mandy, they would sing at the youth club concerts that I did. Miss Hewitt was extremely voluptuous and could easily have led me astray. In my dreams she did, many times, but in reality I obviously didn’t stand a chance.

In an age that talked openly about death, but never sex, the facts of life had never been properly explained to me. Today, it’s the other way round, but when I was 16 I had to unearth the meaning of life for myself. It’s extraordinary to consider the fact that I seemed to be a late-developer as far as my knowledge went, but in those days children had no real chance to grasp the truth. Sex lessons at school were remarkably bland and made no sense at all. Nudie magazines like
Health and Efficiency
had all the pictures of genitals removed. ‘Polished’ flesh remained where things were supposed to be.

The confusion of pre-puberty led me to experience a recurring erotic nightmare. Me and my nightmares! Having been told at school that the man simply placed his penis inside the woman, without giving us any other important details, my dream was of a lady (faceless) who would lie on the bed patiently waiting with her feet stuck up in the air. It must have been because I was so good at woodwork that in my vision a perfectly drilled, round hole was centred between her legs – an inch-and-a-half diameter of turned wood awaited the entrance of her man. I knew exactly where it was, but didn’t know what it was. And for certain I didn’t know what to do with it!