Semi-Detached (15 page)

It was
later made clear that overnight accommodation was not part of the service.
When, the following year, I was given a bigger role in the school play, as Lady
Macbeth, a coded message must have been passed to Mr Baron, the head of
English. In mid-rehearsal, I was suddenly demoted to third witch. That
twelve-mile journey was the beginning of the end of my school theatrical
career.

‘I
never intended to be an actor anyway.

This
wasn’t strictly true. I certainly intended to be an actor at the age of six,
when I wrote in my big, childish hand (which, rather irritatingly, I still
have) that I would like to grow up to be Charlie Drake. This was after a
Christmas trip to the Palladium to see him say ‘Hello, my darlings’ to a row of
dancing green monsters from Mars. To be honest I would have been perfectly
interested in being one of the dancing green monsters too.

Kenneth
Tynan observed that, in his experience, far from coming from harsh backgrounds,
actors generally had supportive, applauding families and were ‘brought up to be
the centre of attention’. Geraldine James, who is a proper actor, disputed
this. She told me that she had become an actor to hide. Suddenly she was given
the right words to say.

She was
able to disappear and become someone else. That’s why Geraldine is such a
wonderful actor. Me, I’m one of Tynan’s babies. I just liked showing off. I was
just as pleased to win the junior elocution prize (well, it was Essex) or tell
elephant jokes to some old ladies’ club (‘How many elephants can you get in a
mini?’) as to gurn and gibber as Scrooge in Mrs Wiltshire’s lavish production
of
A Christmas Carol
at
Epping Junior School. (I had to fall
asleep convincingly, have my dreams and wear a funny hat.)

From an
early age, I had decided it would be fun to be a famous actor. I liked the
frisson that ran through Hartland Road when we discovered that the people up
the end had an uncle who was the man who was Maigret on the telly: Rupert
Davies. The grown-ups earnestly discussed his career dilemmas. ‘He had become
so famous for that role that he was “type-cast”,’ they said knowingly. They
certainly never talked about Harry Kopelman, my father’s colleague at the
hospital, like that.

I
equated acting with riches, prestige and esteem. My father watched Roger Moore
on the telly and told me that if I wanted to be a proper actor I would have to
be able to raise one eyebrow, so I went back to the bathroom mirror and, by
physically holding down one half of my face, perfected the trick of letting the
other half rise in an all-purpose, querulous tic of mystery. I can still do it,
even though I probably shouldn’t.

But
unlike today’s proper actor friends, who joined amateur troupes and were taken
frequently to the theatre, the Rhys Joneses were not a cultural family. We had
our own children’s books, but my father was a typical doctor. He read his BMJ
journal and his boating magazines and kept vast hoards of both stashed about
the house. He had a shelf of medical text books, but they weren’t much help,
although there was one dusty volume that my friends and I discovered in the
garage:
An Introduction to Forensic
Science. The local gangs used to
make appointments to open the book at a black and white photograph of ‘the baby
half-eaten by rats’.

I read
everything knocking about, including a complete set of Arthur Mee’s
Children’s
Encyclopaedia,
with its coloured plates of the flags of all nations, and
its ‘Ten Small Tales to Treasure’, and its grainy photographs of statues of
worthy exemplars, like Nurse Cavell. Having gobbled up my own approved
literature (C. S. Lewis and Arthur Ransome), I was even discovered by my
father, one rainy afternoon, leafing through our
Complete Works of
Shakespeare.
What
pater’s heart would not lift with pride? I
apparently ruined it for him when he found me on the same rug the following day
stuck into
The Green Lantern.
I read to combat tedium.

Alice
Thomas Ellis pointed out that childhood is full of long periods of utter
boredom. But that was then. Not any more. My own children were bombarded with
more visual spew in the first three years of their existence than we had
experienced by the time we were twenty.

Television
was a novelty for us. It arrived in our house as a flickering fuzz the size of
a paperback, and must have taken at least five minutes to dominate our lives.
But we were only ever allowed to watch the BBC, and the BBC, of course, had
only one channel. Even then, the class-based quarantine was extended to certain
specific programmes. My father refused to allow us, under any circumstances, to
watch the blameless
Dr Kildare.
He resented the way that his patients
arrived suffering imaginary symptoms and demanding instant miracle cures.

Today
by jumping channels, any sentient nine-year-old can watch programmes
deliberately aimed at their tastes from six in the morning until, well, six the
following morning.

But in
the early sixties, television went grown-up after
Muffin the Mule, Blue
Peter
and
Doctor Who
(which was considered so complicated that the
first episode had to be shown all over again the following week). If we wanted
to stay up late, we had to watch
Panorama.
There was nothing else on. My
kids just turn over and carry on watching more exciting adventures of real
people being moronic. We only had one telly and no remote control, and usually
a supervisor in the shape of my father snoring in ‘his’ chair, a brown-covered
wing-arm chair, only otherwise allowed to be occupied by the dog, Harold.

By the
age of eleven, however, I had an hour and a half’s homework a night, which, if
of a
scientific nature, would take me three. I would sit scowling at
equations, tormented by my father’s gibbon-like laugh from below, as he howled
at
Dad’s Army
or
Steptoe
in the sitting room. I couldn’t see him,
nose up, his belly shaking, his head thrown back, but I could certainly hear
him: a high, whistling ‘hee-hee’, followed by a prolonged, hooting whoop. Bah.
Sometimes I would creep down to find out what had been so funny and hang about
until I was told to get on with my homework again, and then his tormenting
braying would start all over. He loved television comedy: Morecambe and Wise,
Alf Garnett, Hancock,
The Frost Report.
Eventually we both sat down in
front of
Monty Python.
He encouraged me to watch it, in fact. My mother
resolutely refused to find it funny. It became a thing for us. Even if he never
read the
TLS
my father had an intelligent bloke’s judgement. How could
the man who played the Dame in the hospital panto not have?

Cultural
education was pretty much left to ‘Aunty’ Gwen Powell, my brisk, no-nonsense
godmother and a friend of my parents from their early years. Or at least, she
felt it was.

Poor
Gwen, she was as concerned about the moral responsibilities of art as my
father was indifferent to them.

The
vicar at her funeral, where I embarrassed everyone by sobbing in the pulpit
when I was supposed to be reading the lesson, told me that, on Remembrance
Day, all the veterans in the village had been taken aback to see Gwen, the
fiery old lady from the old people’s home, marching up to the church gate,
straight-backed and bearing the weight of a massive display of medals on her
bosom. Gwen had been a matron on hospital ships in the Atlantic convoys. She
was a formidable woman.

She
asked me in her slightly imperious way one evening, as we left for dinner after
I had been performing at the Lyric Hammersmith, whether I was short of money.

‘No,
not particularly,’ I replied.

‘So you
don’t
have
to advertise cat food, then?’

As well
as improving books on birthdays, she took me to art galleries and to St Fagan’s
Museum near Cardiff, to Cambridge (long before I understood the concept of
going to study there), to archaeological sites and to the theatre. We went
together to Stratford to see David Warner play Hamlet. Gwen encouraged me to
think I could be an actor.

David
Harris had an indirect effect as well. David Harris Senior was our dentist.
David Harris Junior was my bicycling friend. They lived in a modern house like
the ones in American films, built in an immature wood near Harlow and matching
their American family structure with big plate-glass windows and white sofas
smelling like the surgery: vaguely clean and antiseptic. They were a spare
family too. June, the mother, had a slightly vague, pop-eyed expression, and
her son shared it. Dad was equally reserved but more direct. There was always a
slight dour playfulness in his eyes, as if the only proper reaction to young
boys was one of quizzical wariness. But then adults have to do something. Dr
Kopelman was a barker — head back for pompous generalizing. Dr Hayden was a
stooper — cautiously playful and one of the boys. I am abrupt,
brook-no-nonsense. I can’t help it. Adult males struggle to. retain control
with adolescents. We all do it. But Mr Harris was ‘Go on, impress me, you
garrulous twerp,’ though he would never have said anything as coherent. Most of
the time, he seemed to tick along slowly, as if his whole metabolism had been
slowed down by the frozen process of dentistry.

He was
one of our family’s new friends when we first got to Harlow, a fellow health
professional. On one visit, in my early teens, after he had counted off the
teeth and poked around with a broad, flat-ended finger in his American— looking
surgery, in what must -have been a specially planned, dental surgery zone of
Harlow New Town, he summoned my mother to take a look. I had a crowded mouth,
he explained, in his slow non-committal manner. He pointed to my canines, two
sharp teeth. They had detached themselves from the top row and wandered off to
some higher point on my gums, one on either side. I also had an under-hung jaw,
inherited from her, apparently. The combination of the two meant I looked like
a Cro-Magnon Dracula. I rather liked it, but
it
was decided that I
should have orthodontic treatment to fix my bite.

This
had its plusses. Every three months I would take an afternoon off from my big
school. My mother would accompany me on the Central Line tube: Epping, Theydon
Bois, Debden (where they made the banknotes) Loughton, Woodford, South
Woodford. I have to stop there. Once I could- do the lot — at least as far as
Oxford Circus, including Leytonstone, Snaresbrook, Stratford, Liverpool Street
and Tottenham Court Road. If there were singularities connected with any of
these places I never knew them. They were just stops along the jiggling way,
through the immense outskirts of London — miles of flat-backed yellow houses,
linked by the skein of pipes that runs alongside the track on posts, until Stratford.
Then the Underground finally lived up to its name and plunged into the
darkness, and the pipes looped and soared alongside in the dirty tunnel,
sometimes up six feet, sometimes dropping down to run alongside the windows —
always snake-like and always caked with what must surely be ‘grime’.

For a
twelve-year-old, central London meant the fixed determination of the anonymous
crowd, bustling off the carriage with practised purposefulness, knowing which
exit to take, which side of the escalator to stand, where to stick their
ticket, when to get up for the stop. Even then, I could sense the collective
pride in being a skilled native Underground traveller and I sought to emulate
it. After the long, boring ride through the deserted midday platforms, the
stations in the black heart of the city were always exciting warrens of
expectation. The platforms had sudden gusts of hot wind blowing up them in
front of hidden trains. There were thrilling advertisements for corsets and
brassières all up the escalators and brightly lit heel and key bars in the
concourses. All of them seemed to be comprehensively ignored by the passengers
hurrying up to the light. London was far from being a meaningless jumble. We
very rarely went there by any means other than the tube, and its uniform,
slightly out-of-date spirit linked everything. London
was
the clanking
mahogany doors of the lift, the big red sixpence signs on the blue ticket
machines, the tiled octagonal ticket spaces, the wrought-iron bridges and white
on dark blue station names, whether we were emerging in Westbourne Grove for
skating at the Queens Ice Rink or in South Kensington for the museums or
Holborn for the Eastman Dental Hospital.

My
teeth were fixed up in this giant shop-floor of dentistry on the Gray’s Inn Road
off to the north of High Holborn. Dozens of dental chairs were arranged in
ranks. It seemed a factory of pain. The pinkish consultant came and played
around with a plaster cast of my gnashers, before leading the inspection of the
real thing. It was a status deformity. All these people may have been focused
on my teeth, but I was definitely the centre of attention. They had clearly
never seen anything like it. Then the consultant paraded on, and my jaws were
left in the hands of supernumeraries.

Orthodontic
treatment seemed to be based on the most rudimentary of medical principles.
Since my teeth were crooked they would be yanked into line. To make room, a
couple of back teeth would be heaved out first. The straightforward physical
effect was achieved through the most complex of in-mouth engineering. The
remaining teeth were encased in sheaths of metal and fixed up with hooks and
wires. I wore a plate, made of the same startling shiny pink plastic as my
grandfather’s dentures, which slotted around my upper teeth and rested up
against my palate, where it collected a gooey mat of whatever I ate. After
meals I was supposed to take it out and wash
it,
but I was twelve. If I
could be bothered, or if the food was particularly suety or even tasty, I would
lever the thing off the roof of my mouth and suck the residue off. Otherwise,
it stayed in and hurt. It hurt because
it
was designed to force my teeth
into new positions. I was given plastic bags of minute elastic bands. One end
of the rubber was attached to a hook on the back of my plate and the other
around a projection sticking out of the front of my teeth. These projections
sometimes caught in the inner flesh of my cheeks, but were supposed to act as a
grappling hook for a steady, medieval, rack-like torture of the elastic,
pulling the teeth into a new angle in their sockets.