David Jason: My Life (7 page)

But this was where I cut my teeth – the first stages of my acting journey. I was in the Monday-night juniors, but I was very soon starting to get called over into the senior group, which met on Wednesdays and Fridays. There was a consensus that I was useful – to the point where I even got headhunted, as it were, by another local amateur group called the Manor Players. They performed out of a church hall in Church End, Finchley. One evening, I was back from work, stripped to the waist and washing at the basin in the kitchen, when there was a knock at the door. I casually opened it, still half naked, to be confronted by two tall, imposing gentlemen, one of them with a drooping moustache. I assumed I must have been in trouble with the police again, but in fact it was Chris Webb from the Manor
Players, wanting to know if he could have a word. I put a shirt on and took them into the front room, where they explained they were looking for someone who could play a teenager in a production of
Escapade
, a very witty play by Roger MacDougall, who wrote many of the Ealing Comedy films.

And that was the play for which I received my first review. The notice in question was under the byline of W. H. Gelder, the theatre critic of the
Barnet and Finchley Press
, whose reputation went terrifyingly before him. Gelder clearly fancied himself the Butcher of Barnet and struck terror into local actors’ hearts. He was a tough man to please and wasn’t inclined to go easy on a production just because it was amateur and contained teenagers. Indeed, the sentence ‘Gelder’s in’, passed around backstage before curtain-up on an opening night, was enough to cause buttocks to clench and voices to rise by half an octave, right across a cast.

Anyway, Gelder, this choosy arbiter of dramatic taste in the north-west London area, somehow found it in his heart on this occasion to commend me. All these years later, obviously, I don’t recall exactly what he wrote, but it was something along the lines of how ‘David White looked like a young James Cagney and played, though only 16, with the ease of a born actor’. (OK. That’s exactly what he wrote.)

A young James Cagney? I was ready to accept the comparison. The ease of a born actor? I didn’t object to that bit, either, though I did, eventually, when I had finished glowing, laugh it off. It seemed like such an unlikely idea.

I was co-opted into the senior group of the Incogs permanently after that and, from then on, was expected to play across a broad range. And I was growing in confidence, warming to this business of finding characters to hide behind – coming to know the pleasure of losing yourself in a role. Amateur dramatics offered me an opportunity to escape which I increasingly found myself hurrying towards.

As for the abundant girls – well, suffice to say that I found myself stepping out with three members of the Incognito Group, on various occasions, in those early years. Innocently and demurely, of course, as the times dictated: a date at the pictures; possibly an arm around the shoulder (a painfully incremental process which, in the planning and nervous execution, could consume as much as seventy minutes of a ninety-minute feature); maybe some hand-holding on the way home; perhaps, if the stars and the planets aligned, as sometimes they did, a kiss goodnight. So, amateur dramatics delivered on that promise, as well.

Incidentally, the Incognito Players are still in operation – thriving, in fact – with a membership of around 130 actors and staging six week-long productions per year. Furthermore, the place has proper toilets now and in 2010 the building even acquired a foyer. Because of my connection with the place, they asked me a few years ago to become a patron, which I was pleased and proud to do.

And they’re still setting the bar sensationally high. Not that long ago I went along to see a production of
Equus
– a play which famously calls on its male lead to be uncompromisingly naked for a while. And, of course, if you’re in the front row at an Incog production, even these days, you’re very tight in on the action … so … well, what can I say? It practically dipped in your box of Maltesers as he walked around.

I’m not sure Micky Weedon or I would have been on for that – and certainly not on our first Monday night. But well done to the lad in question. And it shows you how far amateur theatre has come since my day.

* * *

I
LEFT SCHOOL
at fifteen with no idea what I wanted to do for the rest of my life – or, really, with any clear concept of ‘the
rest of my life’. That’s not a notion a fifteen-year-old boy can very easily get his head around. At that age, it’s rare that you find yourself thinking, on any given morning, much further ahead than lunchtime.

However, one thing I thought I knew was that my options were limited. In the world I came from, your aspirations weren’t likely to be grand. We were never encouraged to aspire. Maybe it’s different now. But I don’t remember anyone at my school in 1955, as I headed out of the gate for the last time, saying to me, ‘White, the world and all its wonders are out there: which glorious bit of it are you going to try and grab a hold of?’ The assumption was, pretty flatly, that the world and all its wonders weren’t out there. Not for you. So you’d get yourself a decent menial job and that would be that.

True, my brother Arthur, seven years ahead of me, had somewhat flown in the face of convention. He had started off straightforwardly enough, by training, in the family tradition, as a butcher when he left school. But then, in 1951, when he was eighteen, he was called up for his statutory two-year period of national service. (I was to escape this duty. The scheme was winding down by the time I was old enough and was halted altogether in 1960, so, alas, the British armed forces were never to witness what I could have brought to the battlefield.) Arthur soon discovered that, during national service, you were encouraged to develop interests – perhaps because, with the war being over, they didn’t know quite what else to do with you. So, based in Colchester, he had begun to act, taking up with the repertory company there – quite casually at first, and then more seriously, to the extent that, when he emerged, in 1953, he had resolved to seek himself a place at drama school.

I still vividly recall a weekend, during his service, that he came home from Colchester in the company of a beautifully dressed, immaculately coiffed actress with whom he was friendly at the time. She sat on the sofa at Lodge Lane, appearing to
fill the room with her poise and sophistication, while my father did his best not to look at her too closely and only narrowly failed.

Anyway, just because my older brother had broken the shackles and cracked open the door to another, more colourful world, it didn’t automatically follow that I could do the same. Quite the opposite, in fact, on the theory of lightning and its well-known general reluctance to alight twice in the same location.

I duly reported to the jobcentre. There I queued up at a window, filled out a form, and then sat around waiting for someone to call ‘Next’. At which point I was summoned through to a featureless little grey-painted room and given a preliminary interview. The whole set-up felt fantastically, bowel-liquidisingly intimidating to me. ‘What kind of thing do you have in mind for yourself?’ I was asked. To which my less than helpful answer was, ‘I don’t know.’ The only previous work experience I could claim was a brief spell at fourteen as a grocery delivery boy for the Victor Value supermarket on the high street at the top of our road. Hours: two evenings per week, 4.30 p.m.–6.30 p.m., and Saturday mornings. Pay: almost nothing, but if you were lucky you might get a threepenny-bit tip from the housewife you delivered to. Skills: well, those front-loaded delivery bicycles are quite tough to handle, you know, especially if the carrier at the front is stacked so high that the tyre is squeezed down to the rim. (Little did I know that the ability to handle a delivery bike would serve me well thirty years later in a television series.)

Still, it emerged, in the course of this hobbled conversation at the jobcentre, that I liked mechanical things and that I was quite practical. (Did I already mention in these pages the magazine rack that I made in woodwork at Northside Secondary Modern, the joints of which continue to be crisp and lock-tight to this day?) And, after some riffling of index cards on the
part of my interviewer, it further emerged that they had an opening in a garage. And not just the door.

Popes Garage, to be specific, on Popes Drive, Finchley. I was employed as the ‘boy’ – which is to say, essentially, that I made the tea. But occasionally they’d let me get underneath the cars and be a proper grease monkey and do some fixing. The business was run by a bunch of London-born brothers, and the one in charge of the workshop was known to us as Mr Len – a right hard nut, it seemed to me, although that might have had as much to do with my own continuing nervousness in front of anyone who represented authority.

Even so, at first I was happy enough in my new employment and actually rather enjoying myself because I was learning about mechanical things. My fellow mechanics – all older, all taller – were largely welcoming too, although I paid a price for trying to impress them during one of the lunchtime games of football that were played with a tennis ball in the yard between the garages and workshops. All down one side of the improvised pitch was a tall stack of corrugated iron. Demonstrating the tactical acumen and shrewd footballing brain that has served me so well during my long years in the game (or would have done, if I had ever really played football, which I haven’t), I thought that if I could take the ball down the gap between the corrugated iron and the garage wall (and I was sure I was small enough to do so), I would be able to pop out at the other end and score before anyone had really figured out what I was doing.

It worked a treat. The tennis ball barely left my feet as I burrowed down the narrow passageway, suddenly invisible to teammates and opponents alike. Squeezing out at the other end of the stack, I moved inside and deftly side-footed the ball into the far corner beyond the goalkeeper’s despairing dive. And then, with a loud cry of ‘Yeesss!’, I turned to celebrate both the goal and my extreme cunning with my no doubt enormously grateful teammates.

Except that everyone in the yard was staring at me in open-mouthed horror – or, more particularly, staring at the river of blood flowing from the head wound I had just unknowingly sustained by clonking my temple against the sharp edge of a sheet of corrugated iron at the far end of the stack. Off I went to the hospital for stitches – yet again. I think I probably only needed to go one more time to qualify for my own set of needles.

Still, thirty-seven years later, this latest scar would outdo all the other ones by coming to star in its own television series. In 1992 I began playing Inspector Frost in the series
A Touch of Frost
for ITV. In the books by R. D. Wingfield, on which the series was based, Frost is given to fiddling ruminatively with a scar on his cheek, a wound sustained in a gunshot incident. It was a little character detail that we were keen to use. But instead of getting make-up to apply a fake cheek scar, I pointed out that I might as well save time and effort and use the real one by my eye. So it came in handy in the end.

Blood loss and permanent disfigurement aside, my early days at the garage passed happily enough. I’d jump on my push bike at Lodge Lane in the morning and set off to work with a perfectly light heart. And come the end of the week, I’d return home with some money – give a bit to my mother for my ‘keep’, set some to one side for the Post Office savings account, and have the remainder for going out with. For years, I had been watching my dad come home from work on payday and hand over the brown paper envelope with his money in it. And my mother would take out the housekeeping, then the bit that was going towards the holiday savings, and then the little bit that was set aside for emergencies, and hand the rest back to my dad for his beer money. I felt some pride in being able to do the same. (And that little scene stayed with me. In later days, when I became an actor, I was used to setting money aside. It had
become a discipline with me, so, unlike certain of my less fortunate brethren, I was never caught out when the taxman called.)

So my contentedness at Popes and in the world of paid labour endured for a couple of months. But then winter came, as winter will. The temperature in Popes’ workshop now dropped to somewhere around the level of a beach on the Orkneys in mid-January. There were a couple of square electrical heaters mounted high on the wall, which worked as hard as they could but really only ended up providing a thin layer of warmth for the ceiling. The big wooden front doors were closed against the elements, but there was a gap underneath them which was probably big enough to squeeze a cat through, if you pushed it hard enough. Accordingly, as you lay flat on your back under a car, getting dripped on by oil or water, the wind would come howling through that gap and find its way unerringly up the trouser legs of your overalls. I’m not sure that even Captain Oates would have been ready to withstand discomfort at these levels for very long. And call me a fair-weather mechanic but it entirely sapped my enthusiasm for the job.

When the winter came to an end, Mr Len came in to see me and offered to upgrade me from garage boy to apprentice mechanic – a five-year deal, at the end of which I’d be fully qualified and ready to crawl under any car that would have me. I thanked him for the offer and asked for a short period in which to think about it. Back home, I told my parents, and they were delighted: I’d got a job and the chance to acquire a set of skills – I was sorted for life. Pats on the back all round.

So when I told them that I wasn’t going to accept Mr Len’s offer, they weren’t just disappointed, they were completely baffled. My mother, in particular, couldn’t get her head around it at all, and spent a long time trying to get me to see sense.
But I resisted. I don’t quite know where I found the certainty to do so. It wasn’t like me at that time to be so sure of myself and swim against the tide – I was quite timid in those years and tended to do as I was told. But I just knew I couldn’t spend five years working like that. And it was mostly the memory of that long winter in the Arctic-cold workshop that did it for me. I declined Mr Len’s offer, and was back at square one.