Out of the Woods But Not Over the Hill (4 page)

I loved to listen to her tales and I had an inkling early on that some were just a little far-fetched. I remember once she told me of when a fellow parishioner went on a pilgrimage to Rome with the Union of Catholic Mothers. In St Peter's Square, amidst the throng, the woman was excited to hear from her friend that His Holiness himself would soon be making an appearance on his balcony to give his blessing. At that very moment, the Pope appeared. The woman was said to have remarked to her companion: ‘Oh, speak of the devil.'

Grandma Mullarkey opened a door in my early childhood and changed my life for the better and, when she died, she left a great gap. When I was sixteen, I accompanied my mother to Doncaster Gate hospital where my grandmother, aged 81, was dying of stomach cancer. She told me not to look so miserable. ‘Remember,' she said, ‘a smile will gain you ten years of life.' She died the following day, clutching her rosary beads.

Penny for the Guy

As a youngster I looked forward to Bonfire Night with great anticipation. My friends and I would scavenge for combustible material and gradually build the pyramid of wood and old carpets, rags and cardboard boxes, on the allotment at the back of my house. We would keep a watchful eye on our construction, for other boys were known to steal what others had spent weeks collecting. The evening before the big night, we would keep vigil until we were summoned indoors by our parents. My father agreed to become a sentry when I had gone to bed.

We would make a Guy out of old clothes, stuff screwed up paper in the arms and legs, and paint a face on a piece of cardboard. He would be wheeled through the streets on a trolley made of pram wheels and two planks, and we would ask passers-by: ‘Penny for the Guy?' With the money we collected, we would buy fireworks. Recently, I read about the two young lads with their Guy who had been moved on by the police for begging. It's a funny old world.

In October, fireworks were for sale at the newsagents and could be freely bought by children. I would buy a thin rectangular box, on the front of which, in garish reds and blues, was the caption, ‘Light up the Sky with Standard Fireworks'. This small collection would be added to over the coming weeks, up to the Fifth of November. There would be Catherine wheels, blockbusters, squibs, jumping jacks, traffic lights, penny bangers, Roman candles, golden fountains, silver rain and rockets in brightly coloured cardboard tubes, with a cone on the top and a thin wooden stick down the side.

I remember my first Bonfire Night vividly, and it was not a happy memory. I must have been six or seven at the time, and walked from home with my father on a cold, clear night, with the air smelling of woodsmoke. We arrived at Herringthorpe Playing Fields in Rotherham to find crowds of people gathered around the great wigwam-shaped stack of wood. My father sat me high on his shoulders, and I watched the dancing flames and the red sparks spitting in the air. It was magical. Fireworks banged and rockets lit up the black sky, showering bright colours, and the fire was lit. My face burned with the heat. And then I saw him – the figure sitting on the top of the bonfire. He was forlorn and misshapen, and dressed in old clothes with a floppy hat perched on his head. I screamed and screamed.

‘There's a man on top!' I cried. ‘A man in the fire!'

Everyone around me laughed.

‘It's just a Guy,' my father told me. ‘He's made of rags and cardboard. He's not real.'

But I was sad and scared to see those clinging fingers of fire scorch the stuffed body, cracking the arms and swallowing up that wide-eyed pitiful face.

To this day, I still feel uneasy at the sight of a human form, albeit a dummy, placed on the top of a burning bonfire. I am not against Bonfire Night; it is an enjoyable occasion particularly for children, though I guess that the light-hearted festivities have little connection in most people's minds to the fanatical men who plotted the downfall of the Government in 1605. It is just that I do not like to see that burning figure on the top.

You might guess then that I am not that keen on the famous Bonfire Night celebrations in Lewes in East Sussex, where figures of the infamous – or just the famous – are set alight each year. In 1994, effigies included Margaret Thatcher, John Major on a dinosaur, taken from the film Jurassic Park, and the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, in the week of the unpopular Criminal Justice Bill, as well as a Guy Fawkes. On one bonfire, an effigy of the Pope is burnt annually.

I have an ally in a good friend of mine, who is a former scholar of St Peter's School, York, the
alma mater
of the most notorious of the powder treason conspirators – Guy Fawkes himself. The school, he tells me, retains the long tradition of interest in, and even has a certain affection for, their best-known former pupil, who was once tactfully described by a head boy at a school speech day as ‘not exactly a role model'.

I guess my old history master, Theodore Firth, shared this fondness for his fellow Yorkshireman. I found my old history book the other day and have to say that Guy Fawkes doesn't sound, from the notes I took from the blackboard, like the villain most people think he was.

Guy Fawkes was, without question, a courageous, charismatic, if misguided, man, of impressive appearance. Slender, muscular and handsome, with long red hair, a full moustache and a bushy beard, he was a distinguished soldier and a good-humoured companion. He was also well read, intelligent and interested in discussion and debate. A fanatic he may have been, but he was exceptionally brave and capable of amazing stamina and endurance. He died a horrible death, which he faced bravely, after terrible torture on the rack.

So, next Bonfire Night I shall pop a penny or two for the Guy in the tin the little boy holds out when I pass him in the street (that is if he is not moved on by the police), I shall enjoy the spectacle of the fireworks and the sparklers, the over-cooked sausages and the sticky bonfire toffee, but I shall turn away when the figure on the top of the bonfire is consumed by the flames.

Bully for You

No childhood, it is said, is entirely happy. All children at some time in their young lives experience disappointment, failure, loss and hurt, and some have truly miserable and sometimes tragic upbringings. Bookshop shelves, under the heading ‘Tragic Life Stories', are stacked with the heart-rending autobiographies of unbelievably unhappy childhoods – nightmare families, loveless homes, brutal parents – all described in vivid detail; of children beaten and starved, rejected and abused, bullied and tortured. Such accounts, where the authors describe how they have overcome the huge disadvantages of miserable upbringings, have become instant best-sellers, and the reading public appears to love them. Perhaps in doing so, the readers' own lives seem less wretched and more bearable. Perhaps they are heartened by these sad stories of children who have a shining spirit to survive, cope and forgive. For me, such memoirs are painful to read, for mine was a very happy childhood. I did not suffer from great poverty as a child, nor was I born into an affluent and privileged home. I was not smacked or told I was an unwanted child. I was not bullied by my brothers or told by my parents I was a disappointment to them. I felt loved and cherished. There was a short time in my young life, however, when I was desperately unhappy – the time I was bullied.

A couple of years ago, I met the bully again. He approached me after I had spoken at a formal business dinner in Sheffield. I had spotted him earlier, with a group of other men sitting directly in front of the top table. It was the laugh I recognised first, and it brought back unpleasant memories. As a lad, I remember this tall, fat, moon-faced boy with lank black hair and a permanent scowl, who developed an obsessive dislike of me. In primary school, I was a biddable, easy-going child. I enjoyed the lessons and readily volunteered answers and did as I was told. I was small for my age, not good at sports and of average intelligence so, I guess, I was vulnerable and the ideal victim for the bully.

I little thought that my behaviour would antagonise the large moon-faced boy, who was frequently outside the head teacher's room for misbehaving. He would delight in mispronouncing my name, much to the amusement of his two sidekicks. ‘Gervarse! Gervarse!' he would shout, and mince down the corridor. He and his two fellow bullies would stop me going to the toilet, tip everything out of my satchel and spit at me when my back was turned. I had a dreadful two months until I moved to secondary school and thankfully never saw him again – until, that is, I attended the dinner. He hadn't changed much, except that he was now almost entirely bald.

‘I was just telling those at my table we were at school together,' he said to me as he approached. He was smiling inanely.

‘Yes, I know,' I replied.

‘Really,' said the president of the association, who was sitting on my right at the top table. ‘An old school friend?'

‘Hardly,' I said. ‘He bullied me.'

‘I . . . I . . . don't remember that,' blustered the bully.

‘Well, of course you wouldn't,' I said, looking him straight in the eye. ‘Bullies forget but the bullied never do. You were vicious, cruel and you made my life a misery for two months and I have no wish to speak to you.' My heart was thumping in my chest.

He stared at me a moment, shuffled with embarrassment and opened his mouth about to speak, but he thought better of it. He then strode away angrily.

 

Bully

He shouts and swears and smokes and spits,

Pummels, pinches, pokes and nips.

He likes to kick, he likes to punch,

Call you names and steal your lunch.

But, have you ever wondered why

He likes to make another cry?

What makes a child turn out like you?

 

You see at home he's bullied too.

His father beats him, black and blue.

Having a Laugh

One afternoon, just before Christmas when I was ten, my father took me to see the pantomime at the Leeds City Varieties. We caught the train from Masborough Station and walked through the city, crowded with shoppers. It was one of the few very special occasions when it was just me and my father, no brothers or sister. The City Varieties is the oldest extant music hall in the country; an intimate, colourful and atmospheric little theatre, hidden between two arcades. All the greats of variety theatre have performed here: Charlie Chaplin and Houdini, Tommy Cooper and Hylda Baker, Marie Lloyd and Les Dawson and, of course, the legendary Ken Dodd, who takes some persuading to leave the stage once he's started.

I appeared there myself in 2006, in my one-man show. Before my performance I stood on the empty stage looking down at the empty stalls and recalled a small boy sitting on a plush red velvet seat with his father, his eyes (as we say in Yorkshire) ‘like chapel hat pegs', entering a magical world of the pantomime.

It was at Leeds City Varieties that I first saw the great Sandy Powell, who hailed from my home town of Rotherham, and when I heard his famous catchphrase: ‘Can you hear me, Mother?' For a few weeks afterwards, I would imitate this catchphrase at home, much to the irritation of my family, until my father put his foot down and said: ‘That'll be enough!'

Sandy Powell's comedy was clever, clean, inoffensive and hilariously funny. Part of his act was when he appeared on stage dressed in a soldier's scarlet tunic, pill-box hat askew on his head, and holding a particularly ugly dummy, which was dressed identically. He was a hopeless ventriloquist and his dummy would often fall apart in his hands. His act was interrupted by a posh-sounding member of the audience, in real life his wife, Kay.

‘Tell me sonny,' he asked the dummy in a deep throaty voice, ‘where do you live and where were you born?'

‘I vass born in Volchergrankon,' replied the dummy.

‘Where was he born?' asked the woman.

‘Wolverhampton. Oh, I wish I'd have said Leeds. I'm glad it wasn't Czechoslovakia.'

My first sortie onto the stage was when I was thirteen and, at a school concert, I performed a song, an old Yorkshire verse, which Sandy Powell made famous. I was accompanied on the piano by Mr Gravill, the music master. At Christmas, I insist on singing this ditty at family gatherings, much to my children's embarrassment.

 

When I was a right young lad

My father said to me:

‘Seems to me tha's growin' up,

Now what's tha goin' to be?

It all depends upon thyself,

It's only up to thee,

I won't say much to thee ageean,

But tek a tip from me.

'Ear all, see all, say nowt,

Ate all, sup all, pay nowt,

It's a long time, remember,

From January to December,

So 'ear all, see all, say nowt,

Ate all, sup all, pay nowt,

And if ever thy does summat for nowt,

Always do it for theeself.'

 

When I watch the present-day comedians on the television, and hear their acerbic, cutting-edge and supposedly entertaining humour, usually peppered with expletives, how I wish a Sandy Powell would make a return. ‘The golden age of British comedy has passed,' said John Cleese. How right he is.