Size Matters Not: The Extraordinary Life and Career of Warwick Davis (3 page)

My dad was an insurance man who worked at Lloyd’s in the City of London, following in the footsteps of his father. He was proud of what he did but felt the pressure of the city and the long commute from our home in Tadworth, Surrey. Although it was all he knew, he had secret fantasies of becoming a lumberjack. His chance came when the insurance market went haywire in the long recession of the late 1970s. He bought the finest chainsaw available and a checkered shirt, marched out to the woods, and started cutting down trees. After a while, people started to pay him.

My father has a wicked sense of humor; I think this may have influenced some of his many successful moneymaking schemes, one of which involved selling land to the Americans. He bought a small field and sold it off by the square foot so that Americans could own a piece of England (he’d mail them the certificate of ownership as proof).

His scheme has since been repeated, with some people even selling portions of the Moon. I don’t know quite how that’s possible but anyone who bought a square foot of land from my father actually still owns that piece of land.

Our household was firmly conservative. No elbows were allowed on the dining table, where we always ate dinner, and we had to finish whatever was put on our plates. Kim, my stubborn sister, once spent four hours shepherding a dozen or so peas around her plate after discussions about the edibility of peas got totally out of control.

There was only one exception to this rule and it applied to my father. We had an in-and-out gravel drive, of which he was extremely proud. We lived on Lovelands Lane, a cul-de-sac, and it was one of those roads that appeared – to time-short drivers anyway – as if it might possibly be a shortcut to a nearby freeway.

Every so often a car would zip up our little cul-de-sac, discover they were driving toward a dead end, realize that my father’s circular drive would save them from the inconvenience of stopping to make a three-point turn, and so drive straight through and around, spinning their wheels and scattering Dad’s precious gravel before zooming off back toward the main road, usually even faster in an effort to make up for lost time.

Invariably, this would happen at suppertime. It had an extraordinary effect on my father. He would sit bolt upright in his chair, as if zapped by a cattle prod. He’d then throw down his cutlery and napkin and leap up, knocking his chair over. By the time it hit the ground he was outside, sprinting toward his Jaguar, leaping over the hood in a single jump before diving in on the driver’s side. The ignition was instantly followed by the engine’s roar as the Jag flew out of the drive (throwing yet more gravel toward the house). Seconds later Dad would be grinding through the gears, screaming down Lovelands Lane in hot pursuit of the trespasser.

Mum would sigh stoically. Kim would smile (she’d no longer have to eat all her peas). I, on the other hand, would mutter “kaggernash!,” a swear word of my own invention, created so I could “curse” within earshot of my parents. I used it on this occasion because it was my job to sweep the gravel back to perfection. Fortunately, I had come up with a cunning plan that made the job easier, even a little fun. I owned a Honda ATC 70. I tied a garden rake to the back of the tiny motorbike and drove up and down until the gravel was as smooth as a Japanese garden.

Hours after the dinner plates had been cleared away, my father would return, driving sedately and smiling strangely. He never spoke about the outcome of his pursuit. We didn’t know whether he had caught up with the trespassing driver, or what had transpired between them if he had.

I half-expected the police to roll up one day (hopefully they wouldn’t skid to a halt in the drive) and arrest Dad on suspicion of mass murder, finally linking him to all the shallow graves and burned-out frames of Cortinas, Capris, Escorts, and Fiestas that littered the countryside surrounding the pleasant village of Lower Kingswood, Surrey.

Mum, meanwhile, was mainly kept busy with Kim, my average-sized, younger sister, and me, although she also worked as a secretary and personal assistant. I was a real handful, a tightly wound ball of rubberized energy that bounced around the house and garden at giddying speeds. If I wasn’t swinging from lampshades (at two-foot-six I was the perfect height to play Cheetah, Tarzan’s monkey, and relished the role a little too much), I was charging my bike through stacks of cardboard boxes, copying
The Dukes of Hazzard.

My parents were wonderful and devoted lots of time to Kim and me but, of course, this didn’t mean they were perfect. My earliest memories tend to be of a traumatic nature. One of the very first is of my mother and father walking with me in the countryside, each of them holding one of my hands as they swung me back and forth, much to my screaming delight.

For reasons that to this day remain unclear, Mum and Dad both decided to let me go when I was at the zenith of one such arc. I sailed like a tiny screaming football into a forest of stinging nettles. To me this forest was just like the kind you find in
Lord of the Rings
,
^d
full of giant walking trees and plants that entwined themselves about one’s limbs. I fought my way out of the undergrowth (overgrowth in my case), a furious screaming red mass of mumplike blisters. Mum was mortified while Dad maintained an “It’ll toughen him up” approach to parenting.

My very earliest memory was no less traumatic. I was crawling around the lounge floor when I found a pin and decided what better way to treat such a find than as food, and swallowed it. It pierced my tonsil. I screamed the house down and twenty minutes later, after a brief stop in the operating room, a surgeon waved the pin under my mortified parents’ noses and told them, “He could have died from this, you know.”

My parents really wanted to send me to a “normal” (as opposed to a “special”) school. In the mid-1970s, being little was seen as psychiatric as well as physical.

All too often, little people were put up for adoption by parents who’d had the bejeezus scared out of them by ill-informed doctors with little scientific and absolutely no social knowledge. Invariably, these children struggled to find a home.

As the time neared for me to start school, Mum and Dad visited the headmaster of Little Chinthurst, an excellent local primary. They were really worried that he might view me as being “disabled,” or that I was simply too small to fit in.

Dad was so concerned that even though he was wearing a suit when he got back from work for the interview, he changed into a fresh one. He really wanted to give the best possible impression. My parents didn’t mention I was smaller than average until right at the end of the interview.

“Oh, really?” the headmaster asked, “that’s interesting because we’ve just had another little chap leave.”

Mum and Dad were pleasantly gobsmacked. Sure enough, one of the coat hooks in the cloakroom was lower than all the others.

Of course, at school I was indeed entirely “normal,” just a tad smaller than my classmates. Although kids can be cruel, none of them ever saw me as being particularly different, although there was one unusual exception: Pedro, a Puerto Rican boy who had a bad case of lollypopguildophobia.
^e
The first time he caught sight of me his eyes saucered. He yelled, “
Extraterrestre
!” and ran screaming straight out of the school gate. Poor Pedro was so traumatized at the prospect of seeing me on a daily basis that he was forced to abandon the school.

I never thought about the fact that once they were five years old my classmates were already taller than I would ever be. There was no eureka moment; nobody sat me down and told me I wasn’t going to grow up to be my father’s height. I didn’t know what it was to be tall and was used to being small, so I just felt, well – normal. I was unusual in that I had an enormous amount of energy with a personality to boot. When I realized that I was getting left behind heightwise, I simply turned up the volume.

Having said this, we had a weekly woodwork lesson where we were supposed to choose something we would make for our end of term project. While most of my classmates made toy boats, boxes, and stools I decided that it would be appropriate to hack together a pair of stilts.

I had absolutely no desire to use them or to be taller at this stage and, as unbelievable as this might sound, I did not realize for one second what the connection was. Throughout my early life I suffered from the rather naive trait of missing the blindingly obvious.

In this case, I just thought a pair of stilts would be easy to make. Boy, was I wrong. The hammer and chisel did not sit easily in my hands and the results were . . . curious. For some reason, we were supposed to show our finished pieces to the headmaster. His study was just like Dumbledore’s: there was the leather sofa, the softly ticking clocks, the shelves lined with leather-bound books. He looked at me and frowned.

Before him were two wonky sticks of unequal length. In fact, if the assignment had been to make two pieces of wood look as unlike stilts as possible, then I would have won first prize.

“And, er . . . what have you made, Warwick?”

“Stilts, sir.”

“I see, ahem, yes, stilts,” and then he had a sudden choking fit and quickly ushered me out of the room.

The headmaster was a decent enough guy who obviously loved his job. He once summoned my class to his study in groups of three or four at a time. Rather conspiratorially, he beckoned us inside. “Look at what I’ve got here,” he said, and pointed at an oversize calculator on his desk. “The ZX 81. This is the
future
.” He raised his eyebrows significantly. Whatever he was trying to communicate went straight over my head. “And I’ve got the RAM pack,” he added grandly. I blinked blankly back at him.

Little Chint, as the junior section of school was known, was packed full of bizarre teachers. The science teacher had suffered from polio as a child and wasn’t much taller than me. She walked up and down the classroom as she lectured us; her limp was so large that she would disappear and reappear behind the laboratory benches as she went.

The headmaster had an obsession with Cliff Richard. In assembly he’d play us modern religious sermons recorded by the Peter Pan of Pop, none of which ever seemed to make any sense.