Small Man in a Book (5 page)

I began at Dumbarton a couple of weeks before David, and on the day of his arrival he was told to sit next to me as my regular deskmate was away. It was Miss Leahy’s class and she was reading to us from
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, appropriately enough, given my initial reaction to entering the school via the tiny door at the back. Talking to David I discovered that he lived just a few streets away from me in Baglan and would therefore be travelling to school with me every morning on the bus. This was as long and tortuous a route as it is possible to plot from Baglan to Swansea. Every morning I would board the bus outside a row of shops a few streets away from home and we’d trundle along through Baglan, picking up David en route, then through Briton Ferry, past the Metal Box factory in Neath, along to Birchgrove, through Llansamlet and then finally, an hour after I’d got on, we’d arrive at school.

David says that it was on these interminable journeys that he first saw me perform, entertaining a captive audience desperate for any form of diversion from the monotony of the transit. Apparently my repertoire included Hartley Hare (a puppet from the children’s programme
Pipkins
whose voice I found I was able to replicate), characters from the Welsh comedian Ryan Davies’s television programme, Kermit the Frog and a creature of my own making, the Wild Mandango, who specialized in smelling people. I had forgotten all about these bus journeys to and from school but, talking again to David, my little flights of fancy stood out in his memory as being an important stage in my early development as a performer.

I can certainly remember being the one at school who would want to make people laugh, whether it was simply impersonating the teachers or by pulling more elaborate stunts such as the time I hid in the box during PE. In a chilling premonition of the Small Man in a Box I decided that it would be fun to hide in the box – the piece of apparatus made up of sections, all leading to a leather top, over which we would vault – and stay there for the whole of the class. The gym teacher, Mr Jones, was unaware of my presence, but the other boys knew I was there. David remembers seeing a pair of eyes peeping out from the hand-hold holes at the side while Gareth Morris, never the most coordinated of boys (he once put his school trousers on over his wet swimming trunks and then smashed a window with his hand while attempting to kill a wasp), delighted in running head first into the box in an effort to unnerve me and give the game away. I hadn’t factored in getting back out of my little box and when I finally did, the other boys had gone, and with them my clothes.

I took an almost Dadaist pleasure in walking into the next class in my underwear and enquiring in a calm and perfectly reasonable voice, ‘Excuse me, sir, I wonder has anyone seen my trousers?’

The kids all laughed but the teacher, Mr Cope, took a very dim view.

‘You think you’re very funny, don’t you? Well, you’re not and you’re not going to amount to anything until you stop playing the fool.’

He wasn’t happy.

Autobiographies are typically full of tales where the protagonist is suffering verbal or physical abuse at the hands of an unkind or insensitive teacher, but I have only this minor altercation with Mr Cope to offer up. This and the time he called me ‘short-arse’ in front of the class. Not the crime of the century but, at the risk of sounding like a teacher myself, I have to say it was his own time he was wasting.

3

While these early efforts at entertainment were small-scale, spur-of-the-moment affairs, I was soon to expand and widen my horizons with the mounting of my first play – an ambitious and, as far as I’m aware, entirely unprecedented stage adaptation of
Star Wars
. It was 1979 and we were all in the grip of the film, which had created quite a stir in Swansea. Oddly, I don’t remember anything of seeing the film for the first time myself but have vivid memories of the trailer, especially the part where Luke and Leia swing across an abyss on an unfeasibly thin rope. It looked impossibly exciting. David and I wrote the script; naturally I cast myself as Luke Skywalker, Helen Williams was Princess Leia and Gareth Morris, the wasp killer himself, made an imposing Darth Vader. David, not bitten by the performing bug, was happy to essay the lesser role of Chief Stormtrooper, dressed in cricket whites, skateboard helmet and plastic stormtrooper mask, bought at Swansea market. We had battery-operated toy light sabres and, in lieu of an R2-D2 (who was deemed too challenging a build), constructed instead an impressive K9 from
Dr Who
. He was built out of a large cardboard box, with a smaller box for his head, and pulled along the stage by a length of string.

We performed to the school and before the play began I went out in front of the curtain and gave what I suppose was my first ever stand-up comedy routine. It consisted of a few words of welcome and some jokes memorized from my beloved
Two Ronnies’ Joke Book
. I especially recall seeing a teacher’s face change from smiling appreciation of my efforts to a portrait of narrow-eyed disapproval when I told the one about the naked Swedish woman who had been pulled from the North Sea by Scottish trawlermen and covered with an old mackintosh. Mr Angus Mackintosh of Fife, who was delighted. See, it still works.

Our play began with the Stormtroopers, led by David, crashing through the tinfoil door we had constructed upstage right and arriving on the Death Star. The idea was that the fall from my old partner in crime the gym box, placed behind the foil door, would be softened by the presence of a crash mat on the other side. But in his excitement at his first and entirely unwanted stage appearance, David forgot to place the mat. This left him arriving on the stage rather inelegantly, crashing down on his shoulder from a great height and crying out in pain. Audiences often think this sort of occurrence is intentional, and I seem to remember that being the case in this instance: ‘Fair play, that can’t be easy …’

We carried on despite this and a catalogue of other setbacks, including K9’s head falling off mid-scene and the light sabres snapping open during the fight between Darth Vader and Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s hard to communicate the poignancy of, ‘If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine,’ while two Eveready size ‘C’ batteries land with a resounding clunk on the hollow wooden floor and begin slowly rolling towards the edge of the stage, before dropping off and into the audience. Despite our technical shortcomings the production was considered a success and I was well and truly bitten by the acting bug.

I suppose the only other thing of note when it comes to our stage version of
Star Wars
is that, unless she was off ill that day, a very young Catherine Zeta Jones would have been in the audience. The future Queen of Wales was a pupil at the school although, she being some few years younger than me, we weren’t friends. There was one occasion when I bumped into Catherine’s mother while on my way into school. She had just dropped off her daughter and then realized she’d forgotten to give her the lunch money for that day. Instead, she handed it to me and asked if I would pass it on. I of course said I would, and then went on my way, completely forgetting about the money until I found it nestling in my pocket at lunchtime while at the shops with friends. I spent it on some sweets. I’ve told this story innumerable times on a variety of talk shows, so shan’t repeat it here. Hmm, I think I already have – apologies if you’ve heard it before.

I would eventually meet Catherine, very briefly, twenty-four years later at a party after that year’s BAFTA ceremony, at which she had won an award for her role in the film musical
Chicago
. Someone at the do knew that we’d been to the same school and thought it would be a good idea to introduce us. I’d had a few glasses of champagne at this point, otherwise I think I’d have said a polite ‘no thank you’. There’s nothing worse than being introduced to a big star who has no idea who you are. The embarrassment of standing there while a well-meaning third party trots out a potted history of your relatively modest achievements to the bewilderment of the increasingly impatient celestial being is not worth the brief moment of pleasure when you get to say how much you like their work. However, I’d had a drink and so walked over to where she and her husband, the great Michael Douglas, were receiving a line of well-wishers who had formed an orderly queue just off to their right. Being a little tipsy, I happily joined this queue and waited my turn.

It was like meeting minor European royalty and, as I got closer to the front, I began to pick up more and more of the brief exchange that each congratulant enjoyed after having at last reached the top of the queue. Catherine was in that awkward position of really being unable to say anything beyond ‘thank you’ – faced, as she was, with an unending barrage of compliments. Her voice had that familiar mid-Atlantic to often full-on American twang, ‘
Thaaank you!
’ Understandable, given the amount of time she spends there and her being married to Captain America. This was what I heard repeated as I edged and shuffled towards the front of the queue and my moment: ‘
Thaaank you
,
thaaank you
…’ My plan was to congratulate her, accept my American ‘
thaaank you
’ with a good grace, then tell her that we’d been at the same school, a very small school, in Swansea, at the same time as each other. I thought she’d welcome something a bit different, and happily passed the remainder of my waiting time imagining her and Michael inviting me back to the Dorchester, where we’d hook up with Danny DeVito and talk about old times. I was woken from my reverie by suddenly finding myself in front of my prey, and so launched into my well-rehearsed congratulations.

‘Hello, Catherine, I just wanted to say congratulations, really well done!’

‘
Thaaank you
,
thaaank you
–’

‘And I wanted to tell you that I went to Dumbarton too –’

At this point her voice shot out of LA, across the Atlantic at the speed of light, and settled back into its natural sing-song Swansea loveliness.

‘Really?! I saw Mr Aled yesterday!’

And with that she turned and was gone, closely followed by a man who looked like Gordon Gekko.

I slunk back to my table with my tail between my legs, my dining companions anxious for a debriefing.

‘How did it go? How was she? Did she remember you?’

‘Um, yes, err … could you pass the wine, please?’

I suppose I had been performing long before my first, witnessed by future Hollywood royalty, moment on a stage. After school and at weekends I would usually be found with David, riding our bikes around Baglan, two abreast, pretending to be Starsky and Hutch in the red Ford Gran Torino with the white stripe down the side and hearing the crackle of the radio as it alerted us to crimes newly perpetrated:
All units, we have an APB on a suspect, corner of Sunset and Main
… We would swing into action:
Zebra Three, Zebra Three, we’re on our way!
We’d be off, pedalling furiously down Lodge Drive and towards the park, always right next to each other so as to maintain the illusion of being in the Torino.

At that time the thought of being able to drive was exciting beyond belief. I struggled to understand how anyone ever left their car once they’d got a licence. When I was old enough to try, I passed the test on my first attempt despite getting a few of the questions wrong and telling the examiner that in the event of a blowout on the motorway I would pull over and wait for help on the cold shoulder.

David and I would cycle all around Baglan and beyond, often over the bridge to The Ferry Boat Inn for a lemonade and sometimes even as far as Swansea, singing Beatles songs as we went. David’s brother John had the red and the blue Greatest Hits albums; we would sneak them out of his bedroom and listen to them, trying not to allow any scratches onto the vinyl. John was away at boarding school in Llandovery and so David and I would make frequent raids on his bedroom. On one occasion we came back across the landing to David’s room with the glossy programme for Rod Stewart’s ‘Blondes Have More Fun’ tour, which John had rather excitingly been all the way to London to see, at the impossible cathedral of glamour that was Earl’s Court.

David’s house, on the corner of Lodge Drive, was bigger than ours and kept in immaculate condition by his mother, Pam, who waited on David hand and foot. He really did live like a maharajah, returning from school and entering the smelling-of-furniture-polish house, whereupon he would sit down in front of the television and wait for his mother to bring him his tea on a tray, which would then be consumed while watching
Magpie
or some such show. The house had an open wooden slatted seventies-style staircase which was kept polished to such an extent that it became quite dangerous. Every time I visited I would take off my shoes in the kitchen and David and I would pad around the house in our socks. He would tear up and down the stairs at breakneck speed, by now familiar with the amount of slippage, whereas I would cautiously make my way up and down while gripping the banister like a man slowly regaining mobility around his home after a serious accident at work.

Once we’d negotiated our way down the ice wall of a staircase, we’d run outside to the field behind the house to play football. I’d be happy to be in goal so long as he’d tell me where he was going to place the ball and I could execute a dramatic dive. That was part of being an actor; I was always aware of how things looked and wouldn’t mind engineering a situation where I would be the butt of the joke, providing it got a laugh, providing it was interesting. After an evening playing outdoors with David I’d arrive home out of breath and head straight to the kitchen, where I’d pour myself a few glasses of water, passing Mum and Dad in the living room sitting in the oh-so-1970s brown fabric swivel pod chairs, bought at the furniture warehouse set up in an old aircraft hangar at Llandow.

In my mind
Robin’s Nest
is on the television, the windows are steamed up because Mum’s been boiling fish and my little brother is on the floor. Pete was born in 1973, eight years after me, a gap large enough to mean that I always felt as much a paternal influence on him as a fraternal one. We never fought or were competitive with each other. There was no sibling rivalry whatsoever, to the extent that when I had my own children many years later, with just a few years between them, I was amazed at how siblings can fight. I’d never known anything like it. Having said that, in researching this book I came across a picture of a young me and a very young Pete, in which I’m glowering at him as though he was the most unwelcome guest to ever arrive anywhere!