The Life of Lee (2 page)

I used to collapse all the time: on the way to school, during lessons, at break times. I was quite famous for it at school, and it became a bit of a challenge for other kids to see if they could get me to pass out. I did it so often, they called me ‘Rubber Legs’.

I was once dared to go and ask Emma Baker for a kiss. Desperate to please, I jumped at the chance. This was slightly nerve-racking, as she was a girl I fancied very much – well, who didn’t? Emma Baker was the best-looking girl in the whole of Lawrence Weston Junior School, easy, by a long chalk. Her sunny blonde hair danced around her perfectly smooth face and her massive deep-blue eyes were the size of the moon.

Goaded by a handful of giggling boys, I strutted across the playground towards Emma Baker in the extra-large school shorts that Mum had promised I’d grow into. Of course, I secretly relished putting on a bit of a show. I knew it was something they were scared to do, and that made it all the more enjoyable and risky. I was doing OK until I got to the point where I had to say something to her. When I actually stood face to face with Emma Baker, I suddenly came over all nervous. That raised my blood pressure, I felt my legs buckle and bend beneath me, and before I could even pucker up, everything went black. I slumped to the playground floor, not
an unusual occurrence and a highly amusing one for the gathered audience of laughing kids. I lay there dreaming of Emma Baker.

Manic energy has been a characteristic of mine ever since. Indeed, it is a trait that has served me very well as a performer. But my whole life, people have constantly advised me to slow down or sit still – something I find impossible. If I ever have to undergo the torture of having to sit still for more than a second, I have a habit of jerking my leg up and down. It’s like an automatic spasm. I refuse to sit still, which is a constant frustration to my wife.

Over the years, she has tried desperately – without success – to get me to stop for just a moment, to take a break from working and relax. She has, thank God, given up on booking any more holidays. That became too stressful and demanding for her because of my inability to sit on a beach or lie by a pool. She would book a holiday to get some rest, but come back a nervous wreck, in serious need of a couple of weeks away. Maybe one day I’ll learn how to relax. But, for now, even thinking about it makes me feel anxious.

It was typical of my younger self that I would instantly agree to do whatever the bigger kids demanded of me. If they’d asked me to swim the Bristol Channel dressed as a sponge with a pocketful of bricks, I would – like some unquestioning nodding dog on the back shelf of a Ford Cortina – have at once assented to the request. When you think everyone is automatically against you, when you’re seen as the school’s resident idiot, you will do anything to be accepted. All the ridiculous things I agreed to do as a
kid were in some way connected to this apparently futile quest for self-esteem. The problem was, the more I gave in to their ludicrous demands, the less they respected me. Being an outsider has helped my stand-up no end, but back then it was much more of a hindrance than a help.

I was desperate to be a dude, but was – sadly – always much more of a dork.

Welcome to the world of Lee Evans.

2. The Lawrence Weston Estate

I always felt that our family never fitted in anywhere. When I was growing up, it seemed as if we were living in our own world; you might call it ‘The Evans Bubble’. There was never any money and somehow we always felt cut off from the people around us. Mum and Dad feared the outside world. We always had the sense that it was us against them. We were perpetual outsiders.

When I was a small boy, we lived on the very margins of conventional society. Part of the reason I always felt insecure as a child is that, because of Dad’s peripatetic job, our family was constantly on the move. We rarely stayed long enough for me to feel settled in one place, as we travelled from one town to another. The one location where we did spend a lot of time was Bristol, where I was born.

On my brother Wayne’s lap, in Bristol.

I lived there for eleven years, though there were frequent breaks when we followed Dad to his summer seasons all over the country. I remember, when I was little, we moved into a flat above a doctor’s surgery in the city. At that stage, Dad worked on the bins. We all shared a bedroom that overlooked a bus stop. Dad always had trouble with the curtains. They weren’t hooked on to the rail properly, and so one end would keep falling down. He hated it when that happened because the buses would stop outside, and he always
thought the passengers on the top deck could see into our flat.

One morning he was woken by a familiar noise as, one by one, the hooks at the top of the curtain pinged off the rail. Angry and frustrated, Dad climbed out of bed and stomped in a rage over to the window. He picked up the curtain and climbed up on to the windowsill, attempting to hang the curtain back up. We all watched as Dad, mumbling obscenities, tried desperately to re-hang the curtain. He had just stuffed the last piece of curtain up between the rail and the pelmet when he stumbled and, to break his fall, grabbed both curtains, tearing them away from the rail and away from the window. Dad stood there in the window, holding fistfuls of curtain and completely naked, face to face with the passengers on the top deck of a bus that had just stopped outside.

We had no living room, so the doctor would let Dad, Wayne and me, still in my mother’s arms, sit in the waiting room to watch the TV, which was permanently left on for the patients. It was a ridiculous scenario. Here was this family sitting there, Dad stinking to high heaven having worked on the bins all day. We were surrounded by people who had come to see the doctor for all sorts of ailments, and Dad would chat to them all. A man might walk in, coughing and spluttering, and Dad would ask, ‘You all right, mate?’

‘Flu, I think,’ he would reply.

‘Well,’ Dad would advise, ‘it’s probably best you go home, take a couple of aspirin and stay in bed.’

‘You think?’ he’d ask.

‘Well, that’s all he’s going to say,’ Dad would answer, pointing towards the doctor’s door.

Or if Dad was trying to watch the news and someone entered the waiting room and started moaning because he’d hurt his arm, Dad would start tutting and giving him a look. He would put his ear closer to the telly, as if trying to hear what the newsreader was saying. Living there was not really what the doctor ordered.

Uncle John, Auntie Eileen, Granddad, Nan, Wayne, Mum, Dad and me, staring at Dad’s clarinet.

So, not long after, we left the flat above the doctor’s surgery and moved on to the Lawrence Weston Estate, a large housing estate in Avonmouth that was, to say the least, rough and ready. We were the dispossessed, continually ducking and diving in a generally hopeless attempt to make ends meet. We were trying to get by – by any means necessary. Potentially, we were the ASBO generation long before ASBOs were even a twinkle in an authoritarian Home Secretary’s eye.

As kids on that estate, we were like baboons at a safari park. If anyone left anything lying around, we’d have it. But our incessant monkeying about only alienated us further from mainstream society. These days, everyone goes on about middle-class this, middle-class that, but we didn’t know what middle-class people were or what they thought of us because we didn’t know any. There were times when we felt like travellers, moving from place to place without ever putting down roots. We never got any respect – and ever since then I’ve spent my whole life searching for it.

The Lawrence Weston Estate was like the Wild West. It was, for example, the sort of place where arson was an
occupational hazard. On one occasion we were awoken in the middle of the night as a fire had started in the airing cupboard of one of the downstairs flats. Mum said it could have been started deliberately as residents would ‘accidentally on purpose’ set fire to their flats – ‘Oh dear, I’ve dropped me match on the floor. I must quickly run to the shops, and by the time I get back the flat will be well cooked. That’s a new lounge before Christmas right there!’

As long as you could prove it was an ‘accident’, then the council would come in and redecorate for you. That was nice if you liked woodchip wallpaper throughout and the whole place decked out in magnolia. But, if you ask me, that’s just asking for snow blindness. And if you brushed up against it, you could end up with a whole armful of splinters.

The residents of the devastated flat would be temporarily re-housed while the council went in to rip out all the fire-damaged items. Then the problems really began – a brimming skip was just asking for trouble. The workmen would fill it with the contents from the flat, and overnight it would all disappear. You’d see the amazement on the council workers’ faces; they filled the skip up with stuff, then when they returned the next day, like magic, it was completely empty. You could see them all scratching their heads and mumbling to each other, ‘I could have sworn I filled this thing up.’

‘Yeah, I saw you do it.’

You would look on in amusement as residents crept out after dark to see if there was anything of value in the skip, before they quickly darted back indoors, holding a
slightly worse-for-wear picture or a table. Basically, the goods would be taken from the skip outside a fire-damaged flat and redistributed around different residences on the estate. Either that, or they were removed by the local kids, me included, carried round the back of the sheds and fashioned into ramps for our bikes to go over. A kitchen door on which to practise our Evel Knievel impersonations? Yey-ha!

Nothing was wasted on the Lawrence Weston. It was recycling before that word was even invented. Weeks later, you would call for a friend, his mum would ask if you’d like to come in and wait, and as you entered you’d be surrounded by stuff that you recognized from another flat. It was quite obvious that the picture of Prince Charles hanging on the wall had scorch marks all round the frame. Even Prince Charles looked confused by it all.

Like every close community which had no money, we would all come together on a big night. Someone would bring along illicit booze, someone else would come with fags that had fallen off the back of a lorry. We really knew how to party. It was great way of forgetting the daily grind.

Take New Year’s Eve, always a memorable occasion on the estate. It was the one night when everyone really went for it. The thing to do on that night was to go outside on the stroke of midnight with any implement and make as much noise as possible. All the residents would gather at the entrance to the flats in a small hallway just by two rows of bins. Everyone would grab a bin-lid and wait for the moment. It must have looked like the musical
Stomp!
just before a performance, with everyone holding bits of garbage, waiting for the off to smash seven bells out of
any poor inanimate object. Then, suddenly, you would hear a faint voice wafting from across the estate.

‘Haaaapppy Neeeew Yeeeaaaar …’

It felt great to celebrate. God knows what we were actually celebrating, given that we had bugger-all! Nevertheless, it was good to feel like part of the community. Perhaps that’s what we were celebrating – the fact that we all seemed to be in it together, helping each other whenever we could. It may have been considered by some as a shit-hole of a council estate, but it was our shit-hole of a council estate – and we were going to revel in it together!

And we would go nuts, banging our makeshift instruments and shouting at the top of our voices. Mum would be right in front of me, smashing a bin-lid on the concrete floor with one hand, fag in the other, shouting, ‘Happy New Year!’ I loved it. There was a genuine sense of belonging, of being one big (more or less) happy family, celebrating together. It was a rattling good show.

Then everyone would end up at someone’s flat for a drink and a knees-up. We kids would be either still out on the street or gathered in another room, playing. Even when it got to the early hours of the morning, and I was physically exhausted, I refused to admit I was tired. When I was five or six, I’d be asked constantly if I’d like to go up to our flat to bed, but there was no way – I might miss something! Even after all the other kids had either fallen asleep or collapsed and been carried off to bed by their parents, I’d be sitting quietly in the corner of the kitchen, listening to all the grown-ups chatting. I learned so much about life from just staying there inconspicuously, observing the adult world.