As Luck Would Have It. Derek Jacobi
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lovely sauce. I hated and refused to touch the eels, which came from Manzi’s pie shop round the corner. They had a great vat of these slithery eels into which they would stick a hand, pull one out and then kill it in front of you, chop and gut the thing – then cook it. I couldn’t stomach the eels, but I loved the sauce they simmered them in, which tasted great with the mash.
Every Wednesday the three of us, Mum, Dad and I, went to the pictures at one of our many local cinemas, like the Ritz or King’s in Leyton, or all the way to the Regal Edmonton, to see a main feature movie together with an additional feature (the B-film, which was usually in black and white and was likely to involve a bank robbery), while often the organ rose from the pit and the organist played selections during the interval while the usherettes served ice cream.
I loved all those glamorous, sultry female film stars of the Forties and early Fifties, from Barbara Stanwyck, Greer Garson, Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner to Vivien Leigh and the young Elizabeth Taylor – a weekly diet of extraordinary women. We ate fish and chips after the pictures and would then rush back home to hear Donald Peers on the radio singing ‘In a Shady Nook by a Babbling Brook’ at the start of his programme. A boy or girl of my age could stand outside the cinema if they were showing an ‘A’ or adult film and ask a couple or single adult who arrived to buy a ticket to take him or her in with them. You paid for yourself but you pretended you were a son or daughter.
After I recovered from rheumatic fever, the two sports the doctors recommended for me to practise were cycling and swimming. Cycling was too painful, so I took up swimming. My friend Howard was the son of the superintendent of the local baths, known as Leyton Super Baths. He and I were able to go on a Sunday when the baths were closed, and we had the whole pool to ourselves.
I swam in a lot of galas. One of the disadvantages of frequent swimming was that I grew giant verrucas on my heels, which had to be injected in the middle and gouged out by Dr Byrne on our front-room sofa, an excruciating torture. Peter Head, the head boy, who was in the 1954 Olympics team, told me I had a future in swimming. He passed me to an Olympic trainer in East Ham, and for a year I trained intensively. But ultimately I gave up from the sheer fatigue and boredom of swimming length after length with both hands or legs tied together.
Dad’s second passion after his garden was his Hillman Minx, BJD 115, bought just after the war. We would make regular outings in the Hillman on a Sunday afternoon to Ongar, or somewhere in the country, where we went out to tea. Taking Grandpa and Grandma, we would drive on much longer journeys to Southend, to the smarter end of Shoeburyness, and have a picnic from the boot in the car park, then walk to the beach. It was just Dad and I who went swimming together, while Mum sat on the beach with Grandma and Grandpa.
‘Dammit! I’ve lost my teeth!’ Dad shouted one afternoon when we were down on the beach. He was in the water when his complete set of false teeth fell out.
Hearing this, I plunged in straight away to search. I kept diving and scrabbling about on the bottom of the shore, and this went on for about an hour until I discovered them. I was thrilled at my success – and you can see how much I wanted to please my dad because I shouted, ‘Dad, I’ve got your teeth! Dad, I’ve got your teeth!’ as I ran up the beach, waving them in triumph before all the assembled sunbathers in their deckchairs. Dad turned away sharply and didn’t at all want to know: he was mortified – but I did save his teeth!
On a longer summer holiday on the Isle of Wight, Dad taught me to dance. Mum was watching while I stood on Dad’s feet as he spun gracefully round the floor, carried and guided by him, able to pick up the steps and rhythm.
I became highly proficient at ballroom dancing. Later, Isla Blair and I were together in Nottingham, touring in a show about Lord Byron called Mad, Bad and Dangerous, and one night we went ballroom dancing. We were spinning round the floor happily for ages, quite oblivious to everything, when suddenly the dimmed lights went out and a spotlight was following just us, while a loudspeaker voice made an announcement.
Unbeknown to us there had been a dancing competition going on – and Isla and I had won. I’ve always loved dancing – jiving particularly – and can still clear the floor at my best!
St Catherine’s was an evangelical church ten minutes’ walk from us, rather grim in outlook. I can never quite understand how this ever happened, but when I was fourteen I boarded a charabanc with my parents, organised by the vicar for his parishioners, to attend a Billy Graham evangelical meeting in Harringay Arena. For some reason the vicar had inveigled Mum and Dad into this. Billy Graham was hypnotic: behind him stood a gospel choir, and the combination of that voice of his and the choir had a mesmeric effect on me, all building up to the climactic moment when he drawled, ‘I’m going to ask you good people to come forward and give yourselves to Jesus!’
Unwittingly I rose from my seat to follow his words. I was completely smitten. I’d fallen for it. In a dream I moved down the steps towards the centre of the arena. I could not believe what happened next. Mum and Dad, too, had risen from their seats. They were right behind me, walking down the aisle. And then all three of us were dumbly standing before the oratorical hot gospeller, heads bowed, humbly giving ourselves to Jesus.
Graham had stopped speaking. The choir behind him had stopped singing. There we were, humbly together in complete and awed silence. Then suddenly everything changed: stewards appeared out of nowhere, and we all felt somewhat different as we were directed or, like sheep, shepherded to various places below the arena to have our details taken – names, addresses and so on. At this point, for the Jacobis, a kind of shadow fell over the whole thing, and we started feeling sillier and sillier.
Later, back at home, the vicar was so mightily astonished that here was the Jacobi family, all three of us, who’d given themselves wholeheartedly to God, that he invited himself into the house, and asked us to kneel and say a prayer with him. He insisted on coming in.
So Mum, Dad and I knelt down on the carpet in the front room while the vicar said a prayer. But as soon as he turned his back we collapsed with laughter. This visit to Billy Graham put me off religion totally and for good, for we’d been conned, we’d been hypnotised and taken for a ride, and as a reaction made to feel very silly. I don’t think we saw much of the vicar after that – only when he was collecting money for the church.
As a teenager I’d still attend meetings of St Catherine’s concert party, which was called Sunbeams, but they wouldn’t let me join. I even presented them with a programme which included a singer and a comedy sketch, but they said it was rubbish. Because I was so proficient at dancing I was much sought-after at the socials they held, much more than the macho butch boys who really fancied the girls, while I didn’t at all. But I loved the companionship of girls, and most of my friends were girls. I was strongly drawn to two girls in my teens, of whom Jackie was the special one, the younger sister of a boy at school, who came from Theydon Bois.
I went out with Jackie enough for it to be assumed that we were boyfriend and girlfriend. When I asked her to the cinema I would put an arm around her, touch her breast, make all the expected moves and hope that one of us was enjoying it. But sadly that one wouldn’t be me. I escorted her home, and purely physically I kissed her good night. She would cling to me and want more than a kiss. I was following the prescribed routine; meeting a girl, taking her to the pictures, dropping her home, and then I was expected to fondle and maybe more, do all that … But for me it was different, for as soon as I knew anything I knew this was not for me. Nothing happened below the waist, so I had to back away.
The exception to this was the feet: I loved to dance, of course,