As Luck Would Have It. Derek Jacobi
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the party with their children, and we were all having great fun, when the hosts introduced a game with a name I can’t recall; perhaps for the reason that we never got round to playing it – and I was the reason. For this game the boys, who were wearing long trousers, had to roll them up. I duly rolled up mine and was ready to start.
‘Derek, what on earth’s happened to you?’ cried out Ivy’s mum, turning completely white and aghast at what she saw. My rolled-up trousers revealed a gruesome spectacle: my legs were covered in spots, reddish spots where the blood vessels had broken. All the mothers instantly panicked, grabbed their offspring and fled.
And that was the end of the party. It was the time of the much-dreaded polio epidemic. Ivy’s parents had to contact Mum and Dad at work to come and pick me up, and they whisked me off to see Dr Byrne, the doctor who’d brought me into the world after Mum’s forty-hour labour.
For as long as I can remember, Dr Byrne was always on hand as our doctor, a good Jewish boy who lived with his mum in Snaresbrook. He diagnosed me with puerpera, a form of rheumatic fever, and sent me straight to bed.
Virtually paralysed, I remained bedridden for nearly a year.
For the first six months my legs were encased in cotton wool, and a nurse came daily to tend to my bedsores. Such an illness put me into myself and made me brood. For what seemed like an unending sentence it was just me, four walls, Mum and Dad, and the Home, Light and Third Programmes which I listened to day in, day out. Television had not yet made its appearance. We depended on the wireless, and there were wonderful children’s programmes – Toytown had been my favourite when I was younger, and now it was Dick Barton, the detective series.
I was always a listener; sounds and words rather than sights or images featured for me as more truthful and important. This may be one reason why I never grew up with a Cockney accent. And when I eventually climbed out of bed after eleven months my legs almost refused to obey me and I clung to Mum as I shuffled across the floor. My legs were so thin I could practically fit my thumb and forefinger round them. My legs would have shamed a grasshopper: I had to move about on crutches like Tiny Tim.
On the upside, my friends could now come and see me, while Mum brought me work home from school. I became an ace at crossword puzzles, knitting and embroidery. After Dad died aged ninety in 2000, and when I was going through his things at the house, I found a stash of pillowcases all cross-stitched by my ten-year-old self.
Still in convalescence, I took the Eleven Plus exam by correspondence course, with Mum timing me and giving me a bit of unofficial help on the side, and then I joined what they called ‘The Pool’, which gave me an entrée into Leyton County High School for an interview. Here was my big opportunity, for to go to grammar school if I managed to pass the Eleven Plus was a great privilege and honour.
When the day came, I set off shakily along Essex Road, for the school was midway down this long road.
The houses expanded in size as I walked along, the grander ones near the middle, and there was a big Gothic church on the right-hand side, known as the Cornerstone Church. Outside the school, which was an impressive, even monolithic, dark brick building of great expanse, there were raw vestiges of that blockbuster bomb dropped on the crossroads five years before, which wiped out two or three houses either side, blew out every school window, and took a large slice off the roof. There were lawns and flowerbeds at the front and to the side.
Although I had lived all my life in the same street, I had never been in the building. Built some years earlier than our end-of-terrace house, the portico had Corinthian columns in yellow stone either side; inside, the entrance hall had a grand staircase with two sides, with columns and wrought-iron banisters, and on the wall copper panelling listed the World War One dead of Leytonstone. Running along the building at the back, to the left of the wooden flooring, was a courtyard with Chariots of Fire columns, while outside was space enough for three football pitches and tennis courts: but best of all, and ideal for me, the school had a big assembly hall with a stage where they put on plays with proper sets, lighting and costumes.
My first port of call was the headmaster’s office on the left inside the entrance: he was a mathematician named Mr Cummings and he’d fought in the war and been shot in action, so he couldn’t use his left arm. In essence he was a military man, big-boned with a large head and big body, with this slightly withered arm and hand, which I’m sure made him more aggressive than he would otherwise have been. Always wearing a big black gown, he looked like a black eagle swooping down on malingerers in the school corridors.
Personally I wasn’t daunted by his presence, and we soon started talking. I could tell at once I had made a good impression, as I always try to do! I passed the interview, and so was off to a flying start. I was admitted first to the ‘B’ stream and after my first year they put me in the ‘A’ stream.
I was extremely fortunate to gain a place at this grammar school. It was either this, or the more basic secondary modern, where most of those who lived locally had to go. It wasn’t as if we had any other choice, or that Mum and Dad could have paid for me to go to public school.
Apart from the puerpera, I’d passed the first eleven years of my life completely blessed, without a blemish on my happy existence, with no deaths or grief affecting my sunny disposition. By then I had been endlessly devouring films on our new television screen, which we would watch in the dark, and I grew very jealous of all those child actors I saw, for that was exactly what I wanted to do. There was one, a famous boy actor called Jeremy Spencer, who in particular inflamed me with envy.
Later, when I was fourteen, I saw Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince at the Phoenix Theatre, and waited to ask for Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh’s autographs. I recognised Jeremy, who was also in the play, coming out of the stage door and I deliberately did not ask for his autograph. But when at Cambridge as a student I became friends with him and visited his flat in Sussex Gardens, West London, I remember leaning up again his mantelpiece and reciting Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ speech, even getting tips from him on how to say the lines – quite a turnaround!
My determination to be an actor grew fiercer than ever. If there were to be shadows in the future, unavoidable mishaps and disasters, I had no idea when and where they might fall.
Strictly speaking, I couldn’t be called an East Ender, but was an East Londoner: Essex Road was a popular, gregarious street, a quarter of a mile from the Underground. Quiet and comfortable in those days, Leytonstone had few or none of the more exotic or violent aspects of East London life. When I was older, I’d never let on to people that I lived in East London – never mind the East End like Hackney – but would say ‘on the edge of Epping Forest’: it sounded so much better that way, and was in fact true.
I would visit and play with my grammar school friend Mark Allen, whose family had a big house on the edge of the Forest, at Hollow Ponds, and we biked around or played in the skateboard area, or went boating on the lake. I’d even ride with Mark at a stables in the Forest, although this didn’t last long, and brought home to me that horses and I would never become compatible. I was scared stiff, because I never knew what they would do next, and at once they picked up on my terror. I never fell off, though, and even managed to win a certificate for riding 100 yards without holding reins.
Quite a number of famous and notorious people were born in Leytonstone: Alfred Hitchcock, David Beckham, Graham Gooch, Damon Albarn, Lee Mack and Jonathan Ross – who later went to the same school, Leyton High School for Boys, as I did. Sean Mac Stiofain, the first IRA Chief of Staff, and