The Life of Lee

LEE EVANS

The Life of Lee

MICHAEL JOSEPH
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

1. In the Beginning

2. The Lawrence Weston Estate

3. My Family

4. The Outsider

5. The Early Days

6. Fireworks

7. Nanny Norling

8. X-Ray Vision

9. The Wish List

10. The Hair Trigger

11. Jus’ Like That

12. The Beginning of My Life in the Theatre

13. The Move to Billericay

14. The Frisbee Flop Performed Without a Mat

15. Raging Bull

16. How to Win Friends and Influence People (With a Little Help from a Piano)

17. Trying (and Failing) to Impress Girls

18. Getting the Band Together

19. The Art School Rebel

20. Power to the People

21. Teenage Wasteland

22. The Running Man

23. The Girl on the Bus

24. Fairground Attraction

25. Are You Going to Scarborough Fair?

26. It’s Not Grim Up North At All

27. The Lady is a Vamp

28. The Stork

29. Kilburn’s Answer to Gordon Gekko

30. The Death of a Salesman

31. Life in the Arctic

32. Getting on My Bike

33. Tragedy Strikes

34. Opportunity Knocks

35. The Governor

36. Mrs Taylor Was Right

37. What Was This Strange Feeling I Was Experiencing?

38. The End of the Pier – and of Our Story

Epilogue

1. In the Beginning

It wasn’t the greatest of starts. In fact, things were pretty rocky for me at the beginning. As if arriving on earth with a hole in the heart wasn’t enough already, when I was born on 25 February 1964 at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, I was also named Cassius Clay Evans.

Now, that’s fine if you’re a strapping lad from the Deep South who’s destined to grow up to be undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. However, it’s not so brilliant if you’re a scrawny kid from Avonmouth who’s fighting for something else altogether – his life.

Being an obsessive boxing fan, Dad was keen to mark in his own special way 25 February 1964, the day Clay knocked out the seemingly invincible Sonny Liston to claim the world heavyweight title. So passionate was Dad about boxing, the moment I was born he hot-footed it up the corridor from the waiting room where he had been glued to the TV, demanding that I be named after the new champ.

Luckily, Mum flatly refused, thank goodness. I’m not suggesting that Cassius isn’t a decent enough name, but even the great man himself changed it to Muhammad Ali a little later.

Fortunately, Dad’s other passion was rock’n’roll music, and so I was named Lee after Jerry Lee Lewis, the manic,
piano-playing rocker. Looking on the bright side, I’m very glad he never listened to Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

This is the story of how that small, shy, sensitive boy from a run-down council estate near the Avonmouth dockyards of Bristol and a travelling family of performers stumbled quite by accident into the heady world of show business.

Dressed in my best clothes – my first proper photo.

Regarded by anyone I came into contact with as hailing from a different planet, I had a simple longing to be accepted. Life for me always felt like an unexpected turn of events that merely conspired to exacerbate my bewildered state of mind. A naturally quiet, enigmatic, gangly, fuzzy-haired, goggle-eyed scruffbag, I just wanted to blend into the background as best I could. Ironically, trying to do so only made me stand out from the crowd.

My dad was a performer who worked the South Wales and West Country club circuit, eventually sharing the bill with some of the most famous and talented performers of his generation. As a child, I led a kind of secret, dual existence, flitting between show business and the real world. In the realm of loud, excessive, sometimes over-dramatic, insecure show people of all shapes, sizes and persuasions, I was always under strict instructions from my parents to be seen but never heard. I became The Invisible Boy.

All the while, stage folk would talk openly in front of me about all sorts of things that children shouldn’t normally hear. But, through it all, I was unwittingly soaking up everything I witnessed. A loner, I fostered a
clandestine yearning to be noticed, to be a part of all the excitement that was going on around me.

At nineteen, I rushed into marriage and was immediately expected to provide. But faced with never really fitting into the conventional workplace, I was forced under pressure to fall back on what came naturally: show business.

Eventually, when my back was to the wall and all else had failed, I got an act together based on what I had seen as a kid and entered a talent show. To my astonishment, I found very quickly that it felt better out on stage than it did dealing with the harsh realities of bills and rent payments. I stepped on to a magical platform where, miraculously, all my troubles melted away and everything suddenly seemed possible.

Looking back at my adventures now, I have come to feel that, to an extent, I have triumphed over my background. I have hurdled quite a few barriers and undergone an amazing journey. I’ve got a beautiful wife and a wonderful daughter. And I’ve still got all my own teeth. But the truth is, all I have ever been looking for is peace and acceptance.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s go back to the very start, just after my parents wisely dropped the idea of calling me Cassius Clay.

Even though I now had a more commonplace British name, I was still blighted. Afflicted with that hole in the heart, I was for several years seen as the weakling of the family. I suppose that underlined to me the sense that life was going to be a bit of a struggle and that I would always feel a bit detached from everyone else. My illness only
heightened the feeling that, from the very beginning, I was somehow different.

When I was tiny, of course, I didn’t know about the illness, having only just taken my first gasps of air. I was too young, only one step up from a sperm really, at the time. I could have died right there on the table and not known much about it, if it hadn’t been for the hefty ward nurse at the Bristol Royal Infirmary who promptly scooped me up and, with a face that could crack nuts, sternly informed my mum in a thick, unforgiving West Country accent that she was taking me away to let the doctors have a look because there was ‘something wrong’. With that, she swiftly left the room, leaving my mum in stunned silence, exhausted and confused as to what the problem could possibly be and feeling that her baby might not actually return. Eventually, I was returned to Mum, who was allowed to take me home. I still needed lots of monitoring, though.

My dad was the son of a very hard and tough Welsh ex-miner who later became a drill sergeant in the army.

And my granddad – Evan John Evans.

Dad complained that Granddad never really gave him any credit for anything. His attitude was, ‘If you get knocked down, you just have to get back up again.’ Even though Dad joined the army to please his father and signed up for the boxing team, that still didn’t cut it with Granddad. I think this informed Dad’s whole outlook on life. My mum shared his sense of not fitting in. She was the daughter of an Irishman who left her to be adopted in Bristol. Subsequently, she suffered constantly from feelings of abandonment.

So from a very early age, I realized things weren’t
exactly going to be a bed of roses around here and somehow I always knew I was different. That feeling was only heightened by my parents, a couple who always seemed to be at war with the world.

Anyway, after the first few years, my condition slowly improved. But there were still the regular bus journeys every week to Bristol Royal Infirmary, a much-cherished day off school and away from the grey, dull housing estate, as the bus took Mum and me through leafy Fishponds and the excitement of the busy Bristol city centre. As a scrawny five-year-old, I relished the attention from what seemed like angels, the beautiful nurses with their crisp, clean, blue uniforms and tender looks of concern. Then there was the routine examination by the doctor, the cold stethoscope that made me jump every time he placed it on a new part of my chest. ‘Mmmm, mmmm? Mmmmm, Mmmm.’ I thought, ‘Surely I deserve more than “mmmm”? That’s a perfectly decent chest, that is.’

My height was taken, and my weight. Then, after the examination, the doctor would hand me a lollipop from a jar on his desk, smiling as if giving a chimp a treat. You could tell from his face that he thought we were an unfortunate family. As he told me I’d done very well, he’d ruffle my hair with his hand. Then you’d see him secretly check to see if it was now dirty while he gave some quick words of advice to Mum, never to me – after all, I was the one who was ‘ill’.

My illness was never mentioned around our flat. The only indication I got that something was wrong was whenever I decided to run around the lounge. Then Mum would quickly snap at Dad to make me stop. She would
argue with Dad, accusing him of not keeping an eye on me. ‘Why?’ I wondered. ‘What could possibly happen?’

But I always knew there was something not quite right with me, and so did all the other kids where we lived. It’s funny, kids can smell a defect a mile off, and whenever there was a game of football on the green at the front of the flats, involving all the kids from around the estate, suspiciously, I would always be the first to be picked for a team, just so they could laugh at my ineptitude.

My brother Wayne would do his best to look after me. ‘No, come on you lot,’ he would remonstrate loudly, pointing meaningfully to his heart. ‘Let him go in goal.’ In response to which there were always lots of disappointed groans. The cruelty of kids knows no bounds.

I loved the England World Cup-winning goalie Gordon Banks and wanted to be just like him. I would dive all over the place. For no reason whatsoever, even when the ball was up the other end, I would go through a whole mock situation where I saved the ball by heroically throwing myself across the goal and tipping the ball round the post to the roar of the crowd. Then, of course, whenever the actual ball would come anywhere near me, I would miss it completely. I’ve always had the same effect on footballs whenever I go near them. They veer away from me as if we were two negative ends of a magnet being forced together.

Whenever the play went up the other end, a couple of the kids from the estate would get bored, and their attention would turn from the game to me. Adhering to the age-old stereotype of bullies picking on the weak, they would first of all check to make sure Wayne was up the
other end of the pitch. Then they would find it hilarious to dare me to run around in circles. I would immediately oblige, knowing full well what would happen: my blood pressure would rise and mid-run I would suddenly grind to a halt and collapse, dropping like a stone on the spot, much to the amusement of the two lads.