The Life of Lee (5 page)

But for days afterwards, Wayne couldn’t stop laughing about it.

So that was the environment I grew up in. A place full of anger and hardship, of scrapes and accidents, but also of love and laughter. We scrabbled around on the margins of society, but we also had terrific fun – just as long as no one cut Dad up when he was driving.

4. The Outsider

As Dad slowly became more established in the world of show business, he left his job at the docks and began to travel all over the place for bookings. We went with him, frequently having to move schools before returning once more to Bristol. One year, he was doing a long summer season in Blackpool, and Mum managed to blag Wayne and me into the local school for the last two months of Dad’s run.

Me and Wayne waiting for Dad in Blackpool during the summer season.

As we were hauled up in front of the local education authority in an oak-panelled room, Mum pleaded on our behalf with one of the tweed suits. He sat there, resting his leather elbows on the desk and looking down his nose in dismay at these oiks who had somehow talked their way into his office.

Irene Handl-style, my mum adopted a fake posh accent and said, ‘Ah, for the life of me, I think school places are vital for their education.’

Wayne and I looked at each other thinking, ‘Education? What’s she on about? There’s not a brain cell between us!’ I was eight years old, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

Anyway, we got into a school. The second day I was there, the teacher, Mrs Taylor, set the class a test, but a test on work I had no idea about. As Mrs Taylor gave out the test and all the kids around me fell into silence with
eyes down, I just dipped my head so no one could see me, and I began crying.

The next day, Mrs Taylor gave out the results. A scary cross between Ann Widdecombe and Miss Ewell, the terrifying teacher from
Please, Sir!
, she called out one by one the names of all the children in the class, followed by their marks. Filled with dread, I waited with a knotted stomach, willing her not to call out my name. She called out the last person’s name and mark, but didn’t mention my score, which I knew must have been atrocious. To my great relief, she just carried on with the lesson.

But then an interfering busybody of a boy put his hand in the air. ‘Yes?’ enquired Mrs Taylor, smiling and exposing teeth stained red by the generous amounts of lipstick smeared on to her thin crimson lips.

‘You forgot the new lad.’ He pointed at me.

I wanted to run, and to keep running all the way home to where Mum was. I didn’t want to tell her that I’d failed, that I wasn’t liked, that I didn’t fit in – she would have told me to go back, to stop being stupid – but I just wanted to be with her, where I felt safest. When she wrapped her arms around me, I felt like nothing could hurt me and in those moments nothing else mattered.

I began sweating. I felt alone.

‘Yes,’ Mrs Taylor said, smug, calmly rising from her seat. She swaggered around her table, nose in the air. Without looking at me, she demanded I come to the front of the class.

I rose nervously and quietly walked up to her.

‘Stand up there, Lee Evans, let us all see you,’ she demanded, pointing at the top of her desk.

I stepped hesitantly on to her chair and on to her table at the front of the class, head down, hands clasped in front of me, and waited.

‘What you are looking at,’ she began, strolling magisterially between the desks towards the back of the class, ‘is a disappointment, a failure in every sense of the word.’ She turned back, staring at each child as she passed. ‘This young man …’ she carried on.

I don’t know why I did it – it was an automatic reaction – but I began miming, mouthing her words as she spoke and impersonating her swagger behind her back.

The class began to giggle. Mrs Taylor swivelled round and looked daggers at me. I immediately reverted back to my submissive little schoolboy act. She stared briefly at me with suspicion, then resumed from where she had left off. ‘This young man is a prime example of a failure …’

I began imitating her again, this time with more exaggerated movements. The other kids couldn’t help themselves; they knew they shouldn’t, but the whole class burst into laughter. I got carried away. I didn’t know it yet, but this was a good crowd and I was going well.

I was so intoxicated by their laughter that I didn’t notice Mrs Taylor standing next to me, glaring. Then, all of a sudden, I felt her beside me. I stopped and slowly turned. There she was, looking up at me. Face clenched, eyes raging and blood-shot, prim, lacquered hair waving about like the wild woman of Borneo, she exploded hysterically. ‘Get to the headmaster’s office now!’ she shouted, straining the last words out of her empty lungs.

I got the cane that day, but I learned a very useful defensive tool that would stay with me for the rest of my
life. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but one day I would even get paid for it. That’s not to say it’s right – if everyone did it, there would be anarchy. But I realized that at last I’d found something at which I could excel.

I never really conformed at school. I had so few positive learning experiences as a pupil that I can more or less recall each and every occasion I was stimulated. When my interest was piqued, it was as if I had awoken momentarily from a comatose state. I felt enthused, excited, but then we would have to change schools and move on. And just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over and I was out of kilter again.

The problem was, Dad’s job meant we were always on the move. As he got busier as a performer, we were constantly shifting from place to place. I was at school in Bristol one term, Southport the next, then Eastbourne, Blackpool, back to Bristol again, then eventually to Billericay. So I got used to thinking that things were always going to be temporary – friends, school, where we were staying.

Me, on the far left, during a cookery class at Lawrence Weston School, Bristol.

There was never any time for teachers to include me in what was going on, show me how their system worked. How could they? I was never around long enough. So I kept safely out of the way, reclusive, sitting at the back of the class, the new boy, retreating, wandering around in my own imaginary world.

Agonizingly shy, I would sit there all day in the classroom, heart pounding away, face flushed and sweaty, head bowed, trying not to make any eye contact, just staring blankly at the workbook that was put in front of me, in
complete confusion and terrified of being mocked. I’ve always been odd. I’m just not part of the system, the mainstream, the establishment, the norm. I’ve always been the weird boy at the back of the class.

But if you point me out, the focus is thrown without warning towards me, and I will play the clod, the goofball or the klutz, stumbling in at the wrong time from the sidelines to disrupt. So used am I to being the oddball, I actually feel safer there. On the edge is good. It’s a nervous reaction, I think, a kind of physical, mental, automatic form of self-defence. If I am suddenly thrust out in front of some lights, I’m like one of those Duracell battery-operated rabbits. I’m off. I never stop.

For as long as I can remember I’ve been out of step with everyone and everything that’s going on around me. It’s the void where I feel safest. That day in Mrs Taylor’s class, I just did what came naturally. I wasn’t even aware I was doing it.

All I knew was that suddenly I was accepted, regarded. I didn’t understand it at the time, but comedy by sheer accident would become the vehicle into which I would channel all the stuff I saw and felt. It would be a zone I could visit where no one could tell me I was doing something wrong. Comedy would become the one place where I was able to fit in. I found real life a struggle. Only on stage did I feel at home.

5. The Early Days

The Lawrence Weston was the only constant in my life. We’d go back there after every summer season and it was the place where I did a lot of my growing up. The estate backed on to a wide, barren piece of scrubland, interspersed with parking facilities for lorries, allotments, ditches and streams. But mostly it was wasteland awaiting developers’ careless drawings. Sandwiched between this vast space and the sky was a huge chemical works. Beyond that was the point where the M4 motorway – which went from east to west – met the M5 – which went north to south. It was known throughout the estate as ‘the gift shop’, for reasons which will become clear.

When I was nine or ten, I would sit for hours at night staring out across the blackness of the field at the sprawling chemical works, which was lit up like a giant fallen Christmas tree. I would pick out cars’ tiny headlights travelling along the motorway and follow them, trying to predict which way they might go. I was able to tell whether they were going north or south by the fact that their lights either turned red or remained white – hey, there wasn’t much on the TV back then! But I’d also invent the people who might be in the cars, where they were going and for what reason. I would even act out the conversations that might be going on inside the car while sitting on the windowsill of my bedroom.

One whiff of snow would always cause a large crop of road accidents – I never understood why no one ever did anything about that treacherous junction. Every year, without fail, I would watch from our bedroom window the distant blue flashing lights of the police, fire brigade and ambulances. Clustered around a smoking heavy goods vehicle, they would be cutting some poor bugger out of the cab, always at the exact same black spot, the lethal Avonmouth turn-off. That was the junction the heavy goods lorries took to get them down to the docks, either to drop off their loads or pick something up from the foreign container ships.

There was never a long gap between the accident actually happening and the alarm being raised. Someone had a constant eye on the motorway in the winter months, particularly when black ice was on the road. For the usual suspects prowling around the estate, this made conditions ripe for potential booty.

There was no siren or alarm bell – somehow we just knew, we felt the buzz across the estate. It was like a gold rush: grown men still in their slippers, young boys trying to get there before anybody else, a few women with hair still in rollers, a horde of residents all shapes and sizes running full pelt across the back field, jumping over the tall scrub grass towards the motorway, desperate to see who would grab the first pickings from the over-turned load scattered across the carriageway.

To be honest, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the stuff that came off those trucks. The most I ever got was a big box of over-sized men’s Y-fronts that Mum used to clean the flat with for more than a year. So my full-speed
running was more of a ‘let’s take a wander over and see what there is’. By the time I got there, anyway, it was usually too late. Like a bunch of hyenas, the locals had by then well and truly stripped the carcass of any real meat.

As you approached the scene, you would pass a line of men, women and kids, all walking back across the field, each one enthusiastically clutching their bounty. A young boy would be struggling towards us fighting to hold on to an industrial-sized tin of something with no label on. ‘Pineapple chunks!’ he would shout as he passed, face all flushed with excitement.

‘What are you going to do with that? It’s massive!’ I’d say.

‘I don’t know yet, but I’ll find something. Perhaps pineapple pie,’ he’d reply as he staggered back to the estate.

Now more curious to see what the truck was actually carrying, I walked to the edge of the field. From a sloping embankment there, you could look across at the full extent of the accident on the motorway. A lorry would be lying on its side like a dead whale. It had obviously come around the turn-off too fast, hit some black ice and kept on going till it hit the barrier, turned over and strewn its load. Its now-empty boxes were sprawled across both sides of the motorway and the driver’s cab was surrounded by the blue flashing lights of the emergency services trying to free the poor truck driver. They were all far too preoccupied to bother with the scavengers foraging around the trailer for loot.