Читать книгу Clips From A Life - Denis Norden - Страница 10

For several years I dickered with a screenplay based on an encounter I had during my initial RAF training at Blackpool. It happened after I woke up one morning to find my face and entire upper body had turned bright red overnight.

Realising it was some kind of rash, and remembering the instructions they had dinned into us for such emergencies, I packed what they were pleased to call my ‘small kit’ and took myself off to the downtown Medical Inspection room.

This was a former lock-up shop where, after waiting an hour or so, I exhibited my reddened areas to a bored Medical Officer. He took a cursory glance, lifted a phone, muttered into it, ‘I’m sending you a recruit with rubella’ and turned me over to his orderly.

In the outer office the orderly explained that rubella was German measles, then gave me a chit and told me to make my way with it, preferably not by public transport, to the RAF hospital at Lytham St Annes.

And it was on my recollections of what I found when I arrived there that I wanted to base a film story. As soon as I presented my chit, a nursing orderly conducted me to a small ward and suggested I get into bed. As I did so, I noticed that the ward contained three other occupants, all of them congregated in silence at the other end of the room, eyeing me attentively. As soon as the orderly left, one of them – I later discovered his name was Smithy, a tall, skinny fellow, with a long, melancholy face and a lantern jaw – asked me, a little apprehensively, what brought me there. Opening my pyjama jacket, I displayed my gently glowing torso, adding, ‘It’s German measles.’

They came closer and inspected it with considerably more care than the Medical Officer had done. Then, as one, they moved away again and held a long, whispered discussion. Finally they returned to my bedside and introduced themselves. The other two were named Olly and Ted, but it was Smithy who, with some hesitation, announced that they had agreed to risk taking me into their confidence.

Lowering his voice he explained that the reason they were there was that the three of them were in the final stages of ‘working their ticket’. The phrase employed to describe activities aimed at illegally obtaining a premature discharge from the Services. They had all chosen to take a medical route towards this objective and, as each of them had now spent several weeks building up an elaborate case history, they were understandably apprehensive that I might in some way upset their plans. I gave them what reassurance I could and spent the rest of my hospital stay watching their meticulous charades with some fascination.

For Olly, an ebullient Londoner pining for the delights of Tottenham Court Road (‘To think that right now me and my bird could be tanning the floor of the Paramount’), was aiming to make his escape on the grounds of a sudden loss of hearing, brought about by a bomb explosion while he was on leave. To this end he was training himself not to register any change of expression at sudden, loud noises and to gaze uncomprehendingly at any remark addressed to him. The other two were assisting his deception by unexpectedly banging mess tins together nearby, or sharply calling out his name when he had his back to them, monitoring his neck muscles to make sure they betrayed no involuntary twitch. They rarely caught him out.

Ted had set himself a more uncomfortable task. Finding he had a facility for vomiting at will, he had decided to starve his way out of the RAF, throwing up at the first swallow of any food they placed in front of him. He subsisted on midnight snacks made up of scraps the other two secreted from their own meals and chocolate bars from their sweet rations. By the time I joined them, he was looking a little gaunt and his complexion was an unhealthy yellow.

Smithy had chosen the loneliest path. Electing to make his escape by the psychiatric route, he would feign sudden raging outbursts, become prostrated by violent headaches and was given to prolonged and inexplicable bouts of silent weeping. ‘Always real tears,’ he told me proudly, indicating the streaks they made down his cheeks.

For three days I watched them playing their parts, becoming more and more intrigued by their ingenuity and their attention to the fraudulent detail they brought to their individual stratagems. Then just as I was finding myself totally caught up in their efforts, I woke up one morning to find my skin had returned to its customary porcelain hue. The moment the medical staff saw this, I was told to gather up my small kit and ordered to return to my unit forthwith.

From that point on, my participation in their story ceased, leaving me feeling both disappointed and frustrated. Over the weeks, months, then years that followed, the three of them still lurked in my thoughts and I never stopped wondering if all that carefully plotted dissembling had produced results and which, if any, of them got away with it.

That concept of ‘getting away successfully’ came back to my mind when, sometime in the early sixties, I saw The Great Escape, probably the best of many ‘breaking out of prisoner of war camp’ movies we were being treated to at that time. I came out of it mulling over the scrap of an idea that perhaps the story of Smithy, Ted and Olly could be presented as a kind of upside-down version of that theme. Not a tongue-in-cheek rendering, but the true story of three likeable deceivers bent on outwitting the intractable regime that was confining them.

The trouble was, of course, that I didn’t know how far they had succeeded and I was reluctant to fabricate anything. Nevertheless, I began to make notes.

Then, in the late seventies, we had just finished a recording of Looks Familiar and the audience were filing out, when I noticed that one of them was lingering behind, trying to catch my eye. I recognised that jaw immediately. It was Smithy. With much hand-shaking and shoulder-gripping he joined me for a drink in Hospitality. Here, by ourselves at a small table, I plied him with questions, hoping for details that might provide me with a climax for my story, even perhaps a denouement.

His response was discouraging. He told me that no more than a week after I left the ward, an examining board had come round to evaluate the trio’s medical condition. Telling Smithy that they would defer a verdict on him until a psychiatrist could join them, they concentrated on Olly and Ted, the bogus hearing loss and the sham stomach disorder. In both cases their claims were accepted without a moment’s quibble and in no time at all the two of them had departed, vanishing immediately into deepest Civvy Street, whence Smithy had not heard a word from either of them since.

‘So much for dramatic conflict then,’ I remember thinking. ‘Not even any irony.’ Grasping at straws, I asked him, ‘How about you? How did you get on?’

Sensing my anticipation, he looked apologetic. ‘I didn’t. I never did go in front of them.’ He then explained that after the other two left, he became so bored that he began having second thoughts about the whole venture. On the house doctor’s next round he declared himself suddenly free of all his troubling symptoms and assured him he was feeling so much better, he would like to be returned to his unit. With visible relief they granted his request and by the end of that week he was back in training.

That was the point where I decided to place the putative screenplay into the Discarded File. However, noticing my downcast reaction, Smithy ventured, ‘But I did have another go at it.’

I brightened. Smithy was far the most appealing character of the three, his air of gentle melancholy lending him an extra dimension. Perhaps the screenplay might still be salvageable. ‘When?’ I asked. ‘Where?’

He went on to recount how he had had, by any standards, an eventful War. Posted to the Western Desert, he moved on to Sicily and thence to Northern Europe where, after VE Day, with the rank of Sergeant, he became part of the Occupying Forces in Germany.

‘That was when the boredom set in again,’ he recalled. ‘It was bitterly cold and all we were really doing was just hanging around waiting for our demob number to come up. I got so fed up that when a couple of blokes in my mob got out ahead of time on what I knew were faked compassionate grounds, I decided I’d have another go at taking a short cut.’

So, once again, he reported sick with violent headaches and bouts of uncontrollable weeping. As these symptoms were by now greeted with a greater degree of understanding and sympathy, in no time at all Smithy was put on a plane bound for a specially adapted psychiatric hospital in Norfolk.

And here chance decreed that his case was assigned to a particularly caring doctor, an elderly refugee whose unstinting concern for his patients was a byword. Having tut-tutted over Smithy’s symptoms, he confided that his own family had all been killed by the Nazis, including a son who would have been about Smithy’s age had he lived. ‘So I know how your family would feel if I sent you back to them in that condition.’ And, ignoring Smithy’s protestations, the saintly old man solemnly promised that under no circumstances would he allow Smithy home until his recovery was complete.

‘Result?’ Smithy said, his voice betraying only a slight trace of bitterness. ‘I didn’t get out till at least six months later than if I’d waited for my demob number to come up.’

Mentally I sent the notes for my escape story back into the Discarded File. True it might be, but who would believe it?

To gain my Wireless Operator badge, I had to pass an Aldis lamp test. This entailed standing on top of a hill and writing down a Morse message as it was blinked on and off at me from the top of a neighbouring hill.

There was absolutely no chance I would be able to decipher it. My Morse was adequate, but my eyesight was such that the dots and dashes of light merged into an undifferentiated blur.

My only recourse was to have a chum, skilled in the Aldis arts, conceal himself in a bush a yard or so away with a long stick. This he jabbed into my leg as the flashes were being transmitted, a hard jab indicating a dash, a soft one a dit.

Luckily, we were only required to reach a fairly modest speed at Aldis reading, so I managed a pass. To this day, I don’t know why my crouching accomplice didn’t just call the letters out to me. Possibly it was because the painful jabs I had to endure in some way made it seem less like cheating.

Anyway, I paid my respects to Samuel Morse years later when I suggested he could have entitled his autobiography, I Dit-Dit My Way.

During my time moving round Britain with the RAF, a popular trick for saving money on the obligatory telephone call home to let them know you were safe was to make it a personal call to your own name. That way your family knew it was you putting in a call and in reply to the operator’s ‘I have a personal call for Mr D. Norden’, they would simply deny you were there and the call would cost nothing. It worked several times for me, though I gave it up after my mother answered the call and said to the operator, ‘No, I’m sorry he’s not here but please tell him he should wear his overcoat in this weather.’

My mother never really mastered communication aids. Long after the War, when my parents were living in one of the ground-floor flats in a large four-flat converted house, they became worried about a spate of local burglaries, so my sister Doreen and I persuaded the landlord to install an entry-phone system.

I spent some time explaining to my mother how to make the best use of it. ‘When the front-door buzzer goes, pick up that phone and ask “Who is it?” And only when they’ve stated who they are do you press the button to let them in. Never,’ I emphasised, ‘never ever press that button till whoever’s outside has told you exactly who they are.’

My mother followed these instructions unfailingly. The trouble was that whenever she asked ‘Who is it?’ just as unfailingly the people who came calling on her would answer, ‘Me’, whereupon my mother would press the button that opened the door.

Prior to landing in Normandy on D-Day, my unit (554B Mobile Signal Unit 83 Group 2nd Tactical Air Force) was confined to a vast military encampment on the coast somewhere between Portsmouth and Southampton. Thousands of troops, of all types and nationalities, were assembled there, in preparation for the imminent invasion.

I have never known boredom like it. Under strict orders to keep ourselves in readiness to move at any moment, we were not allowed to stray further than five yards from our tents and the whole site was surrounded by barbed wire bearing starkly worded signs, ‘If you go any further, you will be shot.’ With no wireless sets or newspapers permitted, we could only sit around outside the tent all day, with occasional trips to the latrines or mess tent.

On the third morning I took a chance and went for a little wander. Within a few yards, I found myself in the middle of a group of large unoccupied tents emblazoned with the American stars and stripes. It looked to be some kind of supply point, so I nosed around a bit.

And that was when I chanced on my most unforgettable discovery of World War Two. At the far end of one of the empty tents, I saw a wooden crate marked USO. It was crammed to the top with books, pocket-size editions of what seemed to be all that was best in current American writing. These editions were specially printed for the American forces and really were pocket size, measuring no more than half the vertical length of our Penguins. When I picked up a few to glance at the names, there they all were. Steinbeck, dos Passos, Benchley, Wolfe, Ferber, Dreiser, Woollcott, Perelman … One hundred and thirty in all.

I hurried back to where the rest of my unit was dawdling about and, within moments, the books were nestling at the back of our tent under some RAF greatcoats. We spent the next couple of days lying on the grass in sunlit content, reading the best America had to offer. When our embarkation order came, we divvied up the books between us and they went with us on the landing-craft.

They accompanied us all the way through France, Belgium, Holland and into Germany, functioning as a kind of mobile lending library for the various other units we became associated with. I still treasure a tattered half dozen of them.

My family took a somewhat guarded view of my Uncle Jack, partly because he smoked a pipe and was headmaster of a notoriously rough and tumble ‘elementary’ school in Islington, but also because he was given to agnostic opinions and spent his holidays taking solitary walking tours across Europe.

He was always one of my favourite relatives and I think I may have been one of his, because when I was on leave in 1944 and went to see him, he presented me with a souvenir of his walking trips, a small blue volume entitled Baedeker’s Guide to Northern France. ‘This might possibly come in handy,’ he said and quoted me that line about War being a brutal way to learn geography.

No more than a few weeks later, it was D-Day and Dick Organ and I were in the cab of a water bowser about to land on the beach in Normandy. After a beach-head had been established, it wasn’t long before we found ourselves in more settled conditions, a tented encampment among the Normandy apple trees.

As I was lolling outside our tent, immersed in a Robert Benchley pocket book and contentedly enjoying what seemed to be the continuous sunshine of that summer, a visit from Flying Officer Brown, our Squadron CO, had me scrambling to my feet.

‘You’re always reading,’ he said. ‘So I’m volunteering you to get a wall newspaper started while we’re here.’

My response was instinctive. ‘Will it get me off guard duties, sir?’

A deal was agreed and I set to. The contents of the paper, typed on a large oblong arrangement of blank message pads pinned to an improvised easel, were confined to gossipy items about the personnel on the camp, because nothing of the remotest military significance could be included in case the Germans launched a counter-attack and the newspaper fell into enemy hands. So I operated under a rigorous censorship.

In fact, I was beginning to doubt that I could rustle up sufficient material to fill the space available when I suddenly remembered that Uncle Jack’s Baedeker was still at the bottom of my kitbag. Having learned that we were only a few miles away from the town of Bayeux, I looked it up. And, sure enough, there it was.

Within a few hours, the wall newspaper was completed. Its centrepiece was an article on the Bayeux Tapestry. It was a descriptive essay, so detailed in its command of dates and names that F/O Brown came over with a confidential message. His superiors had instructed him to find out how an ordinary AC2 came to be so well up on French cultural history.

I was aware that at the beginning of the War everybody had been asked to hand in their copies of Baedeker so, not wishing to drop Uncle Jack in it, I merely confessed that ‘One of my family used to go on walking holidays round here.’

Although I felt sure this didn’t satisfy them, they still suggested I apply for a transfer to Military Intelligence.

‘He’s always been a vivacious reader,’ an aunt of mine used to say. Eric Sykes mentions in his autobiography that when we were first together in the RAF, stationed at Swaffham in Norfolk, I would read a book while marching the mile and a half from the barracks to the Mess Hall every morning for breakfast. I managed it, as I recall, by falling in behind a cooperative fellow airman of suitable height and on the command ‘Forward march’, I would tuck an opened book between the straps of the haversack on his back and, for the rest of the journey, tread his footsteps well.

While we were making our way across Holland and Germany, we had occasional visits from the mobile cinemas sent out by AKS.These film shows were always welcome, although there seemed to be a somewhat tactless preponderance of those patriotically gung-ho military adventures Hollywood was churning out at the time.

However, the sceptical chi-iking with which our lads received such posturings more than made up for their heavy-handed heroics. One I remember with particular pleasure had a scene in its final reel where the gallant GI hero was sent back from the front-line to have his wounds treated in his Mid-West home town. After undergoing a tense time in the operating theatre and a spell in a wheelchair, comes the day when he must face a special medical examination to determine whether or not he is fit enough to return to the battlefield.

We saw his hopeful face as he disappeared into the doctor’s consulting room, his college sweetheart anxiously waiting outside. After a while, the door opened again and there he stood, the very picture of dejection and dismay.

As he sagged miserably against the doorway, almost with one voice the RAF audience exclaimed, ‘He’s passed!’

When Bill Fraser made his West End debut in 1940, he was acclaimed as the most talented new revue comedian for years. The show was New Faces, the one that introduced Eric Maschwitz’s ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, and I can remember being enthralled by its wit and sophistication. Before Bill had time to take advantage of, let alone revel in, his new-found fame, he was called into the RAF. By the time he came out five years later, New Faces had been forgotten and he had to start the painful clamber to the top from the beginning again. Indeed, the next time I saw him on the professional stage, he was part of a concert party at Westgate-on-Sea.

In the interim, we had become well acquainted. Not long after D-Day, while my Signals Unit were bedded down for a while in Normandy, a notice went up on the Orderly Room board, calling for volunteers willing to help form an RAF entertainment unit. When I went along to offer my services, I found that the CO of the unit was Pilot Officer Bill Fraser. After I showed him a few lyrics and sketches I had written, very much under the influence of New Faces, he appointed me a sort of unofficial PA and we conducted the auditions together.

One of the first to turn up was a Sergeant in the RAF Regiment who told us he had an act that would ‘knock ’em out of their seats’. He then took a razor blade from his tunic pocket, popped it in his mouth and began chewing. After bringing the microphone nearer to his face, so that we could hear the metallic crunching sounds more clearly, he beckoned Bill closer. Motioning him to put his hand out, he opened his mouth and dribbled a mixture of metal fragments and saliva into his outstretched palm.

At his expectant look, Bill said apologetically, his eyes seeking somewhere to wipe his hand, ‘I think it’s more cabaret than revue.’

Fortunately, the next group of hopefuls included a gleam of pure gold by the name of LAC Eric Sykes. In his warm-hearted autobiography, If I Don’t Write It, Nobody Will, Eric has given such an engaging account of the shows we did, the places we toured and the people we met over the ensuing fifteen months, I find it hard to recall any incident he failed to cover.

Come to think of it, there was one. After celebrating VE Day on Lüneburg Heath, then hearing the proclamation of VJ Day, most of us became preoccupied with speculations about how soon our demob numbers would come up. In a bid to sustain unit morale, Bill organised a totally unauthorised trip into Denmark. We were stationed in Schleswig-Holstein by this time, occupying a former German seaplane base, so the border wasn’t that far. We commandeered a truck and, after selling its spare tyre to defray expenses, we made for Aabenraa, the nearest Danish town of any size.

Arriving there at midday, we installed ourselves in the dining room of an old-fashioned wood-timbered auberge just in time for lunch. The twelve of us were led to a table in the centre of the room, while the respectable Danish businessmen and merchants sitting at tables round the walls kept their eyes politely on their plates. Although we must have been the first British servicemen to come their way, they confined their curiosity to the occasional surreptitious glance.

Denmark, which Hitler had dubbed ‘the storehouse of Europe’, knew nothing of food shortages. For us, on the other hand, who had known only rationing and dried eggs for the past five years, the lavish abundance of the food now set before us not only widened our eyes, it silenced all conversation between us as we ate. All that could be heard was an occasional rapturous moan. The well-mannered Danes around us betrayed no reaction to these noises, apart from a lifting of the eyebrow here and there, as if to acknowledge our English right to behave eccentrically.

They received the ultimate confirmation of this eccentricity when the dessert trolleys were paraded for our inspection. One of them was devoted solely to cream flans, saucer-size cream flans, tea-plate-size cream flans, soup-plate-size cream flans, all of them topped with an inch-high layer of whipped cream sculpted with intricate hillocks and pyramids.

We could only gaze in fascination. This was 1945, remember, and we had not seen as much as a teaspoonful of cream since 1939.

‘The middle-size one, I think, gentleman,’ Bill said, to break the spell. When we each had one sitting on the table in front of us, we could still only stare at it, unwilling to disturb its creamy lusciousness. Bill stood up. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said and motioned all of us to be upstanding. ‘Under the circumstances, there is only one thing to do.’

With which, he placed his hand underneath his plate and balanced it on his palm while he waited for us to do the same. Then, as one, the twelve of us raised our hands and sploshed a plateful of cream flan full in our faces.

As we stood stock-still, cream dripping from our eyebrows, noses and cheeks down on to our blue uniforms, we heard a sudden little spattering of applause. Those good Danish burghers were thanking us for allowing them to witness what was surely some traditional old English ritual.

The three Bags of Panic shows I wrote in the RAF, to star Bill Fraser and Eric Sykes, with Corporal Ron Rich, later to become the Reverend Ronald Rich, supplying the music, were all in the nature of what were then known as ‘revues’. They consisted of sketches, songs, ‘point numbers’ and ‘quickies’.

Each show ran for upwards of two and a half hours, making it all the more odd that when I consider the stack of material required to fill the three of them, I can now recall no more than two items. One was a song Ron and I sang called ‘After I’ve Liberated Europe’ (‘Who’s going to liberate me?’) and even there Eric can remember more of the words than I can.

The other half-forgotten unforgettable was a joke Bill was so fond of he referred to it as his ‘all-time top Service gag’, insisting that, in one form or another, it be included in every edition. This was not easy as, unlikely as it may seem today, none of the revues incorporated what is now known as a ‘standup’. So the joke had to be either enacted by two performers as a quickie or sneaked in somewhere during the course of a sketch.

Fortunately, it dealt with a situation which, for Service audiences, worked even better when acted out than narrated. So, in three different versions, they saw a Cockney airman arrive back at barracks after a forty-eight-hour leave, dripping wet from head to foot. ‘Blimey,’ says one of his mates. ‘Is it still raining in London?’ ‘No,’ the airman replies. ‘When I got home, the wife was in the bath.’

Eric Sykes and I lived in the same tent during one of the Bags of Panic revues. When we returned to it after the opening night, Eric was still in a state of elation. Lying on his straw palliasse in the dark, he ad-libbed a fifteen-minute speeded-up version of the entire two-hour show, songs, dances and all.

It was the most glorious piece of sustained comic improvisation I have ever witnessed and nothing since has left me so exhausted with laughter.

Nineteen forty-five. We were under canvas in some meadows outside Brussels and eager to get away from camp and sample the city’s fleshpots, I took a short cut across the area designated as our parade ground. I was chancing my luck because this was prohibited territory unless one was on duty and, sure enough, halfway across I was halted by a familiar roar. ‘Airman!’

It was the Station Warrant Officer, a bristling little man and a stickler for the niceties. Marching up to me, he said, ‘And just where do you think you’re going?’

‘Sorry, sir. I was in a hurry to get on the transport for Brussels.’

He looked me up and down. ‘With a dirty cap-badge?’ As I winced, he passed sentence. ‘Crossing the parade ground and dirty badge? You are confined to camp, my son.’

With which he stumped off. I wandered back to my tent and found I was the only one there. Everyone else was on their way to Brussels. On an impulse, I went round the back of the tent and cut across the field to the perimeter hedge. I made my way along it till I found a hole through which I could squeeze. On the other side was a narrow country road and I started to walk along it in the direction of Brussels, hoping to hitch a lift.

After no more than a couple of minutes, I heard the sound of an engine approaching from behind me and when I turned, there was an RAF 15-hundredweight truck. I stuck out my thumb and it pulled up. Gratefully, I went to climb in and only then noticed who the driver was. It was the Station Warrant Officer.

We gazed at each other. Then very deliberately, he said, ‘You done it all wrong, aincha.’

The remark struck me as so apt that, quite involuntarily, I found myself smiling. He bristled. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘What you just said, sir. It’s so spot-on.’

‘It is indeed,’ he said. Then, ‘Jump in.’ And we were off to Brussels.

Since that day, ‘You done it all wrong, aincha’ has headed my list of benign reproaches.

Contrary to the present-day belief, implanted by a regrettable number of popular films, World War Two did not occur as a series of zooming headlines. It dragged on for year after wearisome year.

My own generation, whose early years were spent in a confused synthesis of Hollywood and reality, was left with a similar set of misconceptions. Thanks to the films of the thirties and forties, I grew up firmly believing that:

Driving a car entails continuously half-turning the steering wheel from one side to another.

Shaving consists of two vertical strokes of the razor down each cheek, followed by patting the face with a towel.

Girls close their eyes when kissing, lifting their heels and occasionally kicking one shoe off behind them.

Childbirth requires lots of hot water.