Читать книгу As Luck Would Have It - Derek Jacobi - Страница 17

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 the society photographer David Bailey were others born in Leytonstone, but I can’t exactly figure out what we all have in common, except that I had less in common with sportsmen and gunmen, and was probably most like Bailey.

But something in common always remains. In 2001 I did a photoshoot for Vanity Fair with David, and because he is an East London boy, and with the discovery that I too was an East London boy, we suddenly became joined at the hip and got on like a house on fire. David was great, talking about himself all the time, non-stop – what a lovely fellow he was, great career, and how he’d had a great life. I don’t want to make out he was unduly conceited, because he was very nice. Like all photographers, when they’re taking a photograph, however awful you look, they tell you, ‘Oh how fabulous – fabulous!’

For the shoot I wore a dark suit, and he dolled me up in a kind of Noël Coward dressing gown. But even from the earliest years I was never keen on having my picture taken. I never found out if the photographs appeared.

From the start I knew I wasn’t much of a looker, that I wasn’t very attractive. My complexion is ruddy, my face round and cowlike. Mine isn’t a face of which you think, ‘Ah, he’s suffered,’ or ‘There’s something violent about him.’ I don’t have the mien of the suffering Dane or the harsh, angry brows of the violent Macbeth.

My face doesn’t brood at all, it just looks placid and cheerful – and even reassuring. I used to ask Father Christmas to forget the toy trains and Meccano, and please give me cheekbones instead.

But he never did.