Читать книгу As Luck Would Have It - Derek Jacobi - Страница 19

St Catherine’s was an evangelical church ten minutes’ walk from us, rather grim in outlook. I can never quite understand how this ever happened, but when I was fourteen I boarded a charabanc with my parents, organised by the vicar for his parishioners, to attend a Billy Graham evangelical meeting in Harringay Arena. For some reason the vicar had inveigled Mum and Dad into this. Billy Graham was hypnotic: behind him stood a gospel choir, and the combination of that voice of his and the choir had a mesmeric effect on me, all building up to the climactic moment when he drawled, ‘I’m going to ask you good people to come forward and give yourselves to Jesus!’

Unwittingly I rose from my seat to follow his words. I was completely smitten. I’d fallen for it. In a dream I moved down the steps towards the centre of the arena. I could not believe what happened next. Mum and Dad, too, had risen from their seats. They were right behind me, walking down the aisle. And then all three of us were dumbly standing before the oratorical hot gospeller, heads bowed, humbly giving ourselves to Jesus.

Graham had stopped speaking. The choir behind him had stopped singing. There we were, humbly together in complete and awed silence. Then suddenly everything changed: stewards appeared out of nowhere, and we all felt somewhat different as we were directed or, like sheep, shepherded to various places below the arena to have our details taken – names, addresses and so on. At this point, for the Jacobis, a kind of shadow fell over the whole thing, and we started feeling sillier and sillier.

Later, back at home, the vicar was so mightily astonished that here was the Jacobi family, all three of us, who’d given themselves wholeheartedly to God, that he invited himself into the house, and asked us to kneel and say a prayer with him. He insisted on coming in.

So Mum, Dad and I knelt down on the carpet in the front room while the vicar said a prayer. But as soon as he turned his back we collapsed with laughter. This visit to Billy Graham put me off religion totally and for good, for we’d been conned, we’d been hypnotised and taken for a ride, and as a reaction made to feel very silly. I don’t think we saw much of the vicar after that – only when he was collecting money for the church.

As a teenager I’d still attend meetings of St Catherine’s concert party, which was called Sunbeams, but they wouldn’t let me join. I even presented them with a programme which included a singer and a comedy sketch, but they said it was rubbish. Because I was so proficient at dancing I was much sought-after at the socials they held, much more than the macho butch boys who really fancied the girls, while I didn’t at all. But I loved the companionship of girls, and most of my friends were girls. I was strongly drawn to two girls in my teens, of whom Jackie was the special one, the younger sister of a boy at school, who came from Theydon Bois.

I went out with Jackie enough for it to be assumed that we were boyfriend and girlfriend. When I asked her to the cinema I would put an arm around her, touch her breast, make all the expected moves and hope that one of us was enjoying it. But sadly that one wouldn’t be me. I escorted her home, and purely physically I kissed her good night. She would cling to me and want more than a kiss. I was following the prescribed routine; meeting a girl, taking her to the pictures, dropping her home, and then I was expected to fondle and maybe more, do all that … But for me it was different, for as soon as I knew anything I knew this was not for me. Nothing happened below the waist, so I had to back away.

The exception to this was the feet: I loved to dance, of course, and at sixteen it was exhilarating to find a girl who could follow you. Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ in the film Blackboard Jungle was the dance of the mid 1950s, and later in the Sixties I adored Mersey Beat. I suppose I was somewhere between a teddy boy and a rocker. In spite of my reluctance to go further than just dance, I never felt rejected by any of my girlfriends: quite the reverse, my dancing skills were much in demand, and still are, and I felt no qualms about enjoying them to the full.

By the age of sixteen I was spending my pocket money taking the Central Line to Gerard Street in the West End to have my hair cut, slicking it at the back into a DA or Duck’s Arse, with the Tony Curtis quiff at the front. I was also a great Elvis fan. Although the rough element at school would call me cissy, one by one when their chums were not around each would sidle up and say, ‘Where’d yer get yer hair done, mate?’ Admiring on their own, they couldn’t let it be seen by the others. But they weren’t violent with me, just a nuisance.

Because I acted and quite often read the lesson at school assemblies and spoke the ‘King’s English’, I was mocked to shreds by the yobs, who really had such advantages given to them, but invariably wouldn’t seize the opportunities offered.

But then came the biggest moment in my life so far: in black wig, with black moustaches, and now that my voice had broken, I graduated to playing Hernando de Soto, the Spanish Conquistador, in The Last of the Incas by G. Wilson Knight, the forerunner to Peter Shaffer’s The Royal Hunt of the Sun. This was a thrilling part, and it was really exciting at last to play a big male role. It was a great disguise for me to assume and I felt very happy.

Likewise I was thrilled by my visits to the Old Vic, where Michael Benthall ran from 1953 onwards his five-year plan of presenting every Shakespeare play. Richard Burton’s Hamlet, with Claire Bloom as Ophelia, was for me the summit of what I aspired to be, thrilling at every twist and turn of the ascent. Harsh, ruggedly handsome, full of wild bursts of recognition, Burton was far from the romantic prince of tradition. Especially eerie and spine-chilling was his confrontation with his father’s ghost: ‘Angel and ministers of grace, defend us!’

I was now in my penultimate year at school. As I grew older my appearance pursued me and dogged me like a curse. When was it going to improve? I was never comfortable at that age as I had terrible acne, which deeply embarrassed me – and I still have the scars. We had a cabinet with glass doors in the front room. I could see my outline in them, but not the texture. With my carrot-red hair and loads of freckles I hated looking at myself; but facing this dark ‘window’ backed by books I’d comb my hair or do up my tie. To this day I can’t look directly in the mirror. When I make up in the theatre I have a magnifying glass that I bring up close to my face: I do the lips and I do one eye at a time.

Mum used to wash my hair. I was very hair-conscious, for the good strong hair, my crowning glory, was a compensation for my ugly face. If it didn’t fall in the right way I’d get angry. She was always calming, she never slapped me down, or said, ‘I’m trying to help you.’ She’d take the rough reply and she was placid, although less placid than Dad.

Placidity – that’s the word that describes them perfectly. I never once heard them row, and they were together in each other’s company twenty-four hours a day. It was calming.

But not on every occasion. As a teenager I found the acne worsened and it got really bad. Mum and Dad made me an appointment to see a skin man, a dermatologist whose practice was in Wimpole Street. We three set out for the West End, and while I went in they sat outside. The dermatologist shot this tube-shaped instrument with a nozzle at my forehead, then with his hands went over my face squeezing it, and finally said, ‘You can go!’ He didn’t clean me up so I walked out of his consulting room covered in blood and pus. Seeing my state, Mum and Dad became so incensed that they walked straight in to protest. They were so angry I thought they’d kill him.

Nothing improved and everything remained awful. Everything about me was wrong. The fatty cheeks, the stubby nose, while to top it all I had no profile. Oh, I so wished to have a face like Paul Scofield! That God-given face! If I were asked who I would like to look like, if I could push a button, it would be Scofield. Handsome, rugged, pitted: a strong, sensitive face. It has got a life on it – it has lived.

And to add to this I was miserable and shy.