Читать книгу You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone: The life and work of Eric Morecambe - Gary Morecambe - Страница 19

‘No-one ever believes this, but my mother would have always verified it for me. My earliest recollection is of when I was nine months old.’

Michael Palin, in his published diaries The Python Years, describes my father perfectly. Palin is at a party at the BBC in 1972 which is full of showbiz celebrities, Eric among them. ‘Eric Morecambe is another one who never dropped his comic persona all evening,’ he writes. ‘If one talked to him, or if one heard him talking to anyone else, he was always doing a routine. He has a very disconcerting habit of suddenly shouting at the top of his voice at someone only a foot away.’ While Palin puts in print what is genuinely recognized but rarely remarked upon, I would just add that my father not dropping his comic persona and speaking loudly at close quarters was not reserved just for evenings out. It’s difficult to think of a time when he wasn’t ‘on’. Add that to the lifestyle of his chosen career, and really it’s no wonder he ended up seriously ill and leaving us so prematurely. Later in his book Palin mentions that he’d heard Eric loved his BBC TV series Ripping Yarns but would never be able to verify if that was true. Well, if you happen to read this Michael, it is true. Eric adored the series and often I would sit down with him at the family home and we’d watch it.

Eric as this rather disconcerting, loud, and boisterous adult was not, it seems, so very different as a child. A little more refined in later years, perhaps, as we already know how as a boy he would misbehave at the local cinema.

Interviewing him in 1982 I asked my father to recall some of his childhood memories. This wasn’t something he normally discussed at length, but I caught him on a good day when he was feeling somewhat sprightly in his tweed jacket and bow-tie, with an endless Havana cigar protruding from his mouth in a meerschaum holder—a kind of Lord Grade pose. The sun was shining through his office window on his portable typewriter, where all his work was keyhammered onto A4 for posterity, and that day he was well up to a bit of gentle reflection:

No-one ever believes this, but my mother would have always verified it for me. My earliest recollection is of when I was nine months old. I remember being put on the kitchen table in our home in Buxton Street, to be wrapped in a coat and long scarf before being taken out in my pushchair. I can also remember that the roof of that house had caved in, and that was why we were the first on the list to be moved to Christie Avenue by the council.

I only know as far back as my great-grandfather on my Dad’s side, who brought his family to Lancashire from what was then Westmorland, but is now Cumbria. So we have been Lancastrians for approximately a hundred and fifty years or so. By coincidence, my grandparents on my mother’s side were also from Westmorland, but came down some years afterwards.

I remember making an inkwell at school during woodwork lessons—we didn’t call them carpentry lessons in those days, you know. I could have been no older than seven or eight. This inkwell that I proudly presented to my parents was in fact just a plain lump of wood with a hole skewered in the middle. You couldn’t have put any ink in it. It was terrible! But my mother thought it was brilliant. ‘Oh lovely, Eric,’ she said when I gave it to her. Then she called my Dad. ‘Look, George. Come and see what our Eric has made.’ She actually kept it, along with many similar items, throughout her lifetime.

I remember once going with the family on a picnic to Hest Bank [on the edge of Morecambe]. I was ten at the time but I really remember it as though it was this morning. I would have to wear a blazer suit if I was going to look my best. That was short blue flannel trousers and a blue flannel jacket. We were standing at the bus stop waiting to go home when a thunderstorm started and it poured with rain. The whole of my suit seemed to become spongelike, soaking up the rain as it fell. I began wiping the rain from my face and hands and legs with my jacket sleeves, but it wasn’t just rain—it was blue dye pouring out of my suit. By the time I got home I was blue from head to foot.

I often have a chuckle to myself when I recollect some of my father’s endeavours. There was a time when I was a boy when I would sit and watch him catch starlings. He used a dustbin lid and a stick with a piece of string connected to it. Then he would put a lump of bread under the lid and use the stick to support it. When the starling went to have a nibble, he would pull the string and trap the poor little thing. He would catch between ten and twenty of these birds, kill them, then give them to my Auntie Maggie to bake in a pie. She needed about twenty, because when you pluck a starling you’re not looking at too much flesh. I once had an airgun as a lad and he borrowed it to shoot a seagull off our neighbour’s roof. He hit it cleanly enough, but it toppled straight down their chimney pot and into the fireplace round which the family were gathered at the time. That must have given them some shock.

I can recall walking with my mother by the river that weaves its way through Hest Bank. I was fifteen, and she turned to me and said, ‘Now one day you’ll be a big star, as long you don’t get big-headed. But when you are a big star, you will buy me a house in Hest Bank, won’t you?’

I nodded dumbly, and said, ‘Yes, Mam; I’ll buy you a house out here.’

Many years later, in the latter part of the sixties, whenever I saw her she would say, ‘Well you are a big star, and now where’s my house you promised me at Hest Bank?’ And eventually I bought her a home in Hest Bank.

Before and during these times remembered from his childhood days, my father was being his lively self, usually in the company of his biggest mate and cousin, George ‘Sonny’ Trelfall.