The Life of Lee Read online

  LEE EVANS

  The Life of Lee

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  1. In the Beginning

  2. The Lawrence Weston Estate

  3. My Family

  4. The Outsider

  5. The Early Days

  6. Fireworks

  7. Nanny Norling

  8. X-Ray Vision

  9. The Wish List

  10. The Hair Trigger

  11. Jus’ Like That

  12. The Beginning of My Life in the Theatre

  13. The Move to Billericay

  14. The Frisbee Flop Performed Without a Mat

  15. Raging Bull

  16. How to Win Friends and Influence People (With a Little Help from a Piano)

  17. Trying (and Failing) to Impress Girls

  18. Getting the Band Together

  19. The Art School Rebel

  20. Power to the People

  21. Teenage Wasteland

  22. The Running Man

  23. The Girl on the Bus

  24. Fairground Attraction

  25. Are You Going to Scarborough Fair?

  26. It’s Not Grim Up North At All

  27. The Lady is a Vamp

  28. The Stork

  29. Kilburn’s Answer to Gordon Gekko

  30. The Death of a Salesman

  31. Life in the Arctic

  32. Getting on My Bike

  33. Tragedy Strikes

  34. Opportunity Knocks

  35. The Governor

  36. Mrs Taylor Was Right

  37. What Was This Strange Feeling I Was Experiencing?

  38. The End of the Pier – and of Our Story

  Epilogue

  1. In the Beginning

  It wasn’t the greatest of starts. In fact, things were pretty rocky for me at the beginning. As if arriving on earth with a hole in the heart wasn’t enough already, when I was born on 25 February 1964 at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, I was also named Cassius Clay Evans.

  Now, that’s fine if you’re a strapping lad from the Deep South who’s destined to grow up to be undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. However, it’s not so brilliant if you’re a scrawny kid from Avonmouth who’s fighting for something else altogether – his life.

  Being an obsessive boxing fan, Dad was keen to mark in his own special way 25 February 1964, the day Clay knocked out the seemingly invincible Sonny Liston to claim the world heavyweight title. So passionate was Dad about boxing, the moment I was born he hot-footed it up the corridor from the waiting room where he had been glued to the TV, demanding that I be named after the new champ.

  Luckily, Mum flatly refused, thank goodness. I’m not suggesting that Cassius isn’t a decent enough name, but even the great man himself changed it to Muhammad Ali a little later.

  Fortunately, Dad’s other passion was rock’n’roll music, and so I was named Lee after Jerry Lee Lewis, the manic, piano-playing rocker. Looking on the bright side, I’m very glad he never listened to Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, or Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.

  This is the story of how that small, shy, sensitive boy from a run-down council estate near the Avonmouth dockyards of Bristol and a travelling family of performers stumbled quite by accident into the heady world of show business.

  Dressed in my best clothes – my first proper photo.

  Regarded by anyone I came into contact with as hailing from a different planet, I had a simple longing to be accepted. Life for me always felt like an unexpected turn of events that merely conspired to exacerbate my bewildered state of mind. A naturally quiet, enigmatic, gangly, fuzzy-haired, goggle-eyed scruffbag, I just wanted to blend into the background as best I could. Ironically, trying to do so only made me stand out from the crowd.

  My dad was a performer who worked the South Wales and West Country club circuit, eventually sharing the bill with some of the most famous and talented performers of his generation. As a child, I led a kind of secret, dual existence, flitting between show business and the real world. In the realm of loud, excessive, sometimes over-dramatic, insecure show people of all shapes, sizes and persuasions, I was always under strict instructions from my parents to be seen but never heard. I became The Invisible Boy.

  All the while, stage folk would talk openly in front of me about all sorts of things that children shouldn’t normally hear. But, through it all, I was unwittingly soaking up everything I witnessed. A loner, I fostered a clandestine yearning to be noticed, to be a part of all the excitement that was going on around me.

  At nineteen, I rushed into marriage and was immediately expected to provide. But faced with never really fitting into the conventional workplace, I was forced under pressure to fall back on what came naturally: show business.

  Eventually, when my back was to the wall and all else had failed, I got an act together based on what I had seen as a kid and entered a talent show. To my astonishment, I found very quickly that it felt better out on stage than it did dealing with the harsh realities of bills and rent payments. I stepped on to a magical platform where, miraculously, all my troubles melted away and everything suddenly seemed possible.

  Looking back at my adventures now, I have come to feel that, to an extent, I have triumphed over my background. I have hurdled quite a few barriers and undergone an amazing journey. I’ve got a beautiful wife and a wonderful daughter. And I’ve still got all my own teeth. But the truth is, all I have ever been looking for is peace and acceptance.

  I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s go back to the very start, just after my parents wisely dropped the idea of calling me Cassius Clay.

  Even though I now had a more commonplace British name, I was still blighted. Afflicted with that hole in the heart, I was for several years seen as the weakling of the family. I suppose that underlined to me the sense that life was going to be a bit of a struggle and that I would always feel a bit detached from everyone else. My illness only heightened the feeling that, from the very beginning, I was somehow different.

  When I was tiny, of course, I didn’t know about the illness, having only just taken my first gasps of air. I was too young, only one step up from a sperm really, at the time. I could have died right there on the table and not known much about it, if it hadn’t been for the hefty ward nurse at the Bristol Royal Infirmary who promptly scooped me up and, with a face that could crack nuts, sternly informed my mum in a thick, unforgiving West Country accent that she was taking me away to let the doctors have a look because there was ‘something wrong’. With that, she swiftly left the room, leaving my mum in stunned silence, exhausted and confused as to what the problem could possibly be and feeling that her baby might not actually return. Eventually, I was returned to Mum, who was allowed to take me home. I still needed lots of monitoring, though.

  My dad was the son of a very hard and tough Welsh ex-miner who later became a drill sergeant in the army.

  And my granddad – Evan John Evans.

  Dad complained that Granddad never really gave him any credit for anything. His attitude was, ‘If you get knocked down, you just have to get back up again.’ Even though Dad joined the army to please his father and signed up for the boxing team, that still didn’t cut it with Granddad. I think this informed Dad’s whole outlook on life. My mum shared his sense of not fitting in. She was the daughter of an Irishman who left her to be adopted in Bristol. Subsequently, she suffered constantly from feelings of abandonment.
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  So from a very early age, I realized things weren’t exactly going to be a bed of roses around here and somehow I always knew I was different. That feeling was only heightened by my parents, a couple who always seemed to be at war with the world.

  Anyway, after the first few years, my condition slowly improved. But there were still the regular bus journeys every week to Bristol Royal Infirmary, a much-cherished day off school and away from the grey, dull housing estate, as the bus took Mum and me through leafy Fishponds and the excitement of the busy Bristol city centre. As a scrawny five-year-old, I relished the attention from what seemed like angels, the beautiful nurses with their crisp, clean, blue uniforms and tender looks of concern. Then there was the routine examination by the doctor, the cold stethoscope that made me jump every time he placed it on a new part of my chest. ‘Mmmm, mmmm? Mmmmm, Mmmm.’ I thought, ‘Surely I deserve more than “mmmm”? That’s a perfectly decent chest, that is.’

  My height was taken, and my weight. Then, after the examination, the doctor would hand me a lollipop from a jar on his desk, smiling as if giving a chimp a treat. You could tell from his face that he thought we were an unfortunate family. As he told me I’d done very well, he’d ruffle my hair with his hand. Then you’d see him secretly check to see if it was now dirty while he gave some quick words of advice to Mum, never to me – after all, I was the one who was ‘ill’.

  My illness was never mentioned around our flat. The only indication I got that something was wrong was whenever I decided to run around the lounge. Then Mum would quickly snap at Dad to make me stop. She would argue with Dad, accusing him of not keeping an eye on me. ‘Why?’ I wondered. ‘What could possibly happen?’

  But I always knew there was something not quite right with me, and so did all the other kids where we lived. It’s funny, kids can smell a defect a mile off, and whenever there was a game of football on the green at the front of the flats, involving all the kids from around the estate, suspiciously, I would always be the first to be picked for a team, just so they could laugh at my ineptitude.

  My brother Wayne would do his best to look after me. ‘No, come on you lot,’ he would remonstrate loudly, pointing meaningfully to his heart. ‘Let him go in goal.’ In response to which there were always lots of disappointed groans. The cruelty of kids knows no bounds.

  I loved the England World Cup-winning goalie Gordon Banks and wanted to be just like him. I would dive all over the place. For no reason whatsoever, even when the ball was up the other end, I would go through a whole mock situation where I saved the ball by heroically throwing myself across the goal and tipping the ball round the post to the roar of the crowd. Then, of course, whenever the actual ball would come anywhere near me, I would miss it completely. I’ve always had the same effect on footballs whenever I go near them. They veer away from me as if we were two negative ends of a magnet being forced together.

  Whenever the play went up the other end, a couple of the kids from the estate would get bored, and their attention would turn from the game to me. Adhering to the age-old stereotype of bullies picking on the weak, they would first of all check to make sure Wayne was up the other end of the pitch. Then they would find it hilarious to dare me to run around in circles. I would immediately oblige, knowing full well what would happen: my blood pressure would rise and mid-run I would suddenly grind to a halt and collapse, dropping like a stone on the spot, much to the amusement of the two lads.

  I used to collapse all the time: on the way to school, during lessons, at break times. I was quite famous for it at school, and it became a bit of a challenge for other kids to see if they could get me to pass out. I did it so often, they called me ‘Rubber Legs’.

  I was once dared to go and ask Emma Baker for a kiss. Desperate to please, I jumped at the chance. This was slightly nerve-racking, as she was a girl I fancied very much – well, who didn’t? Emma Baker was the best-looking girl in the whole of Lawrence Weston Junior School, easy, by a long chalk. Her sunny blonde hair danced around her perfectly smooth face and her massive deep-blue eyes were the size of the moon.

  Goaded by a handful of giggling boys, I strutted across the playground towards Emma Baker in the extra-large school shorts that Mum had promised I’d grow into. Of course, I secretly relished putting on a bit of a show. I knew it was something they were scared to do, and that made it all the more enjoyable and risky. I was doing OK until I got to the point where I had to say something to her. When I actually stood face to face with Emma Baker, I suddenly came over all nervous. That raised my blood pressure, I felt my legs buckle and bend beneath me, and before I could even pucker up, everything went black. I slumped to the playground floor, not an unusual occurrence and a highly amusing one for the gathered audience of laughing kids. I lay there dreaming of Emma Baker.

  Manic energy has been a characteristic of mine ever since. Indeed, it is a trait that has served me very well as a performer. But my whole life, people have constantly advised me to slow down or sit still – something I find impossible. If I ever have to undergo the torture of having to sit still for more than a second, I have a habit of jerking my leg up and down. It’s like an automatic spasm. I refuse to sit still, which is a constant frustration to my wife.

  Over the years, she has tried desperately – without success – to get me to stop for just a moment, to take a break from working and relax. She has, thank God, given up on booking any more holidays. That became too stressful and demanding for her because of my inability to sit on a beach or lie by a pool. She would book a holiday to get some rest, but come back a nervous wreck, in serious need of a couple of weeks away. Maybe one day I’ll learn how to relax. But, for now, even thinking about it makes me feel anxious.

  It was typical of my younger self that I would instantly agree to do whatever the bigger kids demanded of me. If they’d asked me to swim the Bristol Channel dressed as a sponge with a pocketful of bricks, I would – like some unquestioning nodding dog on the back shelf of a Ford Cortina – have at once assented to the request. When you think everyone is automatically against you, when you’re seen as the school’s resident idiot, you will do anything to be accepted. All the ridiculous things I agreed to do as a kid were in some way connected to this apparently futile quest for self-esteem. The problem was, the more I gave in to their ludicrous demands, the less they respected me. Being an outsider has helped my stand-up no end, but back then it was much more of a hindrance than a help.

  I was desperate to be a dude, but was – sadly – always much more of a dork.

  Welcome to the world of Lee Evans.

  2. The Lawrence Weston Estate

  I always felt that our family never fitted in anywhere. When I was growing up, it seemed as if we were living in our own world; you might call it ‘The Evans Bubble’. There was never any money and somehow we always felt cut off from the people around us. Mum and Dad feared the outside world. We always had the sense that it was us against them. We were perpetual outsiders.

  When I was a small boy, we lived on the very margins of conventional society. Part of the reason I always felt insecure as a child is that, because of Dad’s peripatetic job, our family was constantly on the move. We rarely stayed long enough for me to feel settled in one place, as we travelled from one town to another. The one location where we did spend a lot of time was Bristol, where I was born.

  On my brother Wayne’s lap, in Bristol.

  I lived there for eleven years, though there were frequent breaks when we followed Dad to his summer seasons all over the country. I remember, when I was little, we moved into a flat above a doctor’s surgery in the city. At that stage, Dad worked on the bins. We all shared a bedroom that overlooked a bus stop. Dad always had trouble with the curtains. They weren’t hooked on to the rail properly, and so one end would keep falling down. He hated it when that happened because the buses would stop outside, and he always thought the passengers on the top deck could see into our flat.

>   One morning he was woken by a familiar noise as, one by one, the hooks at the top of the curtain pinged off the rail. Angry and frustrated, Dad climbed out of bed and stomped in a rage over to the window. He picked up the curtain and climbed up on to the windowsill, attempting to hang the curtain back up. We all watched as Dad, mumbling obscenities, tried desperately to re-hang the curtain. He had just stuffed the last piece of curtain up between the rail and the pelmet when he stumbled and, to break his fall, grabbed both curtains, tearing them away from the rail and away from the window. Dad stood there in the window, holding fistfuls of curtain and completely naked, face to face with the passengers on the top deck of a bus that had just stopped outside.

  We had no living room, so the doctor would let Dad, Wayne and me, still in my mother’s arms, sit in the waiting room to watch the TV, which was permanently left on for the patients. It was a ridiculous scenario. Here was this family sitting there, Dad stinking to high heaven having worked on the bins all day. We were surrounded by people who had come to see the doctor for all sorts of ailments, and Dad would chat to them all. A man might walk in, coughing and spluttering, and Dad would ask, ‘You all right, mate?’

  ‘Flu, I think,’ he would reply.

  ‘Well,’ Dad would advise, ‘it’s probably best you go home, take a couple of aspirin and stay in bed.’

  ‘You think?’ he’d ask.

  ‘Well, that’s all he’s going to say,’ Dad would answer, pointing towards the doctor’s door.

  Or if Dad was trying to watch the news and someone entered the waiting room and started moaning because he’d hurt his arm, Dad would start tutting and giving him a look. He would put his ear closer to the telly, as if trying to hear what the newsreader was saying. Living there was not really what the doctor ordered.

  Uncle John, Auntie Eileen, Granddad, Nan, Wayne, Mum, Dad and me, staring at Dad’s clarinet.