Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins: The Autobiography

CHAPTER 1
Tales from the Crib

At several times in life one comes to a point of no return. The drama of this moment often escapes us. We walk into it unconcerned, not hearing all the closing doors slam behind us, not aware that suddenly we are cut adrift from the past and are loose on the high seas, charting a new course through undiscovered waters. I must have been six when it first happened to me. I was living with my mother and father, my brother and our nanny in an old pink farmhouse with a moat, surrounded by the cornfields of Essex. The local farmers had finished the harvest and that morning they were burning the stubble. We knew because my mother came charging into the house, after dropping my father off at the station.
"Nanny! Mrs. Smithers! They're burning the stubble!"

Mayhem. I sat on the hall floor as the two women in my life careered around the house slamming doors, closing windows, drawing curtains. Footsteps pounded across the creaky floorboards above, shaking the whole house: my mother's purposeful gait, identifiable to her children a mile off, and Mrs. Smithers', our darling cleaning lady, like a gentle elephant squeezed into my mother's hand-me-down court shoes. Snatches of conversation could be heard from the gables--a peal of laughter from my mother. And then silence. The sun battling through the curtains made the house feel like an aquarium during the burning of the stubble and, since my mother was a stickler for cleanliness, they could stay closed for days until the last fleck of black ash floated off through the sky. I loved it. Darkness made you feel naughty. And outside the inferno raged around us.
It was one of the highlights of our summer and we children were out there, under the gentle scrutiny of the local farmers from beginning to end, looking for hedgehogs and field mice to save from the fire and only leaving as dusk fell on the black glowing embers and the fields around our house had turned into giant tiger-skin rugs.

Meanwhile, inside the house that morning we settled down to the agreeable state of siege, and all sat in the kitchen as Mummy and Mrs. Smithers reminisced about former "stubbles," and Nanny made coffee and Ribena. "That dratted ash can get through anything," my mother could say a thousand times during the course of the next two weeks and Mrs. Smithers would keep on nodding sagely like a toy bulldog on the back seat of a car.

So it came as quite a surprise that it was decided I should be taken to the cinema. "What's the cinema?" I whined, lips a-quiver, ready for a tantrum. But there was no arguing, and no explanation.

"You'll see!" was the only answer.

So pretty soon we all bundled into our Hillman, Mummy at the wheel, me beside her with my own steering wheel, suction-stuck to the dashboard, and Nanny in the back, as we drove at a snail's pace through the howling flames down the chase that led to our house so that I could at least have a good look. I don't think Mummy knew that flames made petrol explode.

Until that year, 1965, we did not possess a television. The only images I saw were happening then and there in front of my very eyes. I had no concept of a world outside, and no desire to find one. When Churchill died my father went out and bought a large cumbersome set so that he and my mother could watch the funeral, and that was the first moving picture I ever saw. Grainy, incomprehensible and utterly boring, I thought, but then I turned around to see the tear-stained, enraptured faces of my parents and must have reconsidered. This television could get a lot of attention.

The Braintree cinema would be getting a lot of attention, too. It was unremarkable, one of those dismal buildings from the fifties with a curved brick front, Crittall windows and a shabby marquee. We parked the car and joined a long line that stretched around the cinema.