Life's What You Make It Read online

  I asked the lady afterwards what the use of these new pictures in my head actually was, and she said it was the comfort of knowing that we live again. I’m not so sure I agree. That terrible set of events are as fresh in my head now as they were when I walked through that door, and I don’t know that they bring me any comfort at all. However, interestingly, if we do take characteristics from life to life, I can’t owe anyone money.

  We had a typewriter in our house on Pentire, and I was pretty much the only person to use it. From the age of ten, I had been applying for jobs at the BBC. I’ve often thought what would have happened if I’d been successful at that early age and actually got a job interview! I regularly typed my application letters so they couldn’t see from my handwriting how old I was. I’m pretty sure that the BBC finally caved after seven years because it was cheaper to hire me than to pay the postage on the rejection letters. One day, I got the shock of my life. At the age of seventeen, I was asked to travel to London to have an interview for the job of a clerk in the Radio Sports and Outside Broadcast department. It had taken seven years of typing, but I was a step closer.

  I travelled to the interview on the train with my dad. It was a memorable day for two reasons. Firstly, and obviously, I was about to go through the doors of Broadcasting House. Secondly, our train was the first-ever Penzance to Paddington Intercity 125. It felt almost as fast as my Chopper ride down Rejerrah hill.

  My dad sat on the steps of All Souls Church in Langham Place as I walked to my interview, sadly not in Broadcasting House but in a dull building across the road. There I met a lady called Margaret Skidmore. She had quite a sizeable file on me, unsurprisingly, and was impressed by my ‘continued interest in the BBC’. We chatted, I performed reasonably well in my typing test, she thanked me and sent me on my way back to Cornwall, promising to ‘let me know’.

  The days were endless, the waiting painful. Then it arrived, the franked envelope with the red BBC letters in the corner. My trembling hands opened the letter. I was in! That night, the reality struck me like a freight train: I was about to leave home. Everything I had always known, everyone I knew and loved, was here. At seventeen, I was launching myself into the unknown, moving away from an idyllic seaside life to a city I knew literally nothing about. What the hell was I doing? Night after night, I lay in the dark of my room, worrying myself senseless: family versus a job, seaside over an office job. What if that was as far as I progressed? Would I end up sheepishly returning home, carrying the smouldering embers of a failed dream? Obviously, I knew the answer. Of course I would go – damn the consequences! I talked myself into refusing to acknowledge potential failure, but it took a few sleepless nights … the first thought loop of my life.

  One of my friends said to me as I packed my bags to go, ‘Why would you want to leave Cornwall? Everything you could ever want is here.’ A small part of me agreed. I was lucky to live in a place where people had to save up to come on holiday. I got to stay there when they had to go home. My dad had built a beautiful Cornish cottage on Beach Road in Crantock. I had the most loving, caring, fun family. I get my sense of humour from my dad, and I get my grey hair from my mum; like me, she got her first grey hairs at sixteen – though I like to call it ‘Arctic blond’. There are seven years between me and my brother, Tim. I would miss him so much. It was tough to leave. But I knew I had to take that huge step into the unknown.

  2

  When I got to London, I stayed with a family friend in Chiswick until I found a place of my own. That first night was horrific. Waves of desperate homesickness washed over me. I had travelled on the train from Cornwall, and when, on my arrival in Chiswick, I unpacked my suitcase, there, sitting on the top of my clothes, was a letter from my mum. ‘We’re so proud of you. This will be the start of a great adventure. Watch the pennies and don’t get anyone pregnant’ was the general gist. I already missed them so much.

  After a couple of weeks, I applied for a bedsit in St John’s Wood in North London, a very nice part of London and walkable to the BBC. I had difficulty finding it, so I knocked on the nearest door. Peter Gilmore from the seventies television series The Onedin Line opened it and pointed me kindly in the right direction! London, eh?

  I met Mr Horn, the landlord, and from the off, I knew I had to impress him. He made it plain that he hand-picked the people in the house and that his concern was that everyone got on, which, looking back, was quite caring of him. He liked me, and offered me a deal: someone in the house had to take responsibility for cleaning. The person who had been doing it had just left and so, for a reduced rent, would I like to take on the job? The terraced house comprised seven bedsits: a couple of doubles and the rest singles. I would be responsible for cleaning the three communal loos, vacuuming all communal carpets and – he stressed this most emphatically – cleaning the brass on the front door. He said, ‘If I drive past – and I regularly drive past – and that brass isn’t shining, the deal is off and you go back to full rent.’ Needless to say, the loos were constantly sparkling, the carpets were spotless and the brass knocker and the number 93 on the door in St John’s Wood Terrace would burn your retina if the sun caught them. From the day I moved in, to the day I left to emigrate to New Zealand, Mr Horn was happy. I’m the sort of person that seizes a task and won’t let it go. It has to be right before I’m happy, so there was no way that brass was going to be anything other than perfect. Having said that, leaving Cornwall had stressed me out and, even now, if I’m stressed, I clean. If my head is struggling, I’ll usually be found wiping kitchen surfaces, tidying up, loading or unloading the dishwasher, or cleaning out entire neglected cupboards. As I type, the cupboards at home are spotless. When I drove past that door on St John’s Wood Terrace a year or so ago and the brass was dull and abandoned, I felt a pang of sadness.

  St John’s Wood Terrace.

  Stair party with my friend Ruth (left).

  My bedsit contained a tiny single bed, a small cooker, a table, two chairs and a wardrobe. On the landing there was a shared fridge and a payphone beside it – thieving piece of shit that it was. My electricity meter swallowed fifty-pence pieces faster than a blue whale sucking plankton. I was still desperately homesick, but Mr Horn was good at his tenant selection and everyone in that house was lovely. In one of the other bedsits there was a young couple (my God, did she scream when they were having sex!), and in another, Eddie, who was a middle-aged, recently divorced guy (he worked for BT and will crop up again in a bit). Ruth, who was a friend of mine from school, lived downstairs, and there were a couple of nurses, who were so busy we didn’t see them that much. None of our bedsits was big enough to house everyone, so each Friday we’d put in what money we could afford, pop down to the offie and buy as much cheap wine as we could, then we’d sit on the stairs and have a party. I still remember those stair parties with great affection and, of course, the carpet was immaculate! If it was sunny, we’d open the front door and listen to the lions roaring in nearby Regent’s Park Zoo.

  I may have been homesick, but I don’t think I was ever lonely. I have, until recently, always been happy with my own company. I love being with friends and family, too, but I never struggled if I was on my own. Perhaps, in my head, stability always overpowered loneliness. In recent times, when stability has faltered, I’ve found that no amount of loving company can stop me feeling lonely in my own head.

  After months of missing home, I can clearly remember waking up one morning and feeling … what? Joy? Yes, that was it. I wasn’t homesick any more. I finally felt at home in the big city. I loved my friends and my tiny home, but I never had any money. I think I earned £4,000 pounds a year. The meter would run out, I wouldn’t have 50p for it, so I’d sit in the dark with one candle and a book. I phoned my folks every evening from the thieving payphone. I’d make the call, pump in the ten-pence pieces, say a brief ‘Hi, it’s me,’ and it would cut me off and eat my money. On my very tight budget, this was provocative in the extreme and, on one particular day, when I knew I o
nly had thirty pence and would be sitting in the dark all night, it ate my money again. I’d reported it so many times, but nobody ever came. I will admit to having a temper. It takes a lot of provocation for me to see red, but when it happens … losing my last 30p again was the final straw, and I can’t tell you how good it felt to kick the bastard off the wall. I’m not proud of it, I instantly regretted it, but for one brief moment I felt I’d taken control. Obviously, it was stupid and Eddie (the BT guy) was singularly unimpressed. However, he did organize another one for us, which was much better behaved.

  With Ruth.

  Constantly being penniless was certainly an issue. I’d walk past restaurants and look at the people sitting inside and wonder how the hell they could afford it. On one grocery-shopping trip I only had enough money for a handful of green beans and a potato. I decided to make a soup, only to discover that the beans were in fact chillis, and though I tried my sweating best, the soup was inedible and I had to go hungry. My folks would, thankfully, send me bail-out money when things got really bad. I looked forward so much to the times my family would visit – my parents would cram into the single bed, and my brother and I would sleep on the floor. I think it was those times that proved what hopeless gigglers we all were. In the night, my dad would say something funny, or someone would accidentally fart, and we’d be screaming with laughter in the dark for an hour. When they left, there’d be a note on the bed when I got back from work: ‘Milk, cheese, veg, butter in the fridge, bread by the cooker, and we’ve bought you a couple of cushions.’ If I could, I’d put a heart emoji here.

  My job was as a clerk in the Sport and Outside Broadcast department of BBC radio. The office was in Room 130 of Broadcasting House, overlooking Portland Place. I can’t pass that building now without looking up at those windows. My first day didn’t start well. I had finally got to walk through those huge brass doors (though they weren’t as shiny as the knocker and plate on No. 93). The feeling of supreme elation as I walked through on my first day was extreme. I’m sure I was glowing. I’d bought myself a briefcase, but only had a newspaper, a banana, house keys and my (empty) wallet in it. I had been given my instructions to find the office: ‘Into reception, sweeping staircase on the left, up to the first floor, 130 is a few doors down on your left.’ I strolled through reception, set off up the grand spiral staircase and disappeared out of view of reception. At that moment, I slipped on the stairs and fell. My briefcase opened, I clattered back down the stairs and into full view of a now-silent reception. I slid into a heap at the bottom and my briefcase followed a split second later, followed by my keys, the paper and the banana! A very smart middle-aged man ran to pick me up and asked if I was okay. I squeaked, ‘Yes,’ and so it was that Sir Ian Trethowan, then Director General of the BBC, helped me to put an empty wallet and a banana back into my briefcase.

  At the time, at seventeen, I was the youngest employee of the BBC in London. This was something they took very seriously. I was constantly asked if I was okay and, looking back, in a remarkable show of care, they paid for my second-class return rail ticket to Cornwall every fortnight, an agreement they committed to ‘until I had reached the age of nineteen or had been there for two years’. I got to know the journey from Paddington to Penzance very well. For a time, I took the sleeper down, but I did learn one lesson very quickly: always take the top bunk. If you take the bottom bunk, at some stage in the night some hairy-bollocked bloke is going to descend the ladder to go for a pee! Far better to be up top with a bladder of steel than be subjected to that.

  Room 130 in Broadcasting House. My desk is in the corner, the Uher booking sheet on the right.

  My dad loved fishing of all kinds, but he was happiest fly fishing. Just before he died, we all had a wonderful sunny afternoon in the garden watching him cast a fly on to a side plate on the grass from further and further away, with remarkable accuracy. On my fortnightly trip home, I would get off the train at Bodmin Parkway (then Bodmin Road) station at about 11 p.m. His car would be the only one in the dark car park. In the wheel arch of the front-right tyre, hidden, he’d leave a torch. I would take it and cross the car park, go through a gate and walk down the most scary-assed lane in the darkness to where he was fishing about a mile away. It always played out the same way. I’d start off nervously, swinging the torch from side to side, then slowly start to freak myself out and walk a little faster. As I walked past the huge, brooding rhododendron bushes, my pace would quicken. The more I scared myself, the faster I went: walk, fast walk, trot, run, Olympic panic sprint. Dad always laughed and said he could hear me coming, crazy running down the lane until I burst, breathless, through the bushes to where he was silently casting his fly.

  ‘Hi [pant, wheeze, cough]. It’s me.’

  ‘I heard you.’

  ‘Caught anything?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Much later on in life, the actor (and fellow Oldhamer) Bernard Cribbins would become a friend, and because of his love of fly fishing, he was the only ‘famous’ friend my dad was ever in awe of!

  My job at the BBC was to manage the diaries of the thirty-two radio engineers, putting in the jobs they were to do and their location. I was only responsible for the recorded events; anything live was handled by John Goodman, who sat opposite me. I wasn’t yet qualified for live, and I left before I ever reached that level of competence. I was still a radio geek and I recognized some of the engineers’ names from the Roadshow days; to me, they were famous. Another part of my job was to book out Uhers, portable recorders that could be taken out for non-studio work. I booked out the Uher that Andy Peebles took to New York to record the last-ever interview with John Lennon. I made a copy of the booking form and kept the original, because it had Andy’s signature (which to me was an autograph) on it, but no one had any idea of how important that interview would be until a few days later. I was also responsible for the Uhers’ timely return and it was my job to chase up any that were overdue. I’d been chasing one for days and, finally, I got hold of the very kind but obviously busy journalist. I politely told her that her recorder was overdue, she apologized profusely and said she’d got caught up in a war zone. I replied to Kate Adie that it was fine, but could I have it back asap.

  Clay shooting with my brother-in-law Tim, Mike Smith and Bernard Cribbins.

  I was introduced to the profound joy of real ale in that office. Thirty-two engineers travelled the entire country and almost every one collected beer mats from wherever they’d been. On a map on the wall, each and every one was displayed – it was an exceptional collection. Even now, I can drink spirits and wine to a reasonable level, but beer always writes me off. I can’t count the amount of times I fell forward in the urinal of the Crown and Sceptre pub and banged my head on the ceramic tiles. That pub, and the Yorkshire Grey, were where we would gather after work to have a drink, and I’d watch in awe as the guys from Technical Stores sank fifteen pints and were still able to walk to the Tube. When I did the one thing I never thought I’d do – resign from the BBC to emigrate to New Zealand – as a real-ale aficionado, John Goodman was furious I’d chosen a country that only drank lager.

  It was a very male-orientated department at the time, with only one female engineer (Liz Rorison), and sport was always a topic of conversation, mainly cricket. John had a cricket bat in the office and there was a wicket drawn on the wall. We’d roll up Sellotape tightly into a cricket ball and play in the office. If you ever walked past Broadcasting House in 1980 and a Sellotape ball flew out of a window and into Portland Place, that was us.

  John Goodman (with his real-ale bible) and Rachel Pryor from the religious department.

  As I’ve said, our office was on the first floor, which was incredibly lucky for me. The end of our corridor opened up into a kind of foyer and at the end were four steps leading down to a set of double doors. At the top of those steps was a camera and a button, and if you pressed that button you were scrutinized from within. If you were deemed safe, a green sign would illuminate ab
ove the double doors, simply saying: ‘Enter.’