I WAKE UP OUTSIDE A TYPEWRITER SHOP IN RED BANK, NEW JERSEY. I FEEL LIKE A CHARACTER ON A TV SHOW, A CROSS BETWEEN THE FUGITIVE AND “RIP VAN WINKLE.” “THIS WEEK ERIC WAKES UP IN….” I HAVEN’T EVEN HEARD of a typewriter shop in twenty years, but this one sells old typewriters and adding machines. We are parked yards from the Count Basie Theatre, which, in addition to me, is also selling the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and Tom Jones. The sun is shining, though it looks chilly. A stiff wind tugs at the flags, making them snap. People go by, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets. Why am I here?
Well, love, why are any of us here?
No, I mean in a car park in New Jersey?
Well we couldn’t get around the back of the theater until later.
No, I mean what am I doing here, on the bus, on a tour, doing this show?
Oh. Right. Oh, dear. He’s in one of his self-questioning moods, love. It’s because you can, Eric, love. It’s because you grew up as a boarding-school boy behaving well publicly, doing as you’re told, and you learned all sorts of survival skills, how to surf life without being drowned, how to survive on a smile and a song and a bitter sense of humor. How to get through. How to maintain. How not to crack. It’s because you went to Cambridge and fell in love with laughs. You liked being a bit of a toff. Dressing up in fancy clothes, copping the adulation of strangers. You became a bit of a laugh junkie, luvvie. You need that big noise of approval the intelligent apes make when you say something funny.
So this, then, is a quest?
If you like, love, it’s a sort of search for your own internal Holy Grail. A spiritual quest of a man who has reached a certain point of life and seeks to explore his own response to that knowledge. Or.
Or what?
Or you just like showing off.
So why did I become a comedian? Try this for pathos. It’s England. It’s Christmas 1945. The country has just spent six years at war, an exhausting, crippling war, a war that has cost it every last ounce of will to survive. After several attempts my father, Ernest, joined the RAF in 1941, in the bleakest, darkest time, when his country stood alone in the world against the entire continent of Europe united under a Nazi Germany. Take a look at the map sometime. It’s awesome. The Battle of Britain. Mastery of the skies, the few, the many dead. The sickening civilian bombing. London burning. The hammering sound of the planes at night. Cheer up, love, we can take it. Death from the skies. The boy Eric was born in 1943. He nearly didn’t make it; a previous son died. His father came home on sick leave to give him blood. The absent father, always away in India, Nassau, New York, Canada, RAF stations around the globe, sitting in the most dangerous seat of a Wellington, the rear gunner, wireless operator. Just a Plexiglas bubble between you and the enemy planes. But he came through.
It was the end of the war. The country shivered under another winter of shortages, but at least the killing was done. No more the dread sound of planes in the sky at night, the awful banshee wailing of the air-raid sirens, the dreadful smell of rubber on his little Mickey Mouse gas mask. Eric was two years old. His mother was working as a nurse in the north of England. His father, Ernest, still in uniform, had nothing much to do but wait for his discharge. They had survived, that was their triumph. Now they flew odd sorties off Scotland to secret destinations with strange code words. He had found the words “Spam Exit” in his father’s tiny handwriting, in his tiny RAF diary for 1945. He had also found a few references to himself, the choking words for July 7: “Eric’s first paddle & trip to the Beach”; and a few days later, “Took Norah & Eric over U Boat.”
Christmas was coming. The boy was not well, but maybe he was not that sick either. His mother yearned for her husband, locked up in those barracks. She sent a telegram: “Come home urgently. Boy very sick.” What harm could it do? It wasn’t as though they were still at war, and four years without your husband, who could blame her? Fate, that’s who. The Fat Lady hadn’t yet sung.
Ernest was granted leave. Four days. It was just before Christmas, December 21, cold, foggy, freezing postwar Britain. The winter solstice, the shortest day, hardly light for more than a couple of hours and it’s getting dark again. Wet roads, lights on, glistening, slippery tarmac. “Don’t take the trains”—that’s the advice to the servicemen; “hitchhike.” Everyone stops for the men in uniform, our boys who have delivered us from evil.
Somewhere outside Darlington the blue-uniformed man gets a ride from a lorry with a load of sheet metal. Hop in the back, mate. No problem. Hitching home for Christmas. Nice one. Cold in the back of the truck, huddling down to escape the chill wind, blowing on his hands. Huddled into his woolly greatcoat, dreaming of Christmas by the fire, wife, child, and the war over.
Outside Darlington on a two-lane main road, a car, hooting in a hurry, tries to pass. There isn’t room. Something is coming. A honking of horns. The car swerves in front of the lorry. The truck skids, a squeal of tires as it runs off the road. Dad in the back is trapped, crushed by the shifting load. Badly injured he is taken to hospital, and now it is her turn to get the telegram. “Come urgently husband very ill.” Pausing only to find someone to care for the two-year-old, she takes the trains all night to end up by his, yes, deathbed. He lingers.
I made a right wakes of this Norah, darling,” he says to her.
He dies the night before Christmas Eve, the nurses in their red capes singing “Silent Night.” Happy Christmas, everyone. Father’s grave: in neat lined slabs they are drawn up in ranks, forever at attention, name, rank, serial number, and date of death, 23 December 1945. And the sad Latin words of the RAF over each of them: “Per ardua ad astra.”
The mother works, the boy grows, she gets £756 compensation and a plaque from the King that says he officially “gave his life to save mankind from tyranny.” The boy grows, but she cannot look at him without thinking she is to blame. Her guilt. Her grief. The shining future that they had dreamed, wiped out by telegram. Christmas by the fireside, the mother weeping, always weeping. Why always weeping, for look it is Christmas and how brightly the fire shines off the little tinsel tree, how prettily it reflects the shiny aluminum reds and golds. Surely that will cheer you up if I cannot? Why weeping, Mother, when we have a big bright food parcel from America with a little teddy bear for the boy? Why are you always weeping?
The boy becomes seven and is sent away to boarding school. Here’s the irony; he is sent to a school to grow up with boys all of whom have lost their fathers in the war. A single-parent half-orphanage that had been, until just before he got there, a full-blown Victorian orphanage with boys in blue coats buttoning from the neck to the ankles. A Victorian school with a dormitory 110 yards long, the longest in Europe they are told. A dormitory which is so cold frost can be found inside in the bleak gray winter mornings. Twelve years he spends there. He becomes a comedian. Why a comedian? To avoid the bullying? To escape the irony? They called it the Ophny, short for orphanage. Sad, isn’t it?
“Are you happy at school?”
“Oh yes, please, sir, thank you.”
Twelve years of happiness. Pure bliss in the longest dormitory in Europe. One hundred and ten yards—a powerful black athlete could easily run down it in ten seconds. They identified with the black slaves. They sang Negro songs on old banjos, plucking at cheap guitars and blowing into small harmonicas. Why should they identify with the black slaves of the American South? The music? No, the lyrics. The bitterness, the hopelessness, the despair, those endless years, those endless fourteen-week terms. Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, the songs of Jim Crow…
If you’re white, you’re all right
If you’re brown, stick around
But if you’re black, oh brother
Get back, get back, get back.
The bitterness, the hopelessness, the despair.
They were fed on a diet of British war films, of amiable RAF men locked up in cold Colditz Castle. No wonder they identified, walled up in their Wolverhampton monastery. Sad? A million sad tales I can tell you, repressed emotion recollected in tranquillity. A thing of duty is a boy forever. Per ardua ad astra. Through hard work to the stars. Could be the motto of mankind entering the Space Age. Or a young man entering show business.