As Luck Would Have It. Derek Jacobi

and I can’t help it!

      Our terraced house in Essex Road was built in red and brown brick, with an iron gate and tiny paved area in front, bay windows, yellow and red brick features and some fancy stuccoed panels: an average, lower-middle-class property. There were three bedrooms upstairs, Mum and Dad’s, mine, and a spare room. At the back was a modest garden where, as I grew into childhood, I used to run around with friends and knock tennis balls about.

      Mum and Dad bought the house before my birth, when George VI was on the throne. They paid £800 for the freehold and it took them twenty-five years to pay off the mortgage. They told me later that when they moved in there were green fields and cows opposite, but these were soon replaced by the inevitable blocks of flats. I don’t remember any green fields or herds of cows, so for me these flats were always there.

      The front room was where we went into on Sundays, the special day, the day of rest, although Mum and Dad rarely if ever went to church. It was the room where the best furniture was kept, well dusted and tidy. Where we played and listened to the gramophone records. Where the cocktail cabinet, the central feature of the front room, was stationed, and where Mum and Dad would display the drinks – which would never be drunk most of the year. The expectations of booze, of parents with their gin and tonics or their nightly glasses of wine, not to mention six pints downed at the pub, were never there for any of us – so different from the way it is for many children born today.

      The exception was of course at Christmas, when the cherry brandy would be poured, and then imbibed to celebrate the tree lights being switched on. The radiogram cabinet was huge, almost as big as a sideboard. It housed the sole piece of broadcasting equipment – the sacred wireless, with white buttons and dials to twirl and press, and rasps and crackles of static and a muddle and jumble of strange tongues, like Pentecost, to which we all listened dutifully, even religiously. There were just three channels – the Home Service, the Third Programme and the Light Programme – and that was all there was, well before television came along. The notion of constant choice and switching channels just didn’t enter into it.

      And so it stayed like that for many years, until I was ten – and to begin with, and for life ever after, the first outlet of my romantic feelings and love was for Mum and Dad, whose whole focus was on me.

      Being a happy child and belonging to a small, close-knit family as I did, my memories of childhood mostly centre around the other members of my family who lived locally. There was Grandpa and Grandma, Dad’s parents; Dad’s brother – Uncle Henry; his wife – Auntie Hilda; and their son Raymond. All five of them lived on two floors in Poplars Road, off Baker’s Arms, which was twenty minutes’ walk away in Leyton. Grandpa and Grandma lived upstairs, the others on the ground floor. Grandma Sarah was tiny. She and Grandpa Henry were very sweet, kind and gentle.

      In the wider family circle my cousin Michael (son of my mother’s brother Alfred) and Vicky, his sister, lived just down the road, too. Alf Two was very close to Dad. Tall and gangling with dark hair, he was a builder and later built the lean-to or conservatory on the back of our house. He was Mum’s favourite brother, a joker who would have us in fits, but he liked to gamble, and on more than one occasion – as I found out later – got himself into ‘a spot of bovver’. One day after the war he suddenly took off with his wife and two children without telling a soul, and sailed for Australia. Mum was heartbroken. On discovering they had gone she came back from their house furious and upset.

      We went round and found the house empty. They really had gone. I think this must have been another ‘spot of bother’ – he’d got himself into a state over money. Even before they left my parents had the feeling that there was something ‘not quite right’, and were suspicious about what was going on in Uncle Alf’s immediate family. Mum wasn’t too keen on the Beardmores, as the family her brother married into were called, and we were all a bit doubtful about them. I grew up wary of the Beardmores: not because they were unfriendly or uncommunicative, but because they were a little odd and eccentric.

      There was a brother of my maternal grandmother – a great-uncle who was known as Gaga. He sat around in Hackney and did nothing, but on Dad’s side Grandpa had six brothers, one of whom was a well-known architect called Julius Jacobi who built some of the first skyscrapers in London, although we never knew him or the other Jacobis.

      A remarkable feature of Aunt Hilda’s household was the one outside toilet to which I’d head to answer the call of nature. When I was ready I’d call out, ‘I’m ready, Aunt Hilda!’ – the call I made for Auntie to come and wipe my bottom. Grandpa, who was a cobbler and worked for Dolcis all his life, had a shed in the garden to ply his trade and mend our shoes; this was his holy of holies, where he kept all his cobbling tools – I treasure to this day a metal last as a doorstop.

      Not only was there no toilet in the house, but also no bathroom. We took our immersions in a tin bath, filled it up with hot water once a week, with a fire blazing in the hearth to keep us warm. But did we feel deprived? Did we feel others had more than we did? Never – it never once crossed our minds.

      Mum’s maiden name was Daisy Gertrude Masters. I knew nothing about her paternal background, but her grandmother had the unlikely name of Salomé Lapland, so heaven knows where she came from – most likely from the frozen north – and for all I knew the family could have been gypsies. She had some French relations somewhere, and there were two adored brothers. There were no actors or anyone remotely like artists in her family. She would later claim that my artistic temperament came from her side, for an aunt of hers played the piano!

      Mum was pretty, she had a round face, while her hair had turned white when she was in her twenties. She was very conscious of her hair and would go to the hairdressers once a week in Leyton. Dad and I had an old-fashioned barber who lived next door and who would come in once a week to cut our hair. We would lay out newspapers in our front room to collect the cuttings.

      I never remember what people look like, but I do remember their voices. The barber had a voice like my uncle Henry, which I learned later had been the result of diphtheria when he was young. It was adenoidal, strained, and he spoke very high, at the top of his throat. His throat had been burned away, or cauterised.

      Both my parents were born in Hackney in the same year, 1910. Mum and Dad met first as teenagers, while very much later, in their forties, they both worked at Garnham’s department store in Walthamstow High Street, where Dad managed the crockery and hardware department and Mum was the boss’s secretary and a department supervisor.

      ‘It was the scout uniform,’ she would say. ‘To woo me your dad had a motorbike with a sidecar. He would come and collect me, and we would go out together.’

      They had a modest wooing, with her on the pillion or sidecar. Sometimes my Auntie Hilda and Uncle Henry joined them.

      War was declared in September 1939, a month before my first birthday. My memories go back to sitting in a pram when we first heard the air-raid sirens. Mum grabbed hold of me, swaddled and wrapped me up, then rushed me down the steps into the Anderson shelter.

      I liked the wail of the sirens and never felt fear. Although we didn’t live in the area of dense, blanket bombing or the fire bombs that set the whole of Docklands on fire, there were explosions enough – flashes, sirens, wailing searchlights crossing the sky and picking out planes and barrage balloons. Somehow I was never affected. I was too young to feel or understand violent death and destruction as a presence.

      Dozens of kids from where I lived were sent away in the early months of war with labels round their necks and a single change of clothing, accompanied by teachers, to board with strangers, but with no guarantee they could stay even with brothers and sisters, and not knowing when they would next see their fathers and mothers.