Morecambe and Wise (Text Only). Graham McCann

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СКАЧАТЬ gramophone and he knew every record we possessed. It’s clear in my memory … He would come in and say, ‘What do you want playing?’ ‘Play me so and so,’ I’d say. He would go through the records, and though he couldn’t read, he would find the very one I had named, put it on, and start dancing to it.

      Whenever we took him out to relatives, all he wanted to do was perform ... ‘I want to do my party piece. I want to sing and dance.’

      ‘Wait a minute, love,’ he would be told.

      I remember one particular night when the pianist told him to wait, and he said, ‘All right, I’ll wait under the table.’ He must have been about three. From time to time he would announce, ‘I’m here, and I’m still waiting.’¹⁰

      Eric could, Sadie recalled, be ‘quite a handful.’¹¹ Both she and her husband had to remember never to leave their front door ajar; they knew that little Eric, had he ever glimpsed a chink of light through the narrowest of gaps, would have pushed the door wide open and wandered off down the street in search of adventure. Whenever Sadie needed to take him shopping with her she found that the only thing she could do to keep him still while she prepared for the trip was to tie him by his scarf to the door-knob and let him sit outside on the step. Even this, however, was sometimes not enough to hold him: on one occasion he managed to convince a passerby that he had tied himself – as part of some obscure prank – too tightly to the door, and needed the assistance of a kind-hearted individual to help him get free. An anxious Sadie tracked him down, eventually, to a damp and dirty building site some distance away at the bottom of Lancaster Road. She found him entertaining the workers by reciting nursery rhymes and performing such songs as ‘Blue Moon’ and ‘I’m Dancing with Tears in My Eyes’, and encouraging them to reward him by tossing coins into his strategically positioned tam-o’-shanter:

      When I got there his little white suit was spattered with mud, his shoes and socks were caked where he had squelched through a really sticky patch, and his face was filthy. He saw me and announced to his audience, ‘I’d better go now, there’s me Mam.’

      One of the builders said, ‘That little lad’s a wonderful entertainer.’

      ‘I’ll entertain him when I get him home,’ I said.

      ‘Oh,’ said Eric, ‘that means I will have to have my bottom slapped, won’t I, Mum?’

      ‘You’ve never spoken a truer word.’

      ‘Well, folks,’ said Eric to his audience, ‘I’ll have to be going. Goodbye everybody. See you tomorrow.’¹²

      It was, in spite of the usual kind of deprivations and occasional crises experienced by all working-class families of the period, a happy childhood. ‘I have wonderful memories of both my mother and father,’ Eric would later remark, ‘absolutely fantastic memories, and I think of them a lot and with great happiness.’¹³ The gentle, easy-going George, his family always said, would start whistling contentedly to himself ‘from the moment his feet touched the ground each morning’.¹⁴ He took great pleasure in spending time with his son watching football matches (often at the modest little ground of Morecambe FC; sometimes, as an occasional treat, thirty miles away at Deepdale, the altogether more impressive stadium of Preston North End). George would also take Eric fishing, or picking mushrooms in the fields around their home, and sometimes for long and rambling walks around the town reminiscing about his own childhood days and telling elaborate, funny stories that frequently concealed unexpected twists in their tail. Sadie, Eric remembered, had less time to spare – understandably – for casual outings, but whenever her work brought her into contact with any aspect of the entertainment world she would make a point of bringing him along for a tantalising glimpse behind the scenes. When an opportunity did present itself for a family excursion of some kind or another it was always made the most of. A photograph dating from 1932, for example, pictures what appears to be the end of a very enjoyable afternoon out in the sun, with George, Sadie and Eric sitting down close together on the grass, their makeshift tent standing behind them, all smiling broadly and each with a ukulele in their hands.

      Although Eric was an only child he did not want for the companionship of friends of his own age. He was well liked by most of the other children in the area. He joined in all the chaotic games of football with the other boys in the park at the back of Christie Avenue, and accompanied several of his friends on their regular visits to Halfway House – the local sweet shop. On most weekends, he queued with his cousin ‘Sonny’ Threlfall outside the Palladium cinema – known affectionately as ‘The Ranch’ – to see the latest movies (Westerns were his favourite) and, during relatively uneventful moments, fire peashooters at bald-headed men in the rows below.

      Morecambe – like most English seaside resorts – was a place of stark, seasonal contrasts: cold, dull and quiet in the winter months; warm, bright and noisy in the summer months. Eric, looking back on his childhood, would describe his memories of his home town as ‘serene and ageless. They emerge vivid and sharp. Happy and bright, not dull and ugly.’¹⁵ One of the clearest images was of seeing his parents share the ‘supreme joy’ of sitting together and ‘watching the Turneresque sunset over Morecambe Bay’.¹⁶

      The town, in those days, was often referred to formally as part of a broader area – ‘Morecambe and Heysham’. Morecambe, as Eric would take pleasure in pointing out, ‘was a double act long before I met Ernie’.¹⁷ Spring, as far as Eric was concerned, was the season that marked the town’s sudden re-awakening, and summer the enchanting time when the town ‘became a different place’.¹⁸ As the temperature began to rise and the sun started to shine, the town moved rapidly from being a rather insular and unobtrusive Lancashire town to become a lively centre for recreation, a welcoming place that boasted all kinds of entertainment.

      Morecambe – the ‘Naples of the North’, a ‘smaller Blackpool’¹⁹ – was at this time in the process of creeping gentrification. The process culminated in the early thirties with the establishment of the art deco Midland Hotel, an ambitiously lavish new high-style building on the seaward side of the promenade that soon attracted the likes of David Niven, Mrs Wallis Simpson and Noël Coward. In the summer, as the holiday season began and strangers flocked to the town from all directions, it was, said Eric, ‘like being brought up to date; finding out what was going on in the world. You never saw many cars in those days, yet August brought a veritable motorcade of Austin Sevens and Morris Eights driven by the “well-to-do” paying their £3 a week, full board at the town’s desirable residences.’²⁰

      On the sands, littered with sleepy bodies slouched deep in deckchairs and mazy formations of energetic boys and girls, the regular daily entertainment was provided by ‘the Nigger Minstrels’ – ‘then undeterred’, Eric would later note, ‘by the racial overtones of their titles’.²¹ They would sometimes hold talent contests, and Eric, whenever possible, would enter them – winning on at least three occasions (after his last success, he recalled, ‘They found out I was a local boy and stopped me from entering.’²²). Summer also brought with it the prospect of a chance sighting of a visiting celebrity, and Eric was particularly excited one year to see ‘the magnificent’ portly British movie star Sydney Howard²³ – fresh from appearing in Shipyard Sally (1939) alongside Gracie Fields – strolling sedately along the pier. The season always ended with the relatively modest but rather beautiful illuminations, a final few visits to the ‘fairyland’ of Happy Mount Park and the first chill winds that accompanied the holidaymakers’ ‘final glimpse of annual escape’.²⁴

      ‘I was proud’, Eric would say, ‘to know that people came to my town for a holiday. It always seemed a pity that they couldn’t stop the whole year round [because] in those golden growing up years, there was a sort of magic about Morecambe. It had a lot to offer and СКАЧАТЬ