Small Man in a Book Read online

  ROB BRYDON

  Small Man in a Book

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Foreword

  PART ONE: ‘Born in the USA’ (The Uplands of Swansea, actually …)

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO: ‘Working on a Dream’

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART THREE: ‘From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)’

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  For

  Katie, Harry, Amy, Tom and George

  Foreword

  Here is the story of some of my life. I start on the day I was born and stop thirty-five years later at the end of the year 2000, the point at which I finally had the first sniff of the ‘success’ I had been so doggedly searching for. Within this timescale I occasionally jump forward into the new millennium when I feel the stories will add to the reader’s enjoyment, and also because I’ve always been fascinated by our inability to know what lies ahead.

  By the time this success arrived, I had married and had three beautiful children. As I sit here at my desk and write these words in the summer of 2011, I find I am the proud father of five children, and married – to my second wife, Claire.

  This book makes no mention of my divorce and its accompanying sadness. My children are of an age where reading about the intimate details of their parents’ lives holds little appeal and great potential for social embarrassment. Coupled with this, their mother – my first wife, Martina – shares none of my desire for attention, nor my willingness to parade around for the amusement of strangers. It is for this reason, and this reason alone, that she features less in these pages than her major role in my life surely warrants.

  In not meeting me until 2002 Claire has ensured that she features even less, making a grand total of zero appearances in the autobiography of her husband – something that feels very wrong but, having structured the book in the way that I have, is, I’m afraid, inevitable. We have been together now for nearly ten years and, were it not for her, I doubt very much that I would have reached a position where I was asked to write an autobiography.

  If that is indeed the case, then should you find the book is not to your taste, it’s really her fault, not mine.

  PART ONE

  ‘Born in the USA’ (The Uplands of Swansea, actually …)

  1

  I was born on Monday the 3rd of May 1965 at a maternity home in Swansea, South Wales, which was called, rather prophetically, The Bryn. I have often wondered how differently my life might have turned out if my parents had instead chosen the nearby James Bond Home For Expectant Mothers. Bryn, as you may know, means ‘hill’ in Welsh, and the home sat on top of one such hill in Killay, the Uplands area of Swansea. Mum and Dad – Joy and Howard – were just twenty and twenty-one years old at the time and had arrived there the previous evening after the contractions began while they were at home watching the television. These were the dark days before Sky+ and so on Mum’s insistence, and despite the lengthening and by now rather painful contractions, they waited until The Fugitive had finished before making a move.

  Just like Dr Richard Kimble, I was keen to escape and by the time the programme was over I could wait no longer. Mum waddled out of the house, and squeezed into the car, which Dad then steered over to Swansea. On arrival at The Bryn, Mum’s waters had still not broken; they did so as the midwife was examining her. My mother was the midwife’s first delivery after a lengthy period of maternity leave, and the time away from the job had softened the poor woman sufficiently that when the moment arrived and the levee finally broke, on witnessing the deluge, she promptly passed out. That’s right, a midwife passing out at the sight of someone’s waters breaking. Not wishing to appear rude my father followed suit. Bang, down he went, leaving my mother staring at the two of them in a heap on the floor. The delivery doctor – an older and, in my mother’s recollection, quite stern gentleman – had to administer to both the fainters before he could turn his attention to the job at hand. He guided Dad out to another room, where he might regain his composure, and then two hours later, shortly after twenty past five in the morning, returned with the words, ‘It’s a boy, and it works …’ This last part of his news a reference to the fact that I had urinated on him in a most enthusiastic fashion as soon as I was out and into the world. On leaving the room he turned back to my dad and, in a glorious example of the politically incorrect 1960s, gave the following advice with regard to my mother, ‘Keep them pregnant and barefoot; they won’t go very far.’

  After coming in to meet his son and check on the well-being of his wife, Dad returned home to Baglan to spread the news, full of pride at having passed out only once. Mum stayed at the home for a whole week, in her own little room, surrounded by flowers and cards, her only disturbance being the sound of one baby in particular who could be heard screaming at the top of its lungs night and day from the nursery where all the newborns were herded together to give their novice parents a break. From the comfort of her bed she couldn’t help feeling sorry for the mother of this noisy little child who was surely in for a rough ride once she got home. On her departure Mum received the splendid news that the child in question was my good self, her little cherub, her firstborn. It was decided that I was suffering from colic, and as mother and child left the home we did so with the advice that I would benefit, even at this young age, from mashed-up Farley’s Rusks to settle my poor little stomach.

  As a baby, shortly after stumbling across my dad’s merkin.

  The pattern was set, and Mum swears I didn’t sleep for the next five years. She and my poor sleep-deprived father would take it in turns to walk me around the bedroom on their shoulder while they sang in what Dylan Thomas described as the slow, black, crowblack darkness of the Welsh night, waiting for my body to go limp and my breathing to slide into the telltale rhythm of sleep. Mum’s repertoire consisted of ‘Lili Marlene’, ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and the now-forgotten song that sounded like the set-up to a Jackie Mason gag, ‘The Three Jews’ (‘Once upon a time there were three Jews / Once upon a time there were three Jews / Juh-ewuh, Jew, Jew, Jew / Juh-ewuh, Jew, Jew, Jew / Once upon a time there were three Jews …’), all the while patting my back in rhythm with the song. Dad opened his set with the first verse of ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’ repeated ad infinitum before moving on to ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away’. There he was, circling the room in the gloom, a lone desperate voice in the wilderness.

  There is a green hill far away,

  Without a city wall,

  Where the dear Lord was crucified,

  Who died to save us all.

  Crucifixion, while an extreme and (one would hope) last resort, must surely have crossed his mind.

  We lived at Woodside, a large manor house in Baglan, just next to Port Talbot in South Wales. It belonged to my maternal grandparents – Bob and Margaret – who had bought the place, kept the best bit for themselves and converted the rest into flats to provide an income. Nan and Grandpa had one side of the ground floor; Mum, Dad and I occupied the other, while the upper floors were taken by a variety of tenants. Most of my memories are of being in my grandparents’ part of the house or in the large sloping garden, which wrapped round one side of it. It was a m
agnificent, imposing house with a long winding driveway and grand steps sweeping up to a veranda and large central door. Mature rhododendron bushes in which I would climb and play at Robin Hood and Tarzan bordered the driveway; there was also a haystack along the way in which I would leap from one bale to another and slide down the gaps in between. Behind and around the house were fields, with a small farm just off to the side, and the whole thing sat high up on a mountain from which it was possible to see the coast at Aberavon, while beyond and off to the right lay the shimmering excitement of Swansea.

  With Nan and Grandpa at Woodside.

  If it seems as though I am painting a picture of a bucolic idyll, it is because that is how it now appears in my mind. The rhododendron bushes, perfect for small arms and legs to climb through, seemed identical to the surroundings that Hawkeye found himself in each week on the BBC’s Last of the Mohicans (which I would watch wide-eyed and then re-enact the following day). Even now, all these years later, if I see a rhododendron bush at close quarters, perhaps while walking through a park, I will have to suppress a strong urge to climb in and dangle from a branch.

  My memories of those early years at Woodside (we lived here on and off for some time) are all late sixties film stock colour-soaked loveliness. Cosy winter evenings with hot buttered toast and Ivor the Engine parping away on the television as he puffed around his imaginary North Wales. Long summer days with the French windows open and the net curtains blowing in the breeze as Mum and Nan sat glued for interminable hours to the BBC’s coverage of Wimbledon and I’d wander in and out of the room wondering what all the fuss was about and when it would end.

  A young Brando. (Marlon Brando.) (… the actor.)

  The television was contained within its own lacquered wooden cabinet, the doors rolling back to reveal the screen, and it was here that I would sit and worship at the altar of entertainment. Pinky and Perky, Bill and Ben and The Herbs as a small child, before my tastes matured and I was able to appreciate the more complex plots of Marine Boy, Champion the Wonder Horse, Robinson Crusoe and Skippy. We were able, thanks to the house being high on a hill, to pick up the English local ITV provider Westward. The station had a fluffy puppet of a rabbit that would sit with the presenter as he read out the birthdays at teatime. When the age of the child was revealed, Gus Honeybun, for it was he, would perform the requisite number of bunny hops in celebration. Perhaps my earliest memory is of my second birthday party and the television being surrounded by aunts and mothers of friends, who all erupted in celebration as my name was read out and Gus began to bust some moves. A chorus of Welsh ladies’ voices rang out, a shrill clarion call of, ‘It’s Robert!’ They rose to their feet in collective triumph: ‘It’s doing it, it’s doing it! The rabbit is hopping for Robert!’ In the process, blocking my view of the screen and rather scaring me.

  I wasn’t having much luck with birthdays. Twelve months earlier, on my very first one, I’m told I had been applauding myself for having blown out my solitary candle when the cat stepped up and quite deliberately scratched my face, as if to tell me off for attracting attention to myself.

  If he was hoping to quell any ambitions in that area, he didn’t succeed.

  Great swathes of my childhood come back to me in vivid colour, with a decidedly American flavour or tone. The Americanization of my memories may be attributed to several factors, in no particular order. My maternal grandfather was Canadian. Robert Arthur Brydon (I was named after him, Robert Brydon Jones) spoke with a Canadian accent, which to my young ears sounded American and therefore rather exotic and exciting. He came to Britain during the war and met my grandmother, Margaret Thomas, in London in 1942. They were at the United Services Library and were both writing letters home. Years later, once I was around and old enough to notice, I’d hear him call up the stairs to his wife, ‘Maaarg!’ I wonder if having this unusual accent in such close proximity contributed to my being able to mimic different voices. Probably not – I suspect it’s a lucky trick, more to do with the make-up of your ear and how it relates to your mouth. It must also tie in with an inbuilt desire to perform, something I certainly had from a young age and was never shy to express.

  ‘I declare this meeting of the Junior Book Club open.’

  Riot!

  Grandpa was a builder. He built houses. He built the one that frames my strongest memories of him, Hawthorn Cottage on the edge of Baglan as it becomes Briton Ferry. This was the house that we moved into in 1981 when Dad’s business became a victim of the recession, a year or so after Grandpa had passed away. He died not long after going into hospital with a complaint that the doctors failed to cure. I only have one fleeting memory of him in his final days, sitting at home on his reclining chair. This was perhaps the only time I saw him unshaven.

  Dad, Grandpa, Nan, Just William, Mum, Cousin David, Aunty Ann, Uncle Peter.

  The bulk of my memories are of a strong man, eating sausage and mash on a Saturday lunchtime with just one hand. I should make it clear that he held a fork in the one hand. He wasn’t an animal – nor, for that matter, an amputee – but he liked to cut up his meal first and then allow the knife to rest while he slowly and methodically picked out morsels of food one by one, like hostages being selected for death. These lunches would follow a Saturday morning when he’d take me, his first grandchild, to Swansea Bay Golf Club where he was twice champion. If you pop in while you’re passing on your way to Swansea, you’ll see his name, R. Brydon, still there on the champions’ board. Every Saturday we would drive over and stroll to a practice tee where we’d hit a bag of balls with a 7-iron. Let’s be clear about this: we would take the balls out of the bag first and hit them each individually. I wasn’t standing there hitting a cloth bag full of balls in a peculiarly Welsh and golf-centric premonition of The Karate Kid. Although we would go to the course once a week, I didn’t really develop a love of the game until many years later when I hit my forties and it seemed rude not to.

  Memories of Grandpa also include trips to the timber merchant in Briton Ferry where selected the materials needed for his current projects, which at one point included a pair of semi-detached houses on Old Road in Baglan into which Mum, Dad and I were to move. Our house had a small spare room in which I one day became trapped when the door handle came off on the inside and I shouted and shouted until I lost my voice. It was also where we lived during my Basil Brush phase, a curious time of my life when I was equally drawn to and terrified of the cheeky little waistcoat-wearing fox. I clearly remember my father reassuring me that in the unlikely event of a visit from Basil, he would throw him over the garden wall. Given that we lived on the edge of a fairly high drop, this would surely act as a deterrent.

  Many years later, while working as a radio presenter for the BBC in Cardiff, I would finally come face to face – or, at least, voice to voice – with Basil, now long past his heyday, in a phone interview. I was surprisingly nervous, but delighted, when he ended our exchange with one of his poems.

  The girl stood on the burning bridge,

  Her leg was all a-quiver.

  She gave a cough,

  Her leg fell off,

  And floated down the river …

  Boom, boom!

  While this house was being built I would spend time with Grandpa ‘helping’ him. I was three years old at the time and I dare say my help was indispensable. After a suitable period of hard toil, we would break and Grandpa would take out a glass bottle of Corona lemonade, or ‘pop’ as we called it. I don’t recall how much he would drink but I would have mine served from the cap – he would fill the cap of the bottle with lemonade, and I would drink the contents.

  Mum and Dad met in 1961. Mum had finished her O levels and was at the Corner House Café, opposite the Plaza cinema in Port Talbot with a friend. Dad worked at the Blue Star Garage, next to the café, fitting tyres and batteries. The owner of the café was a friend and would loan Dad his brand-new Ford Zephyr, with leopardskin seat covers, in which he would then try to impress the girls. M
um walked over to Dad on this fateful evening and asked if he’d take her friend out for a spin in his car. Dad declined the invitation but said that he’d gladly take Mum; he’s still driving her around today.

  Mum and Dad in 1964, event unknown.

  As a young boy, I would go with my family to church on a Sunday, to St Catharine’s in Baglan. It was where Mum and Dad were married and I had been christened. Our vicar was Islwyn Lewis, a lovely man who would encourage me to get up on the steps of the pulpit and perform to the congregation. My signature act was to hide deep inside Vicar Lewis’s flowing robes and then spring out with a song or a funny face. I dare say that nowadays encouraging young boys to hide in your ecclesiastical robes is frowned upon, but these were more innocent times and services at St Catharine’s were considered to have been something of a disappointment if I hadn’t popped in and out at least once. I took centre stage too when Vicar Lewis officiated at the wedding of Mum’s sister, my Aunty Ann. I was a pageboy and kept trying to pull focus by bowing at every opportunity during the service.

  On Sunday afternoons we would go for a run in the car, perhaps east to the seaside at Ogmore or west to Oxwich. When it came to holidays we travelled to spots in Britain and beyond into Europe, where on a trip to Italy I caught mumps and the hotel owner encouraged us to leave earlier than planned. Closer to home we stayed at Mullion Cove in Cornwall with Uncle Colin, Aunty Dilys and my cousin Kim, all travelling down in Grandpa’s metallic-blue Mark IX Jaguar. Once at the hotel Dad became known to the other guests, most of whom were English, as Jones the Jag. Fittingly enough, for a child who would go on to find a career in comedy, we once stayed at the Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay, famously the inspiration for Fawlty Towers. My parents remember being in the bar one night at around ten o’clock, enjoying a drink with the other guests, when the owner suddenly pulled down the grille, switched out all the lights and went to bed, leaving his guests in the dark. Perhaps someone had mentioned the war.