David Jason: My Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

about half a dozen cubicles, each one shared. This less than magnificent emporium was known as the House of Commons. Each cottage had its ascribed cubicle – Id’s was number four, as I recall – but you shared it with five or six other families from the square. By these standards, the outdoor privy by the back door at Lodge Lane, cramped and draughty as it was, came to seem almost Roman in its luxury. As for the smell that routinely greeted you as you gingerly eased your way into the House of Commons … well, let’s just say that, on a hot summer’s day in Wales – and, just occasionally, you did get one of those – the aroma rising off that block would have been enough to stop two advancing legions of the Spartan army.
    Uncle Id had a pet cockerel with only one working eye, called (naturally enough) Nelson. The other eye was missing, presumedlost in some long-forgotten dust-up with another cockerel. And whether it was because he still bore a grudge about that, or for other reasons, Nelson had what we would now call ‘issues’. In fact, he was essentially a Rottweiler in a cockerel outfit. This battered bird had appointed himself protector of Uncle Id’s property and its chief guardian against invasion, not just by other animals but also by humans. Indeed, the only human Nelson was prepared to tolerate was Uncle Id – to the extent of coming to sit on his shoulder at breakfast, where Id, who appeared to love Nelson as much as he loved anyone or anything, would feed him bits of bread. You can imagine the wonder I had for Id, who appeared to possess the powers of Dr Dolittle.
    Mostly, however, Nelson would adopt a sentry position on the window ledge out the back, flicking his head around and flexing his neck to scope the surroundings with his one good eye. To know Nelson’s fixed monocular gaze was to know fear. Deep fear. Coming in or out of the house, your best chance was to hope that he was asleep, when you just about had a chance of tiptoeing quickly around him. What you didn’t want to do, however, was to get caught between the back door and the House of Commons. Because then Nelson would attack.
    Dear reader, I don’t know if you have ever been attacked by a cockerel, but if you haven’t, then allow me to tell you that it’s an experience with very little to recommend it. Sometimes a cockerel, defying physics, has the uncanny ability to come at you low, hard and seemingly out of nowhere. Or Nelson did, anyway. Occasionally, you would peer tentatively from the rear threshold of the house and establish that the horizon was clear. Then, just as you were marooned in the middle, he would materialise aggressively at your ankles, chasing you into the House of Commons. And then you’d be stuck there, looking out through a knothole while he paraded up and down outside the door, daring you to come out again. What was it with that bloody creature?
    There wasn’t a time that I returned to London from UncleId’s without a pair of legs peppered with beak wounds below the knee. Moreover, this double jeopardy – the aroma of the toilet block plus the chance of getting pecked to ribbons by a violent half-blind cockerel – meant I spent an awful lot of the summers of my childhood determinedly crossing my legs and clenching my buttocks, evacuating my bowels and bladder only as a very last resort.
    Despite the battles with Nelson (and perhaps a little bit because of them), Wales was a magical place to my boyhood self. With my cousin Derek, who was roughly the same age as me, and his gang of mates, I would go out all day clambering around those mountains, drinking water from the springs and playing in disused mines, among the overgrown railway tracks and abandoned wheelhouses. One year Cousin John, who after his leg injury had healed had been given a job ‘at the surface’, as they called it, organised for me and my mate to take a tour of a working mine. I would have been about fourteen. I remember us both climbing