Parky: My Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page B

wait for me to get through the door before inviting me into the garden to see the progress he had made with my middle son, Nicholas, who was ten at the time. Nicholas was a slow bowler and his granddad had already taught him how to spin a ball from leg.
    ‘See how he’s come on since you went away,’ said my dad, handing me a bat.
    My son bowled three respectable leg breaks and then skidded one through to hit my leg.
    ‘That’s his top spinner and you are plumb lbw,’ said my dad.
    ‘Nonsense, it hit a pebble,’ I said.
    ‘You’ll see,’ said Father.
    Next ball was a leg break, or so I thought. Instead it turned the other way and bowled me. I looked at my ten-year-old.
    ‘That was my goggly. Granddad showed me how to do it,’ said my son.
    My father had a smile that went right round his face and ended at the back collar stud.
    Later on John Boorman, the film director, used the incident in his film Hope and Glory to symbolise the way some families use the sporting rather than the Gregorian calendar to mark the passing of time.
    An irregular part of my father’s social calendar was a visit to London. We sometimes dossed down in Auntie Florrie’s cold-water flat, up two flights of stairs above a pie shop, between King’s Cross and St Pancras Station. She had returned home after working at Rogerthorpe Manor during the war and been reunited with husband Harry, who had stayed in London and kept on working as a messenger for a newspaper in Fleet Street.
    I saw Grub Street for the first time through his eyes, and I saw it as it should be seen, standing outside El Vino’s looking down the street and up to Saint Paul’s. I didn’t realise at the time that it would be, for a short but significant period, my place of work, and it would be a toss up whether El Vino’s or the Daily Express would have the more significant effect on my career.
    It would be untrue to say my father’s obsession with a visit to the capital was due to a love of the place. London to him meant three things: Lord’s, Wembley and The Oval. He took my mother to London for a couple of days for their honeymoon. She was overwhelmed at the prospect of seeing the city for the first time. She didn’t realise there was a Test match in progress and she spent two days at Lord’s.
    It was a fair introduction to life with Father.
    Another time, upon arrival in London, we were whisked to the theatre to see the Ink Spots perform. They were an American close harmony group, popular at the time, and my father’s favourite singers. Their big hit was a sentimental song called ‘Whispering grass’. ‘Why do you whisper green grass? What makes the wind stir you so?’
    I can remember the lyric clearly, sixty years on, only because my father sang it every day. Indeed he joined in at the theatre, singing the bass part, which brought him a visit from the manager who threatened to evict him if he didn’t stop humming.
    Another time my mother, who loved musicals, took us to see the original production of Kismet . She also introduced me to the treasures within the Great American Songbook . She loved the Astaire movies and bought all the recordings of the tunes by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. They were the lullabies of my infancy. By the time I was five of six I knew more Gershwin songs than I did nursery rhymes.
    Every year I bought my mother a record for her birthday. It would be by Crosby or Sinatra, singing a classic, or sometimes I’d buy one by Andre Kostalanetz and some massive orchestra playing a selection of Hollywood hits. The only time I displeased her was when I was fifteen or sixteen and I gave her ‘All the things you are’ played by Charlie Parker. She said she had never heard anything like it.
    Nor had I.

5
    GRAMMAR SCHOOL SENTENCE
    Miss Turpin, my teacher at junior school, had done a remarkable job. My eleven plus results were so good I had been awarded a place in the Express stream at Barnsley Grammar School, which