Free Paul Daniels by Paul Daniels Page B

and continued into my early teens.
    One beautiful summer’s day a friend, Colin Mason, and I decided to go for a bike ride. We set off out of the Tees Valley and headed south. A car would do the trip nowadays in half-an-hour but the climb out of the valley is steep if you are only using your legs and bikes were not as light as they are now. We came to a village and Colin, who had been there before, told me that he wanted to show me something really interesting. We turned off the main road and set off up a lane. I stopped. I knew this lane. This was the lane of my nightmare.
    Colin could see that something was wrong and I told him about the lych-gate at the top. He asked if I had been there before and I said ‘no’. I just couldn’t tell him about the dream and I couldn’t stop myself from seeing this through even though I was icy cold and terrified. We went up the lane and there was the gate, exactly as it was in the dream. We went through the gate and walked along the narrow church path tothe building. I wanted to go in the main door, of course, but Colin said that what he wanted to show me was in ‘here’ and headed for the side door. I wanted to scream and I don’t know how I didn’t.
    He pulled the door open and …
    NOTHING happened.
    Colin wanted to show me a narrow wheelbase bier. This, he explained, was used to wheel the coffin from the hearse in the lane along the narrow churchyard pathways to the grave.
    As I pedalled home, my head was full of wild thoughts; was I a reincarnation, for example? Was my former body buried somewhere in this village graveyard and did I have some strange mental connection with my previous life? How else could I have known the lane so well and dreamed my dream?
    I got home to the greeting that all young people get when they have been out for hours. ‘And where do you think you’ve been ’til this time?’
    I explained that we had been for a ride to a village called Swainby. There was something in the way my mother started to say, ‘Ah, Swainby,’ and I burst in with, ‘We’ve been there. We were on holiday there in a caravan on the bend of a river and Cousin Ada was with us and Dad came in the middle of the night and …’
    Mam looked at me in amazement. Apparently, all this had happened while I was still being pushed around in a pram. According to her, I couldn’t possibly have remembered it at all, being that young.
    It is my belief that the gliding up the lane came from the view from the pram and, over my head, the grown-ups had talked about the bier and what it was used for. At that age I didn’t understand in detail the word ‘death’ and somehow later in my young life my brain cells had put it together with something horrible and created my nightmare. Ever since thisrealisation, I have always tried to talk in a positive manner to babies and young children. We learn at a very early age.
    * * *
    Meanwhile, back at the cinema, I was still showing movies and bobbing out of the tiny trapdoor of a door at the back of the ‘circle’ to watch them from the back row. I was sitting there one night, minding my own business, when a young man several years older than me, reached out and put his hand on my thigh. I never even thought about what happened next, it just happened. I can’t remember being told anything about homosexuality or warned, so what I did was just a reflex action. There was no fear, no excitement, no thought at all, I merely reached out with my left hand, grasped his wrist and with my right hand snapped his little finger. It cracked and he screamed, causing everyone to look round as he ran down the stairs and out of the cinema. Dad came running up the stairs and asked what had happened and I said I didn’t know, the man just ran out. Years later, in a working men’s club after a performance, a drag act sat next to me and ran his spectacles up and down my leg. Again, without thinking, I reached out, took them and broke them. I guess I wasn’t destined