Free David Jason: My Life by David Jason Page A

if I hadn’t found some cement bags to hide behind. I still wonder to this day whether that falling cement ended up permanently encasing some innocent builder who chose the wrong moment to walk below. Apologies to his family, if so.
    This wasn’t my only brush with an ugly and premature ending during those times. Electricity is a powerful and dangerous force, as I learned at college, of course, though perhaps more clearly while rewiring a girls’ school in Highgate. My superior on the job, Johnny Cole, said, ‘Get up that ladder and undo those wires in that distribution box.’ In this case, it was a three-phase one at 415 volts. The normal working voltage was 240, so I asked the obvious question: ‘It is off, isn’t it?’
    ‘Of course it’s off,’ said Johnny. So I climbed up as far as Ineeded to go and plunged my pair of standard issue pliers into the void to obey my master’s voice.
    The next thing I know is a flash of light as bright as the dawning of time. And the next thing I know after that, I am lying on my back against the wall on the other side of the corridor, flung the width of the place by the reaction of apprentice’s metal on 415 volts of flowing electricity. Johnny was pale with horror because his initial thought was that he had just accidentally killed me. He was wrong – not far wrong, but wrong. I was dazed and slightly hollow but I very quickly mustered the energy to produce the traditional line: ‘I thought you said it was off.’ The pliers, incidentally, were never seen again. They probably landed in Clapham.
    Volt meters and phase-testers were, of course, available for use, but the standard test for live circuitry for lazy buggers who couldn’t quite be bothered to go and fetch the appropriate piece of equipment was to lick your finger and bring it closer and closer to the wire until you did, or didn’t, get a little shock. Really, it’s a wonder none of us weren’t permanently fried.
    I’d always cycle to work, and most days I would cycle home for lunch as well. I could be on a job down at Hornsey, about four miles away, but, come the lunch hour, I’d be back on my bike, pedalling like fury up Muswell Hill to scoff down lunch at Lodge Lane prepared by my long-suffering mother, and then pedalling all the way back to be on the job sixty minutes later. This behaviour made no sense whatsoever, but it just seemed to be what one did. It also kept me trim at about eight stone and with a rather svelte, if I may say so, 29-inch waist.
    On the days when I really was too far away to cycle home – the other side of Highgate, say, which was a prohibitive six miles distant – lunch would be a bag of chips, at 3d (one and a half pence in today’s money), half a bottle of milk and a couple of rolls from the bread shop. The idea was to fill yourself up as cheaply as you could – and, take my word for it, thecombination of fried potato, starchy white bread and full-fat milk will do that for you every time. If I was feeling rich, I would also trouble the fish and chip shop for a pickled onion – a big white thing, the size of a tennis ball, found floating in vinegar in a glass jar on the counter and looking ominously like a biological specimen from a medical school. But that was only for when I felt flush. In general, the question was: how much could you not spend? And then, wadded with chips and milk, I would head back for the afternoon shift.
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    W E ’ RE TALKING now of the late 1950s – a period I remember with great affection. On Sunday evenings in those days, I would go round to Micky Weedon’s little terraced house and his mother would make us high tea – cold meat and salad, followed by cake and sandwiches. It became a sort of tradition. And then we would listen to The Goon Show . Other radio entertainments had drawn me in, such as Riders of the Range , the western adventure series, and Journey into Space , the sci-fi drama which started when I was thirteen and had me immediately