done no good at all, so Dad ended up making me a special foam helmet. Inevitably, it was only a matter of time before I was back in casualty. On settling in Yeovil, where Dad took up a position with Westland Helicopters after a year in the North West, Mum virtually had a waiting room chair reserved for herself in the local hospital.
I had my first operation in Yeovil General Hospital at the age of four. I had been out shopping with Mum in town when I suddenly collapsed with a terrible stomach pain. There was a panic, I was rushed to hospital and less than an hour later I was on the way to the operating theatre for surgery on a hernia. To make things easier for me, my parents brought in my teddy bear, Mr Khrushchev, the name inspired by the influence of television in my early upbringing. To make me feel better the hospital staff pretended the bear had been through the same ordeal as me and had undergone the same treatment. On my discharge I gave probably the first and last hint that I might possibly be interested in anything other than sport as a career. Mum told me to thank the doctors for looking after me and, according to her, I said: ‘The doctors don’t make you better. They just stand there at the end of the bed, say “Good morning” and ask the nurses how you are. It is the nurses who do all the work and make you better. I think I’ll be a doctor when I grow up’. By the time I had another hernia operation four years later, I understood more about how the system actually worked and abandoned that idea for good.
For the next six years, home was 64 Mudford Road, Yeovil, a house with plenty of trees and a large garden, although not large enough for my liking. What lay beyond the garden gate still proved an irresistible draw and led to one of my first encounters with the iron fist inside the velvet glove of Marie Botham. It was only the shock of being told that Dale and I were found running across the busy main road that led Mum to administer the spanking, for that had certainly not been the normal reaction to our misdemeanours. When Dad came home at lunchtime to find us in bed, he thought we were ill. Punishments usually took the form of the ‘you have nearly pushed it too far’ warning movement of Mum’s hand towards the wooden spoon she kept in the kitchen as a deterrent. But as I grew older the occasional smack was administered, superseded at my secondary modern school by the cane, a regular adversary, and they certainly did me no harm. Pity there is not more of it these days.
It was about this time that my sporting life began in earnest. The house at Mudford Road backed on to the playing fields of Yeovil Grammar School, where I could often be found watching the older boys playing cricket. I was frequently discovered here by Len Bond, an assistant groundsman at the school, who would cart me back home in his wheelbarrow. My love affair with sport began in earnest when I moved from Miss Wright’s private school at Penmount to Milford Junior School in September 1962. The school day worked on the basis that I went home for lunch, until I discovered that if you stayed for a school dinner you could also play football. I managed to persuade Mum and Dad to let me stay on even though I was in my first year and you were not meant to play football until the second. My ally was Richard Hibbitt, the deputy headmaster who was in charge of games. He saw how keen I was, made room for me and was soon asking my parents for permission to pick me for the school team. That was all the encouragement I needed, and by the ripe old age of seven I was already practising my autograph for the day when I would be famous.
I didn’t have to wait long for my first appearance on national television, although Songs Of Praise from St John’s in Yeovil was not exactly what I had in mind. At the time the family attended church fairly regularly, and as the church choir was struggling for numbers I was drafted in. I should point out that my singing talents, which are legendary, had no bearing on my selection. I was so bad that when the big day came I was told politely but firmly to mime. Ironically, when the programme went out, I was the chorister who received the most attention from the cameras. Indeed, my ability as a mime artist was to stand me in good stead in pantomime later on in life.
Considering the number of times I have been called upon to scribble my name since then, all that handwriting practice at the age of seven was of great use. Not that you would ever have convinced my parents or teachers at the time: for them it was another distraction from the real job of inwardly digesting. My form mistress at Milford, Mrs Olwyn Joyce, was heard despairingly telling my parents that she wished the school had been built in a traditional style rather than with modern, panoramic windows. Being easily distracted by the sight and sound of a bouncing ball, I was forever staring out of the window watching other classes playing games and wishing I was out there with them.
There were no such problems with Mr Hibbitt. He even forgave me for breaking a school window since the damage had been caused by a cricket ball. Although I had been bowling daisy cutters at the garage door from the age of six and disappearing into the local park for games of cricket at every available opportunity, Mr Hibbitt showed me that there was money to be made from sport when he placed a pile of coins on a good length on the pitch and told us that if we managed to hit them, the cash was ours. I cleaned up, as I did later when, at thirteen, I made my debut for Somerset Under-15s against Wiltshire. The deal was 6d per run, and my score of 80 ensured a jackpot which my Dad was forced to cough up but did not risk again. Needless to say, my one great sporting achievement at Milford came in the form of a six which Mr Hibbitt reckoned would have carried at either Taunton or Lord’s. Then, one sports day I took part in a contest to see who could throw the cricket ball furthest on the playing fields of Buckler’s Mead.
I was standing at the throwing line when the teacher doing the measuring in the distance shouted at me to have my go. It had to be pointed out to him that not only had I already done so, but my ball had landed many yards behind the spot where he was standing. Later, incidentally, in the summer of 1968 the same thing happened when I managed a record throw of just over 207 feet in the Under-13 tournament of the Crusaders’ Union National Sports Day at Motspur Park in South London. The judges did not believe the distance I had achieved with my first throw and made me throw again. They measured this one and I came home with the Victor Ludorum Cup for my age group and a record that stood for many years.
By the time I moved to secondary school at Buckler’s Mead, my sheer bloody-mindedness about getting my own way was well established. In general, I enjoyed myself. My lack of aptitude for an academic life was well-known by my mates who christened me ‘Bungalow’. I got into a few scrapes and scraps, but when the punishment was handed out I took it without complaining. The most serious incident came when I walked out of a woodwork lesson and never went back. Woodwork and I never really got on. I would start to make a coffee table and the legs would get shorter and shorter until all that was left was a big tray. My dovetails never dovetailed and I had no interest at all in the subject. The end came when I was in the workroom one day and the teacher, a Mr Black, suddenly turned round because someone had been mucking about behind me. There were no questions asked, he just walked up to me and whacked me on the head with a T-square. I was so angry, I was shaking. I wanted to flatten him there and then. Instead I told him I was going to do him a favour and leave the room. I went straight to the headmaster, explained what had happened and told him I was not the sort of person who would go home bleating about what had gone on in school. I said that I was never going in a class with Mr Black again, and I got my way.
Adolescence brought the usual horrors for me and my family. My ideas about fashion were to cause one or two run-ins. I was a teenager at the time when platform shoes were all the rage – the first time around. Quite naturally I wanted some, whatever Mum said, but shortly after I eventually got hold of a pair, I realized that she might just have been right all along. Mum was always keen to be with me when I bought clothes because she was rightly fearful of the consequences of my colour blindness. This time I spurned her offer and went into town on my own with the inevitable dire results: blue flared trousers, a bright orange shirt with a huge collar, and a pair of immense platform shoes. Mum and Dad were going out that evening to watch some five-a-side football at a local sports centre and I told them I would join them later in my new gear. In the process of putting on this ghastly costume, I managed to trip over my shoes and rip the trousers.
Mum also noticed around this time that I had begun to open my eyes to the possibility that girls might offer more than pig-tails to pull. When I came home one day and announced
