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face was filthy. He saw me and announced to his audience, ‘I’d better go now, there’s me Mam.’

      One of the builders said, ‘That little lad’s a wonderful entertainer.’

      ‘I’ll entertain him when I get him home,’ I said.

      ‘Oh,’ said Eric, ‘that means I will have to have my bottom slapped, won’t I, Mum?’

      ‘You’ve never spoken a truer word.’

      ‘Well, folks,’ said Eric to his audience, ‘I’ll have to be going. Goodbye everybody. See you tomorrow.’¹²

      It was, in spite of the usual kind of deprivations and occasional crises experienced by all working-class families of the period, a happy childhood. ‘I have wonderful memories of both my mother and father,’ Eric would later remark, ‘absolutely fantastic memories, and I think of them a lot and with great happiness.’¹³ The gentle, easy-going George, his family always said, would start whistling contentedly to himself ‘from the moment his feet touched the ground each morning’.¹⁴ He took great pleasure in spending time with his son watching football matches (often at the modest little ground of Morecambe FC; sometimes, as an occasional treat, thirty miles away at Deepdale, the altogether more impressive stadium of Preston North End). George would also take Eric fishing, or picking mushrooms in the fields around their home, and sometimes for long and rambling walks around the town reminiscing about his own childhood days and telling elaborate, funny stories that frequently concealed unexpected twists in their tail. Sadie, Eric remembered, had less time to spare – understandably – for casual outings, but whenever her work brought her into contact with any aspect of the entertainment world she would make a point of bringing him along for a tantalising glimpse behind the scenes. When an opportunity did present itself for a family excursion of some kind or another it was always made the most of. A photograph dating from 1932, for example, pictures what appears to be the end of a very enjoyable afternoon out in the sun, with George, Sadie and Eric sitting down close together on the grass, their makeshift tent standing behind them, all smiling broadly and each with a ukulele in their hands.

      Although Eric was an only child he did not want for the companionship of friends of his own age. He was well liked by most of the other children in the area. He joined in all the chaotic games of football with the other boys in the park at the back of Christie Avenue, and accompanied several of his friends on their regular visits to Halfway House – the local sweet shop. On most weekends, he queued with his cousin ‘Sonny’ Threlfall outside the Palladium cinema – known affectionately as ‘The Ranch’ – to see the latest movies (Westerns were his favourite) and, during relatively uneventful moments, fire peashooters at bald-headed men in the rows below.

      Morecambe – like most English seaside resorts – was a place of stark, seasonal contrasts: cold, dull and quiet in the winter months; warm, bright and noisy in the summer months. Eric, looking back on his childhood, would describe his memories of his home town as ‘serene and ageless. They emerge vivid and sharp. Happy and bright, not dull and ugly.’¹⁵ One of the clearest images was of seeing his parents share the ‘supreme joy’ of sitting together and ‘watching the Turneresque sunset over Morecambe Bay’.¹⁶

      The town, in those days, was often referred to formally as part of a broader area – ‘Morecambe and Heysham’. Morecambe, as Eric would take pleasure in pointing out, ‘was a double act long before I met Ernie’.¹⁷ Spring, as far as Eric was concerned, was the season that marked the town’s sudden re-awakening, and summer the enchanting time when the town ‘became a different place’.¹⁸ As the temperature began to rise and the sun started to shine, the town moved rapidly from being a rather insular and unobtrusive Lancashire town to become a lively centre for recreation, a welcoming place that boasted all kinds of entertainment.

      Morecambe – the ‘Naples of the North’, a ‘smaller Blackpool’¹⁹ – was at this time in the process of creeping gentrification. The process culminated in the early thirties with the establishment of the art deco Midland Hotel, an ambitiously lavish new high-style building on the seaward side of the promenade that soon attracted the likes of David Niven, Mrs Wallis Simpson and Noël Coward. In the summer, as the holiday season began and strangers flocked to the town from all directions, it was, said Eric, ‘like being brought up to date; finding out what was going on in the world. You never saw many cars in those days, yet August brought a veritable motorcade of Austin Sevens and Morris Eights driven by the “well-to-do” paying their £3 a week, full board at the town’s desirable residences.’²⁰

      On the sands, littered with sleepy bodies slouched deep in deckchairs and mazy formations of energetic boys and girls, the regular daily entertainment was provided by ‘the Nigger Minstrels’ – ‘then undeterred’, Eric would later note, ‘by the racial overtones of their titles’.²¹ They would sometimes hold talent contests, and Eric, whenever possible, would enter them – winning on at least three occasions (after his last success, he recalled, ‘They found out I was a local boy and stopped me from entering.’²²). Summer also brought with it the prospect of a chance sighting of a visiting celebrity, and Eric was particularly excited one year to see ‘the magnificent’ portly British movie star Sydney Howard²³ – fresh from appearing in Shipyard Sally (1939) alongside Gracie Fields – strolling sedately along the pier. The season always ended with the relatively modest but rather beautiful illuminations, a final few visits to the ‘fairyland’ of Happy Mount Park and the first chill winds that accompanied the holidaymakers’ ‘final glimpse of annual escape’.²⁴

      ‘I was proud’, Eric would say, ‘to know that people came to my town for a holiday. It always seemed a pity that they couldn’t stop the whole year round [because] in those golden growing up years, there was a sort of magic about Morecambe. It had a lot to offer and I took it.’²⁵ The one place in town, however, where it seems that he usually took rather less than was being offered him was the classroom: ‘I wasn’t just hopeless in class,’ he said. ‘I was terrible.’²⁶ This was, typically, something of an exaggeration – he was far from being a slow-witted young boy, and there is some evidence to suggest that he showed a reasonable aptitude for certain subjects,²⁷ but, nevertheless, school was never a place that would ever be able to command his full attention.

      He attended two schools in Morecambe: Lancaster Road Junior and then, with markedly less frequency and enthusiasm, Euston Road Senior. He was, to begin with, happy enough to set off there each morning – particularly because Sadie allowed him to take with him a bag of his favourite confection – ‘cocoa dip’, a mixture of cocoa powder and sugar: ‘The idea was to have the bag open in my coat pocket and keep dipping a wet finger into the mixture ... at regular intervals on the way to school. It was like nectar.’²⁸

      In time, however, a combination of boredom and, increasingly, absenteeism ensured that the standard of his work declined alarmingly: ‘I spent most of my time’, he later confessed, ‘in the school lavatory smoking anything I could ignite.’²⁹ Sadie, who had hoped that her son would do well enough to go to a grammar school, was too attentive a mother to have remained unaware of the problem for very long, but, when the school reports started to underline just how poorly he was faring, she felt shocked and angry.

      One report in particular, which arrived at the Bartholomew house early in April 1936, announced curtly that the nine-year-old Eric was forty-fifth out of forty-nine pupils (although, judging from his marks, it is not at all clear how he managed to come ahead of the other four). A teacher’s scribbled addendum – ‘He was absent most of the exams’ – pointed out an obvious contributory factor.³⁰ Sadie (it appears that George left such responsibilities to her) wrote back to the school immediately, declaring on the back of the same sheet: ‘I am disgusted with this report, and I would be obliged if you would make him do more homework,’ adding, menacingly as far as Eric was concerned, ‘I would see he did it here.’³¹ She, typically, was determined that her son should arrest his dizzying decline as speedily as possible and then – she hoped – start to improve. After visiting his school and talking to several of his teachers, however, Sadie was, eventually, forced to accept the

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