Parky: My Autobiography by Michael Parkinson

Yorkshire miners, and Michael Foot and Mick McGahey, the deputy leader of the NUM, marched with us in the front line.
    I said to Arthur, ‘Lot of press photographers around,’ indicating the snappers following our progress.
    ‘Mainly Special Branch,’ said Arthur. ‘After this there’ll be a file on you at Scotland Yard.’
    I hoped he was kidding.
    I judged the Miss South Yorkshire Coalfield contest in Lock Park and when it came to presentation time Arthur said to me,‘I suppose you know what we’re going to give you?’
    ‘A miner’s lamp?’ I said.
    ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘But not the tourist version.’
    He handed me a battered lamp, one which had spent some time underground. ‘This was your dad’s.’

    My mother decided I should have piano lessons. She had mistaken my love for music for a desire to play it. Or maybe she thought contact with Chopin and Mozart and the like would steer me away from the decadence of my new heroes, Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
    Miss Green was a wispy lady who had played at the Rock Cinema during the silent era and now taught piano for a living. She had to compete with my mates who would play cricket and football outside our front window. She came to our house every Wednesday and with great patience endeavoured to make me into a piano-player. After eighteen months I could play the first four bars of Handel’s ‘Largo’ (simplified version). I didn’t give up. Miss Green just stopped coming.
    My lack of talent as a musician did nothing to diminish my enthusiasm as a listener. We had five or six nonconformist chapels in our village and there seemed to be a never-ending production of The Messiah shifting from one to the other. Me and my mate Barrie would sit in the wooden bum-numbing pews and stare, transfixed, at the heaving bosoms and jiggling adam’s apples of the visiting singers. Even though the performances were enthusiastic rather than memorable, it seemed to me the glory of the music somehow triumphed. It has certainly stayed with me throughout my life.
    Barrie treated these occasions as more of a fashion event. After all, where else in a mining village could you find women in long satin dresses and men in tails and starched white collars? Barrie himself was the arbiter of fashion in our village. He was a tall, big lad with soft brown and permanently startled eyes and not a hair out of place, like his great heroes Fred Astaire and Peter May, captain of Surrey and England. He loved dressing up. In a pit village this could cause some consternation among your peers. It didn’t bother Barrie.
    While we were still in school blazers or duffel coats and chukka boots, he favoured the city gent look; pin-striped suits, waistcoats, patent leather shoes, club ties. Instead of playing football he joined the local hunt and turned up outside our house one day astride a chestnut horse and wearing full hunting pink, accompanied by a gang of snotty, dribbling kids who thought he had arrived from Mars. He seemed oblivious to convention and the misgivings of his fellow men.
    He started work at the pits but then he joined the Household Cavalry. While I was doing my National Service and working at the War Office, I was walking past a mounted guard in Horseguards’ Parade one day when I heard, from underneath the helmet, a voice say, ‘Ayup, Parky, old lad.’ It was Barrie.
    Some time after leaving the army and working for a while in the drinks business, with an office in Mayfair, he returned to Cudworth and, no doubt finding the contrast difficult to accommodate, was soon occupied inventing the adventures and disguises that ruled his imagination.
    He decided to compete in a car race to a vineyard in Burgundy, and to make the trip as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. He found a second-hand American jeep and persuaded a friend to accompany him dressed as General George Patton.
    With General Patton driving and Rommel wearing an iron cross and a monocle, they set off on the first leg