Parky: My Autobiography by Michael Parkinson Page A

of their journey. They were just outside Warrington when they started to feel hungry and stopped for fish and chips. General Patton sat outside while Rommel joined the queue in the chip shop. The rest of the customers tried hard to ignore the fact they had been joined by a German officer speaking English the way Germans did in movies.
    Approaching the woman at the head of the queue, Rommel said, ‘I’m in ze big hurry. Can I get ze fish and cheeps before you?’
    ‘Of course, love. Are you going anywhere nice?’ said the woman.
    ‘I’m off to invade Moscow,’ said Barrie.
    ‘Very nice. I hope the weather stays fine,’ said the woman.
    ‘Ve are lost. Can you show us ze vay?’ asked the Field Marshal.
    He and General Patton were waved off by their new-found friends, who advised them to head for London and ask a policeman. They arrived in France on the commemoration of VE Day and were detained for a while by the local gendarmerie. Barrie was one of the most extraordinary characters I have ever encountered, possessing that eccentricity of manner and style that is so peculiarly English.
    He told me that the funniest line he ever heard, which summed up the unintentionally surreal humour of working-class communities, was delivered by a friend explaining why he admired Barrie’s father. Barrie’s dad had a retirement job tending the boiler room at the local cinema. After his death the friend was trying to define to Barrie what he thought about his dad. ‘He was a good man,’ he said. Then, searching for an example, eventually added, ‘He kept them boilers spotless.’ We decided, there and then, this was the epitaph we would both settle for.
    The only other teenager in our group to challenge Barrie’s unconventional dress sense was Freddie Handley. He was another important influence on the way music played a significant part in my life. When we discuss music and teenagers nowadays the two are synonymous. Indeed, the market for popular music is aimed at and dependent upon what young people buy. In the fifties, teenagers were simply a group of people going through an awkward phase, which ended, in the main, at the age of sixteen when the majority would get a job, learn some sense and begin to earn a living.
    The fashion at the time was the so-called New Look, which was out of date by the time it reached us. The newest suits for men were demob suits, often characterised by square shoulders and pleated backs. The popular music was what mum and dad played on the gramophone – Al Martino, Perry Como, Eddie Calvert and his Golden Trumpet and Lita Roza enquiring ‘How much is that doggie in the window?’ These were the chart-toppers. The brash newcomer and American superstar was Guy Mitchell who announced himself with ‘She wears red feathers and a hula hula skirt’ – a huge hit in 1953. Teenagers were ignored and left to find their own music. And we did.
    A major influence on our lives was American Forces Network. Set up by the Americans for their troops in Europe and available – just about – on our primitive radios in Britain, it introduced my generation to jazz. It was on AFN I first heard Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Williams and the like. Then came Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. They stood music on its head. Listening on AFN was one thing, finding the music they played in record shops in Barnsley quite another. Somehow Freddie Handley found a way.
    He produced a stack of records of the new music and hired the bandstand at Lock Park. There, once a week, Freddie and his disciples would meet to listen to this new music played in a bandstand on an old record player. What is more, we would dress up for the occasion. Freddie was the first to wear what later became our uniform – drape jacket, drainpipe trousers and shoes with crepe soles so thick and cumbersome they looked and felt like you were wearing a landing craft on each foot. Hair