Just Williams

Simon on New York in the old days

AFTER THE WAR, when England was still in monochrome, and we baby-boomers were in romper suits plotting the swinging ’60s, shellshocked grown-ups spoke wistfully about a place called ‘before the war’. For us still on rationing, America was the promised land, flowing with Coke and peanut butter, where goody-goody cowboys galloped about with their white teeth. Friends there would send us parcels: blue jeans, candy cigarettes and the LPS of Broadway shows. We had a tablecloth with all the landmarks of New York on it, and took turns sitting next to the Ferris wheel of Coney Island. New York was our Narnia; we’d read Eloise at The Plaza and seen Lady and the Tramp – I dreamed of living in a skyscraper and having a quiff.

When my father sailed off on the

Queen Mary to do a play on Broadway, we added a PS to our prayers, ‘Please let the reviews be good.’ (In the end they were ‘mixed’ – a showbiz euphemism for bad.)

I pictured him there in the Damon Runyon heartland. I had learnt all the songs from Guys and Dolls, my favourite lyric was, ‘My time of day is the dark time… when the smell of the rainwashed pavement comes up clean and fresh and cold. And the street lamplight fills the gutter with gold…’ I imagined Daddy in his tweed suit scooping it up like Dick Whittington, and that he’d come home with cowboy shirts for us all.

Long before I ever went there I loved New York – a legend in every corner, Lucille Ball, Danny Kaye, Rocky Marciano. I ruled lines on to flimsy airmail paper before I wrote to him – ‘The dogs are well. Can you send some bubble gum?’

My mother’s letters had to include a summary of what was happening in

The Archers. He was homesick for Ambridge, the never-never land he’d spent five years fighting to defend. She had to break it to him that Grace Archer had died in a stable fire – what a shock it must have been for him stuck in a drawing-room comedy on Broadway, light years from Borsetshire.

Nowadays on Sunday mornings when I’m torn between church and The Archers Omnibus, I remember him tapping his boiled egg as the theme music began. There’d be a faraway look in his eyes and conversation was out of the question.

If I could have told him 50 years ago that one day I’d be a resident of Ambridge myself, living in sin with Grace Archer’s niece, Lillian, he might not have objected so passionately to me becoming an actor. Listening to myself as Justin Elliott I wonder if he’d notice how like him I sound – a chip off the old block.

As well as playing Justin in The Archers, Simon is in Alan Bennett’s Allelujah! at The Bridge Theatre