The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [117]
One of the joys of our new house in Surrey was planning and planting the garden. We have twenty-one acres, of which six are cultivated, including an ornamental garden, and I designed and built them all myself. They say that as you grow old you grow into your second childhood – and I think my garden takes me back to the Norfolk farm I was evacuated to during the war. A Chinese friend of mine told me that it was great ‘Zen’ to sow, grow, harvest, cook and eat your own food and that is what I do. Food from my kitchen garden tastes better than anything you can buy in the shops and it makes me very happy, so I guess he’s right. I think gardeners are every bit as superstitious as actors. I have a superstition about mulberry trees: if you plant one and it grows it is good luck – but you must never cut it or trim it. So now I have an enormous great mulberry tree blocking a path.
I love the changing seasons in Britain; it’s something I missed while we were living in California. My personal first day of summer coincides with the opening of the Chelsea Flower Show, although I know that’s really still classed as spring. There’s the first day of the Test match cricket season, the first day of the French Open tennis and, of course, Wimbledon – as a sports fanatic, I’m glued to my screen from here on right up to the US Open tennis, followed by the non-sporting, but incredibly patriotic, Last Night of the Proms which signals the end of summer and start of autumn for me.
I love the start of autumn when the trees in my garden change the colour of their leaves in one last dazzling display; I planted masses of trees just for their autumn colours – but I hate it when the leaves drop and reveal an endless view of bare twigs. The days get shorter, the clocks go back an hour and although there is the occasional beautifully crisp, sharp, sunny autumn day, the low grey clouds begin to dominate. The only shining light to guide me through the darkness to Christmas is the arrival of the ‘screeners’ – DVDs of the forty top films of the year sent to members of both the American Academy and the European Film Academy, for potential awards. So just as the outside world starts to darken and shrink and the days become impossibly short, we settle down for a two-month movie hibernation in our own cinema and don’t emerge until my favourite festival, Christmas.
Christmas is a very special time for me because it was a time I hardly knew as a child. I have no memory of my first three years and for the next three years, there was nothing Christmassy to remember. It wasn’t until I was six years old and evacuated to Norfolk that I really became aware that Christmas existed – and then we were told there wasn’t going to be much of one anyway. Food was rationed, for a start, although we did get the rare treat of an orange and a banana and, wonder of wonders, a bar of chocolate. Sounds extravagant, doesn’t it? But there was lots of homemade fun. We made our own paper chains by painting long strips of paper, cutting them into short lengths and then sticking them together with flour-and-water paste – which wasn’t very adhesive and meant that you were likely to be suddenly festooned with gluey bits of paper as you walked round the house. There were no presents, toys or cards. There was a Christmas tree, but because the farmhouse we were living in didn’t have electricity there were no lights on it. Things were better after the war, but money was always short and we couldn’t afford all the traditions and the trimmings that go with a real slap-up Christmas. And then my father died and I became a mostly unemployed actor and so the money was still short. But I already had the fantasy that one day I would have the Christmas of my dreams – and although I can now afford it, I challenge myself each year to outdo the last one.
Christmas Eve always starts for us with music – and it’s always the same song: ‘So this is Christmas’ by John Lennon. It’s a beautiful, haunting