The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [21]
It also did the trick. I stayed there for several weeks until I felt able to go home, and when I did get back to the Elephant, it was to be greeted by my mother with a kiss, a cuddle and a tear and the news that I’d got a job. I started to cry myself because there was a telegram waiting from my agent offering me a small part, plus the role of technical advisor, on a film called A Hill in Korea. The film was being shot on location in Portugal and in the Shepperton film studios and they would pay me £100 a week for eight weeks. This was untold riches! But there was a problem: the film was a month and a half away, Pat needed money to support herself and the baby and there was no chance of me getting a job for just six weeks. Once again Mum came to the rescue and took all her savings – £400 – out of the post office. ‘You can pay me back later,’ she said. As ever, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for Stanley or me.
Once I’d got past my dodgy debut performance I had never had any trouble remembering two hours of dialogue on stage. In A Hill in Korea I managed to forget just eight lines – and I only had to deliver them at the rate of one a week. Filming a take is completely unlike acting in the theatre; most of the time is spent co-ordinating the filming equipment, for a start. By the time the director, Julian Aymes, shouted, ‘Action’ I was a complete bundle of nerves and it didn’t help to overhear one of the cameramen muttering, ‘It’s only one fucking line!’
If my film debut wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped, I felt on much surer ground as a technical advisor. After all, I was the only person on the set who’d set foot in bloody Korea. But no one seemed to want to know. No one understood what we’d been doing there – in fact it often seemed as if no one knew we had even been there. Whenever I’ve mentioned it to American friends, they are completely taken aback. ‘The British were in Korea?’ And it wasn’t just us Brits. I was in a division that also included Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, not that anyone seemed to care. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for soldiers. I know what it feels like to be sent off to fight an unpopular war that no one at home really understands or cares about and then to come back and meet a complete lack of understanding – or, worse, indifference – to what you’ve been through.
I’m very anti-war. I see these young men going off to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and I know what’s coming to them. I can’t watch the news of army casualties; I have to turn the TV off when it comes on because it’s just too sad. Like many of them, I was only nineteen when I was sent off to Korea with the Royal Fusiliers and probably like many of those going off to Afghanistan, I’d never heard of the place. My basic national service training had consisted of learning to shoot a 303 Lee Enfield rifle (obsolete by the end of the Second World War), and how to fire a Sten gun. This machine gun had a major design fault: it either jammed after the first three rounds or kept blasting even with your finger off the trigger. That happened to one of my mates at the firing range and the idiot turned around to ask the sergeant what to do, still holding