Jim Bob - Driving Jarvis Ham

It’s not even a diary really. Not in the conventional sense. This first entry for example, can I call it an entry, even though I’ve just said it’s not a diary, otherwise we’ll be here all day? This first entry was written in black felt tip pen on the first page of a big purple scrapbook. The newspaper cutting about the Tutankhamun exhibition and more importantly about Jarvis Ham’s birth was glued to the front cover. On the next page of the scrapbook was the second diary entry. It’s another Tutankhamun one. It’s still not Samuel Pepys. Six years have passed. There’s a title.

My first ever acting role was the lead in our primary school’s production of Tutankhamun the Boy King . I can’t remember the story. Obviously. I was only six. I do remember that the rest of the class were all dressed as my slaves and they carried me into the dinner hall on a huge golden throne. I had to wave at the audience below me as they all cheered and applauded. My wave was like the wave the Queen Mother does. The Mayor and his wife were there in the audience and probably somebody from the local council. I was six, I can’t remember all the details! All the mums and dads were there too and the teachers and headmaster and a vicar (a guess). I loved it when everybody was clapping and cheering. How do I remember that then, you’re asking I bet. I don’t know, but I do. I won a prize for my acting. Not an Oscar (not yet). I looked exactly like the real Boy King Tutankhamun did, even though I was six and he was nine. I hadn’t trained at RADA or anything. I was only six. Have I made that clear? But, even though I was only six I definitely remember that it was brilliant. Very brilliant.

King Tut.

I got him that gig.

We were six years – although you probably already know that – old when our teacher Miss – can’t remember her name – asked the class who would like to play the lead role. As she scanned the classroom for a raised hand I panicked. I thought she might not find a volunteer and pick me at random for the role.

‘Jarvis, Miss!’ I shouted out, pointing at Jarvis sat at the desk next to mine. The whole class turned to look at him as Miss thing thought for a moment, perhaps about how the cute kids always got to play the princes and princesses and maybe it was time to give the less fortunate uglier fatter balloon-faced kids a chance.

Why did the classroom seating have to be arranged alphabetically on our first day at school? Why couldn’t we have been seated boy/girl/boy/girl instead? Then I might have been sat next to sweet freckle-faced Suzie Barnado. Who knows, perhaps we’d be married now. With a houseful of sweet freckle-faced kids. Or why couldn’t I have just had a different surname? A name with its initial letter earlier or later in the alphabet. My stupid parents and their idiotic ancestors. If my surname had begun with an N or a P, I might have been sat next to Martin O’Brien on my first day at school. Martin O’Brien won three hundred grand on the lottery a few months ago. It was on the front page of the local paper. If my name had begun with an N or a P, I might have ended up managing Martin O’Brien instead of Jarvis and Martin would have had to give me £60,000 of his lottery cash.

The point is. I wouldn’t have been sat next to Jarvis Ham when the teacher was looking for her boy king and we could all end this story right here and get on with our lives.

‘Jarvis? Would you like to play the part of the Boy King?’ Miss I-can’t-remember-what-her-name-was said. She might as well have stood outside the school gates at home time and given Jarvis a free sample of heroin or crack cocaine.

Tutankhamun the Boy King would be Jarvis Ham’s gateway drug. Here’s my review of the show:

There was an American actor and comic named Victor Buono. He played the comic villain King Tut in the 1960s television show Batman . Look him up on the Internet. I hardly remember Jarvis’s King Tut performance, as I was only six myself, but for the sake of this anecdote I’m going to pretend that I remember the six-year-old Jarvis Ham’s King Tut being a lot more like that thirty-year-old plump and slightly camp actor’s version of King Tut than the ancient Egyptian boy child royalty that Jarvis was attempting to portray. I do remember that Jarvis had a beard that his mother had made from the inside tube of a toilet roll; it was covered in black and gold sticky paper and glued to his chin. His mother had also made the rest of his costume. She’d cut the top off a gold cocktail dress and made a headdress out of a tea towel that was held in place with a hair band wrapped in silver foil on top of her son’s royal balloon head.

The rest of the class, including me, carried Jarvis into the dinner hall on a golden throne: made from the headmaster’s office chair, covered in gold paper and decorated with hieroglyphics. It weighed a fucking ton.

It was not very brilliant.

After the performance was over our teacher congratulated us all for doing so well and she gave Jarvis a bag of Jelly Tots for his starring role. As we waited for our parents to pick us up and take us home Jarvis told me to hold my hand out and he poured six of the sugar covered jelly sweets into it.

My management commission.

Mister Twenty Per Cent.

The rest of the scrapbook was blank. What a waste of a good scrapbook. I suppose Jarvis might have started out with good scrapbook keeping intentions and then maybe he ran out of glue, or he lost his scissors. Or was this the beginning and end of the diary of Jarvis Ham? Just these two brief entries about the ancient Egyptian monarchy? Why couldn’t I have been sat next to sweet freckle-faced Suzie Barnado? I could have been reading her diary. I bet Suzie had some filthy secrets.

Then I found this shoebox:

I climbed into the car, adjusted the rear-view mirror and looked at Jarvis fast asleep in the back; his face squashed against the window and the start of a dribble slowly chasing a raindrop down the glass. Not really, it wasn’t raining, I’m just trying to insert a bit of poetry into the story. God knows it’s going to need it. He had the seatbelt pulled across his body but not fastened. He said it made him feel sick when it was fastened.

There was a new smell in the car. I think you’d call it funky, funkier than James Brown. I turned my head to look. Jarvis had taken his shoes off. They were on the back seat next to his big fat plum apron.

These shoes:

I thought about the shoebox and what I’d found inside it. There were some other newspaper cuttings. There were notepads and loose pieces of paper, stuff written on the backs of flyers and takeaway menus. I found a couple of photographs and some drawings, cinema tickets and hairdressing appointment cards and even one or two actual proper diaries. The shoebox was inside this huge old brown leather suitcase:

The suitcase had once been owned by an incredibly famous stage actor that I’d never heard of. Jarvis’s father had bought it at an auction for his son’s eighteenth birthday. It was covered in stickers of places in the world the actor had visited and the plays and musicals he’d appeared in while he was there.