Every morning when I woke up I could see the pit from my bedroom window. If you couldn’t see it, you could smell it, an invisible sulphurous presence.
My father worked at Grimethorpe Colliery, my grandfather and his father before him. It was also where I expected to end up.
I remember thinking I wouldn’t mind, assuming I could marry Ingrid Bergman and get a house closer to the pit gates.
I wasn’t long a teenager when my dad took me down the pit and told his mate at the hoist with a wink that there was a tourist on board. We fell like a man without a parachute.
big laugh The rest wasn’t so fun.
TV presenter Michael Parkinson (right) with his father on their way to a game of cricket
He took me to where men worked on their knees for coal, showed me the lamp he used to test methane gas, and explained how dangerous it was. “Let’s see if you make it to the miner,” he said. He handed me a pick and nodded to the stitching, black and shiny. The harder I hit the coal, the harder the pickaxe bounced off the surface.
“Find the mistake,” he said, running his fingers over the coal wall. He tapped it and a piece fell out, glittering in the light of his lamp.
We walked back and he said nothing until we reached the pit gate. ‘What do you think?’ he asked. “You wouldn’t take me there for £100 a shift,” I said.
He nodded and smiled. “That’s good,” he said, “but be warned, if you ever change your mind and I see you coming through those gates, I’ll kick your ass all the way home.” This is a boy’s story , who did as he was told.
There was a certainty and closeness to life in a pit village then that was comforting to the child lucky enough to find his embrace. I was safe in the perfect cocoon of my home, with my loving parents and extended family never more than a street away.
When my mother started working as a saleswoman in the cooperative in 1943, I was provided with food and drink by my two grandparents, who lived next to each other. That is, if I managed to avoid several aunts along the way who, if they saw me passing, would insist on feeding me too.
By the time I was eight or nine, I was a regular moviegoer. Our local cinema was called The Rock. It became my second home and the source of all my longings.
My first memory of going to the cinema is my father being warned by management that if he didn’t change his behavior he would be fired. At this point, he fell into the aisle, helpless with laughter at Laurel and Hardy.
Here, watching movies about dashing journalists in belted trench coats and trilby hats, I decided to become a journalist. I would still marry Ingrid Bergman, but instead of living near the pit we would live in a house next to Barnsley Football Club.
Broadcaster Michael Parkinson (right) with his wife Mary Parkinson (left) at TV-AM Studios
Looking back, I’m impressed by the freedom I had as a child.
When I wasn’t going to the movies or playing cricket and football, I would roam around our village and the surrounding countryside, or lie in the tall grass and watch my father play cricket.
In 1946 I transferred to Barnsley Grammar School, an all-male environment, where I was tutored by some (but not all) short-tempered brutes who, when all else failed, tried to sneak information into you. I didn’t like it at all.
Just before I graduated from high school, I was beaten up by my principal, Mr. Roche. He had three or four sticks that he practiced swinging with while you stood there wondering how many you were going to get and what the goal might be.
Before the caning, he told you what he thought of you. On that occasion, he ended his speech by saying, “If you don’t pull yourself together, Parkinson, you’ll never achieve much.” Then he handed me six, which meant I didn’t put a pen in my hand for a day or two could take hand.
When I left his study, I was still thinking that there was no point in hanging around here. He didn’t like me and I hated him and what he stood for. The sooner we parted, the better.
The fact is that I had already decided what I wanted to be. When my father was captain of the cricket team, a man from the local newspaper would visit us every Monday, riding a big and sturdy Raleigh bicycle. He would get a match report from my father.
It seemed like a wonderful way to spend a day. I wanted a job like that. Actually, I wanted his job.
I graduated from high school without working and without caring. I passed my studies in art and English and left high school shortly after.
I was 16 and already had a job. I was the man on the bike who came to our house for the cricket results – a young reporter for the South Yorkshire Times.
Michael Parkinson (left) poses for a photo with his mother Freda Parkinson (right).
Many years later I received a letter saying there would be a dinner in honor of my old headmaster and would I be willing to be the guest of honor as he had been following my career with interest? I politely declined.
So that’s how it started. I bought a bike, a drop-grip Raleigh with a Sturmey Archer three-speed, a pair of metal bike clips, and a trench coat like Bogey wore in all of his pictures.
And every day I would cycle about 25 miles around a cluster of pit villages near Barnsley and interview anyone who stood still for two minutes. I bought a typewriter and in the evenings I translated the contents of my bulging notebook onto copy paper.
After I finished, I sometimes read my efforts to my parents. My mother, an avid reader and a woman of great natural style, nodded approvingly at each particularly beautiful sentence.
My father, who liked the court reports best, supplemented the account of the misadventures of a local scoundrel with his own assessment, which was either ‘I’m not surprised at him.’ Never could play cricket.’ Or, ‘You can imagine that!’ I mean, he’s a good opening hitter, this guy.’
Eventually I moved to Doncaster to work for the Yorkshire Evening Post. I chose Doncaster because it was a journalist town at the time. Two evening and three local newspapers were printed there.
There was also a racecourse, a decent soccer team, a nice pub or two and a couple of good looking girls. I met one on the bus and married her.
I remember the moment I first saw Mary Heneghan. I sat on the top deck of a double decker and drove to the mining village of Tickhill. With me was my colleague Denis Cassidy. We were on our way to a council meeting when behind us sat this tall and slender girl with red-gold hair and a red duffle coat.
Denis, who was good at addressing people, introduced us. As I turned to look at her, I thought I could tiresomely stare at that face for a long time.
She said she is a teacher and on her way to earn some extra money with a fitness class in Tickhill. When she left I told Denis that maybe I was in love.
He said to call her. I said I didn’t have her number.
Broadcaster Michael Parkinson (pictured) died on August 16, 2023 at the age of 88
He said she told us what school she worked at. What other information did a trained journalist need? I said I was too shy to call the school. He said, ‘Don’t be so damn stupid.’ I’ll ring for you.’ And he did that by pretending to be me, and that’s how I got along with Mary for the first time.
Actually pathetic and yet the beginning of a 50-year partnership.
We got married in Doncaster. Mary made her own wedding dress; I looked like I made my own suit. We rented a flat in Manchester where I was employed at the Manchester Guardian at the time. My father celebrated our connection by bringing over a ton of sacked coal.
A year after we were married, Mary told me she was pregnant. Our joy was somewhat tempered by my father’s comment that if he were a Lancashire born boy he would not be able to play for Yorkshire.
Even I dismissed that thought as irrelevant, but I should have known my father better, as events would prove.
I was offered a job at the Daily Express for 2,000 guineas – double the salary I was making at the Manchester Guardian. Mary shared my excitement about moving to London. But we decided she would stay in Manchester until the baby was born.
We had reckoned without my father. I got a call in London. “The job is done,” he told me. “What job is that?” I asked. “Mary,” he said. ‘What about her?’ I said. “She’s moved,” he said. ‘Where?’ I asked. “Our house,” he said. ‘Why?’ I asked. “Because we live in Yorkshire,” he said.
“I know that, but why did you kidnap my wife?” I asked. “I told you, but you don’t want to listen. “If the boy is born in Lancashire he can’t play for Yorkshire,” my father said, as if explaining something to an idiot.
“Have you considered that it might be a girl?” I said. “Don’t talk so stupid,” he said.
A month later, Mary gave birth to a boy in a Wakefield foster home. We called him Andrew John and he didn’t play for Yorkshire.
It didn’t matter because he loved his grandpa and was adored in return.
Michael Parkinson in Sydney in June 1982
Meanwhile, the Express was not doing well.
I was one of about 30 writers essentially busy filling the only gap left on the features page after the obligatory political article, the blessed Beachcomber column, Rupert Bear and the Giles cartoon.
With nothing else to do, people used their free time to either write a novel or get drunk. I chose the latter course.
Every day I would show up at the office, pull a fiver out of petty cash and make my way to the legendary wine bar El Vino. There I would sit and wait for the call to duty.
Most of the time it never came and then I waited for Poppins, the Daily Express joint, to open. Here I cashed a check and then returned it all in a drunken round.
I would catch a late train from Waterloo station, hoping to get off at Surbiton in Surrey, where Mary and I had since moved.
The certainty of reaching my destination was somewhat diminished by my habit of falling asleep as soon as the train started. Most of the time I would wake up in Portsmouth and have to catch the next train back.
Once I fell asleep on the return trip and landed back in Waterloo five hours after leaving it. Another night I opened the car door, thought I had arrived at Surbiton, and fell onto the express line at Wimbledon.
I was escorted to safety by some railway workers and then visited by the police who rightly told me what a jerk I had been before taking me home.
Mary said if I was drinking because I wasn’t happy at the Express, then I had to go and find another job. I said we were broke, we had a small child and a large mortgage and I had no job to go to. But I knew she was right.
Michael Parkinson at his Sydney home in June 1982
A short time later I went into the office and told them I was leaving. It neither surprised nor bothered her. Then I went home and told Mary. ‘Where now?’ she said in her wonderful, unflinching way. “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t either.
But within a few years, my career took off in ways we never dared dream of.
Things could hardly have gone better for us in the mid-1970s. My late night talk show drew eight million+ viewers, I had a hugely successful sports column in the Sunday Times, we had a beautiful family home by the Thames and three boys who grew up tough and loud.
Mary was a TV star herself and we were proud of her. Then my father died.
When he retired from the pit we took my parents to nearby Oxfordshire. There my father, as he had done with me, devoted his energies to tirelessly trying to get his three grandchildren to become professional cricketers.
He formed a special bond with Maria, and when he was very ill and in the hospital, he confessed his deepest fears to her. “I don’t want to die here,” he said.
So she brought him home and he lay in palliative care for a month or more while we watched his life slip by like a ebbing tide.
I sat with him and looked at his hands that were outside the sheets. They were strong and shapely, and the palms and fingers were workman’s, calloused and rough to the touch
I placed my hands on his, mine without a trace, soft and smooth, remembering the love and security I felt as a child when he took my hand.
For some reason the memory made me feel ashamed and filled my mind with the unbearable thought that his hands represented everything he had done to give me river views and a simple life.
He died as he had lived, without much ado.
Michael Parkinson (right) and World Boxing Champion Muhammad Ali (left)
When the undertakers picked him up, they brought him downstairs in a blue rubber sack, and he looked so small and insignificant that I turned my head away. In that moment, I came to terms with his death by pretending it didn’t happen. I couldn’t share my mother’s grief either because I couldn’t bear my own.
I started drinking even more than usual, a lot. The more I drank, the more depressed I became.
I went to a psychiatrist who did some research but didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.
It was Maria who changed me. One day she said to me, ‘You know the worst about you and the alcohol?’ It makes you ugly.’
Her words lingered in my mind to this day, making me forever wary of further excess.
One day, about two years after my father’s death, I came across a picture of him as a young man, a group photo of the village cricket team on the ground where I first saw him play.
He looked eager, athletic and handsome and the picture broke the dam in my sadness and I started to cry. I cried for about an hour, tears of love and regret, pride and guilt.
When I stopped I felt purified and I later realized that when she was at the same moment my mother stopped writing her book. Then, like me, she was able to remember him with all the love, joy and laughter he gave us during his lifetime.
- Excerpt from Parky – My Autobiography: A Full And Funny Life, by Michael Parkinson, published by Hodder & Stoughton, £10.99. © The Parkinson Partnership Ltd 2008. To order a copy for £9.89 go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25. Promotional price valid until September 4, 2023.