The Life of Lee by Lee Evans Read Free Book Online

the van, took out two long cases and began walking down the embankment towards the cattle trailer. In a workmanlike fashion, he placed the two cases side by side on the grass and flipped open the lids. He revealed – and this was quite obvious to me as a boy obsessed with comics and American cop shows – the two parts of a gun. He took the pieces out of their cases and began assembling them, checking the barrel and trigger system as he went.
    Now I knew what was going to happen. The other man descended the grassy bank and was handed the gun by his friend. He swung it under his arm, cradling it on his wrist, pointed at the ground. He inserted the pack into the gun and slammed it in with the palm of his hands. It was loaded. I knew, as I’d seen them do it on the TV.
    It was a shock to me at ten years of age to watch that man with the gun stand over the first cow that lay in front of him. There was panic and fear in the animal’s eyes, and the others back in the trailer started to get restless. They were moving and shifting around.
    They knew.
    As the man lifted the gun and cocked it, I turned myhead one way, then the other. All the people were just staring down at what was going on. Why weren’t the grown-ups going to do anything to help that cow?
    The cow looked up in terror at the big man. It began trying desperately to get to its feet but, because of its injuries, it was impossible. My gut wrenched, and I wanted to run down the embankment, but I knew I wasn’t allowed. I didn’t know what to do.
    The man pointed the gun at the cow’s head. Its eyes widened with fear.
    It knew.
    I knew.
    I turned and ran. I ran as fast as I could, stumbling over the knobbly grass, a huge shadow in front of me cast by the floodlights back where the crash was. I didn’t want to hear the sound of the gun.
    I just kept seeing the look of helplessness in the cow’s eyes. My lungs began to burn, I was running so fast. But still I wasn’t able to run fast enough. I heard the crack of gunfire. It stopped me in my tracks. I was confused. It didn’t sound like the guns you hear on the TV. This was a small pop. I knew it was the gun, but I couldn’t help thinking, ‘What a crap gun sound.’
    I stood silently in the middle of the field, trying to make sense of what had just happened. The twinkling yellow lights of the motorway stretched out before me. The bright full moon gave the dark, ominous clouds that sailed across the sky a silvery-blue silhouette. I looked towards the flats, our flat, on the estate. I was in no hurry to run home. All I could do there was sit in my bedroom and think about what I’d just seen and heard. I felt content tostay where I was, on my own in my remoteness in the middle of this field.
    I looked back at the illuminated, surreal scene of the accident, the tiny outlines of people moving around the top of the embankment and looking down into the ditch.
    ‘Pop!’
    I jumped. I’d heard another one. I put my fingers in my ears, so I couldn’t hear any more and tried to make myself feel better by thinking I wasn’t a part of it, like I was looking down from a distant Olympian height. But then I rolled to my knees and began crying uncontrollably.
    ‘Why couldn’t I have done something? I didn’t do anything!’
    It was some time before I could go to bed at night without staring up at the ceiling partially illuminated by the distant lights of the motorway and without thinking about the plaintive look in that animal’s eyes.
    Another childhood incident that had a profound impact on me happened soon after, and it was an experience that rammed home to me the fact that my family appeared to hail from an entirely different planet.
    People often ask me the same question: what was your first break in show business? Well, it might not surprise anyone to hear that it was in actual fact a ludicrous, completely voluntary appearance in an item which topped the bill of the local evening news in Bristol.
    It was 1974, the