- Hello. I’m very pleased to meet you. As I explained on the phone, I’m collecting
material for a biography of Michael Davenport, and I was told you used to work
for him.
- Yes, I was his valet.
- Well, I’d be most grateful if you could
fill me in with some personal details of what he was like. I might say, your
identity will be treated with the strictest confidence if that’s what you’d prefer. Let me get
you a drink anyway ……………… Now, what was he like to work for?
- He was a complete bastard
- Really? That’s most interesting.
That’s not the way most people would
have perceived him at all. They do say, no man was ever a hero to his valet.
Tell me more! In what ways didn’t you get on with
him?
- He had no consideration for us at all. He treated us like dirt: never
once thanked us for what we did. And we had to do absolutely everything for
him, you know. He was like a little kid. It wasn’t
just fetching and carrying. When he went to a formal dinner, I had to tie his
bow tie for him, cos he couldn’t do it himself, and
he refused to wear a made-up one cos it looked cheap. I didn’t mind that too much, but I did mind having to put his
shoes on for him.
- Are you saying he couldn’t do up his own
shoelaces?
- Well, he probably could, though I never saw him do it. I think he just
liked to have someone grovelling in front of him, doing them up. Gave him a
sense of power: made him feel like an emperor or something. That’s the trouble with these new-money types, you see: no
old-style traditional gent would ever act like that. And I really used to hate
him for it; because I’ve got a bad back,
and it really gave me gyp, kneeling down to tie up his shoes. And he didn’t care. I used to hate him for it.
- (Then why didn’t you leave him and
get another job? No, I won’t ask that now: don’t stop the flow; let him carry on talking)
- But I got my own back in the end, you see. He was off for this big
event, flying out, and
he says, George, get me my special black shoes, and make sure they’re properly polished.
Now: his special shoes. Did you know some of his shoes were specially
built up, with quite high heels, to make him look taller? Not many people knew
that. Shows how vain he was. So I went to the cupboard and got the special
shoes with the big heels, but when I was giving them a shine, I noticed that
one of the heels had worked loose and might come off at any moment. Now if I’d told him, he’d have gone mad, and
raved at me for not mending it sooner, so instead I just covered up the break
with some shoe-polish so you wouldn’t spot it. And then
I had to kneel down in front of him to put them on, and my back was hurting
really bad, so I couldn’t straighten up
afterwards, but he didn’t care. And I thought, if
that heel comes off , serve you right! I was really hoping it would, just when
everyone was watching him. Because no-one could ever look dignified in public
with the heel off one shoe and having to hobble around like they’d got a bad leg. He’d just look silly,
and everyone would laugh at him.
- And it turned out to be more than that, didn’t it? Because he appeared at the door of the plane,
and waved, and all the camera flashbulbs popped, and then he started to walk
down the steps, and suddenly, over he went, tumbled right down to the bottom,
head first, landed on the tarmac and broke his neck. Nobody at the time had any
idea how it happened: now we know. A man cut off in
his prime. Perhaps even a turning-point in history. Who knows; maybe in 50 or
100 years, people could be asking, would everything have been different if
Michael Davenport hadn’t died? How did you
feel, knowing that?
- Well, it was tough on all of
us. My back was worse than ever. In the morning, I couldn’t move!
