Unorthodox world of Mister Glass

Unorthodox world of Mister Glass

My first memory of my Uncle Eric is of him noisily eating a crab, the
next of him allowing me to fly in his back garden, causing me to scrape
my knee quite badly on the bark of his apple tree.

We were on holiday in Devon, visiting my grandma. She lived with my
Uncle Eric. At the time, I never thought it odd that my Uncle Eric
should be so much older than my dad and live with his own mother. They
seemed very fond of each other. Of course, I know now that Eric Glass
wasn't an Uncle at all, but he wasn't really a grandfather
either.

He always wore a small hat and he had glasses like me. But he seemed
proud of his, they were huge, with lenses that seemed like car windows.
He had a round face, not fat, but round, like a squash ball.

On that holiday, we walked along the seafront, I dawdled as I looked up
and marvelled at the tiny steps cut into the rain-gray rock. The air
smelled different here, so salty I kept thinking I could clench my
fists and when I opened them, there would be white crystals in my
palms. Uncle Eric stopped by a stall and told us he was going to buy a
crab, he loved crab, he said.

I have never seen anyone else eat a crab in my entire life. Mum told me
off for staring after a while. The crab came in its shell, which was
muddy orange, speckled with white. Eric snapped off the legs one by one
and pulled out the tender meat, eating it with relish and smacking his
lips.

The next day, my mother and grandmother went to the shops. Dad was
watching Grandstand on television, so it was left to Uncle Eric to
entertain me. We went out into the back garden, which sloped and was
impossible for football.

Eric said, "Have you ever seen any magic ? Real magic, I mean ?"

Of course I hadn't and agreed with delight when he promised to make me
fly. I was only able to fly about three feet above the ground, so it
wasn't as I had imagined. I wasn't able to zip past ducks and wave at
them, or find out what clouds were like, but it was still great, right
up until the point where I misjudged a turn and scraped my knee on the
apple tree.

I was seven, of course I cried. Dad eventually came out to see what had
happened and I was about to tell him. Then I saw Uncle Eric put a
finger to his lips and I told my dad that I had fallen playing
football. Later, when I read about George Washington at school, I
thought of this as my reverse-George moment - I had lied to my father
about a tree.

By the time I was eleven, I was quite used to seeing Uncle Eric on
television. You will have seen him too, I'm sure. 'Mister Glass and his
Unusual World'. It was a magic show and for a time, he was in the holy
trinity of Erics in my mind. Morecambe, Sykes and Glass. All three were
adored in my house.

What I liked is that he always stuck to his story. If he was asked how
a trick worked, he always said 'By magic, of course'. Other people did
tricks, he did magic. He was always quite offended if people called
them tricks, but he was offended in a polite way.

Mister Glass' events were in a different league to any other magician.
I know this about magicians - they use doves for a reason. Doves are
white and pretty and not frightening, but they are also small and
docile and (forgive me) they fold up rather well. So, Mister Glass
didn't use doves, he felt they were cheap. He would produce ravens.
Huge black ravens that glowered at the audience and looked thoroughly
uncooperative, as if they hated every moment. He would not take rabbits
from a hat, he would produce a dog that could, under no circumstances
have possibly fitted into the hat.

It was impossible, people would say. And Mister Glass would say, 'Magic
is about the impossible, not the difficult.'

I knew that it wasn't magic. When I was seven, I was a different
person. I was dosed up on the Faraway Tree and wardrobes that led to
snowy worlds. I had known that the world wasn't full of magic, but I
thought that there were corners where it might be found. By the time I
was eleven, I'd stopped believing in almost everything you can think
of. I knew that I hadn't really flown in the garden, though it had felt
that way at the time. I'd just been a kid and easily fooled.

He had probably just held me round the waist and twirled me round. It
would have been as easy as that. When I was seven, I was very light and
ready to believe. I wanted magic to be real.

It was still fun to watch my Uncle Eric on television though. He was
very good at it. Not so much being on television, he always came across
a little old-fashioned, but he could really work the whole illusion of
wonder. It was a bit liked being related to Dr Who.

On one show, he explained to the audience how cheap tricksters hid
things in their sleeves and their pockets. Then he did the whole show
stripped to the waist, with a towel around his waist and bare legs. The
hair on his chest and tummy was white and wiry and he wasn't in good
shape. I could see the red lines on his legs where his socks had been
too tight. But that didn't matter, when he was producing coloured flags
and vases of flowers seemingly from under his armpit, when there could
have been no way of hiding them.

Another time, he told everyone how much trickery took place behind the
average magician. He never had dancing girls or puffs of smoke to
distract the audience (which made his shows less appealing) but he
always said he didn't need distractions.

He then invited some members of the public and two well-known magicians
up on to the stage, so that they could sit behind him and scrutinise
what went on that the audience could not see.

To this day, those two magicians say that Eric Glass did not work to
any traditions or techniques of magic that they had ever observed and
they still have no idea how he performed his tricks. Maybe they would
say that. The Magic Circle sticks together. They like to keep that air
of doubt, that it might not just be fancy apparatus and split-second
timing.

The illusion he is most remembered for is the Birthday Cake. At the
start of a show, he produced ingredients from nowhere, flour, eggs,
sugar, a bar of dark chocolate. Then he brought two people up onto
stage and led them to part of the set which was the Blue Peter Kitchen.
He gave them a recipe and told them to make a cake. The cameras cut
back to them every now and then, while he did the rest of his act and
they were in full sight of the audience. When they'd made the cake
mixture, he told them to pour it into a round baking tin and put it
into the oven. The camera zoomed in on the inside of the oven, nothing
unusual there. The cake came out and was left to cool on a wire rack,
in full view of everyone.

Mister Glass walked over to the cake, waved his hand over it (he never
used a wand) and everyone jumped as two black rats chewed their way out
of the cake from the inside.

He would never tell me, or my dad, or even my grandmother, how any of
this was done. He would just smile in a way that seemed to take an age
to travel from his eyes to his mouth and say that some things were best
left unknown.

Mister Glass was of another age, when talent used to get people onto
television and charisma came purely from excellence. Time moved on and
he grew older and more anachronistic, with all the young smiling
people. He could never do that 'knowing irony' thing. He only knew one
way of doing magic and that was to be absolutely plain that it really
was magic and no explanation was possible. His regular shows became
seasonal specials and then Christmas specials and then they weren't
special at all. I think he got money for the repeats, years later, when
people had begun to get a bit nostalgic.

Even I stopped talking about him to other boys at school. It wasn't
cool any more to have an Uncle who was on television, it was
embarassing to be related to a 'loser'.

I hope this faint disappointment never came through in my time with
him, although it may have done. There isn't much you can hide in your
teens, sadly. He was the same person and his magic was as amazing as
ever really, it's just that people wanted something new. I'd feel
terrible if he ever thought I was ashamed of him or thought badly of
him.

When he died, I wasn't there. Some of the newspapers did articles on
him and I snipped them out, kept them in a scrapbook. Buying a
scrapbook isn't easy when you're a thirty year old man - they all have
those chubby golden bears or Victorian roses and coaches imagery.

He'd done letters for everyone, which we got at the funeral. I think he
knew he hadn't much longer. Nobody told anyone else what had been in
his letter.

All mine said was 'You really did fly. I've never lied about magic.
When you were seven, you really did fly and that's something you should
always treasure.'

The worst thing is, all my memory of it is through a filter of later
doubt. I can't remember how it actually felt to swoop and glide, I only
really remember thinking, years later, 'oh, I bet that's how he did
it'. So I have no real way of knowing whether to believe him, I just
have to choose.