40 Years Ago

John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Rowan Atkinson

Atkins: You can’t beat a good glass of château le chasselet.

Jones: Ah you’re right there Obadiah.

Cleese: Who’d a thought 40 years ago we’d be sitting here, drinking Chateau…

Palin: In them days we’d be glad to have a cup of tea.

Atkins: Aye, a cup of cold tea.

Cleese: Without milk. Or sugar.

Atkins: Or tea!

Palin: Aye, in a cracked cup as well.

Cleese: We never had a cup. We used to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

Atkins: The best we could do was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

Jones: But you know we were happy in those days, although we were poor.

Palin: Because we were poor. My old dad used to say to me, “money doesn’t buy happiness son”.

Cleese: He was right. I was happier then we had nothing. We used to live in a tiny old tumbled down house with great holes in roof.

Atkins: A house. You were lucky to have a house. We used to live in one room, 26 of us no furniture and half the floor was missing, huddles in one corner for fear of falling.

Jones: Well you were lucky to have a room. We used to have to live in a corridor.

Palin: We used to dream of living in a corridor. It would have been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. Got woke up every morning by having a load of rotten fish dumped all over us. House ha!

Cleese: Well when I say house it was only a hole in the ground covered with a couple of feet of torn canvas, but it was house to us.

Atkins: We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and live in lake.

Jones: You were lucky to have a lake. There were 150 of us living in shoe box in middle of motorway.

Palin: Cardboard box? (Jones: Aye) You were lucky. We lived for three months in a rolled up newspaper in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at 6 every morning, clean the newspaper, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down the mill 14 hours a day, week in, week out, for two pence a week and when we got home our dad would trash us to sleep with his belt.

Atkins: Luxury. We used to have to get out the lake at 3 am, clean the lake, eat a hand full of hot gravel, work 20 hours a day at mill for two pence a month, come home and dad would beat us about the head with a broken bottle, if we were lucky.

Jones: Well of course we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of shoe box in middle of night and lick the road clean with our tongues, eat half a hand full of cold gravel, work 24 hours a day for two pence every 6 years and when we got home our dad would slice into us with bread knife.

Cleese: Right! I used to get up in the morning at half past ten at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of freezing cold poison, work 28 hours a day at mill and pay the mill owner to let us work there. And when I got home my dad used to murder me in cold blood each night and dance about on our graves, singing hallelujah.

Palin: Aye, you try and tell the young people of today that. They won’t believe you!