Diamonds at the Lost and Found

by Sarah Aspinall

  He’d asked about her life, and then did a quietly sincere piece saying, ‘Hey Audrey, you sound like an amazing woman, and I send you all my respect and love.’

  She’d loved that message, and played and replayed it to her friends and visitors.

  On the same tape is George Clooney. We’d gone for a walk together, and I’d told him all about her and he compared her with his Aunt Rosemary, and then he did a turn for her. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘so it’s the all-singing, dancing Queen for a Day, Miss Audrey Miller herself …’

  She’d agreed he was handsome. ‘Hmm, he has got a look of Clark Gable, but not as sexy.’

  Robbie Williams was on there too, saying to me, ‘What do you mean she won’t know who I am?’ Then he turns to greet her with: ‘Hello Audrey, I’m Robbie Williams and I’m a singer! Fuck it, I’m not just a singer, I’m a fucking huge star. I mean huge, Audrey!’

  ‘He didn’t have to swear and spoil it,’ she said when she watched, ‘though he looks like he’s rather sweet when he isn’t showing off.’

  There were many more, some highly inventive, as people rose to the challenge, and I’d give the tapes to my mother as gifts, my version of our old book of contacts, and she loved them. Now that her own travel adventures appeared to be over, I believed that I had to carry them on for us both and bring the stories home for our shared collection.

  It was never easy to impress her. During my twenties I was presenting a Channel 4 current affairs series and Audrey would fidget through anything serious that I showed her, only brightening when I managed to report from an exotic location. I made one film about the new Family Law Reform Act and its impact on marriage, which I filmed mainly on an island in the Seychelles, to the bemusement of my colleagues. But I knew that the sight of me standing on a palm-fringed beach in a silk safari dress would impress her far more than one shot outside the Houses of Parliament. My next move, into making arts documentaries, cheered her up enormously as it meant going to more glamorous places, and fewer housing estates. In my career I’ve made many films, but only those involving something that glittered or that got me on the red carpet in a frock, or with a celebrity at my side, ever caught her magpie eye.

  I’ve loved my job. In time, I would go back to all those places my mother and I had visited, seeing them through a different, grown-up lens and overlaying new memories onto my childhood ones. I would often feel disorientation, almost disbelief, as I arrived in New York or Los Angeles to find a driver waiting with a sign with my name on it, that I could be there, now, in such a different role. I would be struck again and again by that shift from childhood to adulthood, from powerlessness to power.

  I saw, in time, that my own strengths as a film-maker lay mainly in finding characters and telling stories, and it was an industry in which, if my mother had been born thirty years later, she would have excelled. She would have seized all those opportunities, found the great story, persuaded people to give her the access, and told it with wit and flair. I would never have had the career I had if she hadn’t taught me how to crash into gateposts and rush through open doors, believing there will be something marvellous on the other side.

  Mum on holiday with Russell, her doctor and close friend.

  In just one generation there had been so much change, and however much she made of her opportunities, they were so different to mine.

  In her later years when Franco had moved to Spain with her blessing, I had found her a live-in companion and carer: my namesake, Sally. Sally adored her, and my mother had finally settled into her old age in style. There was always a stream of visitors and plenty of male admirers.

  I remembered that last Christmas, when she sat holding the gifts and cards that my children had made for her. Now in her eighties, she still retained her glamour. Sally had manicured her hands beautifully as always, and in them she held this year’s ‘Hello Audrey’ tape; she was gazing around at us all with some sort of contentment and I’d wondered what she was thinking. Perhaps that, after all the mad ups and downs, we had finally got to this place of grandchildren, and careers, and happy normality? And I had thought then, in that moment, ‘Well, perhaps I have been good enough, after all.’

  Time is running out and I begin to sort through the box of photographs, choosing the best for the slide show at the funeral after-party the following day.

  Among the many love letters are those from Franco addressed to ‘Her Duckiness of Southport’ and Peter Cooper’s to ‘My Aud, My Love’. There are my father’s, with his drawings of her as a naked angel, and photographs of him. I take in the youthful face, only thirty-two years old: so young for him to have to accept that he was dying. He looks such a boy to me now, and I realize just how much life he had missed out on, and how very painful it must have been to leave a wife and young child behind not knowing how the two of us would fare. Audrey had honoured her commitment to us both in her way, by marrying him and having their baby, and I suspect he forgave her the fact that she didn’t sit at his bedside each night, just as I now forgive her for not sitting beside mine when I was small. I’ve known the sweetness of reading bedtime stories to young children, and can hardly envy her the nights in hotel bars and desperate drives to motorway service stations for the solace of company.

  My father, Neil.

  The happiest photographs in the box, I now see, are of her and Peter Aspinall together. In those pictures she is clearly a woman in love. That long hunt we made together had been searching for the wrong thing in the wrong places, but Audrey had got there in the end. It had been a shot in the dark, chasing this shy widower. But she had kissed a frog and turned him into her prince. It changed us both in all kinds of ways.

  As the years had gone by I was more able to see our rackety life together for the brilliant thing it was, and the many advantages of having had Audrey for a mother: the skills that she has passed on to me, her tools for survival, the diamonds that I found unexpectedly along the way. While I know that children appear to thrive with structure, routine and learning boundaries, I also know that a rudderless life can have its own great rewards. There was a sense of delighted wonder, of freely exploring the world and of doors being wide open to me, that has never deserted me. Beyond anything else, she showed me how to see the magic in things.

  It was 2008 and we were on a family holiday and had just arrived at an airport in Greece. I was walking across the concourse when a distant memory suddenly struck me: my mother and I had been carrying our suitcases across a similar airport lobby, and in the early morning it was almost empty and therefore irresistible.

  ‘Just look at that,’ she said, spreading her hand in a sweeping gesture as if it were a stage set just for her. The terminal hall was wide, gleaming, as her bag dropped to the floor. ‘I wish I had a pair of tap shoes …’ but she was off out there anyway, laughing, clickety-clicking in an arc of twirls, the light catching her floating hair, her slight frame gliding and spinning as her shoes tapped out their own music. Now heads were turning and people slowing; stopping, smiling, and looking around for maybe a film camera and a director about to shout, ‘Cut! And thank you, Ginger, that was wonderful!’

  And it was wonderful; she was beautiful, and totally embarrassing.

  She returned flushed and glowing with happiness. I felt small and awkward beside her, half proud and half ashamed, but completely thrilled.

  It had been only a few days later, while I was still on that holiday in Greece, when her carer, Sally, phoned me, barely able to speak ‘She’s gone,’ she told me, ‘I can’t believe it. I just went in and there she was.’

  My mother had died in her sleep. The death certificate said it had been heart failure, and the world suddenly seemed an emptier place.

  OUTSIDE THE CHURCH the group of men, among them my son Matt, prepare to heave the casket onto their shoulders: tiny Audrey in a big oak box that cost too much money. I can hear her in my head telling me it is nonsense. Someone fumbles with an old CD player and Nat King Cole starts up in the echoing Victoria
n church. ‘Unforgettable’ booms out as the pall-bearers stagger down the aisle. The funeral home has interpreted my request for ‘rose-strewn’ by stapling roses onto the light oak at jaunty angles.

  My children stand in assorted outfits, my son looking almost manly and the girls in things taken from my wardrobe.

  My youngest, Moll, said the other day, ‘I’m turning into you. I sing those random songs and say weird inappropriate things to strangers. My slippers even make the same slippy-slappy noise yours do.’ No, we are all turning into Audrey, I think. Some personalities are so strong they hardly dilute; they are just reincarnating, taking over the future generations, living on like Dracula for centuries.

  Mum, Liverpool, 1932.

  Today Moll looks so like Audrey in the photographs we will later flash up on a screen at the wake. The older girls and Matt all read poems. Moll makes her way to the pulpit like the star of the show: ‘Nana never seemed like other grandmothers; she always seemed to me like Glinda, the Good Witch of the South. I can imagine her leaving the world in a big shiny bubble like the one in which Glinda left Oz. So, Nana, this is for you.’ She then sings ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ in her strong clear voice, pure Broadway. When she has finished, she bows her head with perfect timing, and goes to sit down. These genes are her inheritance, and in gratitude here she is helping Audrey make the right kind of exit.

  The after-party is back at The Prince of Wales, the once-grand hotel that had seemed to me like the centre of the world. Now we are here again for Audrey’s farewell. Her image is playing in a loop over the bar. It has been hard to choose from the big gold chocolate box in her wardrobe: the little Tapper with her cane, and then, a few inches taller, the leggy girl on Southport sands.

  The coalyard is in the background of the Orange Day Parade as the little Queen of the Protestants rides on her Uncle Charlie’s coal wagon in her ‘Good Queen Bess’ regalia, nose in the air. And there are picnic photos each year: the bus to the seaside or country, sandwiches and lemonade. The pictures show sea behind her, and she is squinting in the sun, freckled and happy and quite ready to take on the world.

  Mum, Southport beach.

  Afterword

  I PUT OFF WRITING this book for decades. Not because anyone would have minded. My mother Audrey might have enjoyed any notoriety; but the story took time to process and I had to be grown up enough to tell it with some self-knowledge. I needed to understand the debt I had to her. This was never a story of damage, but rather the story of a series of gifts, for which I’m very grateful.

  The other question with all memoirs is always ‘how much is true?’, and I can only say that I believe it is true except for certain names that have been changed, and the detail of certain scenes and conversations. I cannot of course remember what was said in a Hong Kong hotel lobby over fifty years ago, although I can remember much of what I felt at the time. I also have little evidence for dates, as there are only photographs, which are undated, and a handful of letters and mementoes, so I have sometimes had to guess and tried to be as accurate as possible. The only exception is around the making of the Norman Wisdom film which was in fact two years after Audrey’s marriage to Peter. The accurate version left a rather dull couple of years between their marriage and my pre-teen rebellion, looking for hippies and boyfriends, so I left the events as they were in my memory rather than making them chronologically correct. Once I turned twelve our story became eventful once again, and so from then on I continued to be as factually correct as my memory allowed.

  I’ve sprinkled throughout the book the usual caveats: that much is taken from the stories my mother endlessly retold; and that as a player in those stories I was aware that the events she recounted had been polished or embellished here and there. Probably I have since done this myself, in telling my own versions. But my mother’s embellishments were flourishes, and the substance was true. She attracted unusual people and events to her, and she made things happen.

  Fascinatingly, whenever I have been able to check out these stories the truth has often been stranger. On a visit to Southport a year or so before she died, I was invited to dinner by an old friend of my mother’s and a man was there, one of the biggest property developers in the North West. We were introduced and he did a double take when he discovered who my mother was.

  ‘Wow, you’re Audrey Miller’s daughter! She was an amazing character. I could tell you some stories, but I won’t!’

  I, of course, persuaded him that it was fine to tell all and that nothing would shock me anyway.

  He began: ‘The first time I met your mother was at the bar of a fancy hotel in Liverpool. I was in my twenties, and I was having a drink with a mate of mine, a good-looking guy, a footballer. Your mum came over and offered to buy us a drink. Then she said, “I don’t know if you would be interested, but I know some very attractive older ladies who would pay well for the company of young men like you. And you might even have fun!”’

  I asked if he had taken up her offer? He laughed and said that they hadn’t, but they had been intrigued, and a few of their friends had asked them for my mother’s phone number.

  This only confirmed what I had always half known. At her funeral, her younger cousin Norma said to me, ‘When I was young we all wondered if she was making up half of the stories that she told us; then, when I came to Southport and she introduced me to Clark Gable and he put an arm around her, I decided it was probably all true.’ That was my experience of her life before I was born. It all checked out whenever I talked to anyone who had been there.

  Perhaps one reason why I took so long to write this book was that for much of my life I felt overshadowed by my mother. I felt that I was the less interesting half of that funny double act of my childhood; and as the story became more mine and less hers, I wasn’t sure where to stop. My antics as a teenager in Oxford seem pretty common for kids in the Seventies, and my career as a documentary maker may have some juicy anecdotes, but emotionally I was quite a settled person. As de Montherlant wrote, ‘Happiness writes in white ink on a white page,’ so none of this made my life as interesting as the blacker ink of Audrey’s more troubled years.

  However, I do believe that a harum-scarum life is no bad thing for a child. Having nothing to do, and a few books, will supply most of what we need for a vivid imaginative life and interesting self-education. I also should dedicate this book to Peter, and to all those mentors and role models out there, people who care about us even for a short time and change our lives.

  Acknowledgements

  First of all, a massive thank you to Dbc Pierre who said ‘You must write this story’ and then proceeded to guide me on every step of the journey with his characteristic generosity and brilliance. Thank you, too, to Jane Rogers at Gold Dust for getting me off to a good start, and to Polly Morland for all her encouragement and help.

  I’m immensely grateful to Liz Wyse and Fiona Murphy, my dear friends who patiently and unwaveringly read and reread, keeping me on track with the writing, much as they do in life. To Juliet Annan, who gave me her sage guidance, to Jim Barton, Marian Macgowan, Rosemary Hill and Anne Elletson, all of whom did so much to help shape this book, and to Molly Eagles for her insightful notes, thank you so much.

  My wonderful agent Patrick Walsh has supported me generously each step of the way. My editor, Helen Garnons-Williams, has offered enthusiasm, insight and nurturing throughout, and the whole team at HarperCollins have looked after me so well. Finally to my children, Anna, Meg, Matt and Molly, for all their excellent notes, support and encouragement, a very big thank you; and to my darling Robbie who helped me in every way possible, from brilliant suggestions to pedantic fact checking and his daily unwavering support.

  About the Author

  After her early life with her endlessly restless mother, Sarah became a documentary maker for Channel 4 and the BBC. Her films have taken her on several trips around India and the US, across Mexico and up the Nile and back to some of the places she visited with Audrey decades b
efore. After building a cabin on a secluded beach she finally managed to settle enough to write this memoir, and is currently working on her next book, a novel. She has four children and lives with her partner in London and the South Coast.

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