Ramble Book
Page 10
Hardback copies of all Le Carré’s novels had made the journey to Norfolk along with all of Dad’s other books, and just the day before I had spent the afternoon arranging them on the shelves for him beside everything ever written by Winston Churchill, Patrick O’Brian and John Buchan. Apart from the odd Western, the only TV show I ever remember my dad liking when we were young was the 1982 adaptation of Le Carré’s Smiley’s People, starring old Ben Kenobi himself, Sir Alec Guinness. That Dad was able to call Le Carré a friend was a source of tremendous pride to him, and to unbalance that friendship with a request to borrow £40,000 surely scooped him out. The letter begins:
At the age of almost 67, I am ashamed to be writing to you like this. I know well enough that I have no right whatever to be asking for your help, but I have honestly, and lately desperately, tried every other conceivable way of raising the very large amount of money that I want, and so far none has worked. Now, I have run out of time and cannot think even of any other hope.
It was a long letter, underneath which Dad had filed Le Carré’s reply – a kind, well-worded refusal. I winced and stuffed the envelopes back in the box where I’d found them.
When I was little I thought Dad was just the absolute best guy around: clever, handsome, funny and successful. I loved travelling with him and seeing him charm hotel managers, flight attendants and heads of tourism who fell over themselves to do his bidding. In those days, no problem was too big for Dad to solve and no opportunity to make our lives more exciting was missed.
Sure, he could go too far sometimes. We once stayed at a resort in Barbados that Dad was writing about for his travel column, and one evening we were taken to an open-air reggae concert by a local PR person. I’m fairly certain it was Mum and Dad’s first open-air reggae concert and it made a considerable impression on six-year-old Buckles. I wish I could report that it was the night my passion for music was awakened, but I was just confused by how different we looked to all the locals and how gut-quakingly loud the music was. Seeing the look of alarm on his young son’s face, Dad leaned close to the PR person and asked in a loud, posh voice if the concert could be turned down. The PR person laughed before realising my dad was serious. Even at six, I had a sense that this was not cool. (I just emailed my mum to fact-check this recollection and she confirms, it was not cool.)
Once I was at boarding school, I started to get depressed whenever I knew Dad had to travel. I worried he might never come back. One of many low points during my first term as a boarder was when Mum and Dad came to pick me up for a ‘leave out’ (one of two weekends a term when you could stay out overnight), only for us to drive to Heathrow, where Dad had to catch a flight to New York.
‘Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)’ by Christopher Cross was playing on the radio as we approached the terminal and the chorus ‘When you get caught between the moon and New York City …’ – which may just have been a euphemism for severe delays – struck me instead as a sign that Dad’s plane was going to crash. I knew it wasn’t a rational thought so I stayed quiet, but I couldn’t shake it. As I did my best not to cry, Dad reached back from the front passenger seat, found my hand and gave it a series of soft squeezes. Thereafter Dad used the language of squeezes whenever he had anything emotional to communicate. As we got older and the emotions got more complicated, the squeezes became more expressive.
When Dad looked round the flat in Norfolk and took in the preparations we’d made for his arrival, I got a shoulder squeeze that, even in his weakened state, bordered on painful.
My brother had driven him up that day, and while Dad pottered about his new digs, Uncle Dave and I went out to unload the last of his possessions from the car. There, on the top of the pile of bags, cooking implements and bedding, was the black briefcase, still tightly locked.
‘Where do you want this, Daddy?’ I asked back in the flat.
‘Somewhere safe, old boy. Somewhere out of the way,’ he replied, but before I had the chance to quiz him further our dog Rosie boinged into the room, followed closely by my daughter, then aged six, whereupon I was treated to a rare sight: an unforced beaming smile from Dad.
* * *
RAMBLE
Pa was never much of a smiler, especially in photos. Even when he was young and handsome he was more likely to smoulder than smile. Perhaps that had something to do with my determination to smile in press photographs as much as possible. Though it’s an unreasonable prejudice, I can’t help thinking that when comedians smoulder it’s vain. If you want people to think you’re mysterious and sexy, be a rock star. But some people just don’t suit a smile. When Dad smiled in photographs he usually ended up looking as though he was trying not to cry.
* * *
For the next couple of months the black briefcase sat on top of a tall filing cabinet in the corner of my office, as it had in Dad’s study back in Earl’s Court when I first encountered it 35 years previously. I gave it a shake before I stuck it up there and heard something small and heavy bumping about. It didn’t sound like porn, but the urge to establish the exact contents of the black briefcase was quickly superseded by more prosaic concerns.
Dad had been given between three and twelve months to live and it was agreed that there was little to be gained from any aggressive treatment for his cancer. Soon after he arrived in Norfolk, we met with the local GP, who explained that if he took his various pills when he was supposed to, Dad was unlikely to be in any significant pain and the main challenge would be keeping his energy levels up. To that end, a nutritionist at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital encouraged him to load up on noodles, butter, cheese and other foods that for most people might be considered naughty.
That was bad news for me. I’m not fond of dairy products, and cheese makes me especially sad. In the months that followed I found cleaning up after toilet accidents infinitely preferable to preparing cheesy noodles, cheesy scrambled eggs, cheesy liver and other cheese nightmares for Dad, which, more often than not, he didn’t even eat.
The nutritionist also arranged for a regular supply of smoothie supplement drinks and stressed the importance of consuming at least one a day. They came in a wide range of foul flavours and only ever acted on Dad as a powerful emetic. Between the smoothies and the cheese, one of us was gagging most of the time.
We got to know our local district nurses, who came over every week to check on Dad and drain the fluid building up in his lung bags. They used a plastic beaker with a tube and a needle on the end, and on their first visit the younger and more nervous-looking of the nurses got to push the needle into Dad’s chest. She was rewarded with a hair-raising yelp that left her ashen. ‘Have you done this before?’ spluttered Dad.
‘I’m sure she knows what she’s doing,’ I offered, smiling at the pale nurse, who replied, ‘Actually, this is my first time with the chest drain.’
‘Jeeesus Christ!’ was Dad’s response. It was hard to know where best to direct my sympathy.
* * *
RAMBLE
Dad had a tendency to make loud noises long before he got ill. When he would come and stay with us, I often heard him cry out at night. I’d check on him and he seemed fine, but the noises would persist. Anguished cries that suggested he was either dreaming about the war or bank managers.
During his last year, his weakened lungs made his voice thin and high, but his arsenal of howls, moans and groans expanded and was no longer confined to the night.
Whenever a new nurse or carer attended to him, they’d leave looking shaken after enduring what sounded like the cries of a Game of Thrones torture victim. However, Dad himself confirmed that despite the yowling, he wasn’t in much pain. From then on, the nurses would sometimes refer to him as ‘The Prince of Wails’.
* * *
By the end of summer 2015 Dad was averaging two or three minutes to make the trip down the six-metre corridor between the living room and the dead room – I mean bedroom. His legs, which just a few years before had popped with hiking muscles, were now
papery and wasted, and as he shuffled along with his bathrobe, cane and tufts of white hair sticking up from his skinny head, he looked like Yoda but pale pink and with all the Force used up.
For most of the time that Dad was living with us I was working on another failed pilot. It was one that got quite close to becoming an actual TV show, so the pressure was on to deliver several scripts. In practice, that meant I’d spend several hours a day staring at my computer, not writing scripts and feeling that I ought to be making the most of the time I had left with Dad.
Before he moved in, I’d imagined conversations filled with tender reminiscences, confessions and closure. ‘Hey, Daddy, do you remember that holiday to Greece when I was 12 and Clare trod on a sea urchin and you told us we should pee in a bucket and pour it on her foot to make the spines come out?’ We’d laugh with gratitude for all the good fortune we’d enjoyed over the years, then Dad would say, ‘Come closer, Adam …’ I’d lean in and he’d say haltingly, ‘I’m … I’m sorry I didn’t smile more,’ or ‘I wish we hadn’t sent you away to boarding school. We did it for the best reasons, but I would have liked to have spent more time with you when you were still so young,’ or ‘I just wanted you to know that I thought the three-star review you got for BUG in Edinburgh that time was very unfair – they were reviewing it as if it were a one-man show when it was clearly a presentation of other people’s work with some of your own very funny material mixed in, but people often find it hard to properly appreciate things that aren’t easily categorised.’
Any version of that scenario, even one that wasn’t entirely based on things I wanted to hear, was overwhelmed by the unsatisfactory routines and role reversals we’d unwittingly signed on for. Thing is, you’re unlikely to strike up a heart-to-heart chat with your son for the first time while he’s standing over you until you’ve finished your smoothie, getting annoyed when you don’t take your pills or hoisting your nappy on before bed. Also you’re more or less deaf. And you’ve got cancer. In the end we were just two uptight men who found it easier to be on our own.
One morning when script deadline stress levels were peaking, I went and looked in on Dad to ask what he wanted for breakfast. As soon as he mentioned eggs I made for the kitchen. I was keen to avoid the usual lengthy instructions about how best to prepare cheesy scrambled eggs so I could get the job done quickly and return to work on the failed pilot, but a second after I’d left the room he called after me, ‘Wait! I haven’t finished!’
There was no need to finish, I told him. I knew what he was after. ‘Yes, but sometimes you say that and what you get me isn’t quite right.’
‘When have I got you something that wasn’t quite right?’ I asked, heart beginning to flutter with exasperation.
‘Well, I don’t keep a record. The other day, for example, you got me some scrambled eggs, but you put it on toast, which I didn’t ask for.’
‘I gave you toast because I thought you might like it, but I thought if you didn’t like it you could just leave it, which you did. You know, Daddy, you asked me to tell you if there were ways to make things easier for me while you’re here and this is one of them. I just need you to be concise, that’s all.’
‘You get very touchy,’ he said.
It wasn’t even 9 a.m. and already I was fizzing with nervous stress like Ray Liotta running errands at the end of Good-fellas, but with fewer amphetamines and more self-loathing.
I needed to calm down, so as soon as I’d delivered the eggs (without toast), I went out for a walk with Rosie and we had a therapeutic chat. ‘I’m fucking this up, aren’t I, Rosie?’
‘Go on,’ said Rosie.
‘This is my last chance to spend some time with Daddy and get to know him a little better, and instead I’m just getting annoyed with him for not behaving exactly the way I want him to. And in the meantime I’m fucking up this pilot, too.’
‘How does that make you feel?’ said Rosie.
‘Bad. I feel bad. I’m a bad person doing a bad job, but you know what? I’m going to try harder and make sure the time Dad has left is beautiful and cathartic and meaningful.’
‘For him, or you?’ said Rosie, a bit annoyingly.
My phone buzzed. An email from Dad. It said:
I’m sorry. I forgot to ask you earlier, if you do go to Sainsbury’s today could you pick up the following:
1, repeat 1, bottle of lemon cordial. Stuff in fridge seems to have been there always.
3 big and best navel oranges
Fresh noodles
Canada Dry
Steak pie
Later that afternoon I presented Dad with a steak pie lunch and a new positive attitude. ‘You got the wrong steak pie,’ he said after the first bite.
* * *
RAMBLE
SHIT DAD USED TO SAY
‘A man with a beard is trying to hide something.’ (Said throughout the Seventies, but he stopped saying it when I grew my beard in 2005.)
‘Oh Five Two Six.’ (Said when answering our phone in Earl’s Court.)
‘We’re gone!’ (Said when trying to get everyone out of the house and into car at the start of a family trip.)
‘You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their shoes.’ (Said when I would complain about how hard it was to polish my leather Clarks shoes using a brush – ‘Why can’t I just use the scuff coat?’)
‘Life is a vale of tears.’ (Dad was definitely a glass-half-empty guy. Prepare for the worst and hope for the best, was his philosophy.)
‘The people who care don’t matter and the people who matter don’t care.’ (We’ve covered this one.)
‘Life itself is unfair.’ (Said whenever any of us complained that something was unfair.)
‘They should be put in a leaky boat and sent out to the middle of the North Atlantic.’ (Said about people Dad didn’t like on TV, including Noel Edmonds, Jan Leeming, Barbara Dickson, Bruce Forsyth, Petula Clark, Keith Chegwin, Esther Rantzen, Terry Wogan, Barbara Woodhouse (the Thatcher-style dog trainer) and Jimmy Savile.)
‘You little basket!’ (Said if I did something naughty when I was little.)
‘It’s all good copy.’ (Said whenever something bad happened.)
‘Almost certainly.’ (Said whenever I asked if he could help me with something.)
* * *
CHAPTER 9
1983
In January 1983, aged 13, I made the move from Westminster Under School to Westminster, the fee-paying school next to Westminster Abbey in central London where Dad had secured me a place. The student population was made up of day pupils and boarders. If you were a day pupil you went home at the end of the school day, and if you were a boarder you would sleep at school, in small dormitories at first, then single studies when you were more senior.
Overlooking a central courtyard, known imaginatively as ‘Yard’, were the various ‘houses’ into which every pupil was sorted when they arrived at the school (I have no idea by whom – may well have been a magic hat, or even a magic twat). As well as dormitories and studies, most houses contained an area where the juniors did their homework under the supervision of house prefects, a common room, which, depending on the house, might contain books, games, a TV or even a pool table, and a dining room where you ate lunch with your housemates. Breakfast and supper happened in the communal College Hall, one of the more ancient buildings next to the medieval cloisters that lead to Westminster Abbey. College Hall was like Hogwarts’ dining room, but scruffier and without the nice food and the floating candles.
Some houses at Westminster were more desirable than others, with bigger studies, better facilities and nicer décor. The students that got into these houses tended to have fathers who were either Old Westminsters themselves, celebrated establishment figures, millionaires or all three. As my dad didn’t tick any of those boxes, I ended up in one of the houses generally agreed to be ‘bad’. Entering it for the first time, my impression was of prisons and mental institutions I’d seen on TV: cold, hard and shabby.
The other five boys in my junior dormitory were unimpressed by my tales of life at a mixed boarding school and clearly felt threatened when I told them about my 90-minute snogging record. One boy in particular never missed an opportunity to take the piss, and though we ended up being friendly once we were in the sixth form, his campaign of mental attrition contributed to my hatred of Westminster during my first few terms there. Years later my tormentor told me the reason he’d been so unpleasant in that junior dorm was that he found me intimidating, though he didn’t mention the snogging record specifically. He went on to claim that some of the things I’d said in retaliation back then had wounded him badly, which only very fleetingly made me happy. Beware cornered boys with low self-esteem.
My only real friend during my first terms at Westminster was Patrick Dickie. We had been at boarding school together, though back then I had been wary of Patrick, as he was intensely passionate about things that seemed clever and grown up and which I knew nothing about, like CND, politics, football and the Beatles. We were in the same dormitory when we heard that John Lennon had been shot in December 1980 and Patrick, aged ten, was distraught. I felt he’d reacted in a way that might now be dismissed as ‘performative’ or some form of ‘signalling’ and ventured, ‘What’s the big deal about some old hippy dying? You didn’t even know him.’ Patrick had to be restrained.