You Left Early

by Louisa Young

  I won’t mislead you: grief and love entwine like roses, and never die. They remain with the old and encompass the new. This is what love is – what it was for us. Life does go on.

  London 2018

  Appendices

  From ROBERT’S REHAB PAPERS

  The Life and Times of Robert Lockhart

  Clouds, Autumn 2005

  Born Wigan, Lancs, 1959. Only child. My parents, John and Pat, were deemed to be a glamorous couple in their lower middle class (for want of a better term) milieu. He a travelling salesman with a souped-up Ford Anglia, she a hairdresser. Not quite Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton but never mind. Especially ‘not quite’ on the drinking front (ie no history of alcoholism in the family). I was a relatively happy child, successful academically and at sport, plenty friends … My father was having an affair by the time I was about six, with Lily Glinka, a Russian secretary who was afraid of the wind … and who was anorexic (sp?) I think he was attracted by the ‘victim’ syndrome. At that age obviously oblivious I didn’t think it odd that he often got home from ‘work’ at ten pm. My mother found out, and when he was on his next affair I found out about that one too. About age eight I was frequently woken by my parents arguing in their bedroom late into the night. This went on for about four years. My mother’s attitude was to protect me but eventually she succumbed to an affair herself. He died two years later of diabetes. The next man later became her second husband. My father lost his job. I had changed schools – going to the local grammar (later becoming a comprehensive) – and had the dilemma of whether to stay with my mother at home or go to my paternal grandparents with my father. I left with my father to live with my grandparents – sharing a single bed with him. Particularly unpleasant were his seemingly nicotine-stained elephant-tusk-like toenails. I became somewhat estranged from my mum. I think it was that my father and I had more in common, not necessarily that I loved him more. I went back to my mother but the presence of my future stepfather drove me back to my father and grandparents. This scenario happened again, which must have had an unsettling effect. On the surface things were OK – still good academically – made the under-13s 100m and triple jump and sufficiently advanced to go to music college junior school in Manchester on Saturday mornings. This coincided with an influx of rough lads who beat the shit out of us supposedly posh grammar-school boys. I escaped punishment despite being a prime target as a classical pianist (one is automatically a ‘puffter’) because I had played for Wigan Rugby League schoolboys which even at that age was a sport for hard lads – but because I was studying the piano sadly had to stop due to the high risk of breaking fingers.

  At the junior music college I finally met some peers with whom I had more in common. Sport went downhill, I became more isolated except for Saturdays. This was a period of sexual awakening – not easy when you only see each other weekly. Later I met a senior student – a very mature lady – she was 19. I was deflowered. It lasted six weeks and was my first experience of being emotionally devastated.

  My parents had divorced. Dad met my future stepmother, later they got married on the same day as my mother (a total coincidence). My dad and Kath bought a house – I moved in. With one or two exceptions – a quick slug from a whisky bottle when I was young, drinking 1/2 bottle of repulsive sweet sherry on Christmas day when I was twelve and vomiting in the back seat of the car all over my grandmother’s best hat – alcohol did not play a role in my life. Aged 15 there was the odd semi-drunken episode at the odd disco.

  I didn’t like my stepmother, but thinking back it must have been very difficult for this emotionally and physically barren woman to deal with a precocious, wilful teenager. I met Alex, whose parents had emigrated to America, leaving her homeless. I wanted her to come and stay, my father’s response being ‘do you want a red light outside the house?’ What a hypocritical bastard, pathetic unthinking double standards. After what I’d witnessed with his relationships, perhaps a touch more sympathy, a touch more understanding, might have been appropriate.

  When I was 17 I went down south to college – Alex and I sort of sustained the relationship for a year and a half – with numerous infidelities along the way – and then she went to live in LA. I felt totally bereft.

  College was very difficult at first, trying to fit in with largely posh people. But I began to make friends and in the end had a good time, despite developing what is now called compulsive-obsessive disorder. Alcohol played a bigger role socially but was not a major issue. I had two relationships there, one with Beth – now a good friend. She was my first real love but I couldn’t stand her one infidelity and like a typical male hypocrite dumped her. Biggest mistake of my life.

  I went to London to study piano as a postgraduate for three years – and later took it up professionally. I taught at my first college and played cocktail jazz in wine-bars to support myself. I looked after myself, I was very busy. Still alcohol did not play a significant role. I worked hard, had a lovely new girlfriend, life was good – until my mother from whom I had become estranged died when I was 25. She was 52. She’d had breast cancer before but this time it was the liver. They didn’t spot it soon enough, thinking it to be hepatitis. Seeing her dying – looking aged 80, deaf, blind, incontinent – was probably the most disturbing moment of my life. Professionals always focus on this event as pivotal in terms of the beginning of my alcoholism. Admittedly I did drink 1/2 a bottle of whisky before the funeral, but it’s not as if I continued like that. Thankfully I didn’t embarrass myself but I think that might have been the pivotal moment of change.

  Then on it was a gradual, imperceptible, sneaky evolution I think – more pronounced in my early thirties onwards. By this time I had retired prematurely from playing the piano and started writing music for radio and TV, later also in theatre, films and jingles. Big pressure, scary deadlines, but I didn’t have to be on stage so therefore I could drink. That world was brimming with booze and it became a habit. I could write whilst drinking – at first not drinking before 6 or 7 pm, later the odd one at lunch and later (about five years ago) a straightener – a brandy in my coffee – in the morning – then more in the morning (about two years ago). Sometimes I had to drink to get rid of writers block. It worked. That’s the alarming and frightening thing. I was now a full-blown functioning alcoholic.

  In the early 80s I lived with Lisette for 7 years – we split up 4 times. By this time, still thinking that booze was a laugh, I was overdoing it. Sex became a preoccupation, fuelled by booze. Alcohol was the mainstay. I gained a reputation as a party boy, late nights or rather early mornings, one-night-stands, short affairs, telephone sex, any sex. Low stuff. Stuff that embarrasses me now. Stuff that I could never contemplate doing. Ever. I eventually got involved with someone a lot younger in Notting Hill. We both drank a lot, with her on drugs also. I went to work in Dublin – not great for a budding alcoholic – but at least away from west London temptations. I met Emer, who was an editor on a doc for which I wrote the music. Funny, bright, talented, good skydiver and beautiful. She was an entirely different proposition. She didn’t smoke or drink, hated drugs. I wanted her to come to London where she frequently worked. She wanted me to stay in Dublin where I infrequently worked. I went back to London, she stayed in Dublin. Very sad.

  This stage was getting heavyish: 1/4 bottle of vodka a day + lots of booze with lunch and dinner. So trust me to marry. [NB His marriage was a few years after breaking up with Emer.] I got married pissed and got divorced very sober. The good thing to come out of this was a beautiful son, who is now nearly 7. I was less than perfect. I did love her. I didn’t see my son for a while due to being pissed all the time but recently have seen him a lot. I go to their house to pick him up; kiss her on the cheek, shake her husband’s hand. I think she finds this perplexing! – I take a deep breath. I’m doing it for my son. He’s more important.

  A year later I moved in with Anna. Most time was spent in the pub. Naturally my career deteriorated. Alcohol destroyed us. She woul
d criticise my drinking while drunk which is no way to conduct a relationship.

  On arriving back in London I stayed with an old friend Louisa [then] found a one-bed flat to rent. Louisa I can never thank enough for her support. I drank less and less and we got together, have now been for 3 1/2 years and we still sort of are, but the odd three-hour visit here cannot resolve much.

  I have caused trouble courtesy of the booze. I would go to the shops for supposedly fags and newspaper but in a phone-box would pour a 1/4 of vodka into a half-full bottle of 7-up, fully equipped with the tools of the trade: extra strong mints, chewing gum, toothbrush, toothpaste. It must have been a strange sight seeing someone clean their teeth whilst pretending to listen to someone on the phone. However an equally big problem was Louisa’s daughter, then aged 9. Things have improved but the young woman she is now rapidly and alarmingly becoming resents me for taking her mother away and seeing me never aggressive or violent but palpably pissed.

  The booze antics I got away with for a while but when I broke my ankle in 3 places – the leg was nearly amputated below the knee – Louisa got keys to my flat which she had never visited. This was no bachelor pad. It was a disgusting shit-hole littered with fag-ends and 1/2 bottles of vodka most of which I had peed in.

  After 3 weeks of no booze no fags and lots of morphine in hospital I stupidly went back to my old habits. I really should have grasped that opportunity to stop, but I didn’t.

  Eventually after several home detoxes I went to hospital for a two-week detox having had a severe alcohol-induced fit. Not the best place to be when crack was brought into the clinic.

  Louisa said if I started again that was it. I started again. It is now semi or a third it – the relationship I mean. She is a fantastic woman, one of those annoying individuals who will occasionally have a fag or the odd glass of wine with her dinner. I’d love to be able to do that but all of us know we can’t, we have a different nature. Louisa led me to Clouds. She initiated the whole thing.

  This year started with a heavy long weekend which became a week, a month, a season, etc.

  I miss my dad. He has a phobia about travelling – he has never been to see me since I moved south when I was 17. I don’t go up there much, mainly due to the insensitivity of my stepmother. She perhaps wisely prefers her cat (ironically an unaffectionate one) to humans.

  I’ve got a brilliant agent who nearly died twice this year of an MRSA-induced mixture of double pneumonia and septicaemia. Seeing him with three computers each side of his bed and innumerable tubes stuck into him really made me think. I was killing myself – knowingly. Something else was killing him which was not of his own doing. He weighed 3 stone. Thankfully, remarkably, he is back to normal so I’ll get back my career when I am normal as well, whatever normal is.

  On his career

  Camden Town, Summer 2007

  I was relatively successful, but I suspect that I could have been a lot more so. I had two potential breaks in the States, the Dustin Hoffman Merchant of Venice on Broadway, and in LA with John Schlesinger’s film, Cold Comfort Farm, for which I’d written the score, but due to being inert courtesy of alcohol I preferred to sit chatting to boring alcoholics in a rough Shepherds Bush pub rather than getting in touch with John and Dustin Hoffman, both of whom had admired my music. The boring alcoholics (myself included) were the salt of the earth, I was doing social research, proving that the Oxford University tutor could mix it with the dustman. I was the new George Orwell. What a hero. In the States they want to know what you did yesterday, not years ago. I became so alcoholic that I stopped working entirely. I’ve not spoken to my agent for months. I made myself unemployable.

  Under the influence of alcohol I’ve taken things too far with people both socially and professionally. I’ve ended up in hospital after being beaten up. It all started pretty well – me being a slightly over-the-top risqué party animal, but ended up in a self-parody – empty, pathetic, repetitive, formulaic. I’ve spent nights at her majesty’s pleasure. I’ve had death threats, one after a sarcastic remark to someone in front of his mates in a pub, after beating him at darts; one after going to bed with someone who told her psychotically jealous possessive violent fiancé. People I know have avoided me at parties … and I’m sure avoidance has extended into professional areas. In the music area, London is a village. People talk. The obvious hazards are my exaggerated reactions – Dutch courage, being over-ambitious creatively speaking, misjudging what musicians are capable of in the tense studio environment. Asking musicians to do another take when not really necessary, pressurising and potentially embarrassing them. This can lead to a stiff atmosphere, especially when I’m not exerting the necessary control to achieve the result in the allotted time, due to inebriation. When mixing music, spending hours – exaggerating detail when not necessary. Drunk in front of directors and producers. Very destructive to my career. I always turned up, always reached deadlines, but presentation was distinctly lacking. I told a reputable director at the National Theatre to fuck off. It’s hard to get rid of a bad reputation. One gets labelled.

  I thought that I was a better film, theatre + T.V. composer than most. In terms of sheer amount and consistency, this is pure arrogance. I have written, I still think, some very good film scores. Cold Comfort Farm stands out. But to assume it was one of the great film scores is, to say the least, a slight exaggeration. I’m deeply bitter about having destroyed my career. Jealousy of lesser talent, of what that talent has achieved, is a sad state of affairs. If I hear great work I feel nothing but admiration. The main reason I’m not there is very simple: I’m an fucking alcoholic. [The handwriting shows that having deleted ‘fucking’, he went back and put in the ‘n’ to make ‘an’. He is putting a small but important thing to rights. He is taking care.] And I involved alcohol in everything I did, and persuaded everyone I was with to drink as much as me. This used to be known as ‘Rob Duty’. And I convinced myself and tried to convince others that something was their fault when it was often obviously mine. I assumed I was clever and sexy when I most probably came over as a drunk arrogant wanker.

  ‘He was a very talented musician/composer,’ a fellow composer said, ‘who never achieved the recognition he should have. It looked like self-destruct. He gained a reputation for being very difficult to work with – I don’t think he suffered fools and unfortunately in TV there are plenty of those. I remember being asked to replace him composing for the second series of a TV show. I asked them why they would replace him when his music was so great and memorable – it was because he was too difficult.’

  But this cut both ways. A colleague wrote this, years later: ‘When I worked with him he was one of the last (but best) people to score (in hand) his compositions for an orchestra piece. One of our first trips to Paris was for four days (the dreaded Jif commercial – oh the ignominy!! – he took an instant dislike to them – I can attest they were actually tossers). I built in an extra hour to get him to Heathrow and arrived at his Shepherds Bush emporium with a bottle of brandy to coax him into the cab. We drank it before it arrived. I checked to make sure he had packed (he’d just gotten out of bed) and he assured me he was ready. The cab came, he put on his leather jacket and walked out the door with nothing except a paperback of Jeeves and Wooster. We had to unlock the door again for him to get his passport. And that was it. Nothing, not a change of clothes, no bag, no nothing. I bought him a toothbrush which he lost somewhere between de Gaulle and the hotel. Checking us in, I went for a well-deserved pass out. Waking up, Robert was nowhere to be found. I spent my weekend tracking him down through various cafes. Luckily he left a recognisable wake and I usually managed to find him within a bar or two. But he had that orchestra in the palm of his hand. They all came in ready to toss off a 40-second arrangement; by the afternoon he had taken over musical direction, told the agency to leave but to come back and take us to dinner (we ditched them when we found we had the same tolerance for calvados and the same intolerance for wanky French advertising midg
ets) and the following day the musicians all showed up on time and hung on his every direction. They were looking for him, the reason why they learned the cello or the oboe or the violin. He played the piano at lunchtime and they stayed instead of having lunch.’

  On Compulsion

  Camden Town, Summer 2007

  In the late 1980s with Lisette, both drunk at a party, I stripped naked, danced, annoyed everybody by biting their feet under the table, and damaged the newly decorated house – just the usual. Then the attention-seeking/compulsive-obsessive disorder came into play. I climbed on to a window-ledge and then had to jump to the other (50ft drop). Everyone was amused except for Lisette who was hysterical with fear. We went home to bed – 2am – furious row. I wanted to have sex. She was too tired and drunk. I left on my bike suddenly getting the idea that because I had to recreate an arrangement for a guest artiste and my friend Nina had her CD I had to go round there. And to have sex with Nina. She was asleep but her first floor balcony window was open. I shinned 20 feet up, nearly made it but then slipped and fell 20 feet landing on the (despiked) railings – bouncing on to the pavement. If those spikes had been there I would have been impaled, or, had I bounced into the basement, dead or severely crippled. I managed to ring on her bell, by now bleeding profusely from the anus. She answered, I sat on her bed, blood seeping through my jeans. She hates the sight of blood. I cycled home. Lisette took one look, vomited and cried. Straight to A+E. The wound was so close to the anal passage that they couldn’t stitch it. Jokes were made: not Coriol-anus but Corialbinus. I was working as a music associate at ITV. Playing the piano on the Monday, people were concerned by the special chair with three pillows I had erected. I explained that I had been pushed over the balcony at a party by a jealous guy who thought, wrongly, that I had been chatting up his girlfriend.