by John Challis
Intriguingly (in hindsight), a very young Clive Owen played the Coachman. What we all noticed about him at the time was his rather brooding, listless and unforthcoming nature. I would never then have picked him as a future movie star – which shows how much I know.
Friends who came to see the show, who’d also been to the National production, said they preferred the simplicity of the Windsor version, faintly damning the National for feeling rather self-consciously that, if they must play a classic, they always have to dig out some new, undiscovered facet to it.
After two and a half weeks, we moved on to Bromley, which used to have a tie-in with the Windsor theatre in those days. But I was to be back there under the shadow of the royal castle several times in the future, and in recent years I’ve had a few classic panto outings for designer Lee Dean.
Once the New Year was past, I didn’t need much pushing to join Sabina in a search for a house we could buy together. I was far more sanguine about the idea than I had been when Debbie had demanded the same, and was very happy when we found a charming little house in Trehern Road, Mortlake, just upriver from Barnes.
It was a tiny brick terrace house, built presumably for some kind of artisan about 150 years before. A two-up two-down with very steep stairs and the bathroom brought indoors, it had a garden to re-arouse my gardening juices (which had been sorely deprived in Sabina’s flat). There was room to swing only a smallish cat, but I immediately got stuck in and was reminded, with the pleasure that the passing of time can lend, of my happy days as a landscape gardener in Twickenham during the drought year of 1976. There were already some good roses in the garden, a ceanothus and some viburnum. I started by adding some climbers – jasmine and morning glory – to wind their way up through the existing trellis.
Beside these, I planted some of my favourite vegetables, like courgettes and squashes. From one of these, which seemed to grow like the man-eating plant that did for me when I was Scorby in Doctor Who, I produced the largest courgette I’ve ever seen, in fact a sizable marrow by the time I found it, the only fruit, buried beneath deep layers of its own foliage which had produced only the weediest visible specimens.
The house itself was as tiny as a doll’s house, really far too small for us but we loved decorating it. Sabina was able to bring into play her taste and knowledge of diverse decorative objets, a battered eighteenth-century watercolour beside a Victorian child’s sampler, a pair of chipped Staffordshire lovers and Shelley tea sets. The small windows were curtained with much ruching and frilly ties. Our road was one in a little network of narrow streets close to the railway. Of the two closest pubs, one attracted a clientele of shiny-suited men and dark glasses, with women to match and expensive-looking cars outside. The other had an altogether rougher edge, used by unsophisticated ‘lovable rogues’ like my former business partner from the St Margaret’s Hotel, Leslie Churchill. The regulars were duckers and divers of the ‘gotta make a living some’ow, mate’ type. I was made to feel welcome in both establishments, although by now I’d more or less licked my serious pub habit. Moreover being Boycie was making pub visits a little fraught and sometimes uncomfortable, as aspirational con men frequently wanted to tell me how their schemes matched up to those of my fictional alter ego.
Soon after we’d moved in, my mother arrived from Bath for the first of several visits to Trehern Road. It was clear that her health wasn’t getting any better. The subcutaneous cancer from which she now suffered seemed to be spreading and opening into painful blisters.
However that didn’t stop her wanting to join in and be part of everything that was going on. She relished the regular contact with the theatre world, which she’d aspired to so much as a younger woman. And there was no doubt that she enjoyed the connection with Bill Franklyn, of whom she’d always been a fan. She was certainly pleased that I was with someone who – in her terms – had ‘a little quality’.
Nevertheless, with her continuing, vague reservations about Sabina, she didn’t hold back in expressing her opinions about the way we’d done up the house. ‘I wouldn’t have used those curtains down here,’ she would say through pursed lips, ‘they look a bit bedroomy.’
Sabina’s jaw tightened as Mum went on. ‘It’s strange, but the colour you’ve used in the kitchen reminds me of my mother’s house in Bath.
Isn’t it extraordinary how these things come round again.’ It wasn’t meant as a compliment.
After some bristling and a few sharp intakes of breath, Sabina gritted her teeth, trying to control her indignation. I explained later that my mother must have been suffering from a combination of losing her influence over her only child and heart problems from her debilitating disease.
I went down to Bath to see her as often as I could and occasionally ferried her back to Epsom for a fraught reunion with my father. They would at first clasp each other in a ritual display of affection but would soon revert to their old sniping and bickering. Sad to say, I don’t believe either of them realized how ill the other was and their manoeuvres had the look of a sort of macabre last waltz as the lights in the ballroom died.
Chapter 3
Third Time Lucky?
Neither of my parents came when, in May 1987, Sabina and I were married at Richmond Register Office, with a blessing at the church in West Temple, Sheen. We celebrated afterwards in a large room overlooking the river in the Boileau, a sprawling ’2os pub at the top of Castlenau, by Hammersmith Bridge.
This was my third wedding reception and a pretty riotous event. No doubt some of the speeches were received in a spirit of irony, if not undisguised cynicism. A few days afterwards, taking advantage of a brief window in our work schedules, we presented ourselves with our smartest luggage at Victoria Station alongside the Pullman coaches of the English end of the Orient Express. In those pre-tunnel days one took the English train to Folkestone, to be ferried in a special lounge to Boulogne, and boarded the wonderful old blue-liveried wagons-lits there. The exquisite marquetry and brass fittings of the sleeper cabins, the tinkling of the jazz pianist at a concert grand, cocktails in the bar, and the elegant formality of black-tied men and dressed-up ladies in the dining-car seemed to evoke great waves of nostalgia and yearning for a time that was long before our own. For both of us it was a very romantic trip and my first visit to the ever-magical city of Venice.
Like a lot of people who are visiting Venice for the first time, I was struck most immediately by how much the canals pong. They are, after all, for the most part, rat-infested open drains – not to say sewers – which is why you never see anyone swimming in them... unless they’ve fallen in blotto, when the risk of catching Weil’s disease is quite high. However one’s olfactory organ seems to become accustomed to the odour of drain quite swiftly and enjoyment of the extraordinary and unique qualities of the jewel of the Adriatic is not seriously impaired.
I’d seen innumerable documentaries about Venice, magazine articles and, most potently, Nic Roeg’s eerie film Don’t Look Now, filmed at a time of year when the narrow canals and alleyways are filled with mist, not tourists. Seeing these places, so well known from afar, for the first time in the flesh is a truly uplifting experience, because for once the reality out-trumps expectation. The Rialto Bridge is magical, as it has been for 500 years. St Mark’s Square, the Doge’s hangout, San Giorgio Maggiore (Big George’s), floating on the lagoon opposite St Mark’s and the network of alleys and tiny bridges, the gondolas full of Japanese being pushed through the grimy water by bored, handsome gondoliers are unforgettable sights, which is, perhaps, the reason so many people go back again and again (apart from inhabitants of Las Vegas, who have large tracts of the city recreated on their doorstep – lucky things!).
Sabina and I were staying in a moderately-priced hotel which was in fact a charming and tatty old palazzo on the Grand Canal. With their gift for these things, it seems that the Venetians have known about shabby chic for at least two hundred years.
Sadly, though, despite all this stimulation and beau
ty, Sabina was unwell. Something had got at her stomach – maybe the water, possibly the excitement of it all – but she insisted on staying in the hotel, where she could lie down all day. Thus for most of our stay, I ventured out on my own, self-indulgently stopping at everything that interested me and swiftly passing by that which didn’t. I loved all the treasure houses, the churches stuffed with wonderful paintings, sculpture and decoration – murals by Tintoretto, a ceiling by Rubens or Michelangelo; while in the church of San Pantalon, (Holy Trousers) I found a magnificent ceiling painting of the martyrdom of San Pantaleon, painted by San Antonio Fumiani. I wondered how on earth Fumiani had painted something at such a height and unpromising angle, particularly after learning that he had fallen to his death before finishing the thing.
Of course, when I saw signs to the Arsenale, I had to investigate. While there’s no football pitch there, it turned out to be a fascinating complex of buildings where for centuries the great Venetian navies used to store their firepower. After several days spent wandering on my own through the narrow, crowded streets I was beginning to feel a little hemmed in and claustrophobic on what is after all a small island but luckily Sabina recovered enough for a boat trip across the lagoon to some of the other islands. First stop was Murano.
This little island, just north of Venice itself, produces some of the world’s most beautiful glassware and, curiously, some of the world’s most revolting and tasteless glass objects. But the glass-blowers are all happy enough to churn out this ghastly stuff by the bucketload, for it seems there are always punters for rank crapolata – like someone once said (Rupert Murdoch, probably) no one ever got poor by underestimating public taste.
But for all the downside of Venice – the crowds, the over-priced restaurants, the awful tourist tat the vendors sell, the pong – its beauty and sheer uniqueness will always come out on top and I’ve enjoyed several return trips since my honeymoon with Sabina.
In the summer of 1987 Sabina and I were enjoying Trehern Road, which had become a busy meeting place for our friends, although that wasn’t always a good thing. While we were there, we had what we thought was the brilliant idea of having a party for the casts and crews of our two respective shows, Full House and Only Fools & Horses, both very popular at the time. It seemed perfectly sensible to combine two groups of actors and TV production people, with all that two TV sitcoms should have had in common. Most of my cast came (though David Jason couldn’t at the last minute) and all of Sabina’s. But instead of bonding through the similarities of their work, the gathering developed into what resembled the after-match tea between two rival prep-school football teams, where members on each side would look shiftily at one another and conversation was restricted to mild insult and snide innuendo. Evidently the common experience of making TV sitcom was eclipsed by the differences in social standing of the characters in the two shows and the party was a disastrous failure.
As it happened, with no new episodes of Only Fools being made that year (apart from a later Christmas special), I wasn’t all that busy, although there had been a few other outings on TV, including some sketches with Griff Rhys-Jones and Mel Smith for their show. So, when Sabina and I were offered another job working together, I was more than ready for it. This time we were to be in Bernard Slade’s hit American stage comedy, Same Time Next Year at the new Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead. The Thorndike, a state-of-the-art modern building, had replaced the old theatre I’d first known nearly thirty years before. Back then, as a teenager, I’d been a trainee estate agent in the town and had watched Donald Wolfit cruising the streets like an emperor, while appearing there in a great production of Cromwell at Drogheda, an experience which had done a lot to trigger an urge to go into acting myself.
Same Time Next Year is a highly-structured piece of comic theatre based on a relationship which is unlikely but nevertheless bears examination. It features a man and a woman who meet up at the same place every year to commit adultery. In these circumstances the unpleasantness of infidelity is somehow diminished as the two parties discuss their spouses with genuine fondness, while the action, so to speak, continues over forty years.
Essential to this, of course, is that the two protagonists have to age as the play unfolds; starting in their twenties, they end up in their sixties. The inherent difficulty in this was exacerbated for me by becoming partially deaf just after we’d opened; I felt as if I were carrying on a dialogue with a blanket wrapped around my head, so that I could hardly hear myself, or anyone speaking to me. The problem suddenly disappeared during the second of our two weeks but when I could hear myself again, I was so appalled by what I sounded like I had to make some dramatic adjustments to my performance. However, if anyone noticed, they said nothing to me, while I was made a little more uncomfortable by the fact that the next production at the theatre was announced during the interval of every show, with a reverence that made our production look very modest by comparison, as if to suggest that next week the audience would be able to see some proper theatre, rather than an irrelevant, populist comedy starring a TV face with impaired hearing, who was probably twenty years too old for the part!
Shaw’s An Ideal Husband, with the distinguished director, Patrick Garland, they announced, would star Simon Williams, Lucy Fleming (there’s a surprise, we thought as Lucy is married to Simon Williams), and Alexandra Bastedo (another surprise, for she is married to distinguished director, Patrick Garland). Most of us, and perhaps especially actors, suffer from a little paranoia, not helped now for me when I reminded myself that perhaps I’d only got the part in this bizarre American comedy because it was directed by another distinguished director, Bill Franklyn, to whose daughter I happened to be married.
But I received a pleasing little blast from my distant past when, the day before our run ended, a nice-looking woman approached me in the bar after the show and gazed up at me with twinkling blue eyes.
‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ she asked.
A dozen possibilities swam before my eyes, until, in the nick of time, I got it. ‘Yes, of course I do,’ I said. ‘You’re Christine Shaw, and we were at Tadworth County Primary together.’
Her face showed that she was delighted I’d remembered and so was I. It’s always good to have evidence that your memory hasn’t packed upaltogether. What was more, I bet no one ever came up to Donald Wolfit and said anything like that to him in the bar after, when he was appearing at Leatherhead in Cromwell at Drogheda.
When my mother next came to stay with us her health was not improving and I was a little uneasy about asking her if she wanted to come to a party we were holding at Sabina’s mother’s cottage in Little Chelsea, not far from Sabina’s old flat. But she insisted on coming. She loved the idea of being part of the real acting world to which she’d always wished she’d belonged, instead of the am-dram world she knew. She was aware that she’d be dealing with a more sophisticated gathering of people than she’d been used to among groups like the Tadworth Players, but was, I think unprepared and out of place with the newer, more cynical attitude of modern theatricals. Her fantasies of gentlemen actors and grandes dames of the theatre spouting arch witticisms at each other were quite out of date – if they’d ever had any reality. To my distress, I could see that she was really struggling with the language and mores of the profession as it was now. In the end she crept off to the kitchen and started doing the washing-up – not an activity for which she was best known. Back at our house the next day, obviously depressed and not well, she found a bowl of walnuts, which had come from a tree in Bill Franklyn’s garden, and scoffed half a pound of them at a sitting, before being violently sick.
I took her back to her house outside Bath. She had given a room in the house to a lodger (who probably never paid any rent). Colin was one of what my father used to call her ‘lame ducks’. From now on she spent much of her time in bed while Colin ventured from his litter-strewn room to look after her. In fact he was quite canny with her and adept at judging her volatile moods.
I recognized this and was grateful for it. If a crisis developed, he would ring me and I would try to get down within a couple of hours. Although Sabina often came too, she’d grown no closer to my mother and she didn’t get on with Colin. I would find myself trying to keep the peace between them, while my mother was waning upstairs.
But Mum had retained her surprising sense of practicality.
‘Darling,’ she wheezed, ‘now that I’m dying, I’m going to give you the car, as I’m obviously never going to drive it again. But I’m not going to sign the house over to you, because I don’t want you to be in a situation where Sabina thinks she can have a half share in it. I mean – you know I like her, of course, but I don’t trust her.’
To be fair to Sabina, although my mother showed some prescience in this, I didn’t believe my wife was particularly acquisitive about my material possessions.
The last time I saw my mother in her own house, I was getting into my car outside, and she was sitting up by her bedroom window, smiling weakly and waving. I was sure that next time I came to Bath she would be in hospital, which I didn’t think she would like much.
Fortunately when she was moved into hospital she accepted the reality with dignity, and although she now had to be helped to do almost everything, she fought off the humiliation of it with a great effort to retain her independence. She still followed the horses on TV, while ogling John Francome, and loved to dwell on the old times when theatre, dancing and romance had filled her life.
‘If I were twenty years younger,’ she boldly told one young doctor, ‘I’d be out of this bed in a jiffy, and you’d have to run for your life.’
