by John Challis
Here we go again, I thought, but after that brief tiff, we were soon back on song and doing what came naturally.
News of progress on the aloe vera crop was less forthcoming. On our last trip, Mike hadn’t stopped talking about it. Now he was apparently not particularly interested and seemed uncomfortably vague.
‘It’s coming along OK,’ he said. ‘But, you know... the weather hasn’t been great. We should be past that soon and then we can get on with the harvest – hopefully,’ he added – ominously, I thought, and my first forebodings set in.
With some persuasion he took me out to look at the plantation and it all looked very promising in the sunshine. The leaves from which the essential oils are extracted were fattening up nicely, like plump green little fingers. I couldn’t see what could go wrong.
The first thing to go wrong was that, once I’d driven her back to Benalmadena, Inge and I split up again. She’d got it into her head once more that I was just a feckless male and all males were the same –wanting it all, while the females had to have the strength, the guts to stand up and be counted.
After a week or two of this sort of stuff, I’d had enough. It was, I thought turning into some kind of relentlessly repeating farce.
In a state of emotional exhaustion, after a final, frank, inebriated discussion, I found I had the guts to stand up, be counted and say: ‘I’m going!’
I got in the Citroen and pointed it north towards the Pyrenees. I left a message at Keith and Mad’s house to let them know I was coming back and to ask if I could carry on staying there for a bit – I hoped they would agree. Observatory Road was still let to the Japanese tenants for another six months.
I had thought about going back to Portugal and developing a woolly idea I’d had about growing herbs in containers for English expats in Spain to plant into bigger pots or their garden beds. I almost convinced myself that I’d spotted a gap in the market. I could then sit back and watch the dividends from the aloe vera farm roll in, while I supplemented that with cash from lucrative voice-overs and Only Fools, which was getting 20 million plus viewers by then. On top of that, the BBC were repeating all the earlier episodes, with the result that, although I wasn’t in all the earlier ones, I was getting double bubble for all those I was in. But Slater had been so downbeat about the aloe vera that I thought I’d do better to wait until after the harvest, when the wonga was supposed to start rolling in.
I turned my back on the Costa del Sol and drove away feeling free at last – free from guilt, from angst, and from constant inexplicable bollockings. I loved the drive back, cruising along empty roads I’d never driven, past cities and places with romantic names I’d only known from history and geography I’d learned at school – Salamanca, Pamplona, Biarritz, Poitiers, Crécy...
I stayed in pensions I found on the way and the joy of escape from a disastrous future sustained me almost as far as the north coast of France. After several, increasingly desperate calls to Keith Washington, I hadn’t heard back from him and I was uncomfortably conscious that I had nowhere else to go when I reached London.
I didn’t know if they were away or had simply given up on me. That was a possibility because before I’d left, they’d expressed the view, very strongly that they thought I was insane to be going back to see Inge in Spain.
I got through customs at Newhaven without any trouble this time and arrived at Thornton Road about midday. No one was there but Keith and Madeleine’s neighbour was in and fortunately he knew me.
He had a key and let me in, assuming that they were expecting me. Hoping for the best, I plonked my cases at the bottom of the stairs, staggered up to the spare room where I’d stayed before and collapsed, completely knackered, on the bed.
I woke, very relieved to hear a friendly ‘Halloo!’ from downstairs.
They’d come back from a few days away, seen the cases I’d left in the hall and guessed what had happened. I went down and laughed with them as they played back their messages, to hear the mounting panic in my voice in the several I’d left on my way up from Spain, pleading for somewhere to lay my head when I got to London. They welcomed me back, which was more than I deserved. I felt guilty and bloody foolish about the circumstances of my return, especially after Keith and Madeline had been so against my going back to see Inge but I also realised that at this point in their lives, I could be quite useful to them. Inge had always said about me that I was the ‘best au pair’ she’d ever had.
Now I did a bit of cooking for them, kept the place tidy and pottered around peacefully on my own, which I deeply appreciated after all the hassles over the aloe vera project and drama of life with Inge in Benalmadena. When Keith and Madeleine were busy working, I could often be around for Tom, Keith’s son, if he pitched up from his mother’s, where he wasn’t always happy. I was very glad to be back, sorting myself out again.
My father’s situation, on the other hand, was becoming more of a problem. As soon as I’d got myself sorted out at Keith and Madeleine’s, I drove down to Epsom and let myself into his house with my own key.
Dad was sitting in his battered old chair with a sea of newspapers surrounding him all over the floor. His grey, haggard features showed no signs of interest in life as he listlessly watched a programme on television, one that he’d sworn he would never watch – even if he were dead.
In the kitchen there was even more of a shambles. The table was covered with empty paper bags of all different shapes and sizes. He’d always had a tendency to hoard – pieces of string, candles, lengths of electric flex, plant labels, jam jars and so on. I asked him what the bags were for.
‘I’m looking for the right one,’ he answered grumpily.
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know, do I? What’s it got to do with you?’
I sighed. ‘How are the meals going, Dad?’
He scented the change of topic like an ill-tempered bear. ‘Bloody people – coming round here all hours of the day and night. I just wish everyone would bugger off and leave me alone!’
It occurred to me that his irritability might well be a symptom of withdrawal from alcohol. He wouldn’t be able to get his gin anymore.
I couldn’t see social services bringing it round or slipping out to the off licence for him. And I doubted that his neighbour, George would either. Dad didn’t mention it to me, though.
I wasn’t feeling at all happy, especially when it dawned on me that from now on he would only get worse. I went outside and tried to calm down in the garden, working off my frustration on the army of invading weeds that had grown up, cutting back and tying in. The garden had been a very important part of Dad’s life but when I went back in to talk to him about it, he didn’t seem to give a damn any more.
In an effort to bounce him out of the gloomy introspective world he seemed to inhabit, I dug out some old photograph albums. I found pictures of him I’d never seen before, surrounded by young men and women who had worked with him in the Admiralty, clustered outside some long-forgotten, dreary office building in 1940.
Far from cheering up at the sight of his old colleagues, he burst into tears.
‘They all went to Simonstown, you know,’ he snuffled.
‘What, in South Africa?’
‘Yes, yes – where else would it be? The Strategic Naval Base for the Admiralty. I should have gone with them.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
He lifted his shaking head and looked at me with rheumy eyes.
‘You bloody well came along, that’s why!’
For me, a light appeared at the end of a very long tunnel – maybe this was the cause of the persistent and otherwise inexplicable resentment with which he’d viewed me for most of my life. I seized the chance to clarify this.
‘Are you saying that if I hadn’t been born, you’d have moved out to Simonstown and had a whole different career?’ I pressed.
But the chink of light he’d offered – just for a moment or two – had gone already.
‘I m
ight have. I don’t know. When are you going?’ He looked bleakly up at me again. It was as if the window to his soul, which he’d just opened a crack, had been banged shut.
I shrugged. I’d get no further now. I tidied up as much as I could around the house, rang social services to make sure they were on the case and popped next door to see George.
George, an affable old boy of around seventy, told me that he’d had a few hairy moments with Dad. A couple of days before, my father had turned up at his front door, convinced that George’s house was his own. It had taken George ten minutes, he said, to persuade Dad to go back, when he’d seen him safely into Number 8. He thought Dad had been drinking, he said, so perhaps he did have a source, or could still find his way to the off-licence. Later, I rang the services, who promised to keep an eye open.
Driving back to Mortlake, I reflected on the sliver of light my father had shed on his incurable resentment of me. At least knowing there was a recognizable (if not justifiable) cause for his attitude was some help in dealing with it. When I spoke to his GP later, he confirmed that there was little likelihood of Dad improving but he urged me not to feel bad about it. There was no point in ruining my life, too, over his condition.
Chapter 7
Stage Fright
After an uneventful and frankly unfestive season, my big priority at the start of 1990 was to find a fixed abode of my own. Sabina and I had finally managed to sell 8 Observatory Road and had divvied up the spoils. By lucky chance, I found a flat very quickly, just around the corner in Sheen Lane. I knew the building well – a converted Victorian mill of some sort. Keith had moved into one of the apartments there after his marriage to Joan had foundered ten years before. Mine was a ground floor and basement flat, with two smallish bedrooms at ground level and a kitchen projecting over a large basement living room.
I liked its quirkiness and I thought it would suit me very well. In early 1990 I was ready to buy it and a few weeks later I settled in for what was to prove a short-lived bachelor existence.
Between voice-over jobs, I spent my time watching rugby on the telly in the pub, drinking too much and feeling disorientated and sorry for myself. I wished I had more to do. Absurdly, despite the success of Only Fools and my ongoing key part in it, I was beset by insecurities about my own future. In any case, there were no new recordings planned for the show until the end of the year. As far as relationships were concerned, I’d to come to terms with the fact that I was incapable of good judgement about women and life in general and relied on far too flimsy bases for making such judgement. But I was in full agreement with whichever stout black American soul artist it was who sang: ‘Every ma..an needs a woman,’ and I was still feeling very lonely, when Inge – the Dangerous Dane – rang, out of the blue and said she’d been chucked out of Spain over a ‘visa mix-up’ and was coming to see me in England and could we try again? However much my reason told me this was a bad idea, I did nothing to resist.
Over the couple of days before Inge arrived, I tried to justify my decision to let her come by remembering the good, healthy physical bits of our relationship, which, although outweighed by the mayhem she could cause, were still very tempting.
When Inge turned up to experience everyday life in South West London, not much sense of our past adventures remained. She came with me sometimes when I was working in voice-over studios, when she was still heavily critical of my making money from such a fatuously easy job – as she saw it – saying a few words on a commercial for fish fingers, which might take only ten minutes.
But to her credit, Inge quickly used her own ingenuity and considerable grit to get herself a job as a kind of wandering physiotherapist for the local health authority, dealing with knackered athletes and arthritic old crocks.
Despite the world’s jubilation at the final unravelling of the old Soviet Union and the apparent death of communism, it was an uncomfortable summer for me. I didn’t want Inge to leave but I was become increasingly depressed that nothing seemed to make her easier to live with. I admired her for having sorted out some work, determined as she was not to be too dependent on me, but I couldn’t understand her constant desire to undermine of my own already precarious self-esteem.
To compound my dissatisfaction with these circumstances, it was a lean year for work, too, and I spent a lot of time away from the flat – in the pub, drinking, playing tennis and drinking.
In the autumn, though, things looked up. The seventh series of Only Fools had been scheduled, starting with a Christmas special, Rodney Come Home (in which Boycie doesn’t appear), followed by another nine episodes, of which all bar one included him/me. After seeing the very first episode in which Boycie appears, Go West Young Man, repeated by the BBC for the first time in September, nine years after it had first aired, I was back on the Only Fools set to record The Sky’s the Limit followed by another four in quick succession, including one of my favourites, Stage Fright, in which Del persuades his girlfriend, Raquel to sing at a club with an absurdly tanned, crinkly haired Tony Angelino (wonderfully played by Philip Pope), who can’t pronounce his ‘R’s – not a help when singing Roy Orbison’s Crying.
Class of ’62 featured Jim Broadbent as Slater, the bent copper who had appeared in To Hull & Back. He had invited all his schoolmates – Del, Trigger, Denzil, Boycie and the gang to a reunion in the Nag’s Head, but he’d done it anonymously, so no one knew why they were there. I’ve just had a thought,’ says Del, trying to work it out. Boycie looks down his nose. ‘Then lend it to Trigger,’ he says beadily.
As Christmas approached I made my usual seasonal pilgrimage to Epsom, where my father had, for once, mercifully little to say. He was so weak now, that he hadn’t the energy to berate me like he used to.
He was just about coping on his own. For a while after that Dad got no worse but my visits to Epsom became no more enjoyable. After a low-key Christmas, I jumped at the chance of another African adventure.
One of my friends from the Coach & Horses – the ‘Barnes Office’ – was planning a trip to Zimbabwe. ‘Would you like to come?’ he asked.
‘Yes I certainly would!’ I replied in a flash. ‘Can I bring a friend?’
Bob Hankinson raised his eyes to the ceiling, but he agreed.
I had one more episode of Only Fools to do in January 1991, He Ain’t Heavy; He’s My Uncle, in which Boycie doesn’t have a lot to do, apart from diverting a Ford Capri Ghia on the way to the scrap-yard in order to sell it to Del Boy.
This at least offered some respite from the gloom that was enveloping me before our trip to Africa, gloom which hadn’t been improved by Dad’s condition taking a downward turn. He’d started wandering out and turning up fairly confused in different places, sometimes in the middle of Epsom.
‘Somebody said I looked like a tramp,’ he told me triumphantly when I came to rescue him one time.
They were right. He was wearing a greasy old trilby with the brim pulled down, a tatty, stained raincoat and shoes worn through on the sides because, now his feet were so bad, he found walking very awkward.
I tried to get him to a chiropodist in Epsom and got him as far as the door when he dug his heels in. ‘I’m not going in there,’ he said. ‘I know what you’re up to.’
He was becoming more and more paranoid about my motives and intentions. Everything had become a threat to him and he started not allowing people into the house, not even the doctor or social services.
George from next door was at his wits’ end, trying to keep tabs on Dad. ‘You have to face it, son,’ he said to me, ‘you’re father is, well... mad.’
The transformation of my father from a hard-working, intelligent, conscientious man into an entirely altered being, who only vaguely resembled his former self was tragic to see.
I thought of the pictures of Mum and him walking carefree along the promenade in Torquay on their honeymoon and tried to understand how this metamorphosis had happened. I sorted out more comprehensive care for him from the social services, but it wa
s soon clear that he would need the kind of 24-hour specialist psychiatric and physical care he would only get in a nursing home.
I had to arrange power of attorney and then found he hadn’t been cashing his state or Civil Service pension for over six months. His condition rapidly got worse. Once incontinence had set in and other ailments emerged, his doctor told me he must go into hospital.
He kicked up badly. On one occasion I had to tussle with him – the first time I’d experienced any physical aggression with him since he’d slippered me as a kid at our house in Tadworth. I hated it now, like wrestling with a stranger but in the end, with the encouragement of his GP and a Mental Health Inspector and a heavy heart, I signed a sectioning order. I was reassured that it was for the best and the nursing home he was going to was the best in the area for dealing with his kind of problems. For a while, Dad seemed to agree that something needed to be done. But when it came to it, he refused to leave the house.
In the end, two big male nurses manhandled him onto a stretcher and strapped him down. As they carried Dad out he threw me a look so vindictive it went straight through me.
I burst into to tears and tried to go with him but was advised it would be better to visit him in the home later once he’d settled in. I couldn’t imagine him ever being settled and the future looked pretty bleak for him. I set about cleaning up all the mess he’d created in the house at Sunnybank. When I got round to seeing him at the nursing home, the contrast was remarkable. He was clean and shaved, his feet had been done and he looked strangely calm, if a little spaced out.
The sight of the other inmates wasn’t encouraging. A few were sitting helplessly in front of the flickering inanity of daytime TV.
Others padded about on unfathomable missions, one muttering incessantly to himself. Another marched up and down like a guardsman. A man in what looked like red pyjamas appeared to be standing guard over the men’s lavatory. The scene reminded me depressingly of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The staff told me they’d had to sedate Dad and it soon became clear that he wasn’t going to be able to go back and live in Sunnybank. They told me we’d have to find a home where he could have the long-term care he now needed.
