Boycie & Beyond

by John Challis

  He seemed to me more than just a bit sedated. After that, I would sit for hours with him, sometimes in complete silence, or he would suddenly become alert and turn to me. ‘I don’t know, do I?’ he would say. ‘All these people are bloody mad!’ I found it mentally draining to sit with him, trying to make some kind of contact through the fog that seemed to have settled around him.

  With a sense of gloom and guilt, I searched for a suitable residential home. I found it impossible to get any sense out of Dad over the choice but luckily I found a space in very well run place nearby. One if its major attractions for me – on Dad’s behalf – was that it had an aviary in the garden. Dad had always been a birdwatcher and I thought this would give him some interest. I also bought him a Walkman, with cassettes of all his favourite classical music.

  It all looked good when I got him there and he seemed to like the place but that didn’t last long when he started misbehaving. He’d soon had an acrimonious row with another of the inmates over the ownership of an HP sauce bottle; he got into the kitchens where he found a stack of sandwiches, waiting to go out, started stuffing them into his mouth and refused to come out.

  More alarmingly, he kept going into the rooms of some of the female inmates and getting into their beds, which frightened the hell out of them. It wasn’t long before I had an official request to return him to the nursing home, where, if he spoke to me at all, he complained about the number of ‘men in red coats all over t’place’.

  At least, though, he was more or less permanently comatose and not really capable of bad behaviour and his carers said he was stable now.

  Nevertheless, he remained a source of constant worry, whatever else I was doing and it was with a sense of disloyalty that on a wet English winter’s day, I felt mightily relieved to be boarding a plane with Inge at Heathrow to fly to the heat of South Africa. We were going to stay in Johannesburg for a few days before driving up to Zimbabwe, as I had done thirteen years before to tour Tom Stoppard’s play, Dirty Linen. I had directed and played the lead role in the play while we were there because Peter Bowles, who should have been doing both, refused to enter a territory that had illegally seceded from the United Kingdom when Ian Smith had declared UDI.

  Inge and I stayed with Bob’s brother, Hank in Johannesburg. He had escaped from the former Rhodesia at the start of Robert Mugabe’s unbreakable grip on the country. But soon we were heading north and across the Limpopo River. We spent a spectacular few days in the Hwange National Park – one of the best places in Africa to see herds of elephants, lions and their cubs, buffalo, rhino, hippos and some extraordinary sunsets over the Zambezi River.

  I was loving it but despite all the wonderful natural beauty surrounding us, Inge, ever the truculent Dane, was still dissatisfied and finding no end of things to criticize as well as beating her monotonous drum over the callousness and fatuousness of male animals in general and human ones in particular. There seemed nothing I could say to convince her how pointless all this whingeing was. She carried on insisting that it was always the women who had the guts to stand up and tell anyone who was listening (and still awake) that they were there to be counted.

  Bob Hankinson left after this, shaking his head in disbelief at her attitude – and in pity for me.

  Inge and I struggled on to Kenya so that I could track down an orphan elephant I’d been sponsoring in the Tsavo Wildlife Park between Nairobi and Mombasa. This juvenile jumbo, Edo, had lost his mother, not through poaching, for a change, but through poisoning – perhaps an accidental intake of leaking battery acid, since elephants are notorious for investigating rubbish tips. And we think urban foxes are a problem!

  Little Edo had been found wandering forlornly around the perimeter of the lodge and the staff had brought him in. They knew that elephant herds don’t take in or nurture another elephant’s offspring because the young rely on their mother’s milk for some time.

  Inge and I arrived at Tsavo in the middle of the night in a battered old VW Combi taxi that only just made it to the beautiful Safari Lodge.

  As all the thrilling, vibrant sounds of the African bush lulled me to sleep, Inge was still banging on about the injustice of male domination throughout the animal kingdom.

  In the morning we were taken to the Daphne Sheldrick animal orphanage, which looks after orphans of all sorts – rhino, zebra, even warthogs. It has been hugely successful in rearing its inmates and preparing them for a return to the wild, again, with impressive results.

  It was staffed entirely by Africans, who showed a wonderful patience and understanding of the animals. I was introduced to my juvenile protégé, who displayed complete indifference to the event, except when I had control of the feed bottle.

  But he bumbled about happily in an elephantine way with his chums and I was very proud to be a tiny part of this dedicated organization.

  After a spectacular train journey through the dry bush to Mombasa, we flew up the east coast to Lamu. This tiny, peaceful island is one of the hottest places I’ve ever been, with the whitest sand and the bluest sea.

  In one of the lovely little beach bars we met a man with a dhow on which he took punters out to snorkel among the inshore rocks. I’d always wanted to do this and booked up at once. I turned out to be better suited to this than jet-skiing and happily spent a day floating on my stomach gazing down at the most exotic sea-life I have ever seen.

  Unfortunately I completely overlooked the fact that my neck would be exposed all day to the blistering sun. On the way back to the hotel, I started feeling nauseous and faint, with a tendency to hallucinate. I barely made it back to our room off a bougainvillea-draped courtyard in an old colonial mansion, where I passed out behind the mosquito nets.

  When I came round the hotel staff were gloomily convinced I was showing the symptoms of malaria, until a more qualified medico turned up and shook his head.

  ‘No worry. Not malaria. It just the sun.’

  That was a relief of course – if it were true – but I still spent twenty four hours sweating like a rugby scrum – boiling then freezing, mostly delirious and no use to anyone. After another twelve hours, I felt like a wrung-out dishcloth but better than I’d been, and strangely, my guts, which had been giving me gyp for the past week or so, were back to healthy normality.

  When we caught our plane back to England, I realized I’d enjoyed the trip, despite the heat stroke, but Inge was less sure. She said she was missing Spain and all her friends there but couldn’t go back to work there as a result of her visa cock-up.

  She also missed her family in Denmark, which spurred her to offer me an ultimatum shortly after we got back to Sheen Lane. ‘The only reason for me to stay in London would be if we were married.’

  I didn’t need time to mull this one over. I chose directness of response. ‘I have no plans to get married,’ I said baldly. This evoked a longish harangue about gutless men who couldn’t make decisions.

  And that, at last, was that. She slept in the basement drawing room of my flat and I spent a few tortured hours waiting for her to catch a plane to Copenhagen.

  I was quietly confident that I’d finally managed to bring this most frustrating (although, admittedly, at times very exciting) relationship to an end.

  Our trip to Africa had shown me unequivocally that we were fundamentally living in two different worlds (and that was putting it charitably). I’d tried very hard to accommodate her but we had just been what seemed like a million miles to try and find the key to our relationship and had completely failed.

  As soon as I’d got back to England, I’d been to see my father. He was no worse than when I’d left, still existing in a kind of unknowing torpor; I was distraught that there seemed to be nothing anyone could do to help him return to anything like his old self and I couldn’t help feeling that for him to have reached this condition was, at least in part, my fault for agreeing to have him sectioned and treated as a mental patient.

  Thinking of him and what had gone on with Inge over the
past year or so, I recalled a Stoppard line: ‘The trouble with life is, it’s mostly wrong, all the time.’

  On my way back from seeing Inge off, I contemplated this depressing truth, determined to learn something from this latest clear demonstration of my inability to handle relationships.

  The thick cloud of self-pity that still hung over me, despite the relief at not having to defend myself from Inge’s aggression, was alleviated by a phone call from an old friend, Ian Masters. Ian and I had worked together on Show Boat in the Adelphi Theatre at least twenty years before. He had gone on to do very well in comedies like No Sex Please,

  We’re British and The Mating Game, with Terry Scott and had now forged a strong reputation as a stage director.

  Ian wanted to know if I’d like to appear in his production of Terence Frisby’s There’s a Girl in my Soup, for four weeks in May and June at the Mill at Sonning, on a sleepy stretch of the River Thames downstream from Reading.

  The all-absorbing business of doing live theatre was a very different experience from the fickle promiscuity involved in making TV or delivering voice-overs which, in artistic terms, were more ‘wham bam, thank you ma’am’ than real love. I knew it would provide excellent displacement therapy for a man going through a crisis of self-doubt.

  It had to be better therapy than pouring booze down my throat, which was the only current alternative. For, in a state of bleak humility, I was convinced that all my failures to date in the relationship department were my fault. Otherwise why had there been so many?

  Three washed-out marriages and a string of fleeting relationships that had gone nowhere, leaving me on my own again, at the age of forty-seven.

  A season at Sonning did indeed turn out to be the perfect remedy and in the end provided more cures than I could possibly have hoped for.

  Marc Sinden, son of Sir Donald, was to play the Peter Sellers role in Soup. We all got along very well and it was a fun show to be in. I hadn’t worked at the Mill before, and it was my first experience of playing in ‘dinner theatre’, in which the audience eat their dinner and then watch the show on, as it were, the one ticket. It’s a style of entertainment that the Mill has run for a long time, and the houses are always full, with a special sense of intimacy to them.

  Early in the four-week run, Myra and Peter Egan turned up to see Marc, who was an old friend of theirs. I’d met Myra Frances, as she was known professionally, when Peter had directed me (with John and Pauline Alderton) on stage in Rattle of a Simple Man, some ten years before. Now she was booked to direct the next production at the Mill for four weeks in July and August. She told me that since seeing me in Rattle she’d always kept me in mind for a role. ‘I’ve got a part for you, if you’d like it,’ she said.

  I wanted to jump up and down and clap my hands (although I restrained myself). ‘What? Oh God! Can’t you get someone else? All right then,’ I added magnanimously.

  The thought of another run at Sonning cheered me up enormously. In any case, working in Sonning suited me very well. The parts were interesting, it was a civilized place, well run and commutable from South West London and the short runs wouldn’t let the job become boring. There were also windows in my schedule, which allowed me to pop down to Epsom and minster to my father.

  I loved being back on stage, immersing myself in new roles, living them for weeks at a time and I’m sure that the process did help me to untangle myself from both my broken marriage the year before and my frustrating, exciting but ultimately pointless relationship with Inge.

  She was still keeping in touch with a few phone calls but I had successfully avoided succumbing to any lingering physical urges they may have provoked.

  Marc Sinden had also been asked into the first of Myra’s shows, a play called Dangerous Obsession by N J Crisp. I had a good part in what is a tense and complex drama. My role was a departure for me. John Barrett is an apparently insignificant character, who turns up out of the blue at the house of a well-off, middle-class couple somewhere in the home counties. The husband isn’t in but the wife invites him in. He tells her that they have met before, at a business seminar, which both men had attended with their wives. Did she know, he asks, that his wife had died in a car crash?

  She did not.

  The husband returns and Barrett, unseen by the couple, systematically locks all the doors and slips the keys in his pocket. With a harsh change of tone, he makes them sit and listen while he tells them how the driver of the car that had crashed, killing his wife, had fled the scene, because he was having an affair with her. This driver had never been found. Slowly, relentlessly, he builds a case against the husband, showing incontrovertibly that he had been driving the car that had crashed.

  Producing a gun, he points it at the man’s head, and forces him to admit his guilt, thereby destroying the couple’s marriage.

  He is clearly relishing his revenge. As he prepares to leave the devastated couple, he takes a tape cassette from his pocket, on which he has recorded the whole confession. He holds it up. ‘If you don’t report my presence here, I won’t make this tape available to the police.’

  The husband is too shattered to speak. His wife answers. ‘We won’t.’

  Barrett leaves, satisfied with his afternoon’s work.

  Marc was playing the husband and the beautiful Alexandra Bastedo the wife. In one memorable performance I delivered my exit line and waited for Alexandra’s response before I let myself out.

  She said nothing.

  I waited, the tension mounted. I thought the only thing to do was to deliver my ultimatum again. Still she said nothing.

  I couldn’t leave. Barrett had to have his answer.

  As Alexandra looked at me with a puzzled frown, Marc stepped in to rescue the situation.

  ‘We won’t!’ he gasped, as if it had taken him all that time to get the words out, then he burst into tears.

  Although it was the worst moment in the play for Alexandra to have dried, it happens to every actor at one time or another and, anyway, we all agreed afterwards that it made a much better ending.

  Alex was a treat to work with in many ways. Her husband Patrick Garland was running the Chichester Festival Theatre at the time, while she was well known from the vastly successful TV spy series in the late ’60s, The Champions. She was also rated one of the screen’s great beauties.

  My performance was hailed as a masterpiece of understated menace, marred for me by the fact that I had broken my little finger in a tennis match and it was in a straightening splint. There was nothing I could do to disguise it, sticking out in front of me, parallel with the gun I was pointing at Marc in a gesture not unlike the shaka sign used by the Hawaiian people as an informal greeting.

  One day in July, during the run of Dangerous Obsession, Myra brought her great friend Carol Davies down to Sonning to see the show. Myra asked me to come and have tea with them. Over the Lapsang and fairy cakes, she introduced me to Carol, who reminded me that we’d met on the set of Ever Decreasing Circles a couple of years before. On that occasion, though, Sabina had whisked me away so rapidly I’d barely had time to focus on Carol.

  Now I did. And I liked what I saw. Not only was she tall and Junoesque in a way that I’d always admired and which meant that I could talk to her eyeball to eyeball, she was also refreshingly straightforward and frankly un-luvvie. I had the impression that if I had shown her a spade, she’d have known what to call it.

  I gathered that she and Myra had met at the Hogarth Club, a kind of theatrical health spa on Airedale Road in Chiswick. It was thirty yards down the road from Myra’s house (although she always drove there), and she and Carol spent a lot of time in the gym. While Carol cycled and worked out on all the machines, Myra would gossip, and they became good friends.

  After Dangerous Obsession at Sonning, I saw more of Peter and Myra and found I enjoyed their company very much. It was trait of Myra’s that she was able to offer a sense of solidity to people at times when they were casting around for a little cert
ainty in their lives, as I was at the time.

  I’d been somewhat off-colour for a time while we’d been rehearsing the play and although I was partially recovered by the time it was over, I still wasn’t quite right. I don’t know what it was, but it seemed to be something more than a mere physical ailment. There was a line in the play, when I was holding a gun trained on Alexandra Bastedo that rang true. She’s desperately saying to my character: ‘It’s all in your head,

  John; it’s all in your head!’

  I had been letting my condition control me, and finding outlets where they were easiest to find. When I wasn’t working, I was in the Coach & Horses in Barnes every night with my mind in a mess. As Mo Green said of Fredo Corleone in The Godfather: ‘He was banging cocktail waitresses two at a time.’

  Not quite in my case: one at a time, and a pub barmaid – just theonce.

  I’d worked with Peter Egan a few times during my career, first playing a small part in a TV show in the ’60s, Big Breadwinner Hog, in which he starred. Like his wife, he was also a good director, as I’d found doing Rattle of a Simple Man with his chums, the Aldertons. He’d also starred in Ever Decreasing Circles with Richard Briers in which I’d had a one-off role. Getting to know him better, I liked him more. Myra, thoughtful soul that she is, of course made it her business to make sure Carol and I had a chance to see more of each other. Carol was taking a few deep breaths after unravelling and escaping a tricky, tangled relationship. She’d recently bought a basement flat close to the Egans, in Brackley Road.

  She had been involved in showbiz for a long time, now mainly in the field of wardrobe, currently working on The Phantom of the Opera and we knew a lot of the same people. Shortly after our first meeting, Myra had said, rather cryptically: ‘My friend likes you.’