After the show, Linda Thompson remembers “going backstage, and [Sandy] just had all these blotches all over her face. She looked fifty. ‘Cause she was just hitting it all too hard by then.” She was overwhelmed by the turnout of old friends, there to lend their moral support at what they hoped would be the beginning of a second career. When Val Berry ventured to leave, something Sandy said to her suggested that she somehow knew it was unlikely to pan out that way.
Val Berry: I went in the bar and she dropped everything, threw her arms around me, it was all kisses and cuddles and everything, and I said, “So you finally had a baby. How do you feel about it?” She went on and on and on about how happy she was. And then she did the gig, which I didn’t like very much, and after the gig I had to go. Sandy was talking to somebody, sitting down at a table, and I tapped her and said, “I gotta go.” The next thing, she got hold of my hand really hard, and held it in such a way that I had to get down on my knees, and she just turned and said, “Val, as long as I live, I will never, ever forget you. Your face is imprinted in my memory.” And that was the last thing she ever said to me.
Sandy’s friends had always been important to her, but the move to Byfield had created an all too real distance between them and her, at a time when many of them were looking for a way to face the onset of responsibility. If an out-on-the-town Sandy would have remained an all too real reminder of the conse-quences of evading those responsibilities, Gerry Conway was one of those who recognised the purchase of Byfield as “the slow disintegration of everything … she’d hit some kind of slope.” The concern many of her closest friends felt for the newly-isolated Sandy had its limits, which one by one Sandy began to test.
Linda Thompson: As you get mired in addiction all you can think f is yourself, and the part of you that could lift you up gets drowned in chemicals and stuff … After one too many two o’clock in the morning calls I said to her, “Sandy, don’t call me again in the middle of the fucking night. I’ve got children. I’ve got to get up at seven in the morning.” … Having children is [usually] a wake-up call, but I think it was too advanced. I think I was quite harsh with her. I thought, Pull yourself together. I now know you can’t … I just think she felt lost in general. People were discarding her. You couldn’t deal with her, she was too difficult … What was witty and charming … for so many years, when she became thirty, it’s not cute anymore. It’s somehow undignified.
As events continued to conspire against a saddened Sandy in those final months, she found that her closest friends were not necessarily discarding her, but that they had major, life-changing problems of their own to deal with. In Linda’s case, “I was living at my mother’s. I had left Richard and took the children. I thought, I can’t stand this [life on the commune]. I’ve had enough. So I had my own problems. My father was dying, and according to the commune rules, you just had to forget your parents and I couldn’t do that. I went back to live with my mother, and helped nurse him, so I don’t think I had time for Sandy’s problems. But also she[’d] never call up and say Help! She’d call up and go blah blah blah, and you would sorta think, ‘She’s handling this the way she handles everything.’” Linda was not the only old friend Sandy would call at two in the morning, hoping for someone who might lend an ear. Nor was she the only one who failed to hear the subtext to Sandy’s words on the wire.
Pete Townshend: She would not call me at home very often, though there was one call I remember. She was very drunk, and said that she loved me, she needed to see me, then and there. It was in the early hours. My wife woke up, I put my hand over the phone and quickly explained who was on the line. Sandy realised I was with my wife, and it seemed to be a fact that had escaped her up until that moment … I was still trying to work out what to do to start helping her when she died. I had helped others, and I know I could have helped her, but she came into my life too late. She had wanted my scalpel. Instead I’d offered her my dick. I wish I’d been a bit sharper all round.
Bambi Ballard, the person to whom Island had turned at the end of 1976, is another of Sandy’s dearest friends who admits to “excruciating guilt about the last couple of years, ‘cause I could have helped her and I didn’t. She’d ring me up every two or three days, when she was pregnant. When she had her baby I was the first person she called, I think. I meant to go and see her and the baby, and I didn’t, ‘cause I was going through bad times … I wasn’t there for the last six months, I just wasn’t available – ‘Sandy we must get together, but not today’ – because I knew that, whenever I got together with Sandy, it was three days … she was all-absorbing.” In fact, Bambi’s marriage to BBC journalist Robin Denselow was collapsing, and she was understandably wrapped up in her own life-crisis.
Bambi was also one of the two or three friends to whom David Denny had turned, in 1976, hoping to convince them to keep Sandy on the straight and narrow whilst he began a new life in America. Having established a number of contacts during his touring travails with Fairport and Sandy, and with an engineering background, he had been recruited to lend his expertise to the practicalities of touring for some of America’s rockier badasses. The loss of her brother must have affected Sandy deeply.
Bambi Ballard: I hardly knew [David] but he suddenly turned up to see me two or three times [before he] went off to America. And he was talking to me about Sandy. He just rang me and said, “This is David Denny, can I come and see you?” I don’t remember saying to him, “Why have you come to see me?” And he was saying, “I’m going away. Can you sort of look out for Sandy?” I said, “Sure. In what way?” And he said, “Y’know, just make sure that she’s alright. She likes you. She trusts you.” … He must have felt excessively guilty about leaving Sandy … I’m sure he went to see Anthea in the same way, probably Philippa [too].
Miranda Ward comes close to dissecting the problem when she says Sandy “painted herself into a corner, low self-esteem, always needing help.” When it suddenly became a lot harder to muster sympathy, or even to elicit a friendly hearing, then Sandy began to come apart. Of her friends in London, perhaps only Miranda and Philippa saw that Sandy on a regular basis in the last year of her life, hence perhaps the shock to the system when Linda saw how ravaged she had begun to look at that final London show.
On the border of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire, though, the Fairport family were almost daily recipients of some piece of local gossip that involved Sandy’s capacity for self-destruction. Chris Pegg recalls, “People would call and say, ‘There’s an orange Beetle with a screaming child inside.’ We’d go and try and get Georgia, and Watson wouldn’t let us in. It sounds terrible, but she wasn’t neglecting Georgia any more than she neglected herself.” In the days before Rehab entered common parlance, and with Trevor increasingly AWOL and Georgia merely a helpless passenger, there must have seemed a limited number of options available to the diminishing numbers who cared.
Dave Pegg: We didn’t have much contact with Sandy but she would turn up at our house sometimes in the middle of the night, or first thing in the morning, or you’d see her car in a lay-by and she’d be in it, off her face. I mean, I’ve done that, but when you see it happening on a regular basis, and the village community is like very small, and everybody knew what Sandy’s car looked like … it was an orange Beetle with green mudguards. And we’d hear reports. And we would go out and help Sandy, everybody did whatever they can, but we had our own existence.
So did Sandy have any sense of how imperilled her very existence had become? Linda Thompson thinks that if she did, it never articulated itself, “She never said to me, in all the years I knew her, ‘I must get out of this. I’ve got to stop drinking.’” And yet, one of the handful of items written into a notebook of the time, a lengthy lyric, contains a quite lucid disposition on her perenially low self-esteem, as she berates herself into taking responsibility for her own actions:
“If you see me looking down one day
And you think that it’s the end
I just have
to realise
That I’m my own best friend.
And when I close my weary eyes
And think that it’s the end
And then I realise
That I’m my own best friend.
And I’ve got a lot of things to do
and a lot of time ahead
It’s no use taking sleeping pills
and sloping off to bed
There’s another day and another chance
to seek for that sixpence in the pie.
And if I don’t find it before I die
I just ain’t gonna die. No.
Got me a bottle of wine
I don’t want to drink
Get me out of my mind
I don’t want to think.
But if I don’t make it before I die
I just ain’t gonna die.
I[‘m] in such a terrible state
And my country’s just like me.
I can’t afford to live in this place
And I can’t afford to leave.
My friends all say it’s a rotten shame
they just can’t understand why
But if I don’t make it before
I die I just ain’t gonna die.
I’ve been travelling around the world
There’s nowhere I ain’t been
Everywhere goes by so fast
I don’t know what I’ve seen
They lead me around on a wild goose chase
For those castles in the sky
But if I don’t get there before I die
I just ain’t gonna die. No!”
The poignancy of that refrain, in the light of events, is undeniable. That Sandy refused to envision an end to all her dreams, even when she was using drink and sleeping pills to shut out the pain of existence, suggests no obvious death-wish. Nor does another contemporary lyric, directed at an unknown dead friend, perhaps Martin Lamble or even Mama Cass, whose death in July 1974 shook Sandy badly, coming only a matter of days after they had finally met and bonded:
“I don’t even think you have gone
I still see you here.
There’s a time where I’ve stayed,
And I’m going to stay till my final year.”
If Sandy felt the deaths of others keenly, she also had an empathy for those grieving that suggested someone all too keenly aware of the tenuous grip we have in our tenure here on earth. Gina Glazer remembers hearing about the suicide by eletrocution of her dear friend Paul Clayton, in April 1966, when Sandy was barely twenty, and how, “she was wonderful with me that night, she walked me around and came home with me, made sure I was okay. I was in such a state of shock … Sometimes that age thing sort of reversed and she’d be more the mommy – the caretaker.” And, however hell-bent her path seems now, Sandy genuinely does not seem to have had any presentiment of her own death in those last few months. In fact, she displayed a remarkable capacity for surviving near-death experiences.
Bruce Rowland: Sandy was pretty lonely, making cries for help in an incredibly ostentatious manner all the time. It got to the point where people wouldn’t answer the phone in case it was Sandy, “The car’s in the ditch.” Trevor’s Beetle. I pulled it out twice – second time, the baby was in the back, in a carry-cot loose on the seat. She’d put it in the ditch about two hundred yards from where she lived. God knows how! I was never absolutely certain whether she’d driven the car into the ditch for somebody to come out and rescue her. We had a mutual friend, the gardener Steve Walker. He did not suffer fools gladly. I was at Swarb’s when she did this and Swarb said, “Oh fuck her, I’m not going out. Tell her to call the AA.” What I was worried about was the local bobbie, because she was definitely pissed. She’d been in Cropedy the middle part of the evening and she was getting it on then. I tried to pull it out, and I couldn’t. So I called Walker, who had a Land-Rover, at four o’clock in the morning – this [being] a guy who’s up at six – and he was not best pleased. To his credit he did [it]. But he pulled it out [just as] she walked out, and he cursed her into the ground. [she] dissolved into tears. [But] she had a need for that sort of thing.
If the village as a whole was seriously concerned about the situation, fearing for the safety of the child as much as the increasingly irresponsible parent, Trevor had somehow shut himself off from the reality of the situation. As Bruce Rowland puts it, “Trevor used to have responsibility attacks. He’d clear off to London for two or three days and then come back and be the doting husband.” But part of the problem, as Dave Pegg expresses it, is that “Trevor was such an up guy all the time. Complete opposite of Sandy. It took a lot for her to be genuinely happy … And you can’t find out why … somebody like Sandy Denny wasn’t happy – she [just] became so sad. It all went wrong, and she never came back from that low. That was it. There was nothing anybody could do to pull her out of it. But everybody thought Georgia was in grave danger.”
Just how real that danger was became clear the last week in March, when Sandy took Georgia to visit her grandparents at their holiday cottage in Cornwall. Because of the tensions that stemmed from Trevor and Neil’s Mutual Dislike Society, Neil and Edna had not seen as much of Sandy and Georgia as they would have liked, even though the birth of a grand-daughter had for a long time been a hope that dare not speak its name. And yet, whatever state of denial Trevor was in about Sandy’s drinking, it was as nothing to her parents, blinded by a sense of propriety that had all but consumed their finer feelings. When Sandy fell down the stairs at their cottage, presumably pickled, her mother simply refused to take her down to Casualty to have her x-rayed, more fearful of the damage to her own reputation than her daughter’s skull.
Philippa Clare: Sandy was complaining of very bad headaches and her doctor gave her Dystelgesic, which are very heavy painkillers. If you mix them with alcohol they can give you brain haemorrhages … She [had gone] down to Cornwall to her parents, and she fell down the stairs onto the York paving-stone, and Sandy went, “I really need help, Mum,” and her mother actually said, “I’m not having you seen drunk.” … So when Sandy came back she was going, I’ve got terrible headaches … But it wasn’t taken that seriously. She was mentioning it, but she wasn’t making a big drama about it.
Miranda also expressed the view that if Sandy “was with Neil and Edna, and she was pissed, they wouldn’t have taken her to Casualty because they were unable to accept [her problem] … They didn’t like the fact that she drank. I think Neil went to his grave thinking [she had] the odd glass of sherry or gin and tonic, or a glass of wine with the meal.” Such a remarkably close proximation to the actual incident suggests that she has somehow forgotten Sandy filling in the details over that weekend, three weeks later, when Edna’s daughter, whilst staying at Miranda’s, suffered a fatal brain haemorrhage.
That the fall Sandy had taken at her parents’ house was serious was evidenced by the bloody great cut she was sporting on her scalp both at the benefit concert she gave on April 1, 1978 – when she gave her finale performance to a hundred and fifty local souls at Byfield village hall – and at Dave Swarbrick’s birthday party, just four days later, where she again made light of the fall.
Dave Swarbrick: I do remember her having a bad cut on her head, somewhere up [on top of her head], and she pointed it out to me. But she was drunk at the time. It was the fifth of April, my birthday. She took my hand and rubbed it across the top, and said, “Look at that.” But that was all she said. Didn’t seem that bad. I never knew how she got it. There was a party at the local pub, she turned up there and she’d been barred from the pub, and they wouldn’t let her in, so I took her home. I left my own party, took her back. Trevor came along later. She was drunk when she turned up at the party, and I guess I’d had a few too, by then. We went back to my place, sat down, chatted, then Trevor came along, picked her up, took her back. She was a bit upset.
If Edna showed scant regard for her daughter’s well-being, it seems surprising that Trevor also failed to take further action on
seeing the cut on Sandy’s return from her parents, at least not any attendant to his wife. The question that cannot now be answered is whether Georgia was in Sandy’s arms when she fell down the stairs in Cornwall. Trevor began to suspect as much – unless there was a separate fall at Byfield, to which he was witness, something no-one has been able to confirm. But Miranda, in whose flat Sandy would be found unconscious, feels great bitterness towards Trevor because she understandably feels that “this was a tragedy severely compounded by Trevor. Trevor, as a responsible adult, should have said, ‘Oh and by the way, she had a rather bad fall, but I think she’s okay. She’s having the odd headache.’”
Whichever scenario pushed him to take action, Trevor finally became convinced that Georgia’s life was in mortal peril, and that his wife, as an unregenerate alcoholic, was a danger to herself and her daughter. The onset of responsibility came hard on Trevor, who had little idea of whom he might turn to for help. His friends were Sandy’s friends, and vice-versa. He sounded out some of Sandy’s best friends, like Linda Thompson, to whom he confided, on one occasion, “‘I’ve been in London all day, I came home, and the baby hadn’t been fed. What am I gonna do?’ I said, I don’t know what you’re gonna do.” But he kept his decision to leave Sandy from Linda, who insists she “wouldn’t have told Sandy anyway, but maybe he thought I would.” He decided instead to confide in Philippa.
Philippa Clare: Trevor rang me up from Byfield. Trevor was very rarely in tears, and he was in tears. He went, “I don’t know what to do. I can’t cope. She’s dropped the baby down the stairs. She’s driven [the car] into a hedge. I’m gonna take the kid to Australia because I want my parents to see their grandchild, and I’m gonna say to Sandy, I’m just going there for a few weeks, give you a bit of space, and then I’ll come back. But you’ve really got to shape up.” Trevor was freaking for the safety of the kid. Trevor could see her getting worse.
No More Sad Refrains: The Life and Times of Sandy Denny Page 28
