Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  ‘Good times?’

  ‘The best times,’ he said crisply.

  It was in 1955 that my dad walked into Levy’s Sound Studios on New Bond Street and recorded and conducted his first ever arrangement with a hand-picked jazz big band. Located above the Bunch of Grapes pub and built into a large old forty by forty foot art gallery, Levy’s was one of the few top independent recording facilities not run by any of the major record labels at the time. Aspiring artists could cut a professionally recorded demo straight to acetate disc using high quality equipment and walk out with it under their arm the same day.

  The session was paid for and organised by the actor-manager Brian Rix. Brian was a big jazz fan and had made friends with my dad eleven years earlier on their first day in the RAF together, when they were called up as eighteen-year-old air cadets to the Air Crew Receiving Centre in Scarborough in 1944. The only two in the room with long hair, they hit it off right away, and were soon staging concerts in the hotel where they were stationed. ‘He was a tough little bugger,’ Brian told me recently over lunch, recalling their first meeting, ‘but a brilliant pianist.’

  When they met up again in London in the early fifties, following the first of Brian’s string of comedy successes at the Whitehall Theatre, it was a perfect match: Brian had some spare money and had always wanted to produce his own big band; my dad, then still just the pianist with Harry Roy’s orchestra at the Café de Paris, had been sharpening his skills studying part-time at the Guildhall during the day, and had always been eager to write for one. ‘I saw Woody Herman’s band while on pilot officer training in Canada in 1945,’ he once told me. ‘I knew the sound I wanted. I just needed the chance.’

  The version of ‘A Slow Boat to China’ that was recorded live that morning at Levy’s in 1955 was a key to a door at the BBC. Armed with the acetate, Brian set up a meeting with a couple of the station’s producers and within weeks the Tommy Watt Orchestra had elbowed its way on to radio with a crisp swinging sound and was broadcasting at lunchtimes from the Paris Theatre on Lower Regent Street. It was an audacious and auspicious beginning, but some of the bigger, more established bands objected. Who was this upstart who seemed to have come from nowhere? Competition for air-time was fierce. There were eighteen working big bands touring and appearing on radio at the time; everyone needed exposure; there were established musicians to pay, reputations to enhance. To make it worse, my dad was borrowing their best players but had none of the additional overheads of running a band on the road.

  Forced off the air for a few months while the arguments raged, he and Brian simply turned to George Martin at Parlophone Records, an imprint of EMI, who promptly paid for a single to be recorded (‘Grasshopper Jump’) and offered my dad a two-album deal. When the single was picked up as a sound-bed for various American radio shows, word got back to London, and some British radio producers thought – from the impressive sound – that the band must be American.

  ‘That’s Quaglino’s down there,’ I said, passing the turning for Bury Street.

  ‘Ahhh . . . Quags . . . A good little band that was . . . Always packed.’

  ‘Did you know it reopened recently, Dad?’

  ‘Did it?’ He looked astonished. It had been closed since the early seventies.

  ‘Yes, Terence Conran relaunched it.’

  ‘Well, I never! A decent band?’

  ‘Just a restaurant now,’ I said. I imagined the modern version: wall-to-wall tables full of cosmetic dentists and hedge fund managers on their mobile phones.

  ‘Ah, too bad,’ he said.

  We slowed for a red light.

  Back then, in the mid-fifties, he’d realised that to fully push the door open at the BBC he had to be not just an occasional arranger-conductor on radio, but a respected leading nightclub bandleader. The opportunity arose to become one at the old Quaglino’s with the departure of the Tim Clayton Orchestra in late 1956. Quaglino’s was at the centre of the London social scene at the time. It had a cocktail lounge and dining room and dance floor, and buzzed with aristocrats and actors, socialites and stars. It was the perfect place to get noticed. London was still gripped by austerity. Food rationing had only ended eighteen months earlier in the summer of 1954. Quaglino’s was a gleaming bauble of sumptuous high living.

  Initially booked as the pianist for the new incoming slimmed-down in-house quintet, he saw that it was a chance too good to miss, and convinced the management with compelling force of character that he should lead the band under his own name. ‘What did you tell them?’ I asked him when I was growing up. ‘I told them,’ he replied, without a trace of self-consciousness, ‘that they needed the new sound and I was the one who could give it to them.’

  And so, on 30 December 1956 the Tommy Watt Quintet was launched; it made the front cover of Melody Maker. My dad was thirty-one and suddenly the youngest bandleader in London. It was just the spark that was needed; within a year he had recorded his debut album for Parlophone (It Might as Well Be Swing) and was booked to go back to the Paris Theatre with a twenty-piece orchestra for his own forty-minute lunchtime radio show (Time for Watt) on the BBC.

  We swung round under the animated neon hoardings of Piccadilly Circus and into Regent Street, and up above us the Christmas lights hung thrillingly white and glittering as far as we could see: snow crystals; stars; necklaces and bracelets; cascades of illuminated raindrops above the shop-fronts; crescent moons and icicles. It was like a magical guard of honour. I thought of all the streets he must have confidently walked down back then – streets we were passing – suit pressed, shirt laundered, shoes buffed, owning every pavement, every corner, never imagining anything could ever end or change; knowing the doormen, cracking jokes, taking stairs two at a time. And I turned and looked at him, and there he was, back in the same West End, on his former stomping ground, perhaps for one of the last times, now a little old man buckled in under his seat belt, the world flowing past him unstoppably, and his face was bathed in a mirror-ball of shimmering reflected light.

  Chapter 14

  My mum lasted a few days at Toby’s over that Christmas (‘She was just prowling around after the booze’) before she went back to the London flat on her own. I couldn’t tell if she wanted my dad back for good or not. She’d take a taxi from the rank outside her flat to the care home, then afterwards catch a bus straight back down the road on the way home. The journey became puzzling in spite of its direct simplicity. Twice she overshot the bus stop and once ended up disorientated at Baker Street, where she had to ask a newspaper vendor the way back – although not before confusing him by being unable to resist pointing out she used to write for the very evening paper he was selling.

  It reminded me of the last time they ever tried travelling abroad together. It was 1993. I was performing in Brussels with Tracey and – with some covert help from our tour manager – they had arranged to secretly fly over and surprise us, but they had nearly missed the flight. After collecting their boarding passes, my mum – then sixty-nine, and a little rusty at travelling – had crisply asked the check-in staff for directions, not to Departures or Passport Control, but Customs. As a result, they had been sent to a small remote office in the far corner of the terminal that dealt with all those things we all know there is no point ever trying to take with us on an aeroplane, like snails or soil or exotic plants. It was a good half a mile from where they should have been going. By the time they finally got back near the flight’s actual departure gate, hot and exhausted and out of breath, they weren’t speaking to each other, and my dad – hearing their names for the third time over the public address system – saw red and encamped himself sulkily in the duty-free shop, refusing to budge another inch, while my mum pressed on and stoically got on the plane without him. A search party was sent by the ground crew to collect him and they had to talk him into boarding the flight.

  I tried to picture my mum on her own at the flat. I saw her restive and ill at ease, spending the first forty-eight hours moving photo fra
mes around, smoothing and re-smoothing a shawl across the back of the sofa, squinting at a Final Reminder, huffing and sighing and looking out of a window, absent-mindedly waiting for the sound of my dad to clear his throat in another room, but I couldn’t picture her cooking for herself or listening contentedly to Radio 4 or taking her tablets every day at the right time or even enjoying her own company for very long – doing anything that might actually qualify as ‘independent living’.

  When I think of her eating on her own it is always cold food – half a quiche, cottage cheese on Ryvita, a bowl of Alpen, a banana, a biscuit. A kind of deprivation. She drank half-cups of sweetened black coffee, but she used sweetener (Hermesetas) not sugar, even though she hated the aftertaste. She had always been conflicted about food: disgusted by waste; never indulgent. Cold scraps were put in the fridge after every meal, covered by a side plate. Even cold vegetables. They would stay in there for a couple of days until it was clear no one in the family in their right mind would touch them, and then she would finish them off in a show of dreadful self-sacrifice. As a child, I once saw her open the fridge at seven in the morning in her dressing gown, and bitterly eat a coagulated spoonful of cold Brussels sprouts and cheese sauce before throwing the remainder in the bin with disapproval and revulsion. ‘I grew up in a manse,’ she said, mid-mouthful. ‘What do you expect?’

  It was true. She was born in Carlisle in 1924, the daughter of an itinerant Methodist minister. Her mother was a Welsh Wesleyan too. After a brief stop in Huddersfield, she was five when they moved for most of her childhood to Halifax, where the first manse they occupied was set in the grounds of a cemetery on Skircoat Moor. ‘It was like a dark barn,’ she said, ‘and funeral processions regularly pulled up outside our front door.’ The graveyard didn’t bother her as a child. She played hide-and-seek around the tombstones with her best friend, Joan, collecting discarded flowers left by the visitors. ‘We ran our own imaginary florist just for ourselves,’ she said. ‘A little table with all the wilting posies on it.’

  On the edge of the cemetery – now overgrown – was a vast deserted octagonal brick tower, two hundred and fifty feet high, that still stands imperiously and incongruously over the Calderdale countryside. It used to creak in the howling wind at night. Sparrow hawks nested in its empty abandoned galleries. Her mother hated it. It was built as a chimney in the 1870s to take fumes from the old abandoned Washer Lane dye-works factory using an underground pipe, but in the end was never used. The owner, a rich Victorian magnate – John Wainhouse – had paid for it. Determined that it shouldn’t be an eyesore, he had spent a fortune on its design, including its four hundred and three interior steps and double viewing platforms. Wainhouse’s Folly, the locals called it. A colossus in the countryside. At night my mum sometimes thought it would fall on the house if she’d been bad.

  When she was eight they moved to a new house on Rothwell Road with outhouses and a croft and a paddock, where her mother felt less oppressed by the surroundings. She went to a local school on the moor for a couple of years before being sent to a Methodist boarding school in Arnside, near Grange-over-Sands, and from there she went to another – Hunmanby Hall near Filey. ‘Life was very spartan,’ she told me, ‘bordering on the puritanical.’

  Her father was not only a minister, but Romany on his mother’s side. Born in Hull, a nephew to the celebrated Christian evangelist Rodney ‘Gipsy’ Smith, he grew up with a consuming love of wildlife and the countryside, and for eleven years of my mum’s childhood the family spent summer holidays touring the country lanes around Whitby in a reconditioned horse-drawn vardo – the Romany name for a caravan. It was a proper barrel-roofed wooden wagon with casement windows, locker seats and a split door, bought from Brough Hill Fair in the Eden Valley for seventy-five pounds by her father three years before she was born. It sounds romantic but it was tough for a child: living frugally and walking the hedgerows for hours during the day, always in regimented single file with her older brother, much of it in silence in case they should disturb their father’s self-absorbed bird-watching or charcoal sketching; camping out under leaky canvas at night, spooked by the ants and the moths. If they weren’t out in the countryside they’d be parked up for weeks on end on the edge of windswept Eskdaleside in a farmyard near Hard Struggle Cottages with little to do except run races and swing on gates.

  I dropped round one afternoon in the new year to see her at the flat. She’d left a short message on my voicemail: Could you bring me some cheese? When I arrived she was in the lobby with her coat on.

  ‘Oh, I thought you weren’t coming,’ she said. ‘I’m just stumbling out to the shops.’

  ‘I came as quickly as I could. If you still want to go, I’ll come with you.’

  She smiled as if to say that would be lovely.

  We pushed open the glass swing door. Outside, with her on my arm, life seemed to speed up suddenly. A motorbike courier was remonstrating with a cyclist. A group of tourists blocked the pavement, herding round an A-Z street map and pointing the wrong way towards Abbey Road. She gripped my arm and we walked gingerly down the steps. That same oaky sweet smell was on her breath.

  ‘The air is nice, darling,’ she said. ‘So stuffy in that flat some days.’

  ‘You should open a window.’

  ‘They’re all sealed up.’

  ‘No, they’re not. They’re double-glazed but they all slide open.’

  ‘Do they? You’ll have to show me.’

  ‘Again,’ I teased.

  We walked along the pavement to the corner and turned and walked to the end of the block. The supermarket was on the opposite side.

  ‘What kind of cheese, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, forget it. I’ve got plenty really.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, you know me. I’ll eat any old leftovers.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘Let’s just go once round the block. It’s nice like this.’

  She squeezed my arm.

  I remembered being with her in a wheat field in Sussex near the Walberton cottage where we used to stay in the late sixties. I was almost seven. I could see her edging through a thicket and an iron kissing gate, and suddenly we were out the other side and the sky above our heads was streaked with tattered white clouds. The path cut down the side of the field. We ran our fingers through the outermost line of the blond crop – rough and smooth, rough and smooth – the heads craning and stretching away to the rise in the field, the leaf blades and stems nicking at my fingers. And then she was calling up ahead, ‘Come and look, come and look! Cow parsley and yarrow.’ I loved to hear the names – convolvulus, knapweed, lords and ladies, rosebay willow-herb. The sleeves of her smock were pulled high over her elbows, her crow-black hair pushed back over her forehead, her skin tanned. And at the end of the field we scuttled down the steep slope and over the sedge to the brook. She held my hand across the little wooden bridge. The clear water was puckered like seersucker by the rushes in the shallows, the pebbles on the bottom shining like toffees.

  ‘Why is it called the rife?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s an old word for river. A country word. It may look small now, but in the olden days, it was a big river and the tide would sweep right up here carrying boats with food and people on board.’

  ‘Where is the river now?’

  ‘It’s gone back to the sea.’

  We started to climb up the other side.

  ‘Let’s recite a poem to get us to the top,’ she said, pushing on ahead. And I could hear her voice, strong and articulate:

  ‘I went out to the a hazel wood,

  Because a fire was in my head,

  And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

  And hooked a berry to a thread;

  And when white moths were on the wing,

  And moth-like stars were flickering out,

  I dropped the berry in a stream . . .’

  ‘ “And caught a little silver TROUT”!’ I shouted.

  ‘Yeats!’ she
shouted back.

  I loved the rich evocative words and was frightened of the white moths and the dark hazel wood, and then we were at the top of the hill and we stopped and sat down and looked back to the brook below and the wheat field beyond. A breeze disturbed the hedgerow. The leaves shivered. A cluster of finches darted down the track.

  ‘Finches love the hedgerow and the crops,’ she said. ‘We might see linnets and buntings this week too.’

  The old small church was at the top of the rise. I half looked at it, half hid my eyes. It was frightening and beautiful. We’d walked there once in winter when the track was as hard as bones, flecked with snow, and the fields were empty, in a huffling wind, and I wouldn’t look up. The bell-tower was black in my imagination. And then my mum had taken me to the graveyard wall and made me look, and when I opened my eyes the ground was a carpet of glistening frosted snowdrops and it was like something from a fairy story.

  The cottage where we stayed smelled of woodsmoke and books. The front door opened directly into the small living room. There was no central heating. The downstairs was heated only by a small open fire. The staircase to the two bedrooms above and the short passage to the kitchen had latched doors to stop the draughts. When they creaked it made me want to hide my head under the bedclothes. The passage to the kitchen was piled high with old newspapers. Dried mud clung to the coir matting. At mealtimes we huddled round the kitchen table under a huge poster of a snowy owl with yellow shining eyes with yet more newspapers piled up beside us. Often it was so cold the steam from the food looked like smoke.

  Two steps down from the kitchen was a bedroom with more books and pictures of clowns on the wall, and I wasn’t allowed to play in there, as the man who lived in the cottage most of the time had ‘his things’ in there.

  Upstairs there was a bedroom for grown-ups above the sitting room with a double bed, and another room with bunk beds and orange nylon sleeping bags, where I slept beside a smelly paraffin heater. The cold bathroom had a dark cupboard full of cobwebs and a tank full of water that spluttered and groaned. I used to scare myself by opening it and leaning inside.