by Ben Watt
I sat there with my dad and watch him stiffen. It was unlike him; he was usually loose and relaxed. He seemed uncomfortable, getting up from time to time and pacing around. Once I found him shivering on the back step smoking, the dank sky shrouding the huddled rows of back gardens and pebble-dashed garages. While I saw fascinating curiosities, he just saw a suffocating asceticism.
His father was born in the mill town of Strathaven in Lanarkshire south of Glasgow in 1899. Some typewritten references left among my grandma’s belongings show he got an apprenticeship at fourteen as an engineer and fitter at the vast Dalzeel Steel and Iron Works in Motherwell. He travelled to New York in 1923 on a steam ship on a work visa to make his fortune, but came back within a year and married my grandma, then Jean Cairns, a baker’s clerk from Partick, in February 1925. She was born Jane, but everyone called her Jean. He was born William, but everyone called him Billy. On their wedding day he was twenty-five, she was twenty-three, and nine months later, almost to the day, my dad was born. After years of factory life where he rose to become a foreman, my grandpa was forced to take early retirement through intermittent ill-health but they moved out of the city and he helped Jean set up a seven-roomed guest house in the market town of Crieff – fifty miles north of Glasgow. They had most of the year to themselves but each summer they rented out the rooms, taking on a girl to help with the serving and cleaning. In the back garden was a vast rock that rose out of the lawn. It gave the house its name – Rockearn – and my grandma told me in the old days an auctioneer used to climb on to it on market day and the rock was surrounded by a sea of farmers and animals. They had looked forward to their retirement in Milngavie but within a couple of years of moving in there was the car crash and everything changed. Jean was widowed at sixty-nine.
One night when I was little older, maybe fourteen, I was standing with my dad leaning on the rail at the Ship Inn as a big black barge crossed slowly in front of us sending ripples of water slapping against the brick pier below, and he said out of nowhere, ‘We could see the canal from Banner Road.’
‘What canal?’
‘It’s not there now. I was four when we moved. Knightswood. My mother and father were so proud. It was only a little two-up, two-down, but it was Knightswood.’
On the way back in the car he told me his father had worked all hours to improve his trade and became a machinist – a tool-maker – so they could move again, and at sixteen they transferred to another house in Knightswood, this time with a garden.
‘I was at school,’ he said. ‘I wore a Mackenzie kilt! I can remember cycling home and finding Mother in the new house – it was marvellous.’
Knightswood was one of the major garden suburb developments of the twenties and thirties in Glasgow after the city’s slum clearance schemes. Working-class families who were moved into the smart new-built semi-detached houses and cottage flats were hand-picked, and expected to be principled and hard-working. Everyone paid their rents on time, and there was little or no crime. Probity and godliness were bywords in many of the households but it could lead to a biting austerity in the battle for respectability. ‘My parents scrimped every penny,’ my dad said to me, ‘but it never brought them a moment’s joy.’ Rectitude must have mixed powerfully with the politics of the factory floor. His father came home at night only to lecture on how avarice and capitalism were nothing short of punishable sins. ‘He was a textbook Christian Socialist,’ my dad added scathingly. ‘And a Freemason – that took the biscuit.’
His mother, meanwhile, dreamed of a university place for her teenage son or a job in the Corporation. School results were the focus of great attention, but, as my dad said, ‘I just wanted to play the piano.’ His precociousness was apparent even as a schoolboy. His old schoolfriend, Eric Monteith Hamilton – who went on to become a jazz archivist and owner of one of Glasgow’s most famous hi-fi shops – sent me an email in 2009, at the age of eighty-seven, about their growing up in Knightswood. He had tracked me down and wanted me to know, before he died, what an influence my dad had had on him – a life-changing influence:
He was very popular, and did things most of us were scared to do. And I must tell you, that while most of us were very clean with nice clothes, Tommy was always immaculate, with nice-cut clothes and smart ties; he always looked good. This was unusual at this time. As you know, he was a good-looking boy, and attractive to the girls. We were not so lucky, as we did not have his assured ways.
When we walked up from school he would beat out rhythms to me. ‘Is this a quickstep, a slow or fast foxtrot, or modern waltz?’ I had to answer, and I tried and tried, until I got it.
When we reached his home we would get a drink from his mum, then [we’d go] up to the piano, for a concert. I lived in Cedric Road, which was only about three minutes away.
Then I started record collecting in 1940, I heard Glenn Miller, and was struck, but Tommy was moving on. He wanted to buy a 12" disc of Bunny Berigan’s ‘I Can’t Get Started’, so he sold his old records to me. We were both so keen.
I was very lucky to meet Tommy, and while he did not know it, he shaped my life in music.
To their credit, my dad’s parents gave over an entire room on the first floor at the front of their Knightswood house on Arrowsmith Avenue for his ambitions. He studied hard – classical music initially – and at weekends he was allowed to take the bus into the city to Buchanan Street to Paterson, Sons & Co. where they sold all the leading pianos and player-pianos and organs, and he was allowed to play on all the top brands ‘to keep them warm’.
After he finished school in 1941 at the age of sixteen he got a gig playing piano for the Jack Chapman band (‘I couldn’t really play at all at that stage’) at the Albert Dance Hall in Bath Street. He’d volunteered for the RAF but was given a deferral because of his age. There were places in several bands up for grabs; many of the best players had gone to war. The opportunity was unique and the money was incredible for a teenager – up to ten pounds per week – while most men in Knightswood were taking home three, factory managers maybe five. His parents were very proud – Jack Chapman was regarded in local circles as ‘such a nice man’ – and they were impressed by an advertisement in the local paper that ran: The Albert Dance Hall. For Select Dancing.
One night, not long after starting, he ran into a homesick Glaswegian pianist called John McCormack who was touring with one of the hottest bands at the time, run by the Trinidadian clarinettist Carl Barriteau. In a piece of unshrinking opportunism, my dad suggested that they simply swapped gigs. Before he knew it, it was all agreed, and McCormack had joined Jack Chapman and my dad had left home and was based at the Belle Vue in Manchester with Barriteau, earning twenty pounds per week and flying by the seat of his pants. For eighteen months before call-up to the RAF, he found himself touring the country in the best band around, learning fast and walking on air.
I remember waking in the morning after he told me about his Knightswood childhood and saying to him, ‘You know that photograph of that young man on the dresser in Grandma’s bedroom?’
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘Grandma said it was you before you ever left Glasgow.’
‘Did she now?’
‘Yes, she did. Is it really you, Dad?’
‘No. It’s who I was.’
Chapter 17
For the rest of the summer of 1971 the lid of the piano at home stayed shut. Back from the Bournemouth Winter Gardens my dad would cook an evening meal, and then just as my mum and I were getting ready to join him in the kitchen, we’d hear the jingle of the keys, and he’d have slipped out to the pub leaving all the food in the warming drawer, with no indication he was coming back.
My mum flew to Rome for her second big syndicated interview with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and a couple of days later my dad said we were going to drive out to Heathrow Airport to collect her. Her return flight was landing that afternoon, but he seemed subdued. I remember being allowed to have the sunroof open on the Renaul
t 5 and thinking the whole thing – Heathrow, my mum home, sunroof – was all incredibly exciting, but my dad didn’t say much the whole journey.
That night they had a row in the kitchen just before we were about to eat. My mum told me to go upstairs. I heard my dad raising his voice to her. He never shouted, just seemed to increase the pressure and tension in his voice, until it was insistent and intimidating. Even through the door I heard him say, ‘You’re just an embarrassment, Romany.’ He said it twice. It sounded wrong. Even though I wasn’t totally sure what it meant, it sounded like a bad thing to say.
Then I heard something big crash, and then the kitchen door open, and then the sound of car keys being lifted off the hook, and the flat door open and close, and then the front door open and close. I heard the car leave the car-port and then I heard the flat door open and close again, and I thought my dad must have gone to the pub and my mum followed him down the street. I crept downstairs from my bedroom. My heart was beating like a drum. I pushed open the kitchen door. A saucepan was lying on the floor near the radiator. There was a dent in the wall and little bits of green paint and white plaster were on the linoleum tiles below. I stood and listened for a minute. All I could hear was the blood beating in my ears and the hiss of the gas-ring that was still burning on the stove. I went to the window and I saw my mum down in the garden. It made me jump. She was just standing still near one of the flowerbeds, at a slight angle, not fully facing the lawn or the few scant roses that grew along the fence. She had her arms tightly folded and her back to me. I wished one of my older half-brothers was home but everyone was away.
The months passed and the work dried up for my dad. There was still a bit of library music on offer, but the royalties from his own compositions started to dwindle as they got played less and less on the radio, and the films for which he’d written music – a few farces for his old friend Brian Rix – were repeated more infrequently. To compensate, my mum had started doing additional travel writing for newspapers and magazines. It partially covered the cost of a holiday too, as the travel and accommodation were often thrown in if a commission came up. My half-brothers and half-sister were too old for family holidays by then, so the three of us – plus a schoolfriend I was allowed to take with me for company – drove all the way to Wales for a week over Easter in 1972 so she could write a lightweight ‘family feature’ on the Butlin’s holiday resort at Pwllheli.
We arrived in driving rain. There were people asleep in our chalet. A man found us another one but it was right next to a generator that chugged and thrummed all through the night. My dad lasted forty-eight hours, then knocked the hinges out of the door frame slamming it in a rage, and we all drove home. ‘The walls were so thin you could hear someone fart in the chalet next door,’ he had said in the car on the way back. I was only nine. I thought it was funny but also a bit scary. I caught my friend’s eye. I think he thought the same.
That summer I went with my parents to Majorca when it was still pronounced with a ‘j’. It was my first time abroad and my first time away with just my mum and dad. We went to the Pontinental Village at Cala Mesquida. Again my mum had been commissioned to write about it for a magazine. My dad kept saying how at least Pontin’s was a step up from Butlin’s although I didn’t understand what he meant.
I played crazy golf with other families, bought ice creams from the Sundae Bar and watched English films in the communal day rooms when it was too hot in the afternoons. I wore a yellow sombrero all day long and had a scuba-diving lesson in the shallow end of the pool. My mum and dad mostly just sat on sun-loungers, my mum with a book, my dad with a hangover. The travel company gave us a complimentary Fiat 126 to ‘explore the island’. We used it once to go into the nearby town before my dad dismissed it as a ‘joke car’ and didn’t set foot in it again. At the hotel he mocked everyone behind their backs. The only people he didn’t belittle were the local Spanish waiters and the housekeeping maids. Photographs were taken of all of them – more than anything else. He drank with the waiters and chefs after they knocked off work, sometimes staying up late and playing cards with them, and I would hear him come back into the room in the darkness, stumbling into a chair, cursing under his breath, pulling his trousers off, and falling into bed next to my mum.
There are other photographs from the holiday of me standing with a fishing rod on the rocky coastline below the hotel. My dad is in the pictures too, in a black-and-white-checked shirt and blue cotton shorts and espadrilles, with a denim fishing hat and gold-rimmed sunglasses. In one, he has his arm round my shoulders. My mum must have taken them – she has even managed to get herself in the foreground of one or two – but when I look at them I don’t remember them feeling very real; they strike me as something set up to look like a touching holiday photograph. I can remember my dad’s face in the mornings on that holiday – fixed and pale and distant like a waning moon – and that is more the impression the photographs leave me with.
A year later, on another of my mum’s press trips, we went to the Pontinental Hotel Pineta Beach at Platamona in Sardinia. We had a chalet in a small pine forest, but I was mostly distracted from the friction between my mum and dad as two players from the Chelsea football team (Peter Osgood and Ron Harris) plus the team manager, Dave Sexton, were staying at the hotel with their families. As a fan, I was overcome with excitement.
One afternoon I saw Osgood – as close to a demi-god as it got for me at the time – standing up to his waist in the sea on his own. It was too good an opportunity to miss, and swallowing down my nerves, I swam out towards him underwater and surfaced near by. It all came out in an excited garble.
‘Hello, Mr Peter . . . Mr Osgood . . . I think you’re really good and I love Chelsea and I watched you win the FA Cup . . . and the Cup Winners’ Cup . . . and I think you’re really good . . .’
He stood looking at me. He was bronzed and muscular with an unashamedly thick covering of manly chest hair.
‘Oh, yeah?’ he said economically.
I waited for a moment. Then I realised that was all he had to say, so I pressed on. ‘And I’ve got a proper shirt . . . a blue Chelsea one . . . with number 9 on the back . . . that’s your number . . . well, you know that . . . and my mum even got me a pillowcase with your face printed on it . . . and I sleep with it every night . . . and I think you’re really, really . . . talented.’
He scooped some water up over his arms. ‘Oh, yeah?’ He glanced at me, then looked up the coastline the other way.
I was undeterred. ‘And that diving header in the replay against Leeds . . . when you won the cup . . . was just the greatest goal . . . and I stayed up and watched it . . . and like I said, I love Chelsea and all of it . . . and you, and the winning the cup . . . and your face on my pillow . . . and I’m here and you’re here . . . and I like football . . . and you like footb . . .’
I ran out of steam. I looked back at the beach. My dad was standing taking a photo of us. I felt I ought to go. ‘OK. Bye then,’ I said.
He wiped seawater out of his chest hair. ‘See ya.’
I swam back to the shore. I was disheartened, as though I had made a fool of myself. I didn’t understand how an adult could be so offhand when I was trying so hard and telling him how much I liked him. I told my dad what had happened. He couldn’t stop laughing. He thought it was all just hilarious and said Osgood was ‘a clown’, and later that evening, whenever I asked for something at the dinner table in the restaurant, he just winked at me and said in a mock affectless tone, ‘Oh, yeah?’
As on most nights, we then walked back to the chalet in the dark and my dad smoked a cigarette on the verandah on his own, looking out into the shadows over the wooden balustrade before sloping back to the hotel bar without a word. ‘Your father has always needed stimulating company,’ my mum offered in explanation. And then I would walk out with her between the chalets into the pine forest listening to the cicadas, feeling the dry needles crunching under my flip-flops, the scent rising under the spindly ca
nopy, and out towards the deep indigo sky studded with stars, talking quietly, collecting little pine cones. One night we heard an owl, and although we crept right beneath the tree in which it sat, and heard it clear and loud, and strained our eyes, we couldn’t see it.
Chapter 18
It was February 2003 and a blast of unexpected fresh air cut across the hall of the flat.
‘I managed to open a couple of windows,’ said my mum, greeting me, ‘but I can’t shut them, and now there is a gale force wind threatening to blow us back to Oxford.’
I laughed and went into the sitting room and slid the window shut. A newspaper was strewn across the floor. I gathered it up and placed it back on the sofa. ‘You’ve made it nice for Dad’s return,’ I said, walking back into the hall.
‘He’ll probably go straight to bed,’ she said mordantly. ‘But I shall stay accommodating if it kills me.’
I followed her into her little study. ‘Been tidying in here too, I see.’
‘Yes, if you must know.’
A box of papers was open on the desk.
‘I’m going to make a small coffee. Do you want one?’ she said.
‘Not for me, thanks.’
‘Please yourself.’ She went out to the kitchen.
I sat at the desk. It was the same box containing her Stratford souvenirs that I’d looked through on the day they moved in. To the side was a large certificate. The thick paper crackled as I opened it. Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. This Diploma is awarded to Romany Evens as a special recognition of talent. April, 1947. Next to it were two theatre programmes I hadn’t noticed before. I flicked one open. The West of England Theatre Company. Dear Brutus by J. M. Barrie. December 1947. In the part of Lady Caroline Laney – Romany Evens. I smiled. The whole cast had signed the programme. The tour was a tightly routed journey through Exmouth, Yeovil, Chard, Bridport and Sidmouth, and several more towns of the South-West.
