Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  On week nights, if I’d done all my homework, sometimes I was allowed to use it to go to gigs. I’d leave the tense atmosphere at home and head out across Hammersmith Bridge to the Nashville in West Kensington on the corner of the Cromwell Road and North End Road, and park unknowingly opposite the old Alvic Studios where I was to record my first EP, ‘Summer Into Winter’, with Robert Wyatt three years later.

  Over the next eighteen months I’d stand on my own at the back and watch new bands like Magazine, Black Slate and The Pretenders. I witnessed a thrilling Factory Records triple bill topped by Joy Division, with A Certain Ratio and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in support, for which – to general amazement – OMD’s bassist Andy McCluskey wore era-defying flares and a crocheted patchwork waistcoat. I saw Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers at Hammersmith Odeon – their tiny equipment lost on the enormous apron stage – fully mesmerised by their apparent guileless honesty. At the end of the show Richman got all the house lights turned on and beckoned the entire crowd down to the front for an impromptu question-and-answer session while he swung his legs over the edge of the press pit like a gawky schoolboy. It was another world opening before my eyes.

  I got my first proper girlfriend too. Her family lived on the outer edge of Wimbledon in a small end-of-terrace Edwardian house with a pebble-dash extension. Everyone ate breakfast together in the modest dining room – early-evening meals too, sometimes. It was simple hearty home cooking with everyone talking equally and expressing opinions. Her father was a small thin Oxford-educated Yorkshireman with neat grey parted hair and a stiff back who worked for the civil service; he squinted from behind thick corrective glasses and enjoyed putting everyone right at the dinner table in an exacting – often pedantic – but good-humoured way. He played vinyl pressings of Bach on a meticulously assembled high-end hi-fi system, wore open-toed sandals and woollen trousers in hot weather, and in spite of his poor eyesight, took his own black-and-white photographs of church architecture and then painstakingly developed them in the downstairs bathroom, where the windows were taped up with black bin-liners. He voted Conservative. My dad had told me all Tories were toffs and racketeers, but I found that I liked him, and it made me realise people might not be how you first judge them. Her mother was a teacher from rural Essex: broad-shouldered; a mop of short brown hair; also short-sighted, but with a gentle face that took an interest in everything you told her. She cooked up saucepans of food that filled the house with steam, and tended to plants in a lean-to add-on glazed porch that cluttered up the front door. Late at night we’d often find her on her own in the sitting room, the house in darkness, curled up in an armchair with a single spotlight, wearing a candlewick dressing gown, flushed from a hot bath, reading the latest volume of something like Seamus Heaney, her face myopically pressed against the pages. They took a bath together in the evenings – one of their great pleasures. I pictured their bodies crammed into the foaming frothing tub – him, small and wiry; her, all big and fleshy. And I expected, as an adolescent, to find it repellent, but I thought it was touching, and it made me sad that I could never imagine my parents doing the same, although I imagined they must have done once. A long time ago.

  I think I had looked to get away from home as early as twelve. I made friends with a boy, Andrew, from school. His father was a script-writer called Dick Clement, who had written – among other things – something successful for television called The Likely Lads with a collaborator called Ian La Frenais, although it meant nothing to me at the time. The family lived in a rambling two-storey detached house in Petersham. It had a pan-tiled roof with higgledy-piggledy dormer windows and sat in big grounds with old tumbledown stables, a little fruit garden, chickens and a wide lawn giving way to a copse. I was told Charles Dickens once lived there. The garden was overlooked by a wrought-iron ground-floor verandah entwined with wisteria. Sometimes I’d crush one of its big hanging pale purple blooms in my hand and wonder why we didn’t have such graceful flowers in our garden. They had Dalmatians and things I had never seen before: bean bags; duvets; bagels for breakfast; fibre-optic lamps. They took a holiday in California. They went to lunch on the King’s Road. They drove a big white French Citroën DS Safari estate. It was a world away from our flat.

  I’d play football all day long with Andrew on the huge lawn. He had proper metal goalposts with orange nylon netting; at home I just used a couple of cricket stumps. We’d play for hours, one in goal, one out on the lawn – long matches as imaginary teams. One of us would commentate the whole time as though it were Match of the Day: ‘We’re approaching the eighty-ninth minute. Hollins through to Garland. He’s round one man. He’s round two! He cuts inside. Here comes Hutchinson! He shoots! WHAT A SAVE!’

  Dick and Ian often used to write in the house. Ian turned up in his vintage Bentley – it was said he slept in it – and entered through the tall wooden gates and parked right by the back door, which struck me as showy and a bit daring. They’d lock the doors to the kitchen for a couple of hours in the afternoon and we’d hear their muffled voices laughing and talking. One afternoon Dick called us in from the garden and asked us to sit down and watch something; he wanted to know our reaction to what they had just written and filmed. It was the first ever episode of Porridge with Ronnie Barker as the prison inmate, Fletcher. We thought it was funny and he was very happy we got the jokes. Dick had a kind face, and never spoke down to me. He was younger than my parents. Confident. At the end of the weekend he would often drive me home across Richmond Park in the big white Citroën estate with its brown, hole-punched, tan leather trim and hydraulic suspension. I envied all of it. We’d climb up the hill out of Petersham (‘That’s Tommy Steele’s house’) and into the park, the sun dissolving behind the trees, cruising past glimpses of red deer, and across its two thousand acres and out the other side to Roehampton Lane.

  My dad was withdrawn when I was dropped off, as though he distrusted Dick. Only later did it dawn on me he might have been jealous of him. The self-assured younger man. All that effortless burgeoning success. The world at his feet. Which is where it wasn’t for my dad. Ironically, Andrew’s parents were going through a bad divorce, but I used to try to close my eyes to it; it wasn’t the side I wanted to see. I preferred to submerge myself in the surface luxuries of Andrew’s childhood and the boyish friendship we had. One Christmas was spent running around Rolling Stone Ron Wood’s house at the top of Richmond Hill – the house that he’d bought from John Mills – where a jukebox stood in the kitchen and I saw my first ever recording studio in the basement. Andrew’s family had borrowed the place for the Christmas holiday, but I thought life must be miserable as an adult if even such splendour could leave you as unhappy as his mum seemed to be.

  I tried to compare my parents to other adults in our road too. Woodlands Road was a cul-de-sac. All the kids played together in the street on summer evenings – hopscotch, football, sardines, hide-and-seek. The egg delivery van came once a week and we would all jump up on to its cab and hold on while the van trundled along the road, laughing and screaming. We all seemed pretty much the same, but the parents seemed vivid and towering and different. Looking back, it was an extraordinary assembly of high-achieving figures all living next door to each other, but whose accomplishments meant very little when refracted through the optic of my own experience of them.

  Two doors down was the arts broadcaster and impresario Humphrey Burton whose first wife, Gretel, scared me with a spaghetti carbonara; I thought spaghetti for kids only came as hoops with tomato sauce. Next door was the opera singer, John Kentish, whose shed caught fire one night, and I watched from my bedroom window as he tried to put it out in his pyjamas using only a watering can. On the other side of us was the eminent British historian and Africanist Basil Davidson; I repeatedly damaged his fruit netting with my football. Beyond him was Michael Hogg from the Daily Telegraph (later Sir Michael Hogg through an inherited baronetcy); his wife taught me the piano for a couple of years until the sound of her
dry nicotine-stained nails clicking on the ivory keys was so unbearable it made me give up. Behind us was a pottery studio run by a small rarely seen nocturnal man in a sailor’s cap called Harry Horlock-Stringer, who never seemed to mind if a tennis ball landed in his garden, but whose wife threatened to call the police when my Action Man fell off our back wall into her nasturtiums. Next door to the Hoggs was the TV executive Michael Peacock; he ran both BBC1 and BBC2 for a time in the sixties and then helped start London Weekend Television; I used their trampoline, and his wife Daphne confused me by making me a cup of Earl Grey tea when I was only ten. Next door to the Peacocks was Admiral Sir Caspar John, British First Sea Lord and son of the post-impressionist painter, Augustus John, which seemed to me to make a mockery of ever following in your parents’ footsteps. In keeping with the family’s pioneering bohemian spirit, the Johns’ house was completely devoid of any bourgeois trappings; I can only picture bare floorboards, scattered newspapers, empty wine bottles and nude children. I remember when I was nine, his son Phineas – then seventeen, I think – was sent to borstal for six months for taking part in a peaceful anti-apartheid demonstration outside the South African Embassy. I didn’t know what ‘borstal’, ‘anti-apartheid’ or ‘South Africa’ were, but I remember my older half-sister Jennie telling me about what happened to him and saying it was ‘disgusting’ and being upset. On the corner opposite the verdant shadowy common was a vast yellow-and-white lodge, home to Lord Woolf, Master of the Rolls, although he was only a simple barrister back then; even so, I lost a shuttlecock over his garden fence once and never dared retrieve it.

  Maybe it is just what all kids think, but whenever my paths crossed with any of theirs I only found them intimidating. I couldn’t imagine any of them as my parents, except perhaps Mrs Ritchie at the end of the road by the red pillar box, who one day gave me a slice of cake and a glass of lemonade and let me play with her son’s marble run even though he was out when I went to call. But in general, I realised I could take no leads or clues from any of them and would have to grow up as quickly as I could and work it out for myself.

  Chapter 26

  After my mum left St Mary’s Hospital, she joined my dad at the care home, where they spent the next three months. It was like a wind had dropped. They were quieter. Becalmed. The flat sat empty. I didn’t have the heart to do much with it except empty the fridge. I even kept the central heating ticking over in case something changed. My dad was spending long hours in his little room. His breathing was becoming very poor. He’d lie on the bed while my mum sat in the window sensing the light gauzily change over the wide terraced garden in a kind of absent contemplation. Her eyesight appeared to have taken a turn for the worse. ‘I can see sideways, but your face is vaguer now,’ she said one morning. It seemed as if the surgery had left her introspective, devitalised, self-critical. I recognised the feelings – I’d been through a major hospital experience myself ten years earlier – but they only served to worsen her own natural self-absorption. More than anything I sensed an atmosphere of penance around her.

  I visited and sat there with them, falling into the same silences. ‘You still there, Romany?’ my dad would say from time to time from the bed. ‘Oh, yes, dear. Where else would you expect me to be?’ my mum would reply, still unable to remove the tone of tetchiness from her voice. Maybe she only put it on for my benefit. Or maybe it was because that is how she now felt. Permanently.

  They asked for nothing at Christmas. They did not want to visit anyone – not that my dad would have been able to – and said they’d be just as happy letting the festive days pass uneventfully like any others. They seemed to have accepted the imposed sobriety of life in the care home this time, although they regularly asked for bumper bars of chocolate – the drinker’s methadone.

  Physically, my mum still looked robust, even after two demanding operations. It appeared she might be quite capable, like Eunice, of fighting on to the end. But what she seemed to be finally coming to terms with was the realisation that she couldn’t bring herself to look after my dad any more; not because she couldn’t have perhaps rallied one last time and continued with the fetching and the carrying and the constant attention, but because this time she’d had enough. ‘No hard feelings, darling,’ she used to say in the old days, the morning after another evening of poisonous tit for tat; but now, with the end approaching, it seemed to be too many hard feelings.

  She’d attempted independent living in an effort to briefly reframe her life, but the guilt at leaving him in care on his own was too much, and he was far too good at making her feel guilty for even attempting it. And of course there was a version of him she still missed. It was a double bind: she couldn’t live on her own with him, but nor could she live on her own without him. Joining him in care was all that was left.

  When I looked at her sitting silently in the window on those afternoons, as the bronzed autumn light settled over the empty garden behind the care home, I thought all of those things were on her mind, and encircling everything like a hawk high over the fields a sense of unjustness. I wondered if she reflected on the days when it was all still salvageable, when she was younger and more determined, in those days when she was still prepared to haul everything up off the floor because she knew leaving it lying there in its own unhappiness and recrimination would do no good. Did she recall all the new leaves they had turned over in an effort to put the bad days behind them? The notes of apology they left out for each other? The vows of abstinence? Even the half-baked ones of the seventies when they only gave up whisky under the delusion that white wine and strong German lager didn’t count?

  I shouldn’t forget that they had still made good things happen after the bad. Simple things that mattered as they got older: afternoon runs in the car into the summer countryside; a canal boat holiday; a few days on a farm; visits to the local wetlands; days when their own affectionate companionship was fulfilling and untroubled. The problem was that ultimately none of it had ever replaced the rush my dad had always seemed to need, and had never seemed able to quell. And so the whole thing had begun again, as regular as the rotating seasons.

  I was eighteen when I left for university in 1981. My mum and dad coped in different ways. I’d chosen to read Drama and English Literature at Hull. I was excited by the prospect of the course. Hull had one of the only fully working university studio theatres in the country. My interview had been with the soon-to-be film director Anthony Minghella. The campus librarian was Philip Larkin. Andrew Motion had just left the English Department en route to becoming Poet Laureate. It all seemed like a great secret no one knew about. But my dad – who insisted on driving me – had little interest in literary luminaries or the quirks of my higher education. He was more interested in the four-hour journey up there.

  As we turned on to the M1 he started the way he intended to carry on by telling me a story about picking up a couple of old jazz musician friends at Baker Street and the three of them driving north for a gig. All they had to drink in the car was a full bottle of vodka and a full bottle of orange squash; how to mix them became the focal point of the whole journey. By Newport Pagnell, saxophonist Ronnie Ross – who was in the passenger seat – had managed to take a swig out of each, and then, in the rickety, suspension-free Renault Dauphine in which they were travelling, had managed to meticulously pour a capful from one into the other repeatedly for over fifty miles until the two bottles were perfectly mixed together. And he did this without spilling a drop. These were the kind of skills my dad thought were worth learning.

  The journey wasn’t unenjoyable. My dad thrived on re-creating his love of male camaraderie with me. He was often at his funniest and most relaxed, full of stories and bonhomie. Away from home, it was like a weight was lifted from his shoulders. At the motorway services he told me about the time he and a couple of chums had pulled off the road for lunch, and seen the winning line come up on a fruit machine – three cherries all in a row – and just as it rolled into place, one of them had pulle
d the plug out of the machine at the back to hold the line in position, while another had run to the cashier for a bag of sixpences. With the jackpot payout locked in position, they then fooled the machine into paying out four times.

  By the time we hit the Humber Bridge a couple of hours later, we were the best of mates; it was the way he liked it. The bridge was only just over three months old. We’d made a diversion to cross it especially; it seemed to me that it would represent a transformative moment. From one era into the next. At the time it was the largest single-span suspension bridge in the world – a big deal. I regaled my dad with facts I’d prepared: it was well over a mile long; the twin towers were further apart at the top than at the bottom due to the curvature of the earth; the south tower’s foundations were over one hundred feet deep because of the shifting sands of the estuary; it could bend more than ten feet in high winds.

  As we drove on to it, and the thrill rose up, my dad opened the windows in the Renault 5 GTL. A rush of bracing October wind flushed out the car. Keeping one eye on the road, he reached across me and flipped open the glove-box and fished something out; he’d obviously planned something; maybe it was a little speech he’d prepared. As we hit the middle of the bridge, he depressed the cigarette lighter and put what was in his hand – a small immaculately rolled joint – to his lips. The cigarette lighter popped out, and he pushed a Count Basie Orchestra cassette into the audio player. With one hand, he turned up the volume control, pulled the lighter out of the socket – the orange coil glowing – and touched the end of the twizzled paper. It flared, then blazed. Wind howled in the cabin behind. The languid slow swinging melancholy of Basie’s ‘Li’l Darlin’’ filled the car. He took two small drags before holding his breath, and without a word, passed me the joint, and – as if taking part in a small but perfect ritual – I did the same, as the vast glittering water of the Humber spread out beneath us, and we drove on into Hull with unhurried panache.