by Ben Watt
Half an hour later we both arrived stoned at my student house. As a first year, I’d been allocated a room by the university in a terraced road next to the campus. My dad parked outside and we rolled into the house like seasoned pros. Six of the eight other students were already there. ‘Put the kettle on, fellas,’ my dad cried convivially, before sauntering into the sitting room, flopping into an armchair and putting his feet up on someone’s cello case. ‘And while you’re at it, there’s a trunk in the back of the car. It’ll only need two of you. Thanks, lads.’ Mesmerised by his presence, two fresh-faced eighteen-year-old scientists dutifully went out and lugged my belongings up to the first floor without a word. Tea was then poured, and my dad held court for forty-five minutes with gags and stories, before he levered himself out of the chair, made his goodbyes, went for a slash, slapped me on the back and then proceeded to drive all the way home.
In contrast, my mum was momentarily teary, but generally self-contained and quietly supportive. She wished me luck, told me the fact that my girlfriend was going to the University of East Anglia while I was going to Hull would ‘work itself out in time’ and said she’d write often. And so she did; and with it started a new kind of relationship between us – at a distance, through correspondence, where she painted her life in comic, tender and thoughtful tones. If my dad needed the cut and thrust of a one-to-one alliance to come alive, it was as though the opposite were true of my mum, and it was humour and affection from a distance that seemed to make her more herself. She wrote not long after I’d left:
The beech in front is bare of leaves, and there are tons on the path. John Kentish tries to move them – one of the labours of Hercules. Had a mini bomb scare in Tottenham Court Road last week. It was a hoax of course. Interviewing Ian Dury at Polydor tomorrow. If you want any records, let me know. Two LPs, perhaps. Also doing Judy Buxton from the RSC, so perhaps we could blag them [for tickets] sometime too! I am really struggling to think of anything to tell you. The most exciting is that we now have all the tits and finches on the bird-feeder on our kitchen windowsill. Eyeball to eyeball confrontation with coal tit during washing-up. We miss you, dear. Christmas will be quiet.
On the one hand I felt her writing flowed naturally with engaging pathos and timing, but also I thought that she enjoyed being unmediated by my dad’s presence in her letters, that she could be herself, and there was an element of writing to cheer me up, to make me laugh, to make me like her and miss her. Stuff like:
Was going to finish but might as well drivel on. It’s Katie Boyle’s birthday today! Gosh, I bet you’re thrilled. Kenny Everett was. He mentioned it on the radio. Milkman very late as the Pope was in Roehampton by 7.30 a.m.
Just written 1,750 words on Arthur Lowe for TV Times for first week in July, and received my ticket for my holiday in the Pyrenees. Do you want anything? After-shave? Espadrilles? WALLET? GOLD CHAIN?! Glorious day. Garden gorgeous.
Going to a Salvation Army knees-up on Saturday at the invitation of its current headman, Brigadier Nutty. I joke not. Roly is accompanying me. The invite was for me plus husband, but I didn’t think it was quite ‘TW’ [my dad].
Between the jokes, her antennae were still well tuned to others’ feelings. She wrote:
We are having great pleasure in sitting in your bedroom window for our breakfast coffee. This is something I have looked forward to for a decade – being able to sit on the sunny side of the house now and again. I have moved the rocker and one other small chair. PLEASE, we are NOT taking over your bedroom. Merely using it whilst you are away. OK?
She could also combine both; she wrote to me ‘on impulse’ after my dad was told locally that a boy who’d lived in our road had got ‘hooked on heroin’:
The papers have been full of terrifying stories all week about the rubbish which is being sold so cheaply to kids in London. I always think of you as being mature for your years – so forgive me for writing as an anxious mother! But I do believe it is more important to be aware of the dangers and care about what happens to your beloved children, rather than not mention it in embarrassment. Now for the funny bits: The Mousetrap party at the Savoy was really rather glamorous and I was on Nationwide last night in close-up talking to Bob [Robert] Hardy!! The titles were right across the middle of my face – fortunately. We did a 10p Yankee yesterday and one two weeks ago. In the first Benbow won (collected £8.50). Yesterday Tracey’s Special romped in at 12–1 . . . and Bernard Hepton gave me 2,000 postcards last month!
Her collecting of old postcards, like many of her pastimes, endured derision from my dad, as if it were another manifestation of all that was staid and conventional, and should therefore be renounced. But she carried on regardless and I wondered if it began as a way of documenting a life she felt was otherwise invisible. She had favourite, if unsurprising, categories – the theatre, Romany life, Barnes, birds, Fleet Street – and each month the demure Picture Postcard Monthly appeared in the flat to vie with my dad’s Jazz Journal and Private Eye. On Sundays, in my late teens, she raided Baldur’s, the chaotic antiquarian bookshop on Richmond Hill, which carried a hoard of postcards among its many books. It wasn’t far from home and I’d occasionally join her. Baldur’s had been run since 1936 by the same man: Eric Barton. He was liverish and curmudgeonly and often greeted us gruffly with the words ‘We’re closed’ until he saw who it was. He didn’t mind serious collectors. When she wasn’t collecting for herself, my mum selected apposite old postcards for family birthdays and occasions: I always got something musical; Tracey, often a female poet or a suffragette. I have many from the Hull days. The card would often be attached to a second-hand present. In Romany tradition – at least that’s what I took it to be – she enjoyed recycling family relics and badly gift-wrapping them, imbuing them with a significance that was lost on most of us. A chipped sandwich tray. A pair of ‘Gipsy’ Smith’s braces. Most of us would have been happy with a book token.
During my first year at Hull I began having my earliest success with my music, and then with the music I was writing and recording with Tracey. We’d met on our first day on campus – a meeting of strangers half planned. We were already both signed separately to the same small independent record label in London straight out of school, Tracey with her first band Marine Girls, me solo. It was suggested by someone at the label that we look each other up. A neat coincidence. Two like-minded souls in a remote northern town. Reviews and mentions and then full pages started to appear in publications like Melody Maker and NME. Of course both my parents were bowled over in their own separate ways. As late as 1997 my mum faxed me on tour saying that ‘to wake up in Los Angeles and read a feature on oneself in the LA Times’ – something that I’d told her had just happened to me – was her ‘idea of bliss’, so you can imagine how she felt when the coverage first started coming in. It was like an exquisite validation, and symptomatic of what I have often thought about her outlook on life: that any public existence is only of worth if someone is writing about it.
She adored attending our concerts. She requested an AAA (Access All Areas) tour pass and used the stage-door entrance – not the front door – whenever possible. Her desire to then hang around the murmuring inner sanctum of backstage preparations was sometimes as claustrophobic as it was endearing. In her sixties, she arrived like a discreet pearly queen, adorned in badges from previous shows, sporting an Everything But The Girl baseball cap at a spry angle, and I’d turn and find she’d been standing and observing me from the doorway of a dressing room – her face reflected in the Hollywood-bulb mirrors on the opposite side of the room, a picture of composed glee – waiting to catch the eye of her clever famous son. She would ask how the ‘notices’ had been for the tour (‘Notices were what you got performing in the theatre after the war, Mum’), and then slip away to her seat for the show, only to return again – perhaps on the arm of the tour manager – to soak up more. Afterwards, she labelled her backstage photographs with arrows and comments in the margins indicating who the ‘minor c
haracters’ were in the background – somebody’s granny, a roadie – in case, I imagine, she thought history might need them.
I used to wish sometimes she had been more unimpressed by it all, more outside the circle, less keen to be a character inside the circle. I think I would have preferred seeing her a few days after a concert and had her greet me with an artless maternal hug, and a ‘Did you, darling! I almost forgot! How marvellous! Let me get that kettle on and you can tell me all about it.’ Perhaps I was uneasy with the implication that my world was just a variation on her world, that it was all just another kind of showbiz. I was from a new generation – and in particular the year-zero generation of post-Punk. I was naturally keen to distance myself from any previous generation, in the delusion that we were somehow different. Now, of course, with hindsight, I see that it was just more showbiz, even if it was our generation’s showbiz.
My dad’s reaction was more complicated. On the one hand he was just plain proud: our early recordings borrowed jazz stylings; I’d written my first horn arrangements; and we’d featured one or two older established musicians he had introduced me to at the Bull’s Head – the alto sax player Peter King, and trumpeter Dick Pearce. Early on he wrote me a rare letter:
Dear Ben . . . I can hardly visit Seal’s [the local butchers] without the young staff patting me on the back. You can’t imagine the damage done to my suede jacket by hands – which though well-meaning and approving – are fresh from slicing a pound of offal. ‘It’s Ben Watt’s father again.’ . . . It’s all great news of you both. I am so very proud for you, and of you. We both look forward avidly to the music press this week. Write again soon, even if it’s only a blank cheque . . .
Amid the jokes, I took the compliments. As we progressed, however, I know he wrestled with the pop vocabulary of our recordings, and was more comfortable when the musicianship rather than the concept or intent was to the fore. Backstage I’d sometimes see him struggle to pay tribute to a performance, while remaining true to himself and not hurting our feelings. (‘Very direct.’ ‘You are unique.’) Not famed for his diplomacy, at least he was trying. Perhaps in his heart he dreamed I’d be a jazz guitarist – he bought me Joe Pass and Louis Stewart albums when I bought my first guitar. Instead I had moved into the idiom he had rejected, and then made a success of it. It must have left him conflicted, and sometimes – when he drilled right down into it – perhaps just silently and confusedly envious. In later years my mum said that at times of stress in Oxford he would retire to the kitchen and play our music on the stereo – particularly the jazz-inflected albums Eden and The Language of Life – so I know, in spite of any reservations he may have had, they had great meaning and resonance for him.
Reading back over my mum’s letters to me at university, among her quips and ruminations and the excitement over the music, I spot the little nervous pieces of news about unexpected pockets of work for my dad: a few welcome days of decorating for a friend; a chance to conduct a couple of his old arrangements for a local big band; some semi-pro nights at a hotel run by friends outside Cobham. Each mention seems so precious. A thin lifeline. They rise like distress signals, and the letters don’t seem quite so funny. I can picture their lives at the time: just enough work at the TV Times to keep my mum busy, but long unrelieved days of emptiness for my dad; and all the emptier since I’d left home.
Chapter 27
October 1983
Monday. 5.50 a.m. After a wakeful night.
Another week begins and I wake with those familiar feelings of suppressed dread and anxiety as to what will happen today, tomorrow and the next day.
I heard him come in before 1 a.m., and wonder whether the evening did anything to heal his tortured spirit. Today I go up to my office at the TV Times – a pleasure – I am all by myself and busy and interested all morning. By lunchtime, a small niggling thought insists on returning – will the car be in the car-port when I get home? If it isn’t, I try to go into neutral – a gear in which I seem to waste a great deal of time at the moment. It is a kind of numbness which means I waste less energy worrying and wanting to throw things, and working up to bouts of tears.
As I lie here in bed I think for the hundredth time how I love and pity this man I have married. I think again and again of what steps I would take to try and fill my mind: I would get my TV Times and Radio Times and mark daytime programmes I really wanted to watch. I would make sure I could see good series like Jane Eyre by changing my timetable. I would look up some new ways of cooking vegetables. I would get down some manuscript paper and try to start writing an arrangement for Willie’s band. I would get the compost heap ready for us. I would go to an afternoon film. I would try to structure my life differently. Mark books off in the paper and actually buy them or get them from the library. I would ask the Barnes Community Association if I could do anything with my car. But these are PIPE dreams.
My husband does none of these things because he doesn’t feel it worth the effort to try – he is too wrapped up in his own more global and personal problems. Basically, life is futile – apart from me and Ben and his music and jazz in general. How am I going to cope with watching the Tory Conference this week? How tragic and pathetic that such a subject should make my heart, physically, beat faster, and a kind of sick despair come over me.
I do not blame him. He is dealing with life in the only way he knows how . . . but with his charm, talent, personality – it’s a crying shame.
And I get to look more haggard each day as he gets more bloated.
And finally – each man is an island – what a tragedy. What goes on in his head – how does he feel, really and truly, now that he drinks fairly extensively? I hardly ever get the chance to spend time with him without some effect of alcohol. But I don’t believe it is time to call Al-Anon. The fearsome thing is that I do not know when that moment is imminent. Like Jennie, I feel totally helpless and overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem.
It’s OK for dear Ben to leave a note saying ‘Look after yourselves’, meaning, don’t go dramatically off and leave him to fend for himself (even for 24 hours) because it does no good. And he’s right. But it’s this holding back my real self all the time that is so exhausting. We are always talking on the bloody ‘Dear Katie’ page about self-respect. Where has his gone? He has so much to be proud of. Why does he make every effort to destroy himself ? Is it just a male menopause crisis? This obsession with the world situation is desperately hard to cope with. I feel guilty that I cannot feel as he does – and yet, isn’t there something rather perverse about his intolerance. We can no longer watch Agatha Christie, Reilly, the news, medical programmes or political diatribe of any kind. How can I broaden my own interests so that my life is not exclusively devoted to him (apart from my work)?
O, the unanswered questions. The defeatist feel to the whole of my life is wearing me out.
It must have been dark outside when my mum sat down in her study and wrote those words. The sun doesn’t rise until after seven in October. The flat would have been quiet. Not even the clicking of the cold copper pipes of the central heating as they slowly expanded with the first rush of hot water would have broken the silence; not before six. I picture my dad asleep in the other room, her in a nightie and overcoat at her desk, and the sound of her fountain pen scratching out the pale blue ink on to the large plain pad of ruled paper.
There is no date in the blue ink. Just the day and the time. First thing on a Monday morning. Something pressing on her mind. But it has been added above – October 1983 – in pencil, and the same pencil has been used on the envelope to write Personal – Come On, Romany. There is something about the two pencil inscriptions of the afterthought, as if written a little time later, at the moment the urge to write the rest of it all down had partly subsided, at the point the envelope was sealed and put into a drawer – another sad document for family posterity carefully dated.
But oddly it made its way into my mum’s silver-grey Harrods gift box of souvenirs. I foun
d it in there along with other important things like her baby notebooks and the telegrams of congratulations, a tiny red pair of shoes, the letter from Liz Taylor, her Diploma in Dramatic Art, bundled love letters, a postcard of snowdrops bought on the day of her mother’s death, and a graphologist’s analysis of her handwriting that opens with the helpfully flattering words, This is the handwriting of a highly intelligent, keenly perceptive woman.
There is an engaging indefatigable tone to the phrase Come On, Romany which seems at odds with the hopelessness of the final line of the letter itself. Together they seem to say so much about her. Soft on the inside. Flinty on the outside. She must have considered the letter important to have kept it among all those other important things, and – as with much of her carefully preserved archive – when I read it I couldn’t help but hear a voice that said, Make me heard. I should point out that much of her archive is interleaved with additional notes and arrows and codicils that say things like: ‘Read these, then throw way’; ‘Hadn’t the heart to get rid of this’; ‘Jennie might like these’; ‘Aborted autobiography notes – for family only’. They are signposts that tease and hint and cajole, and ultimately lead to the conclusion that one day she wanted it all known and understood.
I can also be assured the contents of the gift box represent the very heart of how she saw herself, as she was a furious editor as well as an archivist, often weeding out irrelevance and dead wood, throwing away second-rate features she had written, or inconsequential letters, as though she were aware she would be judged soon and was clearing a path to the essential stuff. She made a few wrong calls in my view; ninety per cent of her journalism was purged in the late nineties. She threw away many scrapbooks, keeping only her favourites and interviews with the most famous. I also went in search of one of her much-loved treasures – a first edition of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that I knew had been given to her by Richard Burton in Mexico complete with a dedication to her from him on the title page – but it was nowhere to be found; not among her souvenirs, nor on the bookshelf of any family member. I’d all but given up finding it when a random web search for the words ‘Richard Burton’ and ‘Romany Bain’ threw up a link to a second-hand bookshop in Southport, Lancashire. Sure enough, it had the very copy. She must have sold it or given it away to charity in the late nineties along with everything else. I bought it back. For a hundred pounds.
