Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  A little later, Roly arrived to give me a lift to the station. His battered hatchback saloon car was a tip. Although ordained as an Anglican priest back in 1978, he resigned his parish in south London in 1990 and trained at a circus school in Bristol, before embarking on a vocational second life as a touring professional clown telling stories from his slack rope with a Christian punchline. We’ve never talked about it much. There’s not a lot to say. It is so outside my frame of reference that I often don’t know where to start. I just tell myself it’s a question of belief, and leave it at that. But we get on. We chat mainly about football and the family, and can share a good joke and a pint, and I respect his choices. The back seats were laid flat and all the available floor space was covered in his paraphernalia: red metal frames, ropes, juggling rings, wooden crosses, greasepaint, a foot pump. The dashboard was coated in dust and dog hair. A cold coffee beaker and a half-eaten tub of mints sat by the gearstick. The LCD screen above the radio showed an insistent warning message about the engine. The footwell was home to an empty sandwich carton and a couple of chocolate wrappers.

  ‘They seem to be doing all right,’ I said, the hedgerow brushing the wing mirror on the narrow lane.

  ‘Yes, they’re settling in,’ he said. ‘Mum seems more relaxed, now there are other people to keep an eye on Tom.’

  ‘I worry about his chest.’

  ‘Of course. It’ll be the thing that does for him. A bad winter.’

  ‘And Mum?’

  ‘An ox. Like Nunu. She’s registered down here now, and they’ll keep giving her check-ups, but since the op there’s a fair chance she’ll be in the clear in terms of the cancer. Something else will have to get her when the time comes.’

  We turned on to the A38 heading back to Stoke Gifford and the northern suburbs of Bristol.

  ‘Do they mix with the other residents at all?’

  ‘Did they ever! No, they stay in their room most of the time. Tom has to, really. There’s an outing to Weston-super-Mare soon. I’ll see if I can’t get him a wheelchair and get them to get out on the coach for the day.’

  ‘Thanks for doing this,’ I said.

  ‘It’s fine. You did your bit in London. Jennie’s near by now too. Only half an hour for her. We’ll get there.’

  And I looked at the road up ahead and I realised that was the thing we were all steadying ourselves for: a time and a place somewhere up ahead. When and how it would come we didn’t know. Who first? In pain or in peace? Quick? Or drawn out? A future we cannot outrun.

  We crested the hill and dropped down off the main road into Little Stoke and turned off by the Rolls-Royce factory – the old home of British Aerospace, where they built Concorde – the windows of the abandoned low-rise buildings on the opposite side of the road shattered with bricks and stones behind boundaries of wire fencing.

  He dropped me off at Bristol Parkway Station. As we said our goodbyes and I crossed the road towards the entrance, I passed the minicab pick-up. A few drivers were out of their cabs, chatting and smoking. Near the front I saw Karl’s Nissan Primera. Next to him in the passenger seat was an elderly woman. They looked like they were sharing a good joke. His mum. It had to be.

  Chapter 29

  As the train back to London picked up speed, passing flooded meadows and fields corrugated with rain, I found myself dwelling on the big move my mum and dad made in 1988 – leaving Barnes for Oxford – and how it had sounded surprising yet so seductive. They told me they’d bought a house on the river. I pictured episodes of Inspector Morse and Brideshead Revisited: quads and clock towers; cattle grazing on Christ Church Meadow; the punts and the boatyards; willows lolling over the Cherwell. I suppose it chimed with my enduring idealistic desire to see them miraculously lifted out of their fractious love-hate lives and transformed into well-rounded and contented members of the imaginary happy middle class. Uncomplicated, self-sufficient, loving parents with hobbies and interests. Abiding good health. Cast-iron independence. A state of grace perhaps. I daydreamed about a Strawberry Hill Gothic villa with French windows and a little river frontage, possibly a jetty. They’d certainly made a killing on the Barnes house – sold at the peak of the Thatcherite property boom. Was it too much to expect? Too fanciful?

  As I approached the town from the south and drove across the resplendent gateway of Folly Bridge for the first time – the grandeur of St Aldate’s and Wren’s octagonal lantern for Tom Tower rising ahead of me – I forked left into the municipal one-way system of Thames Street, away from Christ Church, and turned sharp left again into the shadows, and could sense I was still on the embankment of the river but it wasn’t the one I’d idly imagined.

  In front of me, an arrangement of new-built narrow modern terraced houses with brown window frames huddled together in a small cul-de-sac. My first uncharitable thought was not Brideshead but Brookside. Yet as my fatuous dream evaporated I saw that my parents had chosen far more sensibly than I could ever have selfishly envisaged: a low-maintenance four-year-old modern house; warm; convenient; secondary glazing; a decent river view; off-street parking; tiny courtyard garden. In fact, just perfect if you are in your mid-sixties and looking to resettle out of the city. It also emerged that one of my mum’s best and oldest girlfriends from her days in the Wrens now lived in the development near by with her husband – an acclaimed professor of radiology. They had personally recommended it. I felt a bit of a fool.

  I’ve often wondered what they must have said to each other to pull themselves out of the bleak Barnes years of the early eighties for long enough to make the decision to uproot themselves. But when I think of it, perhaps it wasn’t such an upheaval after all. There was little left to keep them: the children had grown up and left home; Katie Boyle had retired from the TV Times meaning the remainder of my mum’s writing career was no longer tied to town; my dad had fallen out of love with the pubs. Perhaps it was staring them in the face. Even a snap decision. It was as if all that was left to them was themselves, and they had to choose. Split up acrimoniously. Or start again. With each other.

  And so here I was, watching them choosing to start again. Again. Dusting themselves off. Still sustained by each other. Co-dependent. On the verge of a new moment.

  My dad was on the wagon. (Again.) My mum had joined him. (Again.) But they had recently bought a dog, an affectionate springy young Irish terrier called Rosie – the same breed my dad had chosen when he lived in Blackheath after he first moved to London after the war – and ‘exercise’ was suddenly all the rage. It caught me by surprise. Up until then, in spite of his having spent twenty-six years living on the edge of Barnes Common and a mile from the sweeping acres of Richmond Park, walking from the bar to the Gents and back had largely been my dad’s idea of a stroll, but now local maps were being scrutinised and new circular walks devised, and soon he was driving every day up to Boars Hill or Shotover to amble through the woods, whistling for the dog, marching with a cane, making small talk with other owners he might bump into, stopping for a fag, leaning on a fence.

  Not to be outdone, my mum would pop out with the dog in the mornings. The downstairs kitchen had glazed doors that opened on to a tiny postage-stamp patio garden that she’d neatly stocked with a blackberry bush, a cotoneaster and a couple of vibernums. She’d open the low metal gate directly on to the treeless tarmac towpath, where the swans came right up to the concrete bank, and turn right for a ten-minute mosey past the back of the new developments along Thames Street, and up on to the rusting ugly thirties footbridge that joined St Ebbe’s on the north side to Grandpont to the south. It was hardly the Ramblers’ Association but it was a start.

  After lunch they’d choose outings that satisfied each’s interests – not one of their strong points – while steadfastly avoiding a pub. For my dad this meant a run-out in his new Mazda and a chance to enjoy the silent creak-free cabin (‘What was that? Can you hear that rattle?’) and the occasional foot-to-the-floor burst of speed on an empty stretch of country lane, the hedgerow
s of the Chilterns racing past the windows. (‘Can you feel that kick-down?’) For my mum it meant a visit to a garden centre – Waterperry Gardens was a favourite – or a postcard fair or a village emporium. A dog show somewhere with an Irish terrier category could be a major highlight.

  And they reminded themselves what they liked about each other: the shared sense of humour; the two of them charismatically braced against the world; the daily hugs and the kisses; the gentle teasing; the enduring moments of physical attraction. They’d be back home in time for Fifteen to One – perhaps looking forward to a little Bergerac later on – and on summer evenings, as the sun was dropping behind the new Pembroke College dormitory building on the south side of the river, casting long warm shadows into their cosy draught-free first-floor sitting room, they’d push away the near-overpowering instinct for the first gin and tonic of the evening, and smile at each other over the top of the crossword, and pour another cup of tea, or sip on a sparkling water.

  The move to Oxford coincided with a brief flirtation Tracey and I had with the countryside. The same year my parents left Barnes we bought a small thatched cottage in the secluded hamlet of Winwick in Northamptonshire. It was all about the log fire and the muddy walks and the church bells, and getting away from the music business, and for a year – until we soon tired of it and yearned for London again – our lives were travelling at similar speeds. My mum and dad would put Rosie in the back of the Mazda and drive cross-country on the A45 for lunch and a walk. Sobriety made my dad subdued but at least we didn’t argue. The novelty of it all was sustaining him. And the Christmas of 1988 was one of the happiest I can remember. My half-sister Jennie came too. Five Go Mad In Northamptonshire. Tracey cooked a fibrous nut roast and Brussels sprouts (we were vegetarians then), my dad drank Perrier water while we drank Perrier-Jouët, and by the evening we were all farting merrily round the fire. Even my mum let her guard down. ‘Oh all right then!’ she said, the last to crack during a long game of Trivial Pursuit. – ‘If you’re all at it, so am I’ – and she lifted her buttock off the cushion and cut one loose with remarkable abandon. ‘I’ve been holding it in for hours!’

  In spite of its unforgiving new-build proportions, the new house in Oxford soon took on their imprint. My mum’s paintings and posters of Romany and theatre life filled the walls. Dark floral shawls were draped over side tables and chairs. Eunice’s remaining antiques – a barometer, a seaman’s chest, bentwood chairs – and their own junk-shop bargains softened the corners. Autumnal paint and carpet colours of rust, sage green and apricot appeared. My dad’s Ivor Novello statuette took pride of place next to a scale caravan made out of matchsticks. There were embroidered cushions, a terrarium, and in the kitchen my moving-in present to my dad – a vintage seventies Fender Rhodes electric piano to replace the acoustic piano they were forced to leave behind.

  If my mum and dad drove to Northamptonshire, we paid return visits to Oxford. All four of us often drove out to Long Crendon at lunchtime where I sank a pint of Flowers while my dad stayed on Coca-Cola, and then we all pottered round the offbeat second-hand emporium next door run by a silly man called Val who wore rabbit-ears for fun, spoke in spoonerisms, and swept breakages up in his ‘crush and bum tray’. My mum would find old postcards for her collection among the junk, I’d rummage through old vinyl, Tracey looked for books and ornaments, while my dad stood outside with the dog, smoking.

  Perhaps as I caught glimpses of him through the window I should have realised that all of this was not going to be enough for him. It was my mum’s new life in retirement we were living, not his. There was still the dog to walk to keep him active and occupied, but perhaps no one should have been surprised when his appetite for another rare plant fair or Pottery in Action soon started to wane and he was calling upstairs to say he was just popping out to ‘scout out the neighbourhood’. This of course was not-very-secret code for checking out the local pubs, but he ended up disappointed. The new young Oxford bar managers were unfamiliar and standoffish, and tourists and students in noisy saloons with background chart music were never going to be his style. And so instead, unable to throw off the old urges, he pulled his familiar comforts around him and retreated to the kitchen. He found a local joiner who built him a sturdy storage unit by the back door that held all his jazz records and his hi-fi system, and in the evenings he had soon returned to his familiar routine of cooking and drinking from five o’clock and letting old records make him lachrymose and unsettled. Three hours later my mum would be left with a fully cooked meal in the warming drawer and a husband who had gone to bed while it was still light outside.

  It was 1991, little more than two years since moving to Oxford, and they were back with what they had left behind in Barnes.

  ‘Come back, Nunu, all is forgiven! What are you doing to me? Let me do what I want,’ my dad wrote in a sour note left out for my mum that barely concealed his underlying unhappiness. I found it among her souvenirs.

  ‘With pleasure,’ she’d scribbled tartly on the bottom in return. ‘I’d forgotten how unpleasant you can be.’

  Why did she keep this stuff?

  It felt so dark. Almost impregnable. For a while I confronted him, caused a scene in the kitchen, or wrote trite letters of disappointment, too young to realise that you can’t beat a drunk with a stick. I thought everything could still be all right, and he would finally wake up and reconstruct his life, and I went on believing it for a long time.

  And then in 1992 I got ill.

  Very ill.

  In fact, I nearly died.

  More than once.

  When I think of my parents and how they hauled themselves out of their slump and coped – of all the blind commitment and self-commiserating confusion from my mum, all the evasion from my dad and then our poignant reconciliation – it seems wrong to skate over those life-changing few months so quickly, but the whole story is documented in detail elsewhere, in the book I wrote about it, Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness.

  But when I think past those weeks in hospital, and think of the aftermath – when I was out of the woods, and through the awful internalised months of convalescence, and how my mum and dad visited me, still shell-shocked at the whole thing, still startled by my weight loss and shamed by my resilience – I see a beautiful photograph that Tracey (a self-confessed technophobe) took on Hampstead Heath in 1993, a year after I left hospital, and it is one of my favourite photographs: the place we all finally got to for a while.

  My mum and my dad – sixty-nine and almost sixty-eight – and Jennie, then thirty-nine, had all come up to London for a Sunday roast to celebrate my dad’s birthday. It was a cold bright late October day, the green leaves of summer drooping in the trees, and after lunch we wrapped up warm and walked the long Boundary Path that cuts across the Heath from the Pryors over to Highgate Ponds, beneath the broad-leafed shelter of the avenue of lime trees, past the replanted saplings from the hurricane of 1987. We turned south-east along the viaduct road, past the football pitch and the metal open-air changing room by the old brickworks, and found a park bench on the path, looking south-west down over the shallow valley and the course of Hampstead Brook below. The sun was low: amber and coppery in the western sky. Tracey took the camera and the rest of us assembled like a football team for a photograph. My mum and Jennie stood behind the bench, my dad and I sitting on the bench itself in front.

  When Tracey clicked the shutter she captured my mum in a belted teal-blue trench coat, her charcoal hair tumbling out in natural waves from her crimson beret, her face set strong and serious and wilful, like some kind of resistance fighter. Jennie, in a borrowed coat and corduroy hat, has her head cocked slightly on to her shoulder, diffusing confrontation, her hands lightly and protectively on my dad’s shoulders in front, her dark-lidded eyes both ardent and tender-hearted. My dad is wearing a navy storm-jacket with a white fleece lining that I bought him once for his birthday on a whim, not knowing if he would like it; it became a major winter favourite. The
pale lining reflects the sun up into his meek, stone-cold-sober face. In his right gloved hand is his walking stick planted between his legs, as if gently marking the spot, as if he is saying, ‘We are all here. In this moment.’ He is wearing round, wire-rimmed Lennon glasses and his hair is crinkled from the damp autumnal air. He has one of the gentlest smiles I think I can ever remember seeing on his face. An adult and a boy in one. I am sitting beside him in jeans and a woollen hunting cap and a black-leather oil-rigger’s jacket, all gaunt and bearded and glint-eyed. And the low cupreous light from the October sun illuminates the faces, and the figures glow like a kind of formal religious painting. Connected. Steadfast. And when I last looked at it, I realised that all of the photos of my dad that I cherish are the ones in which he is sober.

  Chapter 30

  A few weeks before the photograph was taken, my dad was driving the long way home to Oxford after a walk with his dog, Rosie, up on Boars Hill. The late-summer sun was shining and he had the Duke Ellington Orchestra on the stereo. In the outside lane of the motorway he gear-shifted contentedly up into fifth and eased the car up to seventy-five miles an hour. He loved driving; he always had done. He spent hours poring over technical specifications in Car magazine. It was such attention to detail that had recently convinced him to replace his groovy French Renault 5 with a coolly efficient Mazda 323F, and in so doing to make a radical and decisive break from years of loving voguish European cars to loving his new sportily aerodynamic yet reliable Japanese car. In fact, he was loving driving it right at that moment. And then, with no warning, his right arm fell off the steering wheel and lay like a dead weight in his lap.