by Ben Watt
I imagined him in his coffin. Jane, Roly’s ex-wife, had wanted to put him in something smart for the occasion; she’d chosen his double-breasted blue blazer and tartan trousers and had helped get the body dressed. It wouldn’t have been my choice – not that I could have gone through with it – but if I had, I think I would have picked one of his snappy bird’s-eye-check Savile Row suits from the late fifties, with a knitted tie, and perhaps a ciggy between his fingers. The smoking may have killed him, but one last defiant stand might have seemed appropriate.
I looked out into the largely empty chapel. The website said there was room for ninety. We must have mustered about eighteen. Almost all family. A couple of faces from the care home. I’d taken out a ‘death notice’ in the Guardian at 48p a word:
WATT, Tommy. Bandleader, arranger and jazz pianist. Died peacefully on 20 May 2006 aged 80. A much-loved husband to Romany, father to Ben, and stepfather to Simon, Roly, Toby and Jennie. Funeral – Friday 26 May, 1p.m., Westerleigh Crematorium, Bristol. Flowers – R. Davis and Son.
It hadn’t attracted much of a walk-up.
I read some extracts from my book Patient during the service – the bit about when I was a kid and we went to football together, and then another bit about us all as a family having Saturday lunch after the customary visit to the pub, and I made reference to the obituaries that had been commissioned by the broadsheets in the week. I even read from the one Steve Voce had written that had already appeared in the Independent that morning:
No one had heard of Tommy Watt and then suddenly here he was leading a big band made up from the cream of the very best jazz players in the country. An exaggeration? Not when you say Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Ross, Tommy McQuater, Bert Courtley, Jackie Armstrong, Phil Seamen and the other names. And they didn’t just play for Tommy on his records; they appeared under his leadership in broadcasts, clubs and concerts. Amazingly gigs with the Tommy Watt Band seemed to take precedence over all their other work and if they ever did have to send in deps then the deps were top-liners too. At a time when rock ’n’ roll permeated everything Tommy Watt somehow managed to get his band before the audiences . . . Over the years Watt was revered by musicians in many fields, but pretty well obscure to the general public.
I’d rung the papers a few days earlier saying I was preparing the death notice and would any of them be interested in an obituary. I wasn’t sure if he meant anything to anyone any more. They said they’d speak to their jazz writers and get back to me. Within an hour, I’d had calls from Dave Gelly at the Daily Telegraph, Peter Vacher from the Guardian, and Steve Voce. I was quietly thrilled at the speed of their response. It had seemed somehow necessary to me to get him acknowledged. After all, all that obscurity had done for him in so many ways. Or perhaps I was just channelling my mum: we don’t exist unless someone’s writing about it. Brian Rix had rung me that morning to say what a great and accurate portrait the Independent had painted, so I guessed it had been worth it. Either that, or part of Brian is the same as my mum.
We played some of my dad’s music. I’d unearthed a crackly ten-inch acetate cut at a live radio session of a tune he had written for my mum in the early sixties called ‘Wholesome Girl’ – a description that perhaps described the woman he wanted, rather than the woman she may have wanted to be – but, title aside, it is a beautiful piece of writing, especially when stripped of its rather treacly lyrics (written by someone else) and returned to its original soaring and romantic instrumental melody. The version I found was recorded solely with an orchestra; the pops and crackles on the recording lent it a time-trapped authenticity as it pealed out in the chapel, and as it was playing I wondered if all couples who live together for a long time can pinpoint a moment when things were at their most perfect, and in which they felt they were most themselves, because that was what the music seemed to be saying about my mum and dad.
We played some Billy Connolly and there was a prayer for those who wanted it, and then it was over. I’d thought about playing ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ from the Morecambe and Wise Show to round it off, but in the end I chose the ballsiest of the four Forty-Two Jazz Band recordings, and the curtains finally closed around his coffin during a rather fine tempestuous Bert Courtley solo.
Outside, people were gathering in the covered walkway. The wind was sharp and biting. I was surprised to see so many flowers had been delivered, all laid out along the trellis fencing; perhaps the death notice had worked after all. I bent down to read a few and didn’t recognise any names until I realised almost all of them were from the previous funerals that morning. As I was straightening up, one caught my eye; it was the only one for my dad not from the family. It was from Bobby Wellins, the Scottish tenor saxophone player. I unclipped the card from the cellophane bouquet and slipped it in my pocket.
There were a few tears and clinches and kind words but it was too cold to stand around. Within five minutes we had all dispersed to our cars.
An hour later we were gathered together in Roly’s sitting room in his unostentatious fifties brick vicarage paid for by the Church Commissioners, with plates of food on our laps. Someone suggested putting on some of Tom’s music, but no one had any. We fell into familiar roles: Roly softly shepherding; Jane briskly serving food; Toby breaking the ice with one-liners and hearty laughter; teenage children prowling self-consciously; me sitting quietly on the sidelines. And everyone was gently laughing at Jennie – still the butt of so many jokes, padding round in her stockinged feet. Jennie sitting in the wrong place. Jennie speaking with her mouth full. Jennie forgetting what she was saying. It must have been like that since she was a child. And now she was fifty-two. And I could see Eddie, her husband, biting his lip. And suddenly I was angry for her, and when she came over to thank me for the ‘lovely words’ at the service and tell me that she wanted to write to me to express properly what she felt about it all, I gave her the biggest hug, and our eyes were glistening with tears.
Across the room, my mum was sitting silently in an armchair staring into space. She still had her coat on. She had refused food and was on her third large whisky.
‘I’ll get her back in a minute,’ Roly said, as I passed him in the hall. ‘She’s not used to being allowed three any more.’
‘Is she OK?’ I said.
‘Who knows. She’s definitely confused. She has no idea where she’s been today. Whether it will settle down, only time will tell. You’d hope so.’
‘What about Tom’s ashes?’
‘Yes. That needs sorting. He talked about having them scattered somewhere.’
‘Here?’
‘No, maybe in Barnes, in the river. Or he talked about somewhere in Oxford. One of his walks with the dog.’
I went back into the room to see my mum attempting to lever herself out of the chair. Someone steadied her. Once she was on her feet, Roly scooted over and got his arm under her armpit and I could see him saying something in her ear, and she was nodding. ‘Whatever’s best, dear,’ I could hear her say. ‘Whatever’s best.’
When she was settled to go, and we were focused on her leaving, she looked up at the assembled room and said, ‘Thank you for a lovely day, whoever you are.’
Everyone laughed. Half in jest. Half not.
Chapter 35
I went back to see my psychiatrist. I told him my dad had died since I last saw him. It seemed comically unfortunate.
‘And how does it make you feel?’ he asked.
‘I think he’d had enough.’
‘So?’
‘So I suppose I am pleased. For him.’
‘And you?’
‘I think it’s too early to say.’
He asked me about the medication. I told him that it was leaving me stable and sleepy during the day but wakeful at night, that I was forever yawning, that my ears were ringing in the silence of the bedroom at night, that my shoulders and legs felt cramped and I was sleeping face down and outstretched like a skydiver, and that I dreamt the upper floor of an imaginary house I was living in was haun
ted and it had made me wake shouting and crying.
‘Anything else?’
‘Isn’t that enough?’
‘All pretty normal, and it will settle down,’ he said, jotting some notes. ‘Give it a few more weeks. You’ll get there.’
Back out on the street with more prescriptions in my hand I told myself this was the new normal, and soon there would be a better normal, and hopefully, in time, things would go back to normal normal.
A couple of weeks later I got into the car to make a journey I’d been quietly dreading. The route was a familiar one: out on the A40 past Northolt Aerodrome and the Polish war memorial and on to the M40 past Beaconsfield and High Wycombe. It was the same journey I’d made to Oxford in the nineties, wondering what mood my mum and dad would be in, yet always optimistic. I reached the Headington roundabout and took the usual ring road out to the south past Cowley, counting the roundabouts in the same way I had counted them when I first ever visited them, scanning the sky for clouds, hoping for a fine morning, but when I got to the Abingdon Road turn-off and the road up to Folly Bridge I carried straight on heading for Boars Hill, where my dad used to walk his dog.
I’d agreed to meet Roly in a pub car park near by; he was driving from Bristol. It took me a while to find it. I drove up and down the same country road a couple of times. I got there first. When he finally pulled in it was like we were involved in some kind of undercover operation.
‘All OK?’ I said.
He was out of the car by then. He tapped the boot lid, signalling to its contents. ‘Yup.’
‘Come on then. You follow me.’
He went for a piss in the pub and then we got back into our cars and pulled back out on to the country lane. Within five minutes I had found the twisting climbing narrow road that I’d remembered from the only time I’d been up it. At the top by a slatted gate and woods and a bridleway I pulled over, and Roly pulled in behind me. I got out and walked round to the back of his car, as if we were second-rate criminals handing over a smuggled firearm. I wondered if anyone was watching us, but there was no one around. Rooks cried harshly in the woods. I expected him to open the boot and there would be a shotgun wrapped in a towel.
He already had the back of the car open and was reaching inside when I got to him, and then he turned to me and in his hands was a large green plastic container with a screw lid. My first thought was its shape was like the sweet jars in the corner shop where I used to spend my pocket money as a boy. They’d come down from the shelves and be tipped, in a cloud of fine white sugar, into the stainless-steel bowl on the scales. Kola Cubes. Drumsticks. Barratt’s Shrimps. Only the jar in his hands wasn’t transparent. It was a solid colour. More like the plastic from which a garden bucket might be made.
‘Is that it?’ I said.
‘As far as I know,’ he said smiling. He went to hand it over.
I took it from him. It was much heavier than I expected. The static on the plastic had attracted a fine grey dust.
‘How do they know . . .’ I said, faltering.
‘. . . That it’s all him?’ Roly said.
I nodded.
‘They claim they rake it out after each cremation, so you can be pretty sure it’s at least mostly him.’
I smiled. ‘Come on then, let’s get on with it.’
We walked a little way back down the hill to the entrance to the woods. There was an Oxfordshire County Council Map showing some trails. A woman in a bright blue ski hat was coming out through the gate with a dog on a lead. It was the middle of June but the sky was overcast and a fresh wind was on the top of the hill.
I’d walked through the gate once before, more than ten years earlier, with my dad and his dog Rosie. It was one of his favourite spots: a sleepy hamlet; bluebells in April; a short stroll, not too exerting; a contemplative view over Matthew Arnold’s Field and the distant sandy spires of Oxford. We’d driven up in his Mazda, green wellies in the boot. Rosie was a lovely dog with a kind inquisitive face. Once out of the car she’d turned for a look of approval from my dad before bounding away and springing after squirrels. He doted on her. It struck me that a dog is the jazzman’s ideal sideman: the unquestioning, willing companion; no need for language, just gesture and tone; prepared to journey where you journey. It was a tragedy when Rosie died so unexpectedly, aged only eight, tumbling down a flight of stairs on a routine evening at home, witnessed only by Roly’s son Sam who was six at the time and visiting with his family. She’d had an undiagnosed thyroid condition and suffered a heart attack. Sam walked into the sitting room where all the adults were talking and said, ‘Rosie just fell down the stairs.’ Within a couple of hours, and a fruitless run to the vet, there wasn’t a sign in the house that my mum and dad had ever owned a dog. My dad had insisted that everything was either taken away by Roly or dumped. Only a few photographs were kept. One of my dad’s favourites was one of me, lying on my back looking up at the sky, with Rosie still on her lead looking out to sea, on a wide empty shingle beach at Cley on the Norfolk coast during a brief holiday in 1989, when I drove up to see them for twenty-four hours. On reflection, Rosie seemed to symbolise the good years: bought just before they moved to Oxford; a shot in the arm; tugging them eagerly through their short autumnal renaissance. They never replaced her, although they talked about it once, but within a year my dad’s health had worsened and then there was no question of it.
We’d walked a little way into the woods and stopped by a stone seat in a hollow surrounded by the exposed roots of the trees above.
‘Do you want to do this on your own?’ Roly said.
‘Perhaps I should,’ I said, although I didn’t know what I wanted.
‘I’m fine with that. Really.’
We made our goodbyes and he walked off back along the path. I watched until he was out of sight, thinking how he’d driven all that way to hand me the jar – should I call it an urn? – and was now going to drive all the way back.
It felt lonely in the woods. The sky was grey. I kept looking up in the hope that a patch of blue might make me feel better about it all. The wind was between the trees. I looked all around but could see no one approaching. Standing by the bench I began unscrewing the lid. It turned crunchily, and then there I was looking at the contents, full almost to the brim, like the rakings from a winter fire, of mixed consistency, part powdery, part unburnt. Why I had chosen to stop by the bench I wasn’t sure. In my mind’s eye I had imagined a sunlit hilltop that I could have slowly encircled – young lush sappy grass, buttercups, Christ Church visible, livestock grazing – but here I was in unspecific overcast woods by a random stone seat of no particular meaning other than it triggered an instinct. Seat: rest. Stone: enduring.
I walked behind it and tipped some of the ashes on the ground, like flour from a jar, and then made a circle around it. It left a grey trail. Clearly visible. It made me think of The Railway Children and the boy with the bag over his shoulder who leaves the paper trail through the fields for the runners and then injures his leg in the tunnel. I began to walk away from the bench and along a path to a fence and the edge of the wood, attracted by the light from the field beyond. I kept pouring. When people said ‘scattering ashes’ I’d envisaged a handful, not this, not a huge jar full of them. Tiny pieces of bone tumbled out too, and the wind blew ash on to my trousers as I walked, and I involuntarily brushed it away before realising what I was brushing. I half leapt back, a little spooked, and some of the ashes slopped out, but I kept going until I got to the fence.
I looked back. It was as though I’d laid a trail of gunpowder. I questioned if I was even in the right spot. Perhaps he’d hated this part of the woods. It was too late now. The urn was half empty. Along the edge of the fence ran a bridleway, muddier with the imprint of horses’ hooves. I walked a short way along the fence line, emptying the remaining ashes before reaching another bench, this time just an ordinary wooden municipal bench, the kind seen in parks in every town. I stopped and sat on it. Right in the middle. It f
elt right. Simple. The field was empty but for a lone grazing horse.
To my left, at the end of the field where the bridleway stopped, I could see the slatted gate close to where I’d parked. Another car had pulled up facing the field. Inside I could see a middle-aged couple looking out. The man – who was sitting in the driving seat – was pouring something hot from a thermos into his cup. The woman in the passenger seat was eating a sandwich. Under the damp matt grey light everything seemed silent and remote. All I could think of was the mess I had left through the woods, and I worried that people would come across it later and wonder what it was. I wondered if my dad had experienced this view – like this – the hushed wind in the woods behind, this stillness, this silence, this matt sky, these uneventful minutes. And then as I stood up to go, the empty urn under my arm, I saw the horse move into the centre of the field and raise its head, framed by the sunless clouds behind, and it looked majestic and proud.
Chapter 36
‘He still visits me, you know,’ my mum said, her pallid eyes turned to the window.
It was September 2006, almost four months since my dad had died.
I sat close to her on the footstool beside her chair. ‘Does he?’ I said.
‘Oh, yes. Quite often lately.’ She ran the tips of her fingers gently back and forth on the velour of the armrest.
‘How does he arrive?’
Her fingers stopped. I saw the answer appear in her face before a faint wrinkle of doubt flashed across her brow, and she seemed to question what she was about to say. Then she dismissed it and said quite plainly, ‘Through the curtains. Just there.’ She gestured to the long curtains by the locked and alarmed double-glazed PVC door and window at the end of the room.
It was a narrow single room on the ground floor, perhaps fifteen feet long and about nine feet wide, the door and window in the end wall overlooking the car park, and the kitchen staff on their smoke breaks and the fields beyond. She’d been moved in not long after the funeral. A single bed and the last few pieces of her furniture stood along the walls: a tall narrow bookcase of scrapbooks and photo albums near the window; a small red metal office chest of drawers; two armchairs (the green leather one of my dad’s she never used); the large square footstool in a dark William Morris floral print on which I was sitting; the TV that she never turned on; and a slim sixties side table topped with ceramic tiles depicting musical instruments, which I knew from Barnes and brought to mind my dad’s blue Senior Service Satisfy ashtray, flecks of ash, his retractable Sheaffer ballpoint pen and a copy of The Times folded into quarters to show the crossword puzzle. A teak dresser that I didn’t recognise full of photos and a few ornaments took up most of the space inside the door; maybe it belonged to the previous occupant and they couldn’t get it out. Roly had hung some pictures of caravans and one of my dad’s Centre 42 jazz posters on the pale apricot walls papered in woodchip. An adjustable-height invalid table on wheels with a lip around the edge to stop things sliding off was parked near her chair in the middle of the room.
