Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  1957 bled into 1958. My mum was still with Ken and the children at the family home in York Avenue in East Sheen. My dad was still at his flat at The Lawns in Blackheath with June, albeit sleeping in separate rooms. With his quintet continuing in nightly residency at Quaglino’s, he began his new much-anticipated Wednesday lunchtime show (Time for Watt) with his jazz orchestra at the BBC on 8 January, which was to run for two months. Ken tried to turn a blind eye to the affair, hoping it would fizzle out, but he knew my mum and dad kept meeting.

  How did she find the time with four children? It’s something I’ve often asked myself, but with nannies and baby-sitters and her own mother now living near by in East Sheen, she did. Her written memories for my dad are studded with intense images and place names that stand witness to their resolve: ‘Thame and everything it stands for’; ‘the dream child ring I gave myself for us’; ‘the violets you brought to the Grenadier, the anemones last week’; ‘burying the wine bottle at Burnham Beeches’; ‘the birthday card and record in the Adelaide Rooms, and Fitz playing “Our Love Is Here To Stay” ’; ‘you asking me to marry you at Henley and on Hammersmith Bridge’. Yet for all their gameness, her letters of the time also reveal she worried that it might all burn out with the fervid intensity and effort; that my dad’s interest would fade if enforced duty and domesticity kept them apart in between. ‘I can’t bear the thought of you falling back into the old pattern,’ she wrote. ‘I feel you will move back into the bedroom one day, out of pity . . . and you will, out of circumstance and pressure, let things go on as they were.’

  If she was anxious in 1958, by the following year it had been replaced by a creeping despair. There were momentary highs (‘March ’59: The night I sat waiting for you with the Modern Jazz Quartet as background . . . and we decided we must tell them that we wanted to leave them’) but they were outweighed by the thick stagnancy of intervening weeks with little progress.

  If Ken lived on in the slim hope of a reconciliation, he also knew, as the days crawled by, that it was increasingly unlikely. He wrote in a note left out for her:

  You say you must be able to see a gleam of light, but it’s there, isn’t it? What you want will probably happen within two years. Perhaps before. Who knows? I can’t give you a date. At heart I hope – however stupid and selfish and naive that may be – that somehow or other it will never happen. But of course I couldn’t tie you to me, indefinitely, feeling as you do.

  I daren’t look ahead. I know you feel desperate, and that you often wish – as you say – that you were dead. But at least you have two things to look forward to: love, and the children. I lose both. I just don’t see a gleam for me.

  It’s all so much more complex than a few typed sentences can suggest. But this is meant, in a hamhanded way, to give you comfort. And I do hate to think of you being unhappy.

  Tom’s wife, June, meanwhile, had simply dug in for the long haul; if the law said three years for a divorce, then as far as she was concerned, three years it would be. If not more. Unwell, she was spending more time with her parents away from the flat in Blackheath, but wouldn’t countenance any discussion. My mum couldn’t help but be scornful. ‘Neurotic’ and ‘small-minded’ are words she uses to describe her in an early letter to Tom, yet no sooner has she written them on the page, than she feels a pang of sympathy: ‘God knows she feels the same as us, poor soul’, she inserts above the line.

  Looking again through the three pages of her private written memories of 1959, it is not hard to understand the tone of dreamlike reminiscence and elegiac melancholy with which many of them are set down, when one considers that the rest of her life must have still felt so stuck; no further forward, two years on, from the tense deadlock of that first autumn after June found out. She ends with words for my dad: ‘I promise I will read this through and draw on it as you suggested, whenever I am niggly enough to be miserable again.’

  It must have seemed at times as if memories might be all she could be left with.

  I moved the apple crumble off the table and put a small portable CD player in its place.

  ‘I’ve brought you some music, Mum.’

  She said nothing, just eyed my movements. She’d lapsed into one of her dazes and we hadn’t spoken for five minutes or so. Pressing the play button brought the familiar chimes of ‘You Make Me Feel So Young’ from Frank Sinatra’s Songs For Swinging Lovers. Released in 1957, it had been the soundtrack to the early years of my mum and dad’s affair. ‘Every song was written for us,’ she’d once told me. I hoped she’d remember it.

  She squinted as the music played, trying to recognise it, and then suddenly she tuned in, and her head started bobbing as though a familiar pop song was playing on the radio, but she couldn’t quite place it. As the music registered with her more clearly, her eyes brightened and she started to mouth some of the lyrics. And then, quite unexpectedly, she started to sing the ends of lines, in a beautiful soft fluting voice, touching lightly and delicately on the words, her head gently wagging to the rhythm: ‘ “Picking up lots of forget-me-nots . . . A wonderful fling to be flung . . .” ’

  As the music faded, her head sagged a little and she looked down at her hands.

  ‘Another one, Mum?’

  ‘No. No more.’ She looked at me. ‘Is it too sad?’

  ‘For me?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Me too.’

  In the summer of 1960, three years after the affair had started, June’s resolve began to weaken. ‘Please let the holiday be happy,’ she asked of my dad in a letter, as they spent a sickly week in St-Tropez, in what she must have realised would be their final summer away together, ‘and then we’ll see.’ In December of the same year my dad jumped at the chance to decamp to Manchester as the new conductor of the Northern Dance Orchestra – the prestige of the appointment only matched by his keenness to leave the grim atmosphere of Blackheath – but if it eased the residual pressures at home it did little to dampen the affair.

  My mum prepared pre-paid lick-and-seal postcards for him, to be used as love dispatches from the north. She even added her name and address on the front in her own handwriting, so as not to alert Ken. If my mum’s preserved letters are lucid and thoughtful, the few cards and letters of my dad’s in her collection are blunt and endearingly corny and heartfelt. ‘I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY BEING!’ is all one of them says, all in capital letters. ‘My desire to be your husband is IMMENSE’ and ‘We must just hold on, my darling’ are typical of the economical style of the rest.

  But perhaps the most spectacular gesture of commitment saw my mum leave home in London not long after darkness fell in January 1961 seemingly for an evening out with friends. Instead she took the ring road north out of London, and drove on her own – using only long, foggy, single-lane carriageways – all the way to Manchester, where she spent one passionate hour with my dad, before driving all the way back before dawn in time to get the children off to school. In the days before much of the English motorway system was built, it must have amounted to a four-hundred-mile thirteen-hour round trip.

  The story was told lightheartedly by my dad during my growing up as further evidence – ‘if any more were needed’, he would joke – of my mum’s supposedly unquenchable lustful desire for him, and he would paint a lewd and humorous portrait of them getting it on in a tiny Didsbury kitchen, before she’d turned round and driven straight home again in the pouring rain, but it is clear from the letters that something else was on the agenda that night: she went to tell him she was pregnant. But not with me.

  Back in London, she wrote to him:

  Darling, I sometimes have fearful pangs that I should never have involved you in this at all. That I should have kept the secret to myself until this week – as I have from Ken – that I oughtn’t to have burdened you with it – that it spoils our particular happiness. But I am such a part of you now – I couldn’t not tell you – and yet I feel I have let you down in a strange way. I cannot
be entirely unfeeling about it and treat it as a slip – and yet I must not treat it desperately seriously. It’s Harley Street and the law that makes it seem an enormity.

  I never knew about it all the time I was growing up, or even as a grown adult until researching this book. They never mentioned it once; not that you’d have expected them to, even though they were often open and jokey about things; I suppose it’s not something you could be open and jokey about. I am certainly not morally offended, but it seems oddly touching that – as their only child – I was actually preceded, albeit only briefly. I now picture my mum in that car on those roads in a different light to the one my dad had always irreverently cast.

  As it was, with divorce still distant, a termination seemed the only realistic option. Yet if the divorce laws of the time threw unreasonable obstacles in the way of ordinary people, then the abortion laws did the same. It wasn’t until the Abortion Act of 1967 that terminations were regulated as a free provision for all through the National Health Service. Until then, a professional abortion was a luxury only few could afford, but even then a private practitioner had to be found to perform it, and risk to the physical or mental health of the mother through continued pregnancy or childbirth had to be proved. Inevitably, in an unregulated era, paying doctors for ‘proof’ was not uncommon. In early February 1961, Ken composed a letter to a specialist London surgeon:

  I am writing to ask you to terminate my wife’s pregnancy. She suffers from poor health, is most highly strung and overimaginative. It took her some considerable time to recover from the birth of the triplets in 1954. And during the last three months she has been deeply depressed and emotionally disturbed at the prospect of enlarging the family still further.

  Such economy with the truth was fairly standard in such circumstances, but there is a further postscript typed solely on to the duplicate carbon copy attached underneath that has somehow been preserved in my mum’s souvenirs; it does not appear on the original top copy of the letter. It reads:

  As I am not the f. of this c. I feel it would be better that she should not have it. And sub to your advice I hereby give my permission for . . .

  It trails off. It is hard to believe from the articulacy of Ken’s other letters that he was genuinely lost for words. On the contrary, I think every word was very carefully chosen. The coded abbreviation (‘father of this child’, presumably), the implied but unspecified permission he grants, the use of the secret duplicate – they all seem dismally designed to help sidestep any possible legal recrimination, while pushing the whole thing through with a quietly efficient and determined endurance.

  In the upshot, three psychiatrists were required to sign affidavits testifying to alleged ‘suicidal tendencies’ in my mum to permit the procedure to go ahead. Her subsequent preparatory consultations were needlessly undignified, the formalities punctured more than once by the surgeon’s desire to make it perfectly clear he had a very low opinion of her occupation; journalists, in general, were not high on his list. Only after the final meeting, just before the operation, does she plaintively record, ‘He was much more human yesterday.’

  It must have all felt like so much wretched subterfuge.

  By that summer – the summer of 1961 – my dad was back from Manchester after a tempestuous early exit from the NDO. Unable to face returning to Blackheath, and with divorce proceedings finally moving forwards, he began to take advantage of Ken’s absences from the family home on York Avenue in East Sheen, not just visiting regularly, but staying overnight too. It was a step too far for Eunice.

  Perhaps surprisingly, given her strict Methodist views, Eunice had been supportive of her daughter’s affair when it first came to light. She had never warmed to Ken – not that she naturally warmed to anyone – judging him indifferent and cerebral and only weakly concerned with family life. At first, Tom had represented a fresh start – a man who, by all accounts, loved her daughter with the very passion she considered Ken lacked – and as a consequence, she colluded in a number of my mum’s stolen visits to see more of him.

  Tom’s increased presence at York Avenue, however, became a flashpoint. Not unreasonably, it pricked Eunice’s conscience to think that – with the divorces still officially unfinalised – he should be, as she wrote, ‘sitting on Ken’s chair, lying on Ken’s bed, and using Ken’s belongings’. As far as she was concerned, it was at best overhasty, and at worst, dishonourable, not to mention risking scandal with the neighbours. My mum felt betrayed. Just when she needed her mother’s support at a critical time, it was withdrawn. It was not an uncommon feeling – I think she had felt criticised and undervalued by her throughout her life. ‘You haven’t shown me a loving, warm feeling in years,’ she wrote astringently to her that summer, pitching into her ‘bitter, stark morals and cold and sterile ideals’. Eunice unsurprisingly replied in kind. ‘If, as you say,’ she wrote back snappishly, ‘these unkind thoughts have been in your mind these last few years, how could you have been so two-faced as to have used me in a thousand ways to further your affair with Tom?’ The long-running triangular battle between Eunice and my parents that was to carry on all the way until her death in the mid-seventies had had its first testing encounter.

  Throughout it all – judging from his few eloquent and unpresuming letters to my mum, written on brief trips with friends, or from the new flat he took on for himself in Paddington as the divorce was finally crystallising – Ken maintained great humility and grace. Not long before everything reached its slow conclusion, he travelled with his friend and fellow journalist at the Observer, Anthony Howard, to Switzerland in a self-confessed comic attempt at learning to ski – although more, I’m sure, to take his mind off things – and from the distance of a hotel room was able to identify the qualities that perhaps did for him in the end. He writes to my mum a little too ruefully of his ‘elusive identity’, his ‘doggy devotion’ and his ‘slobbish, phlegmatic and all-too-familiar exterior’. As characteristics, they were, of course, the obverse of Tom’s. They were so obviously not what my mum had set her heart on. With his guard down, he also confessed openly to his sadness and desperation in his final letters, yet was proud and honourable enough to remain magnanimous right to the end. In July 1962 he wrote:

  My dear Romany

  As our marriage is at last being ended this week, by the law – years after it ended, for you, from other causes – I feel I should mark the event in some way. So before I go on a holiday and you go on yours, I am daring, with my usual originality, to write you a letter – or, rather, to finish and post it; because I spend too much of my off-duty time writing letters to you in my head.

  This one, no doubt, will turn out to be pointless – as they are – and because the underlying motive behind them all is to say: ‘I am lonely. I am bitter. I am hurt. I never thought anything could hurt as much as this, in so many ways, for so long.’ And what good does that self-pitying do? I know. But I might as well write it now because to pretend – on this occasion – that I am sitting happily and philosophically in a kind of stoical bachelor coma would be silly. Having uttered it, I will not think it at you across the ether so much!

  The worst thing is that – having accepted the inevitable – I can’t look back on the past yet, any more than I can think of you all together in the present. We had what was, for me, a happy marriage; and I look forward to the time when I can look back, as it were, without dissolving into tears, without regrets at the waste, at my own inadequacy. But I wanted to take this chance of saying thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the past happiness, years ago; and to say how grateful I am for that marriage, obviously the most important thing in my life (and how I will not have a word said against it or you), to apologise for the pain and boredom I have caused you; and to wish you – with the deepest sincerity – happiness and contentment and peace of mind in the new life you have already started.

  I found the letter in amongst a few others kept by my mum from the years they were married. They were in the box of
souvenirs, near the stuff of Tom’s, folded together inside a sixtieth-birthday card he had sent to her in 1984, a few months before he died at the age of sixty-three. The card depicts English garden birds – appropriate for my mum, of course – and on it, in her handwriting in biro, it says: ‘Ken’s Lovely Letters’.

  ‘It was all a terrible shame in one way,’ Elspet said, at our last meeting. ‘People loved Romany and Richard [Ken] together. But your mum and dad were magnetised. It was unstoppable. It could be terribly embarrassing sometimes, but that was them.’

  ‘True. And they loved to dominate a room,’ Brian recalled. ‘In a crowd – on more than one occasion – Tommy would spy Romany over all the heads, and put his hand to the side of his mouth and call out loudly “I LOVVVE YOUUUU” – just like that, down the room, exaggerating and lengthening the words so the whole place noticed. It made us cringe. Awful. Sometimes we’d throw a party, and friends would ask who else was coming, and if we said Tommy and Romany, there would be – you know – looks.’ He winced to illustrate it. ‘But what could you do?’

  ‘Romany loved it of course,’ said Elspet. ‘She’d preen and laugh. All that attention. Who wouldn’t? She wasn’t used to it.’

  ‘What happened to June – Tom’s first wife?’ I asked.

  ‘I think she died,’ Brian said glumly, looking at the table.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Not long after. It was never mentioned.’

  And that is how I remember it too. June. A name. Nothing more. Written out of the story. It took Brian to tell me she’d had nephritis, and it took my own research to look it up and realise how debilitating it must have been. All that was said when I was growing up was that she was ‘an invalid’. That she had ‘tricked’ my dad into marriage. That her parents were ‘demons’.