Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  I tracked down their marriage certificate. She was born ‘Jeune’ not June. Her middle name was Rhoda. She and Tom (I expect she called him ‘Tommy’) were married on 13 May 1947 at St Thomas’s in Old Charlton. She was twenty-three. My dad was twenty-one. She was a sales assistant. Her father, Arthur, was a civil servant. My dad was just out of the RAF. All I could think was that they were very young.

  And I pictured my mum in the car on that journey to Paddington after she’d come up to see me in the eighties and heard her words again: ‘You never mean to hurt people, do you?’

  On 24 July 1962 June was finally granted a decree nisi on the grounds of adultery. Ken was granted the same. In anticipation of the final paperwork, my dad and my mum – already four months pregnant with me – had been settled into the new flat at Woodlands Road in Barnes for over six months with the triplets and Simon. Eunice was living on the ground floor. Ken had moved from Paddington to a more permanent flat on Ladbroke Grove.

  ‘Did you know what was going on at all with Tom and Mum?’ I asked Roly, the afternoon I collected the souvenirs and crockery from his loft.

  ‘No, but then you don’t understand when you are a child. You sense something is odd but you can’t work it out,’ he said. We were outside in the garden behind the vicarage. A brisk late spring breeze whipped across the weathered picnic table and harried the long grasses at the end of the rambling lawn. ‘I remember one day being told out of the blue that we were moving from York Avenue to Woodlands Road, with Mum and Tom, but not Dad. We must have been eight. We went away on a holiday with Dad, I think – Jennie kept calling him “Tommy” in the car and then correcting herself – and when we got back we were taken to Woodlands. I can remember running round the new house exploring with Toby and stumbling across a pram in the hall and asking Mum what it was, and that’s when she said we were going to have another little brother or sister.’

  In among my mum’s papers, I found a short telegram to my dad from his solicitor, Blanche, confirming the ratification of the divorces that July of 1962. It reads: ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’.

  Chapter 39

  ‘Is my mother still alive?’

  We were sitting as we always sat, in the solitude of my mum’s little room, the TV off, the brightly lit soft hubbub of the communal lounge with its ring of upright armchairs out of earshot. The direct question seemed to deserve a direct answer. Unsure how she would respond, I answered simply, ‘No, Mum.’

  ‘No, I thought not,’ she said lightly, with a small nod of the head, as though she were pleased to have worked out something that was true and concrete in everyone else’s real world, and not just in her imaginary one.

  ‘How long ago did she die?’

  ‘Over thirty years ago.’

  She stared ahead. A cloud passed across the sun and the light shifted in the room. ‘How odd,’ she said, momentarily perplexed. ‘Was she not here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What is this place?’ she said, her face earnest.

  ‘The care home. Near Bristol. Where you live now. You’ve been here over five years.’

  She said nothing at this, and after a moment’s silence, tucked the nail of her index finger in between the gap in her two front teeth, and flicked it out making a clicking noise. Her eyes darkened. ‘Who are you?’ she said, turning to look at me fixedly.

  It startled me, but I tried to see the moment from her side: dealing with the slow decrements in capacity; the illusions and the uncertainties; the fleeting facts; the mutating faces; shadows on the wall; snipers on the roof. ‘Ben,’ I said gently. ‘Your son. Your youngest.’

  ‘But you are thin,’ she said, with a tetchy exasperation. ‘If you were fat, like you were as a little boy, I might remember you more easily.’

  I laughed. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  ‘And your hair. Very short. And you’re bald. At the back. When you turn round. I’m not used to it.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ I said sarcastically, still laughing. ‘Thanks for reminding me. Not sure why it all fell out. Dad – Tom, I mean – had lovely hair.’

  At the mention of Tom, she turned towards the window and fell silent. I sat still. Someone marched past the half-open door. Outside, a car edged slowly off the green verge.

  ‘He’s not been lately,’ she said quietly. ‘He’s away.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Where is he? Do you know?’

  ‘In prison.’

  At 8.45, on a cold quiet Saturday morning on 27 October 1962, at Surrey County Council Register Office, opposite Norbiton Station, in front of no one except two witnesses, my mum and dad finally got married. After all the years of waiting, all the desperation, as an occasion it could not have been more low-key. No invitations were sent out. There was no reception. There are no photographs. I knew my mum was almost eight months pregnant with me. Was she camera-shy? It seemed unlikely. Did they just not plan it in time? They’d certainly had long enough. All those letters, all the anticipation – didn’t they finally want to tell the world about the love that couldn’t be extinguished? It would seem not. So what happened?

  I knew one version of the story: it started just over a month earlier in the small hours of a Tuesday morning on 18 September 1962. My dad had left the old Ronnie Scott’s jazz club on Gerrard Street in Soho with trombonist Ken Wray, after a night out watching the Tubby Hayes Quintet. It was a five-minute walk to the car. They turned right into Newport Place and right again into Lisle Street. Safely inside the parked car, Wray had the beginnings of a joint in his hand when a face appeared at the window. My dad grabbed the cigarette paper and the crumbled hash, but it was too late; the police officer was already tapping on the windscreen. Confiscating the cigarette paper and its contents, the officer then found twenty-eight grams of ‘Indian hemp’ in my dad’s possession and arrested both men. ‘Look, I am a fairly important man,’ my dad was reported to have protested. He suggested the officer was taking it all a bit ‘seriously’. It made no difference. The officer was taking it seriously.

  ‘The first we knew about it was when Romany rang the next day,’ Elspet said, when we last met.

  ‘She was in a terrible state,’ added Brian. ‘She said Tommy had been arrested and had already been down to Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, and he’d been convicted already, and they’d given him six months. He’d lodged an appeal but he needed the bail money.’

  Brian leapt into action. He rang his friend and colleague, the theatre director-producer Wally Douglas, and the two of them headed immediately for Bow Street.

  ‘We just had to get him out of there,’ Brian went on. ‘Wally had been a prisoner of war. He was very, you know, stiff-upper-lip, and he’d seen everything, but he couldn’t take the seediness of it all. There was talk they’d thought Tommy was a dealer. It was like having fifteen teeth out without anaesthetic for poor old Wally; but we signed the forms and paid the money, and got Tommy out.’

  The next day The Times ran a news report. Under the headline Composer and Musician Had Indian Hemp, it read:

  Thomas Mitchell Watt, aged 36, a composer of Woodlands Road, Barnes SW said by Detective-Constable W. Huckleby to be earning between £2,000 and £3,000 a year, was sentenced at Bow St Magistrates’ Court yesterday to six months’ imprisonment for being in unauthorised possesssion of Indian hemp in Lisle St, Soho, W.

  With him on the same charge was Kenneth Wray, aged 35, a musician of Fairhazel Gdns, Kilburn NW, who was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. Both pleaded guilty.

  The Daily Mail ran a similar, but longer report the same day, mentioning the appeal, and soon everyone knew. Letters arrived at Woodlands Road from concerned friends offering to help. Aunts wrote hoping it was all a ‘silly mistake’ and it would all ‘turn out for the best’. Tom’s father wrote – a great rarity – referring to it as a ‘sordid matter’ that he was relieved hadn’t made the Scottish newspapers or been the subject of gossip on the factory floor.

  The cou
rt appeal, when it came, not long after the sentence, featured two brilliant cameos from Brian and Wally who stood up and, in matchless theatrical aristocratic voices, vouched for my dad’s first-rate character and RAF record, while drawing touching attention to the imminent birth of his first son, his essential work for the BBC, and his recent effective adoption of four stepchildren. It was, by all accounts, a tour de force. My dad – much to everyone’s ample relief – got off with a fine of £150 and the sentence was quashed. Ken Wray got off too. ‘Brian’ was also later inserted into my middle names (for a long while it was only going to be ‘Thomas’) as acknowledgement of his selfless and sterling efforts to clear my dad’s good name at the eleventh hour.

  So surely there was great cause to celebrate. Why didn’t they? What prompted my mum and dad’s long-awaited marriage to take place on that cold inauspicious early Saturday morning before breakfast, opposite Norbiton Station, squeezed in before all the day’s other well-planned ceremonies with their limousines and flowers and hats and happy tearful relations?

  The answer came when I was researching this book. I found out the date of the appeal. I’d assumed – and my parents had implied – that it was within a couple of weeks of the original sentencing back in the September, but it was in fact on 31 October 1962 – not only the very day of my dad’s thirty-seventh birthday, but also four days after the wedding. They married because they didn’t know if my dad might be going to prison a few days later. They married so that there wasn’t a chance they might have to do it in prison before I was born. They married in the hope that it would read well at the appeal and with any luck I’d be born without my father in jail. No one was at the ceremony at Surrey County Council Register Office that morning because no one was supposed to witness that hope; it must have felt so threadbare; as if, after all those years of waiting, nothing could be properly celebrated.

  In the end, I was late. Reluctant to come out. Story has it that no amount of sulphurous baths or heart-thumping walks up and down the stairs at home could tempt me. The sub-zero temperatures of the bitter winter of 1962–63 were probably to blame; but finally, with London gripped by a murderous fog on a Monday night in early December, my mum took herself to the old Middlesex Hospital in town, where she was sure I must emerge at any minute, while my dad played the piano at Grosvenor House, clock-watching nervously.

  The next morning, Tuesday 4 December, a thick layer of acrid, green-and-yellow smog was covering the whole of London. It was to stay for three days. As Wednesday stumbled into Thursday, two hundred and thirty-five people were admitted into the city’s hospitals. The government was recommending ‘do-it-yourself’ masks made from thick cotton gauze or woollen scarves. Coal fires and bonfires were banned. Windows were kept closed. Black ice covered the roads. By the Thursday morning ninety people had died, and the fog was spreading across the country.

  Inside the relative safety of the Middlesex Hospital on the Thursday afternoon I was finally induced. My dad was rehearsing an episode of Brian’s new TV series, Dial Rix, for which he had written the music. My mum managed to get a message to him and he crawled across town by car in near-zero visibility just in time to be at her bedside as I finally emerged at 7.35 p.m. on 6 December 1962.

  My mum remembers the look on my dad’s pale face as he first saw me – one of adoration, disbelief and relief. I’ve wondered if it wasn’t dissimilar to the look on his face as I greeted him that last time I ever saw him in hospital a few days before he died. As he reached out to pluck me from the cot, it’s said he stumbled over the oxygen tank, half dropped me, then caught me again inches off the floor.

  Chapter 40

  In December 2009, three and half years after my dad died, my mum was diagnosed with DLB, or Dementia with Lewy bodies. It sounded confusing. I looked it up on the Alzheimer’s Society website. Dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), it said, is a form of dementia that shares characteristics with both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. I learned that the Lewy bodies – named after a doctor, Frederich Lewy, who first identified them in 1912 – are tiny protein deposits that when found in the brain’s nerve cells disrupt the brain’s normal functioning. I scanned down the specific symptoms, saying yes in my mind to all of them when picturing my mum: problems with attention and spatial orientation; a tendency to shuffle when walking; detailed and convincing visual hallucinations, often of people or animals; can fall asleep very easily by day, and have restless, disturbed nights with confusion and nightmares. Roly, who pops his head round the door several times a week, said it rang very true for him too; all of which was heartening, given that it is said to account for around only ten per cent of all cases of dementia in older people and tends to be under-diagnosed. At least her carers know what to look for now, and there is medication to take, although none of us are under any illusions – DLB is a progressive disease. And over time the symptoms will only become worse. I am pleased, though, that her long-term tendency towards depression has been tackled too with extra medication, and it seems, at least in part, to have relieved her of the more ghoulish aspects of her hallucinations.

  I never know when I get on the train to Bristol quite how I will find her – alert, or sometimes mute and self-absorbed. Her abilities can fluctuate by the hour. Some days she is almost completely unresponsive; it is rather like talking to an elegant owl. And she is still so beautiful, in that hawkish way she has always had. Other days she is positively skittish.

  ‘I was a good actress, you know,’ she said, by way of nothing at all recently, on one of her chatty days.

  ‘You were. What can you picture?’ I replied. I try not to ask her if she can remember anything any more, or what the weather was like this morning, or what she had for breakfast. I know she won’t have a clue. But climbing into her head at a particular moment can unlock memories we might share.

  She wrinkled up her face, as she often does now, trying to focus on and articulate her fleeting thoughts. ‘Smoke,’ she said. ‘Smoke in the corridor. And Sir John coming for me. For our scene. To dance. To dance with me.’

  ‘Sir John Gielgud? At Stratford?’

  She snapped open her eyes. ‘What?’ Her voice was pettish, prickly. It was as if she were cross that I’d broken a spell.

  ‘To dance with Sir John Gielgud?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gielgud. To dance with Sir John Gielgud.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you mean. Who?’

  ‘Never mind, Mum. It was just a passing thought.’

  I told her about this book, and relayed scenes and moments I was writing about, and she closed her eyes, as a child might listen intently to a vivid story, occasionally throwing out a comment (‘Ken – a dear man’) then gesturing for me to go on, still with her eyes shut. (‘I can see the house in Halifax now . . . yes, the cemetery. And the tower. Very good!’)

  ‘You have been doing your research,’ she said, opening her eyes as I finished. ‘Oh, I shall look forward to reading it immensely when it comes out.’

  I smiled at her, knowing she never would, but cherishing her good manners.

  ‘I do like it when you come,’ she went on. ‘You remind me of so much. Most of the time I live in a dreamland, you know. I was quite interesting once. I am proud of my Gypsy connections, you know. But now I need to stand up. And when I stand up, I shall fart. Very tiresome, but I wanted to warn you.’

  I helped her up from the chair.

  ‘There it goes,’ she said, expelling a sharp retort. ‘Quite nauseating, but it can’t be helped.’

  I was still laughing about it on the train several hours later.

  As for my own depression, I have slowly got on top of it these days. The worst is behind me, I hope. I did get to see someone as the Harley Street psychiatrist had promised – someone to whom I warmed, and shared a lot of stuff with. And some of it I seemed to have known for ever but just had in the wrong order, but I learned some things I had perhaps never thought of before – that my dad might well have been jealou
s of my success, for one thing. But most of all, I began to see the mum and dad that I grew up with not only as people who I loved and who undoubtedly loved me but also as just two people I happened to know, for whom life was still as complicated in middle age as it was for me as a child.

  What do I see when I look back at them now? In my dad, I see how the war offered the social mobility he craved as a precocious ambitious Glasgow boy. ‘Tommy’ was such a classless name. Approachable. Unpretentious. It was as though, on top of his natural skill as a musician, he acquired a key to a door, a route to imagined sophistication and acceptance on merit. He never went to the Scottish Academy of Music as he claimed to the BBC when accepting his appointment with the NDO, even though it went into the press release and was reprinted in all the newspapers. He faked his CV. He was venturesome. The boy who blagged the piano stool with Carl Barriteau. Leaping from opportunity to opportunity. Blending in. Having us on. The great charmer.

  When the fusty old general confronts the young upstart Army medic and opportunistic rebel leader, Percy Toplis, in Alan Bleasdale’s 1986 First World War TV drama The Monocled Mutineer at the peak of the training-camp riot, and demands, ‘And who are you?’ Toplis replies, in so many words, ‘Anyone I want to be. And who are you . . . any more?’

  There was something of Toplis in my dad. Confident, nimble, amoral, repudiative. And friends of mine, whose lives he passed though – in backstage dressing rooms or on family occasions – have said what a laugh he could be. Drink in one hand. Fag in the other. Stylish. Assertive. Charismatic.

  And yet, I asked Brian to describe him in a single word. ‘Bloody-minded,’ he said. ‘Chippy. Brilliant but bolshy. He always had the talent but he didn’t have the personality, in that his single-mindedness led him down a blind alley.’