Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  ‘And he didn’t spend the time with Romany that she might have liked,’ added Elspet.

  And I had to agree. For all his charm and swagger, I also saw his self-absorption and the disillusioned musician he became: sulky when things went wrong; intimidated by the outside world after failure; with only my mum to ‘understand’ and ‘forgive’ him.

  When I played ‘Wholesome Girl’ at his funeral, in honour of his love for her, I was struck by how wrong the adjective ‘wholesome’ was. What did he mean? Virtuous? Decent? Fully rounded? It is strangely suppressive. It was as though the image he wanted of her was not exactly the person she was. Once all the exultant sex was out of the way, and his career was in jeopardy, it’s as though he needed looking after too much, but then would accept little in the way of affection, while counting on her to be there through the mess that followed.

  Yet the curious thing is, she fell for it. Certainly at the beginning. In Elspet’s words, ‘She loved the bad boy image.’ For all her thoughtful agonising and Wesleyan self-reproach she’s always been a quiet thrill-seeker and a sucker for glamour. Her pin-board was a gallery of hunks and brooding leading men. Even now she’ll swoon over a high-contrast black-and-white photo of a young Anthony Hopkins. All that bruised Welsh passion. ‘But she tried to rein him in,’ Elspet continued. ‘And that was fatal.’

  If my mum ended up applying a brake on my dad, perhaps she was destined to be the more prudent and cautious partner. It was certainly never going to be easy to throw off the sober conscience of her upbringing, especially with her condemnatory mother forever watching from the wings. Her children also made her involuntarily watchful and maternally protective, and for all her flirting with danger and passion, she was mindful of the damage being done by a tortuous spun-out divorce, and bothered by guilt in its aftermath. I think a part of her – even with Tom – also still just yearned for a stable life with known boundaries, where she was appreciated and respected. Not much to ask. Although he couldn’t have made it harder for her sometimes. It struck me that she used the same contented phrase to describe her time at Stratford in 1950 as she did for her period working at the TV Times in her later years as a journalist in the eighties: ‘I was just happy to be a cog in a wheel,’ she wrote, in different notebooks at different times.

  In 1986 Elspet suggested she and my mum, and Tom and Brian, meet socially but was knocked back. ‘It’s family only now,’ my mum replied cryptically. Elspet remained mystified for years. ‘We had been so close,’ she said to me recently.

  ‘I think she thought it was safer,’ I ventured. ‘Tom was such a loose cannon by then. Only the family would forgive it. Anything else risked too much embarrassment. The sad thing is – all too often – it soon became just Tom only; and then she became a proud captain prepared to go down with her ship.’

  My mum was writing short travel and nature features as a freelancer for the Observer at the time. Instead of meeting up, she invited Elspet to travel up to Scotland with her on a commission – a birdwatching trip to Skye. ‘It was a wonderful few days. We were very happy there,’ said Elspet. They took a car over on the old ferry. It was October. In gale-force winds and driving rain they rented a chalet overlooking the sea-loch, and sat with binoculars watching gannets nesting in their thousands on the opposite cliffs, as cormorants and shags plunged vertically into the sea below. In the calm purple-and-amber-lit evenings sea otters played in the shallows near the rocks. Trudging across a peat bog one afternoon they crested a rise in the hill only to meet a wide field of greylag geese. Swans arrived from Iceland overhead, among buzzards, sparrow-hawks, merlin and a great golden eagle. They ate and drank contentedly and talked long into the evenings. The early eighties were among the hardest of times with Tom. I like to think of my mum on this trip around that time too.

  It strikes me that my mum and dad imparted little advice, and offered few pep talks or manuals for life. They just let me be and get on with it, working it out for myself, guessing my way through the mistakes. If they had one thing in common, it’s that they vowed never to repeat the child-rearing they’d each experienced, with all the attendant rectitude and stricture. ‘Live and let live’ was another of my dad’s great battle cries. Of course he regularly defaulted on that one. ‘He can be a right bastard to those who love him,’ my mum once said in a letter to me. But at least I never had to controvert their authority. And they never raised a hand to me. And a lot of the time they were very funny.

  I pieced together their golden years, and some of them shone very bright, but mostly I saw ordinary people trying hard, which is all we can hope to do. As for the downhill part, it can’t have been easy. It’s the descent that is the tiring bit. ‘How old am I? Eighty-eight?’ my mum said the other day. ‘Too long. Too long.’

  When she was in one of her skittish moods recently, I took her hands and helped her up from her seat and we shuffled out into the small sunlit lounge beside the lawn, where we settled in a couple of chairs overlooking the soil-filled skips and loaders and metal fencing of the new extension going up at the care home.

  ‘Tom’s downstairs now, you know,’ she said.

  ‘Is he?’ I said, knowing there was no downstairs as my mum’s room was on the ground floor, but wondering if she half pictured our old flat at Barnes with Eunice below, or perhaps even Oxford, where you’d hear the front door open and close from the first-floor sitting room.

  ‘Yes, he’s on the board here now. Very important.’

  ‘Do you get to see him?’

  ‘No. Too busy. But he’s around.’

  I waited to see if she would add some more, but she seemed content to leave it there, as if knowing he was ‘present’ in some way was a kind of solace. It seemed oddly spiritual and comforting, if a little comical – Tom, the man who conducted Tubby Hayes and Phil Seamen in full flight, on an imaginary board at a rural care home outside Bristol – but maybe it sat well with her to think he was about the place, looking out for her, overseeing her daily life in some way, her interests at heart. And that was good, wasn’t it?

  ‘Do you remember the day when I was little,’ I said, ‘and we walked hand in hand through the fields at Walberton, past all the wheat, pointing out all the wildflowers, and down the hill, across the bridge and up to the church, and you recited that poem by Yeats, out loud?’

  She wrinkled up her face, and closed her eyes. Then she opened them. ‘No. I don’t,’ she said.

  ‘Never mind.’

  I tucked in the label that was sticking out from the collar of her cardigan, and took her hand, and we sat a little longer.

  Author’s Note

  While writing this book I had to settle on whether to use the word ‘Romani’ or ‘Romany’ when describing my mum’s background. Although ‘Romani’ is now becoming the more accepted modern spelling – and the term adopted by large bodies including the United Nations – the spelling my mum used, and the one I grew up with, was the older variant, ‘Romany’, and for this reason it is the one I have chosen to adopt.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my godfather Brian Rix and late godmother Elspet Rix for their memories and kindness, my half-brother Roly for sharing the load, my late beautiful half-sister Jennie who had so looked forward to this book and whom I miss every day, my aunt Jean for her tea and insight, Karen Levy and Jeremy Pfeffer for their helping hands, the late Eric Monteith Hamilton for his unexpected emails, Sir Arnold Wesker for sending me his Centre 42 souvenirs, my agents Kirsty McLachlan and David Godwin, my editor Alexandra Pringle for having me back, Mary Tomlinson and Sarah Barlow for their eagle eyes, Bobby Wellins for remembering, Graham Kaye for helping me uncover some crucial court details, Marianne for holding the fort, Beach Hut A for a place to think and write, the British Newspaper Archive at Colindale, Bodil Malmston for her encouragement right from the beginning, all the staff at Windmill House, and lastly, lovely Tracey and our three kids, everyone out there who has chosen to read this book, and of course, my mum and my
dad.

  A Note on the Author

  Born in 1962, Ben Watt is a musician, songwriter, DJ and author. His first book, Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, voted a Sunday Times Book of the Year by William Boyd and shortlisted for the Esquire Non-fiction Book of the Year. He is perhaps most well known for his twenty-year career in alt-pop duo Everything But The Girl (1982–2002). He is also an international club and radio DJ, and since 2003 has run his own independent record labels Buzzin’ Fly and Strange Feeling. Having recently returned to songwriting and live performance, his first solo album for thirty years is expected in 2014. He lives in north London with his wife Tracey Thorn and their three children.

  Follow him on Twitter @ben_watt

  www.benwatt.com

  By the Same Author

  Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness (1996)

  ‘Ben Watt's harrowing, candid account of his near death from one of the world's rarest diseases lives on in the mind – a fine testimonial to his fortitude, his powers as a writer’ WILLIAM BOYD

  A Sunday Times and MAIL ON SUNDAY Book of the Year

  A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

  Esquire Non-Fiction Award Finalist

  In 1992, Ben Watt, one half of the band Everything But The Girl, contracted a rare life-threatening illness that baffled doctors and required months of hospital treatment and operations. This is the extraordinary, critically-acclaimed story of his fight for survival and the effect it had on him and those nearest him.

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  Copyright © 2014 by Ben Watt

  All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. For information, write to Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018.

  “Home is So Sad” from The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin by Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett. Copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by kind permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and Faber & Faber, Ltd.

  “The Song of the Wandering Aengus” by W. B. Yeats is reprinted by kind permission of United Agents on behalf of The Executors of the Estate of Grainne Yeats.

  “Slough” from Collected Poems by John Betjeman © The Estate of John Betjeman 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001. Reproduced by kind permission of John Murray (Publishers).

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  eISBN: 978-1-62040-373-0

  First published in Great Britain in 2014

  First U.S. Edition 2014

  This electronic edition published in June 2014

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