Authors: Ben Watt
Romany and Tom (13 page)
We turned right at the pond and down towards the abandoned police station, and right along by the common.
‘Do you remember Colin Welland’s house, Dad? The playwright. Just back there.’
‘Do I?’
‘Of course you do! You did some decorating for him.’
‘That’s right. I did. You’re right,’ he said, suddenly brightening. ‘Well, I’ll be blowed. You have got a good memory, Ben.’ We turned into Vine Road. ‘Never much liked him though. Very full of himself.’
We drove along under the beautiful arch of lolling and embracing winter-bare trees, and on up towards the old pale blue railway signal box, now derelict. The gates were open. We trundled over the level crossing, down the short dip with the recreation ground on our right, and up to the second set of gates. The signal box that used to stand there had been knocked down.
Back then, I could see right up into it if I was waiting for a train. On hot days, the signalman kept the door open and I could see the rows of gleaming polished levers and machinery used to operate the points. You had to be strong. Young lads often got the job, and in the summer holidays, they’d be wearing cap-sleeve T-shirts and handkerchiefs round their necks like roadies for Rod Stewart, and teenage girls gathered under the box to watch and giggle as the latest sweating recruit worked the levers; he would be loving every minute of it. Sitting there on my bike waiting for the gates to open in my school uniform I thought it was one of the coolest jobs in the world.
We drove up and over the line and down the other side, past the scruffy green open space where I used to play football until it was dark on Sunday afternoons with anyone who wanted a game, or sneak under the rope – draped by the Council to protect the cricket square – to bowl on a real wicket.
At the pillar box we turned right. I drove quietly down the dead-end road and stopped outside number 15.
‘There you go, Dad,’ I said.
It was our old house.
With the car windows down I could imagine the wind rustling in the huge twin copper beech trees that had stood outside the house – one at the front, one at the back – for as long as I could remember. They were so tall that they were higher than the house itself and their mahogany leaves changed colour as the months passed – old gold, henna, ginger, burnt orange – gathering in the front garden and alleyway in autumn like the sweepings of broken and torn pieces of dark parchment. I used to ride my bike through them, listening to them crunch under the thin tyres.
The house seemed smaller. Semi-detached. Quite squat. But still quiet and insulated from the world. No passing traffic. A coveted dead-end road on the edge of Barnes Common. Christmas lights were on in the downstairs front room. So different to how I remembered it: the darkened bedroom of my ancient grandmother. The house was converted and divided back then. A self-contained flat at street level. It was the only way my mum and dad could afford it back in 1962: they bought the top two floors; my grandmother paid for the ground floor. We all used the front entrance, but we had to go upstairs to our flat door, while my grandmother’s door was right there in the hall. I was a baby in a cot in that room above the porch. Born in the December of the brutal winter of 1962–63. Thick fog on the night I was delivered. I wasn’t allowed outside for three months. There’d be ice on the inside of the window in the morning. I glanced up at the single dormer window in the slate roof and pictured the old temporary partition walls in the top-floor bedrooms, put up when everyone first moved in in order that my half-brothers and my half-sister could all sleep up there.
Looking again at the first-floor window above the porch I thought back to the late autumn of 1970 after it had been turned into my mum’s little office. I would have been almost eight. I pictured her typing energetically, basking in the glow of success after her trip to Mexico to interview Burton and Taylor, my dad in the back bedroom feverishly writing arrangements for his new jazz orchestra residency at the Dorchester in the coming new year. It must have been a good time, each of them with a sense of purpose, the relationship balanced, twin layers of lightning.
It can’t have been easy for a few years before that; their careers were going at different speeds. Her acting ambitions long gone – and with the older children more independent – my mum had been writing showbiz features mainly for
She
magazine since 1963. She used to love recounting her favourites, the ‘goodies’, as she called them: a young ambitious David Frost at the Waldorf; a badly hung-over Richard Harris slumped before her horizontally, dressed only in a shortie silk dressing gown and a pair of tennis socks; a nervous Michael Caine on the eve of stardom in
The Ipcress File
in 1964 in his flash new flat at Marble Arch with its freshly hung Japanese grass wallpaper, Dino storage units designed by Zeev Aram in the sitting room, and pristine navy-and-chocolate curtains in the bedroom. ‘I’ve only brought an electric razor and a teaspoon from my last place. I’ve already spent three grand on this flat,’ he said. ‘I’ve gone for just a five-year lease, as I reckon I’m either going to be rich enough to live here, or so poor that’s all I’ll be able to afford. So five years is about right. If the film flops, I’ll not go out; I’ll sit here on my own till the rent runs out.’ By 1969 she was doing ten major feature interviews a year. She meticulously collected the published versions in her scrapbooks, among them, Rod Steiger, Glenda Jackson, Anthony Hopkins, Goldie Hawn, Woody Allen.
In contrast, my dad had not had any decent work in over four years, and you could say nothing serious in almost eight. Unwilling to compromise his musical principles, he had watched the wave of pop music that came in the wake of The Beatles wash many of his dreams away. Interest in big band jazz faded. Ironically he was asked by George Martin at Parlophone to work on the Beatles project as an arranger right at the beginning but, sticking to his guns, said no. In the event, his days leading and composing for a big swinging successful jazz orchestra stuttered to a halt in the mid-sixties. While my mum was working in town three days a week – sometimes not getting home until ten – and travelling abroad on assignments three or four times a year, he had managed to fill the ensuing gap with only a couple of years as a jobbing arranger for the BBC and a false start writing for the difficult early months of London Weekend Television. With four teenage stepchildren and me, he had been forced to accept an unexpected role as house-husband. I am sure it isn’t how he imagined it would turn out, at the peak of his powers when he first met my mum.
The role reversal is captured in a photograph from the time. It was taken for a magazine article in 1969 about modern working mothers called ‘He’s So Nice to Come Home to’. I was six. My mum’s desk has been pulled from her little study into the doorway of the sitting room to fit it into the shot. I remember thinking it was stupid because it didn’t live there, and no one could get in and out of the room. The whole family is in the picture. It felt unreal; I could sense it even though I was young. I knew my half-brothers and half-sister wouldn’t be doing the things the photographer told them to do for the picture in real life – not all together at the same time, and not without shouting at each other. Simon, aged eighteen, is in the background, sitting on the back of the sofa beside my dad’s turntable in a tangerine nylon polo-neck and straw hat pretending to read the sleeve notes on a vinyl LP. Jennie, aged fifteen, is next to him, resting her elbows on the back of the same sofa while pretending to read a book. Roly and Toby, also fifteen, are lounging on the sofa pretending to chat, while I am on the floor in front in a black roll-neck jumper pretending to play a ukelele. I can remember feeling cross and idiotic. In the foreground, my mum is at her desk in the role of the modern working mother, her hands poised over her typewriter, a stubbed-out ciggy in the ashtray, a press release for the Spinners to hand – the text artificially turned to the camera to make it easier to read. She is pointing out something she has just pretended to write to my dad, who is standing over her shoulder in a lilac shirt, hand under his chin pretending to think, while wearing a striped French apron and pretending to offer her a cup of coffee.
Although my dad says in the accompanying article – which, with no heed paid to impartiality, was written
by my mum
about ‘four very helpful husbands’ who take over the ‘domestic chores’ while their wives go out to work – ‘I enjoy running the house very much’, I am sure sitting at the piano writing for thirteen hard-blowing brass players, a pianist, a drummer and a bass player and then steaming up to the West End to lead them until the small hours of the morning would have been preferable.
In February 1971, the Dorchester residency finally started. All that hard work writing in the bedroom was going to pay off. The musicians’ charts – one hundred and twenty-eight of them, each for one of nine players – arrived home in time for the opening night in individually bound leather folders, tied with ribbon and embossed with gold lettering:
Tommy Watt Orchestra
. They were the same ones that that tumbled out of the suitcase on the day they moved into the new London flat in 2001. The Dorchester was clearly pushing the boat out. Apple-green flyers appeared:
DINE and DANCE in the Terrace Restaurant to the Music of TOMMY WATT AND HIS ORCHESTRA from 8 p.m. – 1 a.m. (every weekday evening).
He had personally selected the band; he had always been very fussy about that; nothing but the best. And I remember seeing him standing in the kitchen window polishing his shoes on the opening night – one of his favourite rituals. (I’d sometimes come down for school in the morning and find he had polished
my
shoes after he had got in from a late night out and left them gleaming on the kitchen floor for me. He was big on shoes.) His freshly dry-cleaned black-wool dinner jacket and cummerbund were hanging in clear plastic in the hall. I never understood what a cummerbund was for and wondered if it might be an apron, but why you needed an apron to play the piano I hadn’t yet worked out. I liked the silk braid down the side of his trousers though; I thought it made him look a bit like a soldier. My mum said he looked handsome in a bow tie.
In retrospect, it seems so obvious that he was being naive to think it could be a success in the way he imagined – a throwback to the heyday of the fifties, or the start of a jazz big band revival. Maybe he secretly suspected it at the time, but suppressed it in the hope he might be wrong, but whatever was in his mind, the residency was a crushing disappointment. The clientele who arrived to dine and dance in the Terrace Restaurant had very little interest in the music of Tommy Watt, or his band. It wasn’t that the people who came didn’t want to dine and dance, it’s that they were largely elderly nostalgic couples from the suburbs, who had grown up with the softer melancholy sound of Glenn Miller and wanted two courses and then a quiet waltz before catching the last tube home. Most nights the place was virtually empty by 11 p.m.
A photograph shows him – aged forty-five – seated at the Dorchester’s grand piano not long after the opening, the band behind him in black tie, playing from padded leather lecterns in front of marbled columns and velvet drapes, and on his face is simply an unalloyed look of innocent boyish hurt, as though bigger boys had come and stolen his baton. On the piano lid is a stack of charts, the same charts I had heard him painstakingly write day after day – ‘Turn the telly down for your father, darling. Master at work!’ – many of which must never even have got looked at. Within a few weeks the management cut their losses, pulled the plug and it was all over.
He tried not to let it get to him. I found a draft for a press release written in the aftermath, in my dad’s handwriting with some corrections of the grammar and punctuation by my mum:
Brilliant arranger and pianist, Tommy Watt, has formed a hand-picked nine-piece band for both dancing and listening. Personally responsible for scoring the band’s library – which includes standard tunes, hit-parade toppers of the last ten years and the latest bossa novas – Tommy has just completed a season at the Dorchester Hotel, and has been featured on the BBC.
It is the ‘and has been featured on the BBC’ tacked on the end that smells of desperation. The phone didn’t ring. Weeks passed. By June, in need of work, he had accepted a booking to play piano in a pit band at the Bournemouth Winter Gardens for the summer season’s ‘pre-season’ run. He wasn’t needed for the main attraction. He was playing on middle-of-the-road arrangements for the Beverley Sisters and listening to comic turns from Arthur Askey and Hope and Keen in half-full houses before the main season started with Bruce Forsyth in
Here Comes Brucie!
I visited him with my mum. We stayed in a bed and breakfast together. My dad was in digs. We went down to the seafront one afternoon and they had a big row in public near the crazy golf. Then my mum walked off, and my dad took me for sausage and beans in the theatre canteen, and I ate while he smoked and stared out of the window.
‘They’ve made a nice job of it.’
My dad was looking up at the house through the car window.
‘Very smart,’ he went on. ‘Nice paintwork.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Good workmanship.’
The old front wall and gateposts had been partially demolished and replaced by neatly pointed yellow-stock London bricks with elegant York coping stones. Small ornamental box hedges marked out the path to the front door. A young honeysuckle had been allowed to run up and loop itself through the holes of the first-floor balustrade. There was only one doorbell. It looked like a proper family house.
