Romany and Tom (41 page)

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-yoursel
f
’ 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 jealous 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.’

‘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.