Authors: Ben Watt
Romany and Tom (42 page)
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.
While writing this book I had to settle on whether to use the word âRomani' or âRomany' when describing my mum's background. Although âRomani' is now becoming the more accepted modern spelling â and the term adopted by large bodies including the United Nations â the spelling my mum used, and the one I grew up with, was the older variant, âRomany', and for this reason it is the one I have chosen to adopt.
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.
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
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
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“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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