That's Another Story: The Autobiography (21 page)

One Sunday morning, Sunday, 23 July 1971 to be exact, I had come on duty, and was immediately summoned to the matron’s office.

‘Sit down, Miss Walters.’

A thin, weary and distracted-looking woman sat at the other side of the desk, fiddling with a ballpoint pen. I could think of no reason why I should have been summoned. Had someone made a complaint? Was I being made redundant? And then, just as I was thinking that maybe I had been found out in my lie to my parents about living in the nurses’ home:

‘Your father passed away last night. Your mother has been trying to contact you; she seemed to be under the impression that you were living here.’

I sat staring at her, aware that I still had the same half-smile on my face that I was wearing when I entered the room, only now it was immovable, a moment of innocent bewilderment frozen on my face, from the other part of my life. My parents . . . My parents . . . My parents think . . . No, no, no, my mother . . .? I couldn’t make the syntax of what she had said fit into any discernible or sensible order.

‘I presume you were expecting this?’ She was flicking the biro between thumb and forefinger so that it blurred like the propeller of a plane.

‘My d—’ I’d got it! Dad was dead; I’d got it now. A gunshot through the centre of my chest and I was still smiling the stupid smile. ‘Oh yes, yes, we were . . . expecting it.’

No we weren’t, no we weren’t! I stood up, and the smile started to shift with a series of muscular twitches in my cheeks.

‘Well, you’d better get off home to your mother, she’ll be needing you.’

Where had I heard this before? I wanted to say something to her, but my throat had closed, so I turned and left. Outside, in the long echoing Victorian corridor, where the endless cacophony of the hospital could swallow up every human sound imaginable, I let out a little trapped yelp of sorrow; the smile was gone and the tears came. My Auntie Clare, my mum’s sister-in-law, picked me up from the hospital and, driving the wrong way round the one-way system in Birmingham city centre, dropped me, surprisingly without incident, at the flat of my brother Kevin. As soon as we looked at each other in the hallway, his face became a mask of silent pain to which he gave vent in the privacy of his bedroom. We raced home, to 69 Bishopton Road, in Kevin’s Mini van, the two of us in a fog of feeling that neither could express, and then suddenly my brother went flying headlong into the back of the car in front. The driver got out, shocked and furious, and began to shout and swear at my brother.

I immediately jumped from the car and screamed at the man: ‘You leave my brother alone, our dad’s just died, we’ve got to get home!’

He didn’t say another word, even apologising for an accident for which he was in no way responsible.

I was anxious about seeing my mother. How was I to make sense of her without my father? I was almost expecting to see a piece of her physically missing. She was sitting in one of the easy chairs in the kitchen, bunches of newspaper crackling beneath its thin foam cushion. She looked up as I came in, her face bright red and tear-stained, helpless with grief.

‘We were five and now we’re only four.’

She looked smaller and strangely childlike. Several neighbours were standing round including the one who had comforted me when she thought I had failed the eleven-plus but was pissed off when I announced that I had in fact passed it. Now she took me to one side and said in a confidential tone, ‘You’ll have to keep an eye on your mum, you know, she’s suffering. I mean, I’m sure she’ll be all right ... She never was erotic.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Your mum, she was never an erotic woman. She’s always been very stable.’

After my small release in the hospital corridor, I didn’t cry again until the funeral a week or so later. I had felt oddly numb, possibly because my mother was so upset and I felt I needed to be strong, but sitting in St Gregory’s church, waiting for the funeral service to start, I spotted two little blonde girls walking up the centre aisle. They must have been about four and six. I could see them only from the back, I didn’t know who they were, and yet my heart broke.

In the days that followed we started to sort out some of my father’s belongings. On going through his filing cabinet, I found a lock of my hair from years ago when it was blonde and a diary from when I was fourteen. It was full of random, mundane facts like: ‘Went to school’ and ‘Hockey practice’ and ‘Spot on chin’ in a childish scrawl, and then I found ten Park Drive tipped. I took them out into the yard and stamped on them over and over, snot and tears flying this way and that as I screamed down at them, ‘You bastards! You bloody, fucking bastards!’

My mum rushed to the back door with a rolling pin in her hand and flour on her chin.

‘Julie! What on earth are you doing?’

Now I was down on my haunches, the battered fag packet in my hand.

‘I’m just so angry about these bloody things.’

‘Well, there’s no point talking like that now, your father’s gone.’

I threw them down and stamped one last time. I then crouched down again and, with my chin resting on my knees, I said in a small voice to myself, ‘Thank God I’m a grown-up, thank God he died now and not when I was a child.’

A few weeks later the woman who had referred to my mother as ‘erotic’ came up to me in the street, and said, in the same confidential tone that she’d used on the day of the funeral, ‘How is she?’

‘Oh, she’s doing all right.’

‘Good. She needs to eat more, you know.’ This woman, incidentally, was enormous. ‘I saw her yesterday, she’s starting to look emancipated.’

My mum did do all right. In fact you could say that, in some ways, she eventually flowered after my father’s death. She started going out more, attending a night school to learn French, and asking me on one occasion whether I’d like to put my feet up and have a
coup d’etat
, thinking she was offering me a cup of tea. She began to take the foreign holidays she had yearned for all her life, my father having had no interest. One of the first of these was a trip to Lourdes that was organised by the church. She came back with conjunctivitis and was most put out when we suggested that she might have contracted it from the holy waters, citing very forcibly the air-conditioning on the coach as the obvious cause. She seemed to worry less and when after some time I asked her whether she would ever consider marrying again - after all, she was only fifty-six when Dad died - she said, ‘Good Gad, no. Why should I spend my old age running round clearing up after some old man?’

She died in 1989. I stood in a field and screamed at a pale sky until my voice went ragged, ‘Where are you?
Where
. . .?’

I had driven back from my brother’s house in Birmingham a couple of days after the funeral, berating my new Mini for having so little power, only to discover that I had driven the entire journey home with the handbrake on. I stood in that field at the back of our house in Sussex, a house that she had never been to. We had just moved in and she had said that she would wait until the days got longer and lighter to visit us. I stood in that field until the pale sky went black, hoping for a sign, a sign that this incredible energy that was my mother was still in the world, unable to comprehend how her huge presence and extraordinary drive, without which I would now probably be languishing in a job for which I had no heart, were no longer here.

The love between us was prickly and fierce, combative and competitive, but I never doubted its power. The mourning of her was hard and painful, and some of it was carried out in public. In the West End stage production of
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune
later that year, the character of Frankie, whom I played opposite Brian Cox’s Johnny, has a very moving speech about her mother towards the end of the piece, and every night I cried for the loss of my own mother as I spoke the lines. And again the following year, I was allowed to mourn her further, in Peter Hall’s production of Tennessee Williams’
The Rose Tattoo
, through the character of Serafina, who continually cries for a sign from her dead husband.

The mourning continues to this day, but now it is softened by a bit of understanding of what it is to be a mum and, of course, it has mellowed with age. I no longer look for signs as once I did; there is no need. They are everywhere.

Later in the summer of 1971, DT and I took off overland in a Mini to Istanbul with another couple from London, whom we had met working at the hospital. Both were students at Birmingham University and the chap, whom we codenamed Rupert, was the owner of the said Mini. I’m not saying that he was a car owner ‘who loved too much’ but heavy breathing could often be heard coming from under the bonnet as he drooled over the engine beneath. It was always best to knock before entering his garage and pages of his
What Car?
magazine were frequently found to be mysteriously stuck together. He was one of those car anoraks who spent all his free time sniffing around underneath the vehicle, twiddling and tweaking, and although DT was meant to share the driving with him, Rupert could never quite bring himself to let him take the precious wheel. People often refer to their cars as ‘she’, but somehow when Rupert did it had a greater resonance. Interestingly, he called his girlfriend, who did all the navigating, by her surname, firing orders at her as we went along.

‘Henman? Passports!’ or ‘Henman? Chewing gum!’ or ‘Henman? Consult map, please!’

Almost as an omen, and after Rupert had spent days fiddling and ferreting under the bonnet in preparation for the trip, one of the wheels began to wobble free as we drove off down the Balham High Road, just minutes into the first leg of our big adventure.

We went through France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece and finally Turkey, with Rupert driving as if a homicidal maniac were in hot pursuit. DT and I were squashed into the back seat with assorted belongings crammed in around us. Convinced that it would prevent the engine from overheating, Rupert insisted that we had the heater on inside the car, which became unbelievably stifling almost as soon as we crossed the Channel. I’m not entirely sure when we discovered that we might have made a mistake embarking on that trip, but it was probably on the Balham High Road.

In Rumania we travelled through the High Carpathians, where bears are meant to roam and where huge mountains on either side of the road almost touched in places, leaving just a tiny blue crack of sky above us. We set up camp in a borrowed tent that was slightly superior to the one we had used in France, and at night we listened to the sounds of wolves howling. In the little towns, the local people crowded around the car, stroking it, with Rupert darting about to check that they hadn’t left any mark. They were saying its name, incredulously, over and over again, almost chanting with wonder, ‘Owstin Meenee!’

It was like an incantation, with Rupert joining in each time it was said, and nodding in confirmation.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, Austin Mini, yeah, that’s right, mate, yeah, yeah, don’t touch the windscreen wipers, mate. Yeah, yeah.’

One man, who had stroked virtually every inch of the car as if it were a flying saucer newly arrived from outer space, spoke a little English.

‘You are from London?’

Rupert was straight in there, polishing with his cuff where the man had put his hand.

‘Yeah, that’s right, mate, well, I am, me and Henman are. These two are your bloody Northerners.’

‘I know Londoner.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yes, Derek Brown . . . Do you know Derek?’

‘Never heard of him, mate.’

The people simply couldn’t believe that we had travelled all that distance, from London, England, and by this time neither could we. When we passed through the border between Hungary and Rumania, Rupert surpassed himself with his tactful cockney charm. As the Hungarian border guards were walking around the car, one of them signalled for him to open the boot. Rupert swaggered around to the back to flip it open and, as they rooted through, he pointed at the contents and said with a smirk, ‘Yeah, bombs! Yeah, there’s bombs in there, mate! Yeah, that’s it, bombs!’

If DT and I could have slid down our seats and disappeared, we would have, but as the cramped conditions in the back of the car prevented it, we were forced to cringe, sitting up in full view of anyone who cared to look. Clearly thinking that these men couldn’t speak English, Rupert made an exploding sound, blowing his cheeks out and throwing his hands into the air, as a rather excellent visual aid, just so that they got the full picture. Whereupon the guard, in perfect English, of course, said, ‘Take everything out, please.’

We were there for hours as they emptied the contents of every single container out on to the ground: soap powder, washing-up liquid, shampoo, orange squash, etc., all of which we would have to replace. By now DT and I were furtively discussing where we could jump ship.