Romany and Tom (18 page)
Authors: Ben Watt
I remember waking in the morning after he told me about his Knightswood childhood and saying to him, ‘You know that photograph of that young man on the dresser in Grandma’s bedroom?’
‘Yes,’ he replied.
‘Grandma said it was you before you ever left Glasgow.’
‘Did she now?’
‘Yes, she did. Is it really you, Dad?’
‘No. It’s who I was.’
For the rest of the summer of 1971 the lid of the piano at home stayed shut. Back from the Bournemouth Winter Gardens my dad would cook an evening meal, and then just as my mum and I were getting ready to join him in the kitchen, we’d hear the jingle of the keys, and he’d have slipped out to the pub leaving all the food in the warming drawer, with no indication he was coming back.
My mum flew to Rome for her second big syndicated interview with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and a couple of days later my dad said we were going to drive out to Heathrow Airport to collect her. Her return flight was landing that afternoon, but he seemed subdued. I remember being allowed to have the sunroof open on the Renault 5 and thinking the whole thing – Heathrow, my mum home, sunroof – was all incredibly exciting, but my dad didn’t say much the whole journey.
That night they had a row in the kitchen just before we were about to eat. My mum told me to go upstairs. I heard my dad raising his voice to her. He never shouted, just seemed to increase the pressure and tension in his voice, until it was insistent and intimidating. Even through the door I heard him say, ‘You’re just an
embarrassment
, Romany.’ He said it twice. It sounded wrong. Even though I wasn’t totally sure what it meant, it sounded like a bad thing to say.
Then I heard something big crash, and then the kitchen door open, and then the sound of car keys being lifted off the hook, and the flat door open and close, and then the front door open and close. I heard the car leave the car-port and then I heard the flat door open and close again, and I thought my dad must have gone to the pub and my mum followed him down the street. I crept downstairs from my bedroom. My heart was beating like a drum. I pushed open the kitchen door. A saucepan was lying on the floor near the radiator. There was a dent in the wall and little bits of green paint and white plaster were on the linoleum tiles below. I stood and listened for a minute. All I could hear was the blood beating in my ears and the hiss of the gas-ring that was still burning on the stove. I went to the window and I saw my mum down in the garden. It made me jump. She was just standing still near one of the flowerbeds, at a slight angle, not fully facing the lawn or the few scant roses that grew along the fence. She had her arms tightly folded and her back to me. I wished one of my older half-brothers was home but everyone was away.
The months passed and the work dried up for my dad. There was still a bit of library music on offer, but the royalties from his own compositions started to dwindle as they got played less and less on the radio, and the films for which he’d written music – a few farces for his old friend Brian Rix – were repeated more infrequently. To compensate, my mum had started doing additional travel writing for newspapers and magazines. It partially covered the cost of a holiday too, as the travel and accommodation were often thrown in if a commission came up. My half-brothers and half-sister were too old for family holidays by then, so the three of us – plus a schoolfriend I was allowed to take with me for company – drove all the way to Wales for a week over Easter in 1972 so she could write a lightweight ‘family feature’ on the Butlin’s holiday resort at Pwllheli.
We arrived in driving rain. There were people asleep in our chalet. A man found us another one but it was right next to a generator that chugged and thrummed all through the night. My dad lasted forty-eight hours, then knocked the hinges out of the door frame slamming it in a rage, and we all drove home. ‘The walls were so thin you could hear someone fart in the chalet next door,’ he had said in the car on the way back. I was only nine. I thought it was funny but also a bit scary. I caught my friend’s eye. I think he thought the same.
That summer I went with my parents to Majorca when it was still pronounced with a ‘j’. It was my first time abroad and my first time away with just my mum and dad. We went to the Pontinental Village at Cala Mesquida. Again my mum had been commissioned to write about it for a magazine. My dad kept saying how at least Pontin’s was a step up from Butlin’s although I didn’t understand what he meant.
I played crazy golf with other families, bought ice creams from the Sundae Bar and watched English films in the communal day rooms when it was too hot in the afternoons. I wore a yellow sombrero all day long and had a scuba-diving lesson in the shallow end of the pool. My mum and dad mostly just sat on sun-loungers, my mum with a book, my dad with a hangover. The travel company gave us a complimentary Fiat 126 to ‘explore the island’. We used it once to go into the nearby town before my dad dismissed it as a ‘joke car’ and didn’t set foot in it again. At the hotel he mocked everyone behind their backs. The only people he didn’t belittle were the local Spanish waiters and the housekeeping maids. Photographs were taken of all of them – more than anything else. He drank with the waiters and chefs after they knocked off work, sometimes staying up late and playing cards with them, and I would hear him come back into the room in the darkness, stumbling into a chair, cursing under his breath, pulling his trousers off, and falling into bed next to my mum.
There are other photographs from the holiday of me standing with a fishing rod on the rocky coastline below the hotel. My dad is in the pictures too, in a black-and-white-checked shirt and blue cotton shorts and espadrilles, with a denim fishing hat and gold-rimmed sunglasses. In one, he has his arm round my shoulders. My mum must have taken them – she has even managed to get herself in the foreground of one or two – but when I look at them I don’t remember them feeling very real; they strike me as something set up to look like a touching holiday photograph. I can remember my dad’s face in the mornings on that holiday – fixed and pale and distant like a waning moon – and that is more the impression the photographs leave me with.
A year later, on another of my mum’s press trips, we went to the Pontinental Hotel Pineta Beach at Platamona in Sardinia. We had a chalet in a small pine forest, but I was mostly distracted from the friction between my mum and dad as two players from the Chelsea football team (Peter Osgood and Ron Harris) plus the team manager, Dave Sexton, were staying at the hotel with their families. As a fan, I was overcome with excitement.
One afternoon I saw Osgood – as close to a demi-god as it got for me at the time – standing up to his waist in the sea on his own. It was too good an opportunity to miss, and swallowing down my nerves, I swam out towards him underwater and surfaced near by. It all came out in an excited garble.
‘Hello, Mr Peter . . . Mr Osgood . . . I think you’re really good and I love Chelsea and I watched you win the FA Cup . . . and the Cup Winners’ Cup . . . and I think you’re really good . . .’
He stood looking at me. He was bronzed and muscular with an unashamedly thick covering of manly chest hair.
‘Oh, yeah?’ he said economically.
I waited for a moment. Then I realised that was all he had to say, so I pressed on. ‘And I’ve got a proper shirt . . . a blue Chelsea one . . . with number 9 on the back . . . that’s your number . . . well, you know that . . . and my mum even got me a pillowcase with your face printed on it . . . and I sleep with it every night . . . and I think you’re really, really . . . talented.’
He scooped some water up over his arms. ‘Oh, yeah?’ He glanced at me, then looked up the coastline the other way.
I was undeterred. ‘And that diving header in the replay against Leeds . . . when you won the cup . . . was just the greatest goal . . . and I stayed up and watched it . . . and like I said, I love Chelsea and all of it . . . and you, and the winning the cup . . . and your face on my pillow . . . and I’m here and you’re here . . . and I like football . . . and you like footb . . .’
I ran out of steam. I looked back at the beach. My dad was standing taking a photo of us. I felt I ought to go. ‘OK. Bye then,’ I said.
He wiped seawater out of his chest hair. ‘See ya.’
I swam back to the shore. I was disheartened, as though I had made a fool of myself. I didn’t understand how an adult could be so offhand when I was trying so hard and telling him how much I liked him. I told my dad what had happened. He couldn’t stop laughing. He thought it was all just hilarious and said Osgood was ‘a clown’, and later that evening, whenever I asked for something at the dinner table in the restaurant, he just winked at me and said in a mock affectless tone, ‘Oh, yeah?’
As on most nights, we then walked back to the chalet in the dark and my dad smoked a cigarette on the verandah on his own, looking out into the shadows over the wooden balustrade before sloping back to the hotel bar without a word. ‘Your father has always needed stimulating company,’ my mum offered in explanation. And then I would walk out with her between the chalets into the pine forest listening to the cicadas, feeling the dry needles crunching under my flip-flops, the scent rising under the spindly canopy, and out towards the deep indigo sky studded with stars, talking quietly, collecting little pine cones. One night we heard an owl, and although we crept right beneath the tree in which it sat, and heard it clear and loud, and strained our eyes, we couldn’t see it.
It was February 2003 and a blast of unexpected fresh air cut across the hall of the flat.
‘I managed to open a couple of windows,’ said my mum, greeting me, ‘but I can’t shut them, and now there is a gale force wind threatening to blow us back to Oxford.’
I laughed and went into the sitting room and slid the window shut. A newspaper was strewn across the floor. I gathered it up and placed it back on the sofa. ‘You’ve made it nice for Dad’s return,’ I said, walking back into the hall.
‘He’ll probably go straight to bed,’ she said mordantly. ‘But I shall stay accommodating if it kills me.’
I followed her into her little study. ‘Been tidying in here too, I see.’
‘Yes, if you
must
know.’
A box of papers was open on the desk.
‘I’m going to make a small coffee. Do you want one?’ she said.
‘Not for me, thanks.’
‘Please yourself.’ She went out to the kitchen.
I sat at the desk. It was the same box containing her Stratford souvenirs that I’d looked through on the day they moved in. To the side was a large certificate. The thick paper crackled as I opened it.
Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. This Diploma is awarded to Romany Evens as a special recognition of talent. April, 1947.
Next to it were two theatre programmes I hadn’t noticed before. I flicked one open.
The West of England Theatre Company
. Dear Brutus
by J. M. Barrie. December 1947.
In the part of Lady Caroline Laney – Romany Evens
. I smiled. The whole cast had signed the programme. The tour was a tightly routed journey through Exmouth, Yeovil, Chard, Bridport and Sidmouth, and several more towns of the South-West.
She came back in with the coffee.
‘You must have done this between RADA and Stratford,’ I said, holding up the programme.
‘What?’ she said waspishly, anticipating provocation. She peered at me. ‘You know I can’t
see
it from here.’
‘J. M. Barrie.
Dear Brutus
. West of England Theatre Company.’
‘Oh, that.’ She lightened. ‘Probably all nonsense.’
‘Don’t be silly. It’s great. Sounds like fun. How long were you in rep before Stratford?’
‘A couple of years, I think.’ She huffed. ‘You must have heard all this. Why are you asking again?’ she said suspiciously.
‘I
like
hearing about it. You must have gone to RADA right after the war, yes?’
She put her coffee down. ‘Yes, I would have gone sooner but Mother wouldn’t let me. She thought a doodlebug would fall on my head if I went up to London during the war.’
I remembered how – after the information was declassified – she’d told me about her time in the Women’s Royal Naval Service and her work on the fringes of Ultra signal intelligence, playing a small part in the decryption of the German ciphers and the breaking of the Enigma codes. She’d finished her education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and joined in 1943. She was posted initially to the empty Gayhurst Manor, a huge Elizabethan house in acres of parkland less than ten miles from the main centre of operations at Bletchley Park. A hundred and fifty Wrens were stationed there. Some were out in the woods, some in the house itself. Bunks were thrown up in the grand ballroom. New arrivals often had to construct their own beds out of reclaimed bed-frames. Doors were left unlocked to rooms stacked with priceless antique furniture, paintings and china.
The round-the-clock working conditions in the Nissen huts out in the woods were hot, noisy and smelly, the air rank with the stench of oil from the decoding machines. The shift work was stressful and tedious. At night, exhausted, they’d walk back through the looming darkness to the house, under the canopy of trees, picking their way between the tiny headstones of an overgrown dog cemetery by moonlight. Towards the end of winter, the woods were filled with a carpet of snowdrops. There was a chapel in the grounds, and a beautiful dovecote and turreted stables, and out in the parkland war planes were draped in camouflage waiting to be pressed into service. During the late-autumn weeks, as the light drew in, the walk to the huts was accompanied by the unsettling throaty sound of roaring stags and the clash of antlers.
