Romany and Tom (40 page)

Throughout it all – judging from his few eloquent and unpresuming letters to my mum, written on brief trips with friends, or from the new flat he took on for himself in Paddington as the divorce was finally crystallising – Ken maintained great humility and grace. Not long before everything reached its slow conclusion, he travelled with his friend and fellow journalist at the
Observer
, Anthony Howard, to Switzerland in a self-confessed comic attempt at learning to ski – although more, I’m sure, to take his mind off things – and from the distance of a hotel room was able to identify the qualities that perhaps did for him in the end. He writes to my mum a little too ruefully of his ‘elusive identity’, his ‘doggy devotion’ and his ‘slobbish, phlegmatic and all-too-familiar exterior’. As characteristics, they were, of course, the obverse of Tom’s. They were so obviously
not
what my mum had set her heart on. With his guard down, he also confessed openly to his sadness and desperation in his final letters, yet was proud and honourable enough to remain magnanimous right to the end. In July 1962 he wrote:

My dear Romany

As our marriage is at last being ended this week, by the law – years after it ended, for you, from other causes – I feel I should mark the event in some way. So before I go on a holiday and you go on yours, I am daring, with my usual originality, to write you a letter – or, rather, to finish and post it; because I spend too much of my off-duty time writing letters to you in my head.

This one, no doubt, will turn out to be pointless – as they are – and because the underlying motive behind them all is to say: ‘I am lonely. I am bitter. I am hurt. I never thought anything could hurt as much as this, in so many ways, for so long.’ And what good does that self-pitying do? I know. But I might as well write it now because to pretend – on this occasion – that I am sitting happily and philosophically in a kind of stoical bachelor coma would be silly. Having uttered it, I will not
think
it at you across the ether so much!

The worst thing is that – having accepted the inevitable – I can’t look back on the past yet, any more than I can think of you all together in the present. We had what was, for me, a happy marriage; and I look forward to the time when I
can
look back, as it were, without dissolving into tears, without regrets at the waste, at my own inadequacy. But I wanted to take this chance of saying thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the past happiness, years ago; and to say how grateful I am for that marriage, obviously the most important thing in my life (and how I will not have a word said against it or you), to apologise for the pain and boredom I have caused you; and to wish you – with the deepest sincerity – happiness and contentment and peace of mind in the new life you have already started.

I found the letter in amongst a few others kept by my mum from the years they were married. They were in the box of souvenirs, near the stuff of Tom’s, folded together inside a sixtieth-birthday card he had sent to her in 1984, a few months before he died at the age of sixty-three. The card depicts English garden birds – appropriate for my mum, of course – and on it, in her handwriting in biro, it says: ‘Ken’s Lovely Letters’.

‘It was all a terrible shame in one way,’ Elspet said, at our last meeting. ‘People loved Romany and Richard [Ken] together. But your mum and dad were
magnetised
. It was unstoppable. It could be terribly embarrassing sometimes, but that was them.’

‘True. And they loved to dominate a room,’ Brian recalled. ‘In a crowd – on more than one occasion – Tommy would spy Romany over all the heads, and put his hand to the side of his mouth and call out loudly “I LOVVVE YOUUUU” – just like that, down the room, exaggerating and lengthening the words so the whole place noticed. It made us cringe.
Awful.
Sometimes we’d throw a party, and friends would ask who else was coming, and if we said Tommy and Romany, there would be – you know –
looks
.’ He winced to illustrate it. ‘But what could you do?’

‘Romany
loved
it of course,’ said Elspet. ‘She’d preen and laugh. All that attention. Who
wouldn’t
? She wasn’t used to it.’

‘What happened to June – Tom’s first wife?’ I asked.

‘I think she died,’ Brian said glumly, looking at the table.

‘When?’

‘Not long after. It was never mentioned.’

And that is how I remember it too. June. A name. Nothing more. Written out of the story. It took Brian to tell me she’d had nephritis, and it took my own research to look it up and realise how debilitating it must have been. All that was said when I was growing up was that she was ‘an invalid’. That she had ‘tricked’ my dad into marriage. That her parents were ‘demons’.

I tracked down their marriage certificate. She was born ‘Jeune’ not June. Her middle name was Rhoda. She and Tom (I expect she called him ‘Tommy’) were married on 13 May 1947 at St Thomas’s in Old Charlton. She was twenty-three. My dad was twenty-one. She was a sales assistant. Her father, Arthur, was a civil servant. My dad was just out of the RAF. All I could think was that they were very young.

And I pictured my mum in the car on that journey to Paddington after she’d come up to see me in the eighties and heard her words again: ‘You never mean to hurt people, do you?’

On 24 July 1962 June was finally granted a decree nisi on the grounds of adultery. Ken was granted the same. In anticipation of the final paperwork, my dad and my mum – already four months pregnant with me – had been settled into the new flat at Woodlands Road in Barnes for over six months with the triplets and Simon. Eunice was living on the ground floor. Ken had moved from Paddington to a more permanent flat on Ladbroke Grove.

‘Did you know what was going on at all with Tom and Mum?’ I asked Roly, the afternoon I collected the souvenirs and crockery from his loft.

‘No, but then you don’t understand when you are a child. You sense something is odd but you can’t work it out,’ he said. We were outside in the garden behind the vicarage. A brisk late spring breeze whipped across the weathered picnic table and harried the long grasses at the end of the rambling lawn. ‘I remember one day being told out of the blue that we were moving from York Avenue to Woodlands Road, with Mum and Tom, but not Dad. We must have been eight. We went away on a holiday with Dad, I think – Jennie kept calling him “Tommy” in the car and then correcting herself – and when we got back we were taken to Woodlands. I can remember running round the new house exploring with Toby and stumbling across a pram in the hall and asking Mum what it was, and that’s when she said we were going to have another little brother or sister.’

In among my mum’s papers, I found a short telegram to my dad from his solicitor, Blanche, confirming the ratification of the divorces that July of 1962. It reads: ‘
All’s Well That Ends Well’.

Chapter 39

‘Is my mother still alive?’

We were sitting as we always sat, in the solitude of my mum’s little room, the TV off, the brightly lit soft hubbub of the communal lounge with its ring of upright armchairs out of earshot. The direct question seemed to deserve a direct answer. Unsure how she would respond, I answered simply, ‘No, Mum.’

‘No, I thought not,’ she said lightly, with a small nod of the head, as though she were pleased to have worked out something that was true and concrete in everyone else’s real world, and not just in her imaginary one.

‘How long ago did she die?’

‘Over thirty years ago.’

She stared ahead. A cloud passed across the sun and the light shifted in the room. ‘How odd,’ she said, momentarily perplexed. ‘Was she not
here
?’

‘No.’

‘What is this place?’ she said, her face earnest.

‘The care home. Near Bristol. Where you live now. You’ve been here over five years.’

She said nothing at this, and after a moment’s silence, tucked the nail of her index finger in between the gap in her two front teeth, and flicked it out making a clicking noise. Her eyes darkened. ‘Who are
you
?’ she said, turning to look at me fixedly.

It startled me, but I tried to see the moment from her side: dealing with the slow decrements in capacity; the illusions and the uncertainties; the fleeting facts; the mutating faces; shadows on the wall; snipers on the roof. ‘Ben,’ I said gently. ‘Your son. Your youngest.’

‘But you are
thin
,’ she said, with a tetchy exasperation. ‘If you were
fat
, like you were as a little boy, I might remember you more easily.’

I laughed. ‘Thanks, Mum.’

‘And your hair. Very short. And you’re
bald
. At the back. When you turn round. I’m not used to it.’

‘Oh, thanks,’ I said sarcastically, still laughing. ‘Thanks for reminding me. Not sure why it all fell out. Dad – Tom, I mean – had
lovely
hair.’

At the mention of Tom, she turned towards the window and fell silent. I sat still. Someone marched past the half-open door. Outside, a car edged slowly off the green verge.

‘He’s not been lately,’ she said quietly. ‘He’s away.’

‘Who?’

‘Tom.’

‘Where is he? Do you know?’

‘In prison.’

At 8.45, on a cold quiet Saturday morning on 27 October 1962, at Surrey County Council Register Office, opposite Norbiton Station, in front of no one except two witnesses, my mum and dad finally got married. After all the years of waiting, all the desperation, as an occasion it could not have been more low-key. No invitations were sent out. There was no reception. There are no photographs. I knew my mum was almost eight months pregnant with me. Was she camera-shy? It seemed unlikely. Did they just not plan it in time? They’d certainly had long enough. All those letters, all the anticipation – didn’t they finally want to tell the world about the love that couldn’t be extinguished? It would seem not. So what happened?

I knew one version of the story: it started just over a month earlier in the small hours of a Tuesday morning on 18 September 1962. My dad had left the old Ronnie Scott’s jazz club on Gerrard Street in Soho with trombonist Ken Wray, after a night out watching the Tubby Hayes Quintet. It was a five-minute walk to the car. They turned right into Newport Place and right again into Lisle Street. Safely inside the parked car, Wray had the beginnings of a joint in his hand when a face appeared at the window. My dad grabbed the cigarette paper and the crumbled hash, but it was too late; the police officer was already tapping on the windscreen. Confiscating the cigarette paper and its contents, the officer then found twenty-eight grams of ‘Indian hemp’ in my dad’s possession and arrested both men. ‘Look, I am a fairly important man,’ my dad was reported to have protested. He suggested the officer was taking it all a bit ‘seriously’. It made no difference. The officer
was
taking it seriously.

‘The first we knew about it was when Romany rang the next day,’ Elspet said, when we last met.

‘She was in a terrible state,’ added Brian. ‘She said Tommy had been arrested and had already been down to Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, and he’d been convicted already, and they’d given him six months. He’d lodged an appeal but he needed the bail money.’

Brian leapt into action. He rang his friend and colleague, the theatre director-producer Wally Douglas, and the two of them headed immediately for Bow Street.

‘We just had to get him out of there,’ Brian went on. ‘Wally had been a prisoner of war. He was very, you know, stiff-upper-lip, and he’d seen everything, but he couldn’t take the seediness of it all. There was talk they’d thought Tommy was a dealer. It was like having fifteen teeth out without anaesthetic for poor old Wally; but we signed the forms and paid the money, and got Tommy out.’

The next day
The Times
ran a news report. Under the headline
Composer and Musician Had Indian Hemp
, it read:

Thomas Mitchell Watt, aged 36, a composer of Woodlands Road, Barnes SW said by Detective-Constable W. Huckleby to be earning between £2,000 and £3,000 a year, was sentenced at Bow St Magistrates’ Court yesterday to six months’ imprisonment for being in unauthorised possesssion of Indian hemp in Lisle St, Soho, W.

With him on the same charge was Kenneth Wray, aged 35, a musician of Fairhazel Gdns, Kilburn NW, who was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. Both pleaded guilty.

The
Daily Mail
ran a similar, but longer report the same day, mentioning the appeal, and soon everyone knew. Letters arrived at Woodlands Road from concerned friends offering to help. Aunts wrote hoping it was all a ‘silly mistake’ and it would all ‘turn out for the best’. Tom’s father wrote – a great rarity – referring to it as a ‘sordid matter’ that he was relieved hadn’t made the Scottish newspapers or been the subject of gossip on the factory floor.

The court appeal, when it came, not long after the sentence, featured two brilliant cameos from Brian and Wally who stood up and, in matchless theatrical aristocratic voices, vouched for my dad’s first-rate character and RAF record, while drawing touching attention to the imminent birth of his first son, his essential work for the BBC, and his recent effective adoption of four stepchildren. It was, by all accounts, a tour de force. My dad – much to everyone’s ample relief – got off with a fine of £150 and the sentence was quashed. Ken Wray got off too. ‘Brian’ was also later inserted into my middle names (for a long while it was only going to be ‘Thomas’) as acknowledgement of his selfless and sterling efforts to clear my dad’s good name at the eleventh hour.