Dear Fatty

by Dawn French

  I had one other blissful moment like that with you. Do you remember when we went to Jamaica on holiday? You and Malcom and me and Len. What a laugh. Splashing about in the pool noticing our tits were the same size as our husbands’ bums, scoring some wacky baccy in the local market and putting it in our tea only to realise it was sage or some such herb; being flirted with on the beach by Rastas calling us their ‘heavy babes’ and trying to mate with us. Then, most clearly of all, I remember when we went on a lazy raft trip. Len and me in front. You and Malcom on the raft behind. We floated aimlessly down the river in the gorgeous sizzling heat. All was calm and silence till you were taken with an irresistible urge to sing. You sang out, clear and strong, filling the air with magic. I couldn’t see you but I could hear you, your beautiful voice, direct from God, providing the soundtrack to a heavenly, perfect moment.

  I knew then that, as you often tell me, I would always ‘love the bones of you’.

  Calling all members of the Lazy Susans,

  GREETINGS. AS SOME of you may already know, I am writing a book, a kind of memoir, in the form of letters. It will be much like an album, I think, offering glimpses, snapshots if you like, that define and describe my life. I cannot conceive of such a book without reference to you, to us, to our highly clandestine society. However, I am, of course, mindful of our strict code of honour, and the need for discretion at all times. I intend to include a photo of us in our very first club outfits, taken at one of our gatherings in about 2002, I think. We do, of course, have new uniforms now, which will not appear. I will, without question, adhere to our confidentiality agreement and I will block out the faces of each member so that no identities will be disclosed. It is my utmost intention to preserve the integrity, secrecy and infrastructure of our organisation. I will not, repeat NOT, be revealing details of our passwords, handshakes, colour-coded livery or group rituals – especially not the one involving an axe and a carton of fake blood. I will not be disclosing the ingredients of our secret beverage and I will not be recounting anything of our exploits together on this continent or any other where we may, or may not, have met. Like any true Susan, I promise that our assignations and our purpose will follow me to the grave. This I swear on the life of my fluffy kitten heels. If you object to my suggestion, please let me know in the usual way, being careful at all times that you are not followed, or bugged.

  Specialis infinitas, pinas coladas,

  Dawn Susan

  Dear Len,

  REALLY, THIS BOOK should be called Dear Len and simply be one big long love letter to you. It’s hard to know how to sum up everything I want to say to you in one letter. We have been married for 24 years now, and we were together a couple of years before that, so half of my whole life is you. You. You. Obviously there are things I can’t and won’t write about in these pages because we both, but especially you, are quite rightly very private about our life together, but when I think hard about who you are to me, and what I really want to say to you, it is, essentially, thank you.

  THANK YOU for filling out the all-purpose, multiple-choice questionnaire I devised for you when we first met. This helped me to ascertain whether you really wanted to eschew all opportunities of bendy dancer girlfriends and go out with a Weeble such as me. It also told me whether you could take a joke or not. You could.

  THANK YOU for getting down on your hands and knees and helping me to trim the carpet at Gaynor’s very clean flat with nail scissors (all I had) when you had stepped in the cat-litter tray and walked the poo round the whole flat, and she was due home in 20 minutes.

  THANK YOU for doing 86 astonishingly accurate impressions of different famous people saying Happy New Year to me on New Year’s Eve, and for knowing that, for some reason, New Year makes me gloomy, and I needed cheering up.

  THANK YOU for being the kind of person who fell for the lady in the shop’s patter and therefore bought the most expensive ring with which to propose. Thank you for wrapping it in six increasingly bigger boxes for added surprise. Thank you for not having a suitable face to go with the moment, so twitching like a demented Disney rabbit in anticipation. Thank you for not minding in the least that the ring has spent 24 years in a safe because it is beyond hideous.

  THANK YOU for not chucking me when I took you to a romantic place I told you was ‘magical’ which turned out to be an old railway carriage set into the dunes on a beach in Cornwall where we were both very cold because it was winter. You kept a huge sheepskin coat on, inside and out. Thank you for making good jokes about not using the loo when stationary. Thank you for patting my back when we spent most of the week vomiting because we ate the stew my mum had cooked, which we had left in the sun on the back shelf of the car, and then refroze. Which was the wrong thing to do. We both threw up from both ends for days and it wasn’t pretty or romantic or even slightly ‘magical’. Thank you for still kissing me after seeing sick in my hair.

  THANK YOU for taking me to Jamaica to meet your wider family. For not minding when I laughed a lot after you were trying out your best Jamaican accent and the man you were asking directions from just looked and said, ‘You is an Englishman.’

  THANK YOU for doing a five-month summer season, two shows a day, seven days a week, at the end of the North Pier in Blackpool, to pay for the wedding.

  THANK YOU for insisting that all birthdays are celebrated, even when I can’t be arsed. I remember when you insisted I go to Le Gavroche posh restaurant on my birthday despite my many protestations that I was too knackered to go out because I was filming. I begged you to let me stay at home and celebrate with a candle in a Big Mac. You persuaded me to go because when my supper arrived under its silver dome it was revealed to indeed be a hamburger with a candle in it, Gavroche-style. It was delicious and the kitchen staff were buzzing with excitement – they’d never ever served a hamburger before.

  THANK YOU for buying me a white Pagoda soft-top 1964 Mercedes.

  THANK YOU for putting up with the many pets, all of which you hated to begin with, and only three of which you came to love. Aretha the Cat, Delilah the Dog and Dolly the Smaller Dog are winners, but Hale and Pace (goldfish), Rodent (hamster), Oscar (guinea piglet who was eaten by Delilah the Dog on Christmas Day, the day he arrived), Holly (replacement guinea pig bought on Boxing Day), Hoppy (rabbit), Dracula (vampire rabbit) and Stickys 1–23 (stick insects) were not beloved by you.

  THANK YOU for introducing me to your friends, especially the Lokshen gang, whose mums cooked you soup when you first came to London on your own at 16 years old. The Haftels and the Greens have always been the most loyal buddies, with whom we have shared much light and any bit of shadow.

  THANK YOU for opening up a world of music to me. Music I would never have listened to if I didn’t know you. Thanks for all the tapes and CDs you’ve made, especially those which were for special reasons, like when I did Smaller with Alla and every song had something to do with small or little, or songs to celebrate anniversaries or songs with stories or songs with gags or songs that start with talking or songs that start with the letter D.

  THANK YOU for not minding too much when, embarrassed and horrified by the price, which we could ill afford, I returned the very early model of a computer you’d bought me as a birthday gift, in 1983, to the shop. Sorry I’ve never learned to use one yet and thanks for printing things out for me or even occasionally typing things for me. I will catch up eventually. Probably. Will I? No.

  THANK YOU for being such a loving son-in-law to my mum, and starting jokes ‘My mother in-law is so nice’, ‘… so genial’, ‘... so supportive’, and so on. I guess I felt the same way about your mum. The only time it was dangerous to be around them was the regular Christmas Turkey Tussle. We used to cook it very slowly overnight, remember? My mum likes the turkey to be moist but fairly plain with perhaps an onion up its bum for flavour. Your mum would sneak down, yank out the onion, slam in some peppers and a pineapple and cover it in rum; two hours later my mum would creep down and remove all that and repla
ce with an Oxo cube; your mum would later discard that and add chillies and sweet potatoes, and on and on all night. The wars of the mums. Whoever raped the turkey last was the victor, leaving the other one to pout and sulk, lemon-lipped, over the Christmas dinner table. Yuletide joy!

  THANK YOU for, unprompted, saying my mum can live with us when she’s too old and infirm to change her pants. I’ve got news for you, she tells me that day ain’t never comin’. She would rather live in a pond of her own wee at waist height and shoot at strangers through her letter box than be a burden. Let’s see, shall we?

  THANK YOU for offering, without hesitation, to let me put our house up as collateral to get the loan to start my big girls clothes business, 1647 Ltd, with my African partner, Helen Teague, in 1991. Still chugging along 17 years later, we haven’t made a penny, but we have provided lots of big girls with some decent clobber that fits their bootylicious bums!

  THANK YOU for never complaining when endless streams of friends and family come to stay, often bringing further, even more unwanted pets into your life.

  THANK YOU for understanding the nature of my very close relationship with my cousins Keiren and Ellie and knowing that I never want to be without them, and so allowing our door to be open to them at all times of night and day. Sometimes people are placed in our lives for a purpose and these two have 100 per cent been given to me so that I may learn about the profundity of family love. (Are you and Keiren going for some kind of world record when it comes to memory tests about old movies and music, by the way? Is that what boys do when they’re alone together?) Thing is, you see, I looked out for them a bit when they were younger and now they return the favour and look out for our kid. There is a natural symmetry in it all.

  THANK YOU for your patience and understanding and total commitment to the endless rounds of heartbreaking IVF failures we endured together, while quite often simultaneously celebrating yet more arrivals of new babies in the lives of our chums. The sneaking in and out of clinics, often at night, to avoid press interest. The discoveries of various problems, on both sides. The support we gave each other. The awful, painful injections you had to administer to me at home and your sweet crinkled face, so reluctant to hurt me with them, but so determined to try and make it work. The isolation of not being able to speak about it to others, for fear of alerting the media. The endless prescribed todger-tugging for samples and specimens. The jokes about it. The miscarriages and the grieving. Two of us quietly forging ahead together in our great yearning for a baby. The giving up. The reawakening. And then, the uphill adoption process. The hours of interviews, the reports, the questions, the counselling and the minute scrutiny of our marriage by strangers. The intrusion. The enforced dieting, the breath-holding and, eventually, the utter joy. Thank you so much for being such a mensch through it all. We sailed together in one small boat on this most private and personal sea of troubles, safeguarding each other throughout. We brought a baby back to a united and happy home.

  THANK YOU for being such a genuinely great dad. For breaking a mould and being the kind of dad you had no example of, for making it up as you went along. For holding fast through terrible twosomeness tantrums which lasted ten years and immediately turned into tricky teenage tantrums, most of which appeared to involve the exact same dialogue.

  THANK YOU for reminding me that, ‘every day, clean slate’.

  THANK YOU for riding the bucking bronco that is a household of hormonal women when you are the lone chap.

  THANK YOU for doing so much devoted parent stuff during all those nights I couldn’t be there when I was onstage. I’ve counted up the evenings of my absence from bedtimes since Billie turned up. It’s over two years’ worth. You had all those evenings on your own with her and you never once complained. Thanks for giving her that unquestionable security, the surety of her dad’s love. I, for one, know just how important that is as a foundation for every other relationship she will have. She doesn’t know it yet, but she will.

  THANK YOU for telling me the truth when, like most marriages, ours was buffeted by a tornado. There’s a reason we vow to love each other for better and for worse. It’s because there will always be a worse. Otherwise how do you know what the better is? Or the even better? Ironically, I think you and I have always shared a kind of unspoken misbehaviour gauge, below certain levels of which much naughtiness is excusable and fairly harmless. We work apart a lot, we meet interesting attractive people and they are interested in and attracted to us. Some stuff ’s gonna happen and mostly, so long as no one is hurt or embarrassed, it’s unimportant and ignorable. I genuinely believe that. We are, none of us, robots or perfectly perfect people. We are flawed and weak and tempted. Often. What compounded the situation in this particular instance was that certain facets of the press decided to whip up an infidelity maelstrom. You had made some grave errors of judgement, yes. It was frightening and humiliating to be doorstepped in the night by two journos in macs who I was convinced were police. You were driving home from a gig that night, so when I saw them I thought that they were here to tell me you had died in some awful crash. Instead, they were at my door to gleefully dump their buckets of sleaze and schadenfreude on me. Oddly, I was relieved! I thought you were dead. You weren’t dead; you were just careless and a bit daft. No one wants to hear bad news like this, and no one wants the entire country to hear it, and worse, no one wants the entire country to hear a bizarre, and in so many instances, fabricated version of it. BUT we are in the public eye, and when you trip up, unfortunately everyone’s going to know about it. What the public never, ever get to hear is the entire truth with all its twists and turns, so there is rarely a balanced account of anything so hotly gossiped about. In an effort to lure us out of the silence we chose to keep, several newspapers ran supposed ‘Exclusive Interviews’ where we were both apparently quoted verbatim. Since neither of us has ever spoken to anyone about it, those brazen lies really shocked me. That they were willing to go that far down lies lane. I guess we all know it happens but, like the old cliché, until it happens to you, you ain’t got a clue. Meanwhile, we were forced into a strange utter-cards-on-the-table kind of congress at home, both of us. We needed to know every single incident, harmless or otherwise, from 16-odd years of marriage, so’s we could be armed against the bomb attack. It actually became quite tedious recalling any tiny or big moment that could be construed or exaggerated or reported in any form that would harm or threaten our life together. We started to invent wild scenarios to keep our interest up, remember?! The most remarkable thing was that, once again, our natural instinct was to pull tighter, towards each other, unite, hold hands and walk through the storm together. There was no single moment when separation was a possibility. Quite the opposite was the case. We needed to remind each other what was worth fighting for, and my darling Bobba, you really are worth fighting for. The most terrible thing about the whole palaver was that it had all come at a time when you were already feeling a bit midlife-sad, your mum had died and you were in the grip of that slippery old snake, grief. You had thrown yourself into too much work, both TV and touring, and you were knackered. All of this humiliating shit publicity on top of already feeling shit made life shit to the max. That’s when you had a total wobble and I knew you needed to talk to someone, to work out what was really wrong. To see if you could work your way through some pretty challenging self-doubt and consequent destructive choices. That’s when you went into the Priory, which was the last place on earth I would have wished for you to be, believing like so many others that it was a guilt hideout and spa for frazzled pop stars. Of course, the reason so many people go there, mostly unfamous, is because it’s frickin’ good, simple as that. The main doctor who was recommended to work with you couldn’t treat you unless you went there, and we particularly needed his help. The Priory is not a spa, it’s a hospital, with many people on the edge of their lives, for one reason or another. You didn’t have an addiction, I don’t know if you really had a depression in the truest sense of the word
, but you certainly had a life-toppling, debilitating crisis of utter, all-consuming sadness and it was awful to see. You firstly needed sleep, proper big long sleep, and you needed to be safe in the hands of someone who could help you unpick the mental mess you were in. You are emotionally bright, you could put yourself back together so long as you could understand why you fell apart. Which you did. Quite quickly. You were hungry to understand, to dissect and analyse huge chunks of your life. It was amazing to witness you logically fitting your personal jigsaw back together. You love reason, you get it. It was a fabulous example of proper help for emotional and psychological trauma. I so wish this was the avenue my own father had been able to take. He struggled on alone with his private torments till it was all too much and he sought his own, tragic way out. You didn’t. You took quantum leaps of courage and examined your flawed self, you drew conclusions and made decisions about how to live your life to avoid that sadness as much as possible. That, for me, has been the most remarkable, courageous and bloody brilliant achievement you have had, in what is a life chock-full o’ achievements, frankly! I bloody loved your fortitude and your humility and your openness at this frightening time. I saw your phenomenal backbone righting itself and I saw you walk upright again, in the face of much scorn and derision. And certainly the comedy fraternity know how to heap scorn upon a fellow comic. Ouch. So, I thank you for your determination, for not scurrying off, for facing your fears and your mistakes with supreme dignity. I also thank you for, at that time, going to the homes of everyone on both sides of our immediate family and sitting them down to tell them what happened by starting with ‘Look, I’ve been an arse … I wonder if you can forgive me?’ By dint of that humility, you is SO not an arse. You is a proper man.

  THANK YOU for all the poetry, the letters and the cards. You haven’t let a month of our marriage go by without reminding me of something meaningful. You always point me towards the bigger picture when, oftentimes, I’m busy doing frantic colouringin with felt tips in the corner.