by John Challis
And while religion had never been important for her before, she started asking to be helped to the chapel where she would pray.
A few months before, Sabina and I had booked an autumn trip to Sicily, where the sun was still hot and the lemons were ripe. The thought of meandering though the empty, sleepy, cicada-buzzing mountains where Al Pacino had once roamed in his breeches and butcher’s boy hat was very appealing. I was worried about going now, with Mum looking as pale as a sheet and speaking in a whisper but she wouldn’t hear of us cancelling our holiday and hated the thought of being a dampener on anyone’s life. She even seemed to rally a little and the staff at the hospital tried to assure me she would be all right at least until we got back in a fortnight.
I was relieved. I needed this break, drained as I was by driving up and down to Bath, worrying about Mum and also my father, who wasn’t in much better shape by then.
On the day before we left, I spent a few hours at the hospital with her, holding her hand while we watched Korky the Cat flickering on the TV, before giving her a hug, telling her that I loved her and that she wasn’t to spend too much on the horses.
As I left, she smiled at me. ‘God,’ she whispered. ‘I could murder a glass of champagne.’
I blew her a kiss and on the way out arranged for the nurse to get her a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.
With a reasonably clear conscience, I set of with Sabina for Sicily.
From Palermo we flew south to Catania from where we took a ferry, which offered the most picturesque introduction to Syracuse. This crumbly, ancient and beautiful port, right on the south-eastern corner of the island was absolutely soaked in history; over the past three millennia it has been conquered and occupied by Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, Venetians, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines and Arabs as well French and English crusaders, who had all stamped their influence on the place in the temples, churches and palaces they built (except for the Vandals, of course, who’d just done a bit of vandalizing).
The town nestled like a chip of white chalk in the rusty, rugged coast; the sea below us, where we sat for our first drink, lay still and deep turquoise, broken by sparkles of silver as fishing boats, great flashy gin palaces and little cargo ships slid silently across the surface.
I thought of the two Antipholuses, the Boys from Syracuse, as the Hollywood film makers had called their version of the Bard’s dotty Comedy of Errors, where the twins are so absurdly confused in a way with which only a playwright of Shakespeare’s eminence could get away with.
Looking for a place to eat, we couldn’t resist the allure of a small trattoria, where we sat at battered iron tables on a stone-flagged terrace beneath a vine-clad trellis, from which dangled large clusters of plump, dark purple grapes.
It was, I thought, your dream Italian family restaurant where you’re treated like an honoured guest and you feel they can’t do enough for you. Sicilian charm seemed warmer and more authentic to us than the suave gushing of the chicest Italian restaurants in London, where the head waiters think they can kiss your wife as soon as you’ve eaten there a couple of times.
Amid the wonderful aroma of good food cooked in olive oil and the competing musty scent of the oleander, we looked over the dazzling town, down on the sea and felt very content. Sabina was in her element, her eyes glowing and her skin somehow already tanned. The sense of authenticity we felt about the place was confirmed by the presence of a number of other diners, who were clearly locals, and one family gathering in particular at a table close to us.
A dark-eyed old matriarch with silver hair gathered in an elegant bun presided over two or three offspring and their younger families. Two handsome young men, with dark brown skin and jet black hair couldn’t take their eyes of Sabina, who was, it has to be admitted, very eye-catching in a white shift dress. They made no attempt to disguise their ogling while they chattered away in torrents of Sicilian dialect, laughing and constantly throwing glances at us before they decided to summon a waiter. With a lot of gesticulation in our direction, they evidently instructed him to bring us a couple of plates, each containing a small baked pink fish.
I was suddenly alarmed at what this might have meant. Was it some kind of challenge? What, in the southernmost town of this island of Mafiosi did the despatching of fish to strangers signify? We were, after all, less than a hundred miles from the Godfather’s home town of Corleone. As I became more uneasy, involuntarily communicating this to Sabina, a garbage truck growled by slowly and drew to a halt a few yards down the hill. The motor was turned off. In the silence that followed, the family beside us had gone quiet, the sound of a dozen busy cicadas rubbing the back legs together grew louder and an onshore breeze rustled the vines above us.
I stared at the fish in front of me. Its dead grey eye stared blankly back at me and just the thought of eating it made me sick. The waiter stood by with what seemed to me like a deeply menacing smile.
‘Mangiate! E buono!’ he urged with what sounded to me like an ugly hint of a threat.
Was that it? I thought in panic. They would kill us with the fish for daring to enter their milieu and dispose of us in a garbage truck.
Sabina, who liked fish and seemed oblivious to the danger we were in, was already carefully slicing it away from its bony skeleton. She looked at me, puzzled, as if to say: ‘What’s wrong with you? It’s just a fish!’
I’d hardly dared to look at our donors but snuck a quick glance.
The two young men were looking at us, raising their glasses in salutation. ‘Lucca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes,’ I remembered. I couldn’t defy them by declining their gift.
I look a deep breath and gingerly started lifting the flesh of my fish off the bone.
I forced myself to take a mouthful, controlling my urge to gag.
It was delicious – the most succulent Mediterranean pesce I’d ever eaten. I looked at Sabina who was now munching happily and at the family, who looked ecstatic that we’d finally got round to eating their offering. Some of them even started clapping and laughing.
We gathered through a conversation of mime and pidgin English that this was a fish peculiar to the region, and, as an hors d’oeuvre, one of the great delicacies of Syracuse.
To my shame, I went limp with relief when I realized I was panicking over nothing more than attack of my own blasted paranoia; that I was no kind of threat to the local Mafia. The garbage truck started up again and rolled off down the hill to go about its lawful business.
After that powerful introduction, we fell in love with Sicily and were in the midst of a happy week visiting the still bubbling volcano at Etna, the beautiful town of Taormina perched on towering cliffs, boasting an ancient, almost undamaged amphitheatre, where naturally I couldn’t resist slipping down to the flag-stoned stage and spouting a few lines from Shakespeare, to the alarm of a few English tourists.
Being with Sabina away from the tensions and competitiveness of our usual lives, we were as relaxed together as we’d ever been and the lingering, niggling doubts that I’d had about us being married seemed to dissipate like the morning mist in the Sicilian autumnal sun.
Our sojourn there was a little marred one morning when I lost my wedding ring while floundering in the turquoise sea. The following day, 13 September, as Sabina and I frolicked in the swimming pool, the pool attendant called across to me, beckoning me to the poolside phone. It was Colin, my mother’s friend and self-appointed carer.
My mother had died during the night.
By stomach dropped like an express elevator. My first instinct was to blame myself. If I hadn’t gone, I convinced myself, she wouldn’t have died. And what the hell was I to do now? I couldn’t possibly stay on holiday, although it wouldn’t make any difference to my mother now – but then mourning is always more about the feelings of the bereaved than those of the deceased.
Sabina agreed that we’d have to go straight back and I set about finding a flight.
There was nothing for three days, which we managed to cut t
o two by entrusting our lives to a clapped-out Rimini Airways spanner bag. We drove straight from Gatwick to the Royal United Hospital in Bath, where I gazed on my mother’s unmoving face for the last time. She was sixty-seven and had died through heart failure brought on by a leaky valve, as her mother had. I was desperately sad to see the poor old thing so frail and thin and looking slightly cross, as if somehow betrayed by life, while my father, eighty miles away in Epsom, was failing completely to deal with his own self-inflicted problems. I couldn’t help crying over the bitterness that had developed between the two of them and, with a measure of guilt, I felt sure I could have done more to reconcile them.
At this distance in time, I doubt that was the case; the truth was that there’d always been an underlying tension in what was fundamentally a marriage between two incompatible people. I learned about the reality of this more directly, I suppose, after I’d allowed myself to fall into the same condition for a period of my own life. It must be something that happens to people far more often than it should but then again, I guess this kind of risk-taking, punting against the odds in choosing a partner, is essential to the evolution of the human species, in order to provide greater genetic diversity.
While I looked at her, I started thinking of rather strange aspects of her behaviour since she’d been admitted to hospital. She’d called me, for instance, just before we’d left for Sicily to tell me that she didn’t want flowers at her funeral. Instead, she wanted everyone to plant a tree in her memory. ‘No flowers, but plant a tree for Joan,’ she insisted.
When she’d rung off, I’d called the hospital to ask what drugs she was on.
‘Oh, yes, she was a bit high, wasn’t she? Sorry!’ They didn’t sound it.
When Sabina came into the room with me to see my mother, she rather unexpectedly crossed herself, as if she were entering the house of Dracula but, despite her ambivalent feelings about my mother, she was very supportive. She understood completely when I burst into tears while ordering the forbidden flowers; she could see that losing my mother had hit me harder than I could have imagined. And this wasn’t helped by my father’s reaction when I went to see him to break the news.
Telling him was awful. He looked at me, puzzled. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, apparently not very moved, ‘what a pity. When will she be home?’
‘Dad, she won’t be coming home, ever.’
He looked annoyed. ‘That’s all very well; she can’t just go away on holiday and not come back.’
‘No, Dad; I’ve been on holiday and I’ve come back, but Mum has died – and she won’t be coming back.
He shook his head. ‘Well, I don’t know, I really don’t. Nobody tells me anything!’
When I went back to Bath to organize Mum’s funeral, I found that all the burial places in the city were full and I had to look elsewhere. I found a spot on the hills to the south, overlooking Bath, near the Radstock road. I knew she would have liked the place; she and I had often been up there to walk the dogs.
My father came – or rather, I went and picked him up from Epsom myself the day before the funeral. I’d asked him to be in his best suit, and somewhat to my surprise, he was, sort of – his jacket and trousers didn’t match, he hadn’t shaved and he had odd shoes on.
I remembered my Uncle Albert wearing similar footwear to a funeral in Sheffield, when Aunt Milly had to point it out to him.
‘Aye,’ he’d said. ‘Ah’ve another pair like this at ’ome.’
I gave up trying to persuade Dad to change and only got him into the car with a struggle. He’d hardly been in a car for ten years or so and couldn’t handle the journey at all. He kept flinching and moaning about the speed, although I couldn’t have been driving more sedately.
Once we got to my mother’s house, Sabina and I sorted out sleeping arrangements for him and us for the night before the funeral. He took a while to settle down in strange surroundings, although in the middle of the night, he evidently thought he was back home and blundered into our room, convinced it was the lavatory. I was embarrassed on his behalf and it took some time to get him to change his mind and show him where he should go.
I’d let everyone I could think of – family, friends, former colleagues – know about the funeral and most came to the service, presided over by the vicar of the church where Mum and Dad had been married forty-six years before. I felt there was at least a nice symmetry to the arrangement but Dad seemed completely unaware of the connection.
As we entered the church and walked up the aisle behind the coffin to its place in front of the altar, I took Dad’s arm, which he immediately wrenched away with a sharp snort. Once we’d made it to our places on the front pew, he spent the whole service tutting and sighing, as if he’d rather be anywhere else. I could see the concerned faces of the people around us, whom he’d known most of his life but he ignored them and grew even more irritated. He treated his wife’s other mourners as if they were all total strangers, undoubtedly causing quite a lot of hurt with his eccentricity. Afterwards at my mother’s grave, which I’d been to so much trouble to find up on the hill, he refused to get out of the car. After a lot of persuasion from the driver, Sabina and me, he grudgingly climbed out and shambled up to the graveside, where he carried on muttering and sighing grumpily.
I felt bad about even bringing him now, although I had been determined to, perhaps to shake him out of the misery that seemed to have been consuming him, making him increasingly bloody-minded and antisocial as he aged.
Now, though, he was behaving worse than ever, and apparently doing it deliberately, as if some evil spirit had taken him over. I had been hoping desperately that at least seeing he wife going for the last time, he might have relented and shown some vestige of the love he’d obviously had for her as a young man. But there was not a flicker of regret or affection for her in him.
I felt devastated that I had failed so completely to bring about any kind of final reconciliation between my parents. It was a very unhappy day.
I spent the next couple of months dealing with my mother’s estate, such as it was, and filming the next great feature-length Only Fools Christmas special.
My mother had left me about £20,000 in shares, plus the house, which sold for £60,000. I sold the shares and passed some of the money I got for them to my father’s only other living relative, my Aunt Enid, who lived frugally in Sheffield. Enid was my father’s youngest sister, who had been married to an eccentric, possibly certifiable hoarder, whose house was so jammed with junk he’d accumulated that there was no room left in the place and she’d had no option but to try to find a place of her own.
I’m happy to say that, twenty-seven years on, Aunt Enid is still going strong, and writing regular letters of complaint to the BBC about their failure to run a fifth series of Green, Green, Grass (she is family, after all).
The Frog’s Legacy was one of John Sullivan’s typically convoluted plots of expectations raised, brought to a frenzy by Del Boy’s relentless optimism, only to be dashed by impossible obstacles.
Del Boy, Rodney and Albert have been asked to the wedding of Trigger’s niece, Lisa. Trigger’s Auntie Renee makes an appearance, played by . Joan, of course, was something of comic legend for playing highly strung, often sexually-charged women of a certain age. It was said that the always hilarious Dick Emery had based a lot of his female characters on those created by Joan. I was naturally excited to be working with someone I’d grown up watching in comedies like the Carry On films which had been huge hits from the ’50s on, and she couldn’t have been better in her role with us; but sadly, for some reason I never gathered, she seemed uncertain of herself and didn’t appear to enjoy her time on our set.
Auntie Renee, who had been Joan Trotter’s best friend, talks to Del about the legendary local ‘gentleman’ thief, Freddie ‘The Frog’ Robdal.
She tells him that his mother met Robdal and they became friends (in fact had a brief affair) before Rodney was born and while she and her husband Reg weren’t getting on.
Renee claims that Freddie Robdal was a cultured man, interested in French wine and paintings. He and his gang had broken into a London bank to steal £250,000 in ; the rest of the gang were caught but Robdal got away with the gold and hid it. After he’d died (by accidentally sitting on a detonator while working on another bank raid), it was found in his will that he’d left the hidden bullion to Del and Rodney’s mother. On the basis of this story, Del embarks on a quest for the lost gold,having theoretically inherited it from his mother on her death.
It turns out that Uncle Albert knew Robdal a little during the war but he’s incredulous when Del suggests that Robdal had had an affair with a married woman who lived on the estate. However, Del is wondering why he left everything to his mother. He also mentions a rumour that Robdal and the woman had an illegitimate child, who would be about Rodney’s age now. This begins to worry Rodney, although Uncle Albert dismisses it as a mere rumour.
In the meantime, Del gets Rodney a new job, as chief mourner for the local funeral directors. Rodney’s not happy about it but as a result, finds out that Robdal had bought a coffin from the firm when they first started business, for a ‘friend’ called ‘Alfred Broderick’. Rodney quickly sees that ‘Alfred Broderick’ is an anagram of ‘Frederick Robdal’, and concludes that Broderick didn’t exist and the coffin had been used to hide the gold and was buried in a fake funeral.
But Albert now tells them Freddie Robdal had been a frogman in the Royal Navy, so he had buried the gold at sea, planning to recover it later but was killed before he could do it. While Del vows to find the gold, Rodney can’t help asking Albert about his resemblance to Robdal. Although Albert still dismisses it as a rumour, he does acknowledge that they do look a bit alike. But Rodney is unimpressed.
‘Freddie the Frog? Killed himself by sitting on someone else’s detonator. What a plonker!’
Of course, the gold was never found but this episode laid the foundations for a theme that John Sullivan was to explore twenty-five years later, when he conceived the idea of Rock and Chips, a prequel to Only Fools,which features Nick Lyndhurst playing Freddie Robdal, Rodney’s dad.