by John Challis
‘She ought to see a shrink,’ I said, but after a few weeks, I began to sense that she was right, when I started to spot subtle – and not so subtle – hints of Carol’s interest. It was a case of the spider and the fly – although I was, at first, a reluctant, resisting fly.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like Carol. I could see that we had a lot in common and beyond the merely physical. But I was realistic enough know that I wasn’t in a reliable state of mind. I didn’t want to start anything, only to let her down and experience yet another self-destructing relationship. I felt I’d already made so many wrong choices that my confidence was in shreds and I didn’t trust myself ever to get it right, while Myra gently nudged things along and Peter stood and watched in the wings, an amused spectator. Could I really play this part, I wondered?
It wasn’t long, of course, before I succumbed. After a jolly evening at Airedale Road, I walked Carol back to her little nest in Brackley Road. It was late, I was tired and emotional (in the real sense) and too full of booze to drive home.
Carol offered accommodation. I was accommodated.
She had to leave early in the morning for her job in the wardrobe department in Phantom at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket, where, among others, she dressed and undressed the lovely John Barrowman. Barrowman was so lovely, she said, that he was not averse to shedding all his clothes and walking around back-stage stark naked.
I had the impression, from her description, that she wasn’t averse to him doing it.Just before I left her flat, a message was left on her answerphone. It was a female friend.
‘Hello, Carol. Hope you’re OK. Looking forward to seeing you soon. Hear you’ve got yourself a new man, darling! Well done!’
‘Well!’ I muttered to myself, a bit like Frankie Howerd, ‘that’s a bit previous!’ And I sat down to write her a note thanking her for her hospitality.
Within a month of meeting Carol, I had recognized that this was something entirely different from any of the relationships, marriages or flirtations in which I’d been involved in the past.
This, I knew, was real. For a start, Carol was real. She said what she thought; there was no dressing things up, or avoiding the issue. I loved that she was so tall and striking and yet at the same time, had such a great sense humour.
It turned out that she had a goodish back story of her own. She’d been born in Libya, where her father was stationed as a British Army officer in the post-war mopping-up operations. Returning to England aged three, she lived with her mother’s parents in Martinstown, near Dorchester in the West Country.
Coming from old Dorset land-owning stock, she and her brother, Johnny had had an idyllic childhood. Carol’s mother probably harboured hopes that one day her daughter would marry into some fine old Dorset family. In this she was to be disappointed. Like many full-blooded young female in the 1960s, Carol escaped to London, ostensibly to work in Bourne & Hollingsworth’s stationery department, in fact just to be anywhere closer to the action than Dorchester.
She lasted six months at B&H, before enrolling into the London College of Fashion, just off Oxford Street, where she could extend a natural talent for dressmaking and design. As a young fashion student in London in the last convulsions of the Swinging Sixties, Carol got to know a lot of musicians and performers and had been known to ride pillion behind Jimi Hendrix wearing nought but a rabbit-fur coat. She was spotted while holiday-jobbing in Harrods’ lingerie department by Peter Baker, choreographer and talent spotter for the Bluebell Girls.
He always had his eye out for very tall, glamorous dancers and mannequins. At six foot one, Carol ticked those boxes. As a Bluebell, she would be one of a troupe of twenty girls employed to stand around in statuesque pose with hardly any clothes on.
Luckily, Baker introduced her to Raphael Olsen, an American of tiny proportions who had started out in Las Vegas doing an acrobatic dance routine with James Cagney and had since built up a spectacular cabaret act known as Raphael and his Model. His ‘model’ was always much taller than him (not hard) and (using a step ladder) he would dress them with extraordinary and outrageous creations, conjured up from lengths of silk and satin taken from a prop box and enormous hats lit up with fairy lights, trailing cloaks and feather boas. Clusters of diamanté added a splendid touch of ‘bling’ and at the final moment a miniature poodle called Johnnie, dyed pink to match the costumes, made an entrance from a secret pouch in a feather boa!
Raphael’s current model had just become pregnant and he’d sent Baker an SOS for a replacement. The job description required the successful candidate to stand around in statuesque pose with hardly any clothes on but, in this case, on her own. Carol was the successful candidate and took the job like a shot.
As Carol described the act, I wished I’d seen it. It was remarkably refreshing for me to be talking to a woman who, on the one hand, knew how the business worked (unlike, for example, Inge) but, on the other, didn’t suffer from an actor’s inherent need to pose and pout all the time (unlike, for example, Sabina), for despite having been an actor all my life, there were some aspects of actors of the opposite sex with which I was never very comfortable.
Olsen’s was quite a famous act that was seen in all London’s major cabaret venues. As a result of the exposure this gave her, Carol became much in demand. David Nixon wanted her for his TV show, Magic Box; Mike and Bernie Winters for their show and Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise offered her a regular appearance on their Saturday night programme. Unfortunately, Carol couldn’t take up any of these offers as she was tied to Raphael’s act and stayed with it for the next five years. By the time she’d finished her stint in it, she had got her DipAD from the School of Design and had met Patrick Curtis at an audition for Queen of the Amazons, starring Patrick’s wife, Raquel Welch and Christopher Lee. The film called for a tall woman who could stand around in a statuesque pose with hardly any clothes on, a role for which Carol was, by now, very well qualified. Unfortunately she had also met her first husband, who wasn’t so keen on the idea and a more conventional career beckoned, although it would always have a showbiz connection.
While the two Sonning plays were going on, I’d been able to keep up regular visits to my father, unrewarding as they generally were. As he’d shown no signs of being let off his by now powerful course of sedatives, he’d been moved to an altogether more hermetically-sealed establishment, where everything was very clinical and controlled, as if he were living in a laboratory.
I was struck that he was more comatose than ever, and the staff admitted that he’d been very agitated when he’d arrived and they’d had to up his dose again. I was guiltily put in mind again of Nurse Ratchett and Jack Nicholson’s character in the Cuckoo’s Nest, although I had to accept that there was no alternative.
A month later, after some kind of seizure, he was rushed to Epsom General Hospital. By the time I got there, he’d been stabilized and was sitting up in bed, awake but very wan. He didn’t recognize me. I took his hand but he snatched it back just as he’d done at my mother’s funeral four years before.
I was still there when he had another truly alarming seizure. He vomited violently and his eyes rolled right back in his head. I gasped in panic. I thought I’d just seen my father die.
But, astonishingly, they brought him back. He coughed, his eyes flickered open; he looked somehow apologetic and again gazed at me as if I were a total stranger.
A young doctor took me aside. ‘Look, John, we’ve brought him back twice now. If it happens again, do you still want him resuscitated? I mean, there’s no quality of life there and it’s not going to get any
better.’
I understood that pragmatically he was probably right but this was my father.
‘You know I can’t possibly agree to that,’ I said.
The doctor nodded ruefully. ‘I know.’
They made Dad comfortable and he fell asleep, while I sat there wondering what the hell to do. After half an hour, a nurse suggested that I go home and com
e back the next day.
I drove home with my mind in turmoil. Not knowing what else to do, I went to the pub, got monumentally drunk and dragged the barmaid back to my cave in Sheen Lane.
I woke up the next morning feeling bad in every possible way. I didn’t recognize the barmaid who was still there but as the mist cleared
I remembered who she was. ‘Christ! Is the bar open already?’ I asked.
I looked around to see the familiar surroundings of my own bedroom.
Later, I tried to work out what I was doing. I knew I’d been drinking a lot too much. Although since I’d met Carol I was beginning to see that what I’d found with her was probably something important, I seemed to be fighting the urge to commitand a pointless, one-off night like I’d just had was part of that process.
I went as often as I could to see Dad in hospital, although for a while, he still showed no signs of knowing who I was. Eventually, he improved enough to go back to the Oakfield Nursing Home in Ashtead and I was very relieved I hadn’t consented to withholding resuscitation.
I couldn’t get to the nursing home every day and when I did get there, I usually came away with the impression that it had made no difference to him if I was there or not. Nevertheless I felt bad that I couldn’t go daily and that sense of guilt was only slightly assuaged when someone on the staff told me that a lot of the patients were just dumped there by relatives and were never visited at all. One of them hadn’t had a visitor in ten years.
I got a small reward for my troubles and a little encouragement on one visit when Dad opened his eyes and appeared to let me in.
A nurse came into his room and asked Dad if he wanted a cup of tea.
‘No, no,’ he grumbled, then added, out of the blue, ‘What about you, boy?’
‘Thanks, yes,’ I replied, provoking an impatient sigh from my father.
He fell silent. I drank my tea. After a few minutes, he grabbed the sugar bowl, stuffed every single sugar lump into his mouth, lifted the milk jug to his lips and downed the lot. He looked at me. I saw the hint of a twinkle.
‘This tea’s bloody cold!’ he muttered.
In my excitement, I nearly spluttered my PG Tips all over the floor.
‘Dad? Dad?’ I whispered, eager to keep any contact with the ‘old’ Dad, the funny Dad, who’d loved surreal humour and laughed at the Goons with me when I was a kid. I allowed myself the sudden hope that he was coming back and this long stretch of non-communication was over.
A moment later, he fixed me with a monitory eye, as if to say: ‘I know what you’re up to.’
And the window was closed.
I drove home, depressed as hell and grabbed the whisky bottle as soon as I’d got through the front door. It really hurt me that I seemed never to have had any real communication with my father. Reflecting on this, as I had increasingly, I now saw that as an only child, I’d found myself for much of my adult life being a kind of pawn in the curious struggle that had developed between my parents, each of them wanting me firmly in their camp.
The lack of connection with my one remaining parent lay, I think, at the heart of most of the uncertainties I harboured about myself.
Whatever the outside world and the proliferating band of Only Fools fans may have thought, I felt, as an individual, that I was a total washout, with three failed marriages behind me, and no kids (probably a good thing, in the circumstances). To compound those failures, I’d allowed myself to start and stay with a ridiculously volatile relationship with the Dangerous Dane, which at no stage looked as if it could last.
Now that I’d met someone with whom I felt real and at ease, I didn’t trust myself not to let her down and I was finding that I was drinking even more, maybe to avoid stepping up to face the possibilities and encouraging fate to put the boot in again.
I talked about it to Myra Egan, who had directed me in some of the Sonning plays and had got to know me as well as anyone in the previous dozen years. She suggested I might like to talk to someone about my condition. I knew that she was a great listener herself and that she meant it constructively. I took the idea seriously and she introduced me to a friend of hers, Wasyl Nimenko, a well-known doctor with a wide range of corporate and high-powered clients.
Wasyl was a charming, jovial man who thought I should have a session with Susie, the in-house analyst attached to his practice. I agreed to an exploratory meeting with Susie, who had a lot of experience with performers of various sorts. She was also an able, all round psychoanalyst and I believed her when she told me that, as an only child, I was likely to have had a more complex relationship with my parents than was normal, particularly when communications had completely broken down between them. She suggested that my father may well have had issues of his own, which, of course, had never been dealt with – at least, not as far as I knew.
She advised me to take my time over writing a letter to my father, in which I should express all the doubts and frustations I felt about our relationship, his lack of encouragement and absence of approval for anything I’d ever done and how he seemed always to keep barriers up between us, as if forbidding my entry. It was only then, when I started writing about these things, that I realized just how painful this had been for me.
The letter wasn’t intended to be sent to my father – and I could never have sent it – but as a means of identifying and drawing out all the bitterness and self-doubt in my feelings for him and I found that was undoubtedly a help in putting these emotions into perspective.
On the morning of 29 September 1991, I woke with a hangover again, in my flat in Sheen Lane with the phone beside the bed ringing in my ear. This time I was alone. I’d been out drinking, wherever booze and company were on offer, long after the pub had closed. I rolled over, managed to pick up the phone and grunt into it. For a few seconds, I couldn’t take in that a female voice was telling me my father had suffered a heart attack during the night and was dead.
I shook my head to clear it. ‘How can that be? I only saw him the day before yesterday!’
But the caller only repeated what she’d said.
I slammed down the phone, pulled on some clothes and drove straight down to Ashtead.
‘I’ve come to see my father,’ I announced when I got there. But he wasn’t there. They hadn’t had a chance to tell me before I’d banged the phone down that his body was required for a post-mortem.
As I drove away to the mortuary, looking at semi-rural fringes of London that surrounded it, not far from where my father and mother and I had walked the dogs in the old days, by the woods and meadows my father had loved and I thought it was not such a bad place for him to have died.
Hardly anyone came to Dad’s funeral at the Anglican church in Ashtead. His sister Enid came down from Sheffield; Keith Washington and Mad came to support me. Although I had started to see more of Carol, she had never met Dad and I didn’t feel I could ask her to come.
Near the grave, beneath the foliage of a flowering cherry tree, I said goodbye to my idiosyncratic father, and cried like a child. It must have been the realization that I had witnessed the final departure of the man who had brought me into the world and whom I had never really known. It was only after I’d passed forty myself that I’d started trying to find out what he truly was about and by then it was too late.
Enid cried too. He had never really talked to her, either, she said. Back in Epsom, I stood in8 Sunnybank, depressed and painfully gloomy about the deterioration of the place. Some pipes had burst and water had run down the stairs into the hall and living room; paint was peeling, gutters falling off and the garden looked like a bomb site. This was where I’d passed my formative years as a teenager, where Id set out for my first job as an estate agent and where I’d returned for sporadic breaks between stints of acting in my twenties. The house looked completely worn out and abused now. And I had inherited it.
This had happened by default. My mother and father had come to an agreement that anything she had to leave would come to me and a
nything he had would go to his sister, Enid, who was known to have been having a bad time with her husband.
I wasn’t surprised, though, to find that Dad had died intestate and I was his next of kin.
Enid needed somewhere to escape from her marriage, a home in which to look after her autistic daughter, Cathy. I had squandered most of what I’d inherited from my mother on Michael Slater’s aloe vera farm and that didn’t look as if it would ever be a productive venture. I didn’t want that to happen again, so once my father’s ragged property and effects had been sold, I aimed most of the proceeds Enid’s way.
And there I was at forty-nine, an orphan. It was a strange feeling, being at last cut loose to drift through life without the anchorage your parents provided.
My mother had died at sixty seven, my father at seventy-two. I was very conscious of my own mortality at the time and I couldn’t help wondering if my own death might not be so far in the future.
To add to the grief I felt over my father, my third marriage had broken up quite harshly, I had just lived through two years of an extremely volatile and destructive relationship that had also gone badly sour, and now I’d been orphaned – all in the space of the past three years.
I needed a drink, badly.
But before I left Sunnybank on that day after the funeral, I was having a last look through what was what, when I found an old ARP box tucked away in a spare room wardrobe. In it was a letter from my mother to my father, written about fifty years before. In it, she begged his forgiveness because she had strayed and had become pregnant. She had no idea how to tell her father, because he would have been scandalized.
I tried to piece together what might have gone on between them. They had met and had just a brief and, I suspect, fairly unphysical liaison before deciding to get married right away because, with the looming threat of a Nazi invasion, there might be no tomorrow.
What I read into this was that Mum had become pregnant by another man.
The man I had called Dad was not my father.