Heads and Straights

by Lucy Wadham

  After Scum she got a job as third assistant director on an advert shot for Lee Cooper by the then unknown Tony Scott. The brief was to make an edgy, punk film to the soundtrack of Gary Numan singing ‘Don’t Be a Dummy’. On the first day of the shoot the casting agency sent over a handful of squeaky-clean actors dressed up as punks. Fly was appalled. Taking a deep breath, she stopped Tony Scott on his way out of the audition room and offered to get him the real thing. He agreed, so Fly went down to the King’s Road, and with the promise of fifty quid each recruited a handful of volunteers from her old gang. The following morning she rounded them all up, squeezed them into a cab and delivered them to the set.

  With her walkie-talkie radio, her chutzpah and her eloquent obscenities, Fly became a valuable element to have on a shoot. Tony Scott gave her a job at the production company he shared with his brother, Ridley, who was in the process of making Alien. Fly, who back then had the junkie’s perspective on private property, at the end of the shoot somehow managed to nick the khaki boiler suit that Sigourney Weaver had worn in the film. It was an old NASA suit made of thick, silky material and covered in zips that laced tightly at the back and made it fit like a corset. I inherited the suit when Fly was done with it and wore it all through the eighties. It was the outfit I changed into when I took off my wedding dress.

  When I was fifteen Fly left World’s End and moved into a basement flat off Notting Hill Gate, which she rented with her roadie boyfriend. By then I knew that she was taking heroin. On a long car journey my mother had broken down and confided in me. They sent Fly to the Priory, a gloomy, neo-Gothic rehab clinic surrounded by dusty laurel bushes. The consultant psychiatrist asked her to make a list of every drug she had taken thus far (on the strength of which he would later tell Mum that there was no hope for her), then he very slowly and methodically took apart his Schaeffer pen and asked her if the process reminded her of fixing. Fly thought he was a twat, went through the motions in group therapy and crossed off the days until she could leave. Sleeping in the bed next to her was a woman receiving electric shock treatment for depression who moaned through the night. Fly turned twenty while she was in there and I went to visit her on her birthday. With my pocket money I’d bought her a pair of feather earrings that I’d found in the Great Gear Trading Company. I remember her opening the little box and bursting into tears. It was more of a shock to see my invincible big sister crying than it had been to find out that she was on drugs.

  Fly tried several times to quit and when she did the one person she could withdraw with was Gran. She would drive down to Wales and hide out with her in her little cottage beside its roaring stream. Sometimes she would let Gran nurse her through cold turkey, but mostly she would go for a night and then race back to London to score. Gran adored Fly, recognizing in her her own vulnerability and bravado. She tried to help her fight her addiction, without ever judging her for it. On those rare occasions when Fly did manage to sit out the agony of withdrawal, Gran would take her into her bed and tell her stories from her own flawed life. Perhaps she wished to warn Fly against the same uncompromising spirit that had so often defeated her, but like the rest of us, Fly admired her all the more for her adventuring.

  Gran had a theory that there were three basic types of compatibility: intellectual, emotional and sexual. A lasting relationship required two out of three of these, and one of them, she believed, had to be sex. Her second marriage, she said, was built entirely on sexual attraction and as a result, could not last.

  After the audacious start to her adulthood, Gran carried on in defiance of convention, following her heart, loving and hating with equal passion and inciting equal proportions of love and hate. ‘Don’t let her into your life,’ her second husband, Peter, once warned my father. ‘She’ll wreck it for you.’

  When Eileen and Peter met they were both twenty-two. Eileen was living happily with her two year-old daughter, Elizabeth, running the riding school and enjoying her independence. It was love at first sight, she said; a bolt of lightning. Peter was tall and dark, his good looks offset by a beguiling shyness. He was teaching history at a boys’ prep school, dreaming of making his fortune in the colonies and serving the Crown as his own father had done. To Peter, Eileen was the most glamorous creature he had ever set eyes on and he saw in her all the courage and drive he needed. Without a moment’s hesitation Eileen gave up her riding school to marry him and have his children. She now wanted only one thing: to make Peter happy, so, with her usual gusto, she swung into action and, with her father’s help, bought them a house in the country, found him a job in London (organizing trade shows and exhibitions with her father) and bore him three children.

  Five years later, she was living happily in a large house on the Sussex Downs of her childhood, freelancing for the Daily Express women’s page and home-schooling the children. Peter, who was commuting to London to a job that bored him, had come to feel like a stranger in his own life and an adjunct to hers. This was not the life of purpose and adventure he had dreamt of. Unwilling to confront her directly, he began to stay away for longer and longer periods, sleeping in London at his club (the Oriental), and eventually in other women’s beds. Gran’s version is that he was too chronically insecure to allow her to love him properly, but for my mother, Elizabeth, Eileen suffocated Peter and thrived on the drama of their constant rifts and reunions. Mum says that her own fear of conflict comes from listening to their terrifying rows. The war, when it came, was a boon to Peter and he volunteered immediately. Mum still remembers the pallor of his face when he came home from Dunkirk, and the smell of his wet uniform.

  After the war Peter seems to have tried to escape Eileen by accepting a posting in Kenya. Six months later, determined to ‘save the marriage’, she followed him, with the four children, to a hill station 9,000 feet up in the cedar and bamboo forests of the Mau Escarpment. Elizabeth was fourteen, her little sister, Mary, was nine, Henry was four and Uncle J (then called Paul), was two. In Nakuru, the nearest town, Eileen waited for Peter to appear. When he did, the rows began again for she quickly gleaned a sense of what he had been up to for the past six months. She described the atmosphere of ennui and promiscuity that reigned in Nakuru at the time as ‘Happy Valley in its death throes’. One after the other, she was introduced to the bored, white colonial housewives who had been entertaining her handsome husband during his furloughs. They greeted this haughty new bluestocking, clearly intent on spoiling the fun, with undisguised hostility.

  At last she and Peter packed and left for his new posting. He would be ‘DO’ (District Officer) of Olenguruone and it would be a new start for their marriage. He had orders to settle a land dispute in the Rift Valley between the Maasai, nomadic warrior herdsmen, and the sedentary Kikuyu farmers. Travelling with them cross-country by jeep were an African radio operator and five informants from the warring tribes. Eileen had no misgivings. The boys would love ‘Olo’, Peter told her. They could run wild there, and the girls too.

  The house was thirty-two miles from Molo, the nearest town, and at the end of an 18-mile-long dirt road. A large bungalow with a wide veranda and a tile roof, it was set in a lovely garden with a ‘banda’, a round hut with whitewashed mud walls and a ‘makouti’ (thatched) roof for guests. Five black servants stood on the veranda to greet Eileen. They bowed and called her ‘memsahib’, and she shook their hands, smiling awkwardly. According to Mum, she was never relaxed with the servants: ‘How could I be,’ she would ask, ‘when I could feel they hated us?’ Eileen shook hands with Wingula, the head boy – who, as she discreetly observed to Peter, was a man, not a boy – and with Otupa, who would be her cook, with Awanda, the chief ‘houseboy’, with the ‘dhobi’ who would do her laundry and with the ‘scyce’ who would look after the two horses that Peter had borrowed for her from the nearby estate.

  Then two white men appeared to whisk Peter away. They were a surveyor and the local policeman, who was working with him. Eileen watched her husband climb into their jeep without a backward
glance. Knowing that she had made a mistake, she rolled up her sleeves and, with a strong sense of the absurd, set about unpacking her twenty-two crates of fine furniture, pictures, records and first-edition books.

  Whilst her children were exploring the outlying hills, Awanda, the head houseboy, who was not Kikuyu, but Luo (like Barack Obama’s father), would try discreetly to warn her of the situation into which she had brought them. In the forests all around them, Kikuyu independence fighters were gathering under the command of a man called Lucas Kipkoech, a disciple of the charismatic leader, Elijah Masinde, leader of the Dini ya Musambwa movement. Masinde preached that the white man was the devil and that the fate of the African would never improve until he had dipped his spear in the white man’s blood. This was the start of what would become the Mau Mau Uprising that would leave more than 12,000 dead and begin the end of British rule. Gradually Eileen came to understand that Peter had brought her to a front line.

  Caught between the demands of Whitehall and the Kikuyu elders, Peter felt increasingly out of his depth. Often away ‘in the field’, he left Eileen with a loaded shotgun, which she took to bed with her. One night a man tried to climb into her bedroom window. Fortunately she did not obey Peter’s instructions, which had been to shoot first and question later, for the man had come to ask for her help. A woman in the Kikuyu village was having a difficult labour. Eileen put on her dressing gown, found a torch and followed the man through the forest to the hut where the woman was lying in agony. I don’t know what my grandmother did. She had no medical training of any kind or any particular expertise but the woman apparently calmed down at the sight of this authoritative white woman in her home and delivered her baby without further incident.

  Mum said that Eileen never fell in love with Kenya like she herself did, but she made the best of it. Every morning she would school the children around the dining-room table. She read the little boys The Black Arrow, Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale of outlaws and derring-do in the forest, hoping, perhaps, that fiction would somehow override reality in their imaginations. Uncle Henry said that they felt no fear as children, only excitement at all the adventure. He remembers the sound of the Kikuyu drums at night and the thrill at the sight of the forest on fire as the Kikuyu tried to burn them out. Mum remembers evacuating the horses as the bamboo popped all around her, covering their heads with damp towels to lead them away from the inferno.

  For Peter, the fire was the last straw. He handed in his notice, arguing that his family was no longer safe. He told Eileen that they would go to South Africa, where there were opportunities for him. While he was away preparing their journey, Eileen received a telegram from him instructing her to sell everything. She and Awanda organized a lawn sale. ‘It was the books,’ she would tell me, still smarting all those years later. ‘They were the hardest things to lose.’

  Then, as she was waiting with the children at the train station in Nakuru, someone handed her a telegram: ‘Returning Saturday. Hold everything. Peter.’

  He returned as promised, set them up in a tin-roofed bungalow beside a diatomite mine in a place called Gilgil and then disappeared in pursuit of some new opportunity upcountry. In Gilgil my mother, who was now seventeen, became engaged to Richard Campbell, the white policeman who had been working with Peter. He was, of course, tall, dark and handsome, but he was also, at the tender age of twenty-four, a war hero, having fought as a fleet air-arm pilot on the Russian convoys. A week before Mum’s eighteenth birthday he was killed by a Kikuyu spear while trying to arrest Lucas Kipkoech on the shores of Lake Baringo.

  Mum went to bed for several weeks. Gran, who could never quite believe in her precious daughter’s love for any man, tried to hurry her recovery. Only Peter seemed to understand the depth of her grief. In those last weeks in Africa, Mum would wake every morning to find her stepfather sitting in a chair beside her bed.

  After Richard’s death at Baringo, Peter seems to have run out of ideas. His colonial dreams were unravelling as fast as the Empire itself. With no clear ambition, he returned to Nairobi to await another posting. Eileen was unwilling to follow him into the vapid ex-pat life of the Mathaiga Club and the Rift Valley Club and the Norfolk Hotel, where Happy Valley types were still trying to squeeze the last breath from their idyll. Instead she took the children along the coastal trail from Mombasa to the port of Tanga and caught the ship home.

  I loved listening to Mum talking about Kenya. The stories always gripped me, as if I knew, even as a child, that this was where she had been her most alive. I grew up knowing that Richard Campbell was my mother’s One True Love and always had the sense that my father would do, but didn’t quite match up.

  As the seventies came to a close our comfortable life in Chelsea began to fall apart. Dad’s press-cuttings business, which he had milked recklessly all through the seventies to pay for our extravagant lifestyle, was failing. The Times, one of his main clients, went on strike for a year and this was followed by the Winter of Discontent, all of it carrying the Conservatives into power on a tide of uncollected rubbish. During this period, my flamboyant father, instead of downsizing, moved his business into smart new offices in the prophetically named Terminal House in Victoria. He also hired an expensive secretary called Frances, whom he interviewed in our sitting room at home. While pacing up and down in front of the fireplace, he spied something dark in the thick, white mohair carpet. He bent down and picked it up and it was only as he was popping it on the mantelpiece that he realized it was one of my little brother’s turds. He sealed the deal with Frances by shaking her hand. Very soon she was out of a job. Thatcher’s chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, had raised interest rates and Dad’s firm, like so many other small businesses, went to the wall.

  For Dad, 1980, the year he liquidated his company, would become the Year of the Crash. Henceforth, for him, there would be ‘BC’ and ‘AC’: before and after the crash. He tried hard to eschew bitterness. Under the influence of his Swiss skiing instructor, Otti – who fancied himself as a bit of a guru and saw the lost English public schoolboy that was my father as a prime target for reform – Dad started reading the work of the contemporary philosopher, Erich Fromm. His latest book* invited the reader to stop trying to ‘have’ and start trying to ‘be’. That summer, I remember sitting beside Dad on a rock looking out over the Adriatic (we were on holiday in Communist Yugoslavia), listening to him talking about Fromm’s teachings. It was to be our last summer together before he and Mum decided to emigrate to Australia, and I was simultaneously falling in love with a young Serbian and the idea of socialism. (Tito had just died and my holiday dreamboat, in between sustained snogging, had been recounting tales of the Communist leader’s heroism and vision.) As I sat on that rock, listening to Dad’s new, humanistic world view which coincided so beautifully with my own, I felt a powerful bond with this father from whom I was in the process of breaking away.

  These new ideas would never properly mesh with Dad’s nature and conditioning. He was a materialist to his last breath. He lived for good food, good wine and what Fly calls ‘zhuzh’, meaning anything posh or fancy: smart hotels and fancy restaurants, skiing, quality tailoring. Indeed, part of Dad’s relief at the news that I was going to marry Laurent came from the idea that I would be living in the style to which he was accustomed. For many years my generous French husband would pepper my father’s life with expensive skiing holidays and luxury villas. It is a great credit to Dad that he hid his despair when, submitting to Gran’s deep influence, I left Laurent and moved to a ruin in the Cevennes, a part of France that boasts not a single Michelin star.

  On that rock Dad and I talked about our new lives, about his in Australia and mine in London. In September I would be enrolling for the first time in full-time, state education, studying for A-Levels at a sixth-form college in King’s Cross. Dad would be taking Mum, Cissy and my brother, Joe, to Sydney, where no one would care which school he had attended, or whether or not he had been to Oxford. He had sold his three houses and his cars an
d he was ready to ‘start again’, but this time in a classless society and with a new set of values. I believed him, having no idea back then that he had ferreted away as much of his fortune as he was able to hide from the taxman in Switzerland which he would eke out over the next thirty years to pay for such indispensable extravagances as his annual skiing trip.

  It is amazing to me to think that when Dad moved to Australia he was only forty-seven. He never tried to set himself up in business again, masking, with his newfound philosophy, a shattering loss of confidence. Instead he worked as a freelance PR consultant, adding to his income by importing and selling Guernsey sweaters door to door. His relationship with my mother, which had thrived on his glamorous view of them both, began to wither in their new, constrained circumstances. Despite his protestations to the contrary, he could never completely sever the class ties that still bound him to England. He ostentatiously transferred his loyalty to the Australian cricket and rugby teams, but speculated endlessly about how much his house in Chelsea would cost now, drooled over English stately homes, and fantasized about the life he might have had if he had done what his public-school cronies had advised and ‘got straight back in there’. It was as if he was plagued by the idea that, deep down, he was accountable as a man only in the mother country and by his own class, and that all attempts to escape that reality were somehow doomed.

  Mum, on the other hand, was busy embracing her new life in a society that couldn’t care less about her illegitimacy and lack of formal education. People judged her by what they found: a beautiful, amusing woman eager to start again. As Dad’s inner resistance to his new life grew, he and Mum began to drift apart. Increasingly despondent and in the absence of any desires of his own, he did what she asked and left Sydney for the outback. They bought the house she had fallen in love with. Set in the verdant Southern Highlands of New South Wales, it reminded her of Kenya. Like her mother, she would breed horses, learn to drive a four-in-hand and throw herself into rural life. And like the Rift Valley where Eileen’s marriage to Peter had come to an end, this idyllic place would be where she and Dad would bury their love. It was here that Mum, in the time-honoured tradition of the women in my family, fell for a man twenty-two years younger than her. Mellors, as my father would rudely refer to him (after Lady Chatterley’s lover), came to build Mum some stables and within a year she had moved in with him.