ANNOUNCER: This is the BBC Light Programme
GRAMS: [‘HOLMES & WATSON OPENING 1’ by Willy Scott]
ANNOUNCER: We present Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, with Gordon Lestrade, Martha Hudson and Billy Page in...
GRAMS: [‘HOLMES & WATSON OPENING 2’ by Willy Scott]
HOLMES: The Adventure of the Red Headed League.
EFFECTS: Usual establishing sounds. A horse-drawn carriage passes along Baker Street, a newspaper boy shouts the headline of the day, in the distance a police whistle.
WATSON: It was a particularly miserable Tuesday when Holmes and I first heard about the Red-Headed League. The wind was icy and the fog thick. So thick, in fact, that one kind soul was heard giving it directions. It was so cold, I was forced to set fire to the front door just to get my key in the lock. By the time I reached my armchair I needed a large brandy. I sat and savoured it, rejoicing in what the papers were assuring us was one of the finest British summers on record.
HOLMES: Good morning Watson. You appear to have an icy growth under your nose.
WATSON: (Bunged up) Oh Lor’...
EFFECTS: A scraping sound followed by a noise akin to a chandelier smashing.
HOLMES: I see it’s another temperate day.
WATSON: Someone was chipping a horse off the pavement as I came in. Street children were licking the shattered remains like equine ice lollies.
HOLMES: If it distracts them from stealing the lampposts again, we may consider ourselves lucky.
EFFECTS: A distant sawing followed by the sound of a lamppost falling over and a loud, youthful cheer.
WATSON: No such luck. I can’t imagine what it is they do with them.
HOLMES: I’m told they make effective clubs against the rats.
I ESCAPED THE train at Scarborough, stepping out into a mass of traffic and gloom.
I had grown up in Yorkshire and half-remembered lazy Sundays in the town, reading yellow-stained comic books from creaking spindle racks and sitting on the beach, letting sand pour through my hands in the hunt for precious shells. There was no such nostalgia in sight as I crossed over to the main road and made my way towards the front.
There’s a universal rule that all train stations must be located in the most awful part of town. Scarborough was no exception. The station was the heart of a street full of betting shops and estate agents, cheap cafés stocked with watery coffee and inedible sandwiches. There was the theatre, of course, but whatever its reputation, it was an ugly pile of bricks, only coming to life as darkness fell. I slogged my way along a pavement spotted with the dark remains of old chewing gum. A newspaper sign tried to cheer me up with the story of a man who had recently been poisoned by his wife. Nicotine Death Stuns Police, it claimed, though obviously ithadn’t stunned them quite enough to let the murderer get away with it.
All in all, it was a miserable welcome to a childhood haunt. Eventually I found myself in the pedestrianised part of town, a shopping centre that could have existed anywhere, a place of mobile phone shops and orange brick. I queued inside a coffee chain, a raucous room of dark wood and hissing steam, and bought a universal cup of its universal coffee to sip as I walked.
By the time I reached the front, a hint of sun had thrown a more flattering light on the row of Victorian buildings and amusement arcades. The sound of beeping machines and electronic racing cars spilled out onto the pavement. The beach, while empty, looked like the sort of place where nice things might happen, if you had sufficient imagination packed along with your bucket and spade.
The wind was blowing so hard that walking involved effort. After several hours on the train, it was as good as a shower and a couple of hours nap. I would never be completely ready to meet the man I was here to interview, never, but after ten minutes of being sandblasted I was as, at least, suitably alert.
I made my way past the endless stream of paint-flaked hotels: Thursday Night is Caribbean Night!!; Appearing Tonite: Double Down(‘Best vocal double act on the coast,’ Yorkshire Evening News); Karaoke Competition! Sing for your Supper at Cap’n Jim’s Bar and Grill. Soon the offers of accommodation dwindled and the street shifted towards the residential. Checking the numbers, I finally found the address I was looking for.
I was twenty minutes early, so I walked straight past it and sat down on a nearby bench.
I checked my dictaphone; the last thing I wanted was to look a fool by faffing with it once in the house. It was fully charged, set automatically to back up recordings to cloud storage. I’d be hit by a whopping data charge, but better that than lose a word. I put it in my jacket pocket, then took it out and checked again, suddenly hit by a panicked certainty that I’d missed something the first time. Perhaps I should have brought two machines? A backup for the machine with the built-in backup? I was fretting myself in circles. Finally convinced I had no need to worry, I returned to the secure world of my headphones.
HOLMES: Watson, meet Mr. Jabez Wilson. You will note several obvious details at once. He has spent some time in China; the tattoo on his left thigh of a young Geisha wrestling with an octopus can hardly have come from anywhere else. Several elements to its design are distinct to the country: the colour of the ink, a faint pink hue sourced from fish scales, the thin, stylised line-work...
WATSON: The words underneath saying “Hu Tat, China’s Premiere Ink-Flinger since 1856.”
HOLMES: Well... yes, those too.
WATSON: He’s also clearly a drunk.
HOLMES: Watson! How many times must I warn you against theorising without facts? Upon what evidence do you base such a deduction?
WATSON: He’s passed out naked in our coal-scuttle.
I CHECKED MY watch, decided that being five minutes early was no bad thing, and walked back to the house.
This was my Schrödinger’s Cat moment. Before my finger triggered the bell, the man behind the door would exist only as a theoretical construct, a man of fiction. The moment the bell rang, leading the door to be opened, he would be real, inarguable, and staring right at me. I found the notion of it terrifying. You should never meet your heroes.
I rang the bell.
After a few moments a shadow appeared through the frosted glass and made its way towards me. The indistinct figure reached out for the catch and its fingers resolved into clarity, pink and lined through the glass.
The door opened and I was face to face with John Watson.
I had been prepared for him to be transformed by his years, few of us can hope to get to eighty-five unscathed. His hair had all but disappeared, his rugged, leading-man looks sagged. His skin had grown thin and shiny, his eyes pale. He seemed far too small to be the man who loomed so large in my appreciation, his body awkward and his movements slow. His famous smile— that had allegedly won over the attentions of everyone from Shirley Eaton to Jean Seburg—was nowhere to be seen, and the set of his jaw was so stern it was impossible to imagine it ever making an appearance.
“Yes?” he asked, his voice fractured by years of tobacco.
“I’m Arthur Doyle? We spoke on the telephone?”
“Did we? About what?”
“I’m the one that’s doing the book.” This didn’t seem to help. “The book about you?”
“Oh, that. Today, is it?” He turned and walked into the house, I assumed it was safe to follow.“Thought today was Monday,” he said, checking his watch as if to test any claim to the contrary.“Bloody bank holidays.”
He wandered into the kitchen and waved at the table, inviting me to sit down.
“That’s the thing with retirement,” he continued,“every day the same. End up losing track. Looking an idiot.”
“Not at all,” I tried to reassure him.“Easily done. Same when you’re a writer, to be honest; when I’m working weekends, the days blur into one.”
What little I’d seen of the house seemed soulless. A place inhabited, but never truly embraced. It was littered with functional things, old magazines and books. A man who lived to please his whims, wi
th no mind to aesthetics.
A pair of glasses with Sellotape on their bridge lay, lenses down, on the worktop. Next to them, an e-cigarette sat charging next to a pile of various liquids. Vanilla, menthol, coffee and cherry. John Watson had clearly been forced to kick one habit, only to develop another. It felt absurdly personal to see them, a little window into my host’s habits.
He filled the kettle.“Writer. Yes. Always fancied that myself. Prose. Done scripts, obviously. Different,though.” He turned the kettle on and rifled through one of his cupboards. The kitchen units were old, owned by a man who hadn’t the enthusiasm to replace them. The cupboards were half-empty. No clutter of excess groceries here; he was a man who bought what he wanted, consumed it, then replaced it. “Tea or coffee? Coffee’s fresh. Don’t do instant.”
“Don’t go to any extra effort.”
“It’s only coffee. I’m not past being able to fill a cafetiere.”
“Sorry, no. Coffee would be lovely.”
“French press, the Americans call it. Because cafetiere is too hard a word. French press. So literal, the Americans. Probably why they never liked us. Any country that can only just stop short of naming a cafetiere ‘French coffee thing’ was never going to like two stupid bastards making jokes about death. Sugar?”
“Just milk,please.”
“Can’t say herb properly either, have to affect a silly accent. Contradictory. Never understood the Americans.”
“Two countries divided by the same language,” I said, with what I hoped was a suitably friendly smile.
“Sense of humour, too. Very different.”
Holmes and Watson had never really found success in America. They had been household names in the UK and had successfully toured Australia towards the end of their professional career (despite reports that their relationship had soured into wild rows broken by uncomfortable silences) but all attempts to ‘break’ across the Atlantic had failed. Perhaps the most notable example being their box-office flop, Clueless, which had seen their characters attempt to solve a New York mystery with the assistance of Mickey Rooney as a diminutive Sam Spade clone.
“I suppose you’ll talk about that damned film?” Watson asked.
“I’d like to talk about everything,” I admitted, “well, everything we have time for. I appreciate there’s a lot to cover.”
“Time I have,” he said, handing me the cafetiere and a mug. “Not much else. Let’s go into my study. More comfy.”
I followed him out of the kitchen, still not quite believing that I was walking round the home of a man I had revered since childhood. If you were not supposed to meet your heroes, you certainly weren’t supposed to notice the messy state of their living room, or the curious stain on their hallway rug.
I had come to Holmes and Watson not through the radio shows, or TV series, but rather The Casebook of Holmes and Watson, an illustrated book of short stories and comics featuring their famous characters. I’d bought it at a car boot fair, not realising the stories were supposed to be absurd. I still feel a nostalgic glow remembering the time Holmes and Watson averted the flooding of Croydon in ‘The Adventure of the Norwood Plumber,’ and the utterly bonkers, alien-invasion comic ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Men.’1 I had a copy of the book in my bag, just in case I felt brave enough to ask John Watson to sign it. Unless he thawed out completely, I likely wouldn’t. One smile would probably do it, but that seemed too much to hope for.
His study was a jumble of memorabilia, bookshelves filled with folders of scripts, CDs, cassettes, videos and, with what space was left, books. A large desk sat at one side, empty but for an ancient laptop, a lamp and a photo of his deceased wife. A two-seater sofa stood underneath the window, the view of the sea reserved for the man sat behind the desk. The walls were lined with posters from live shows, newspaper clippings and photos of Holmes and Watson stood with other famous folk. I couldn’t help but linger.
“Take a look,” he said, sitting down at the desk, the large wooden chair creaking despite how little it was being asked to bear.“My wailing wall. On miserable days, I pray to it.”
Beneath a poster for their Australian shows—cartoon images of Holmes in his deerstalker hat and Watson with his service revolver disguising the age and mood of the two men—there was a photograph of the two of them with their arms around Brigitte Bardot; in another, it was Susan George; yet another offered Anoushka Hempel. It was a veritable cluster of blondes that the shallow part of me couldn’t help but speculate on. John Watson’s libido had been notorious in the years prior—some even claimed during—his marriage to Mary Morstan in 1976. Indeed, in Edward Malone’s seminal, if rather scandalous, biography of Holmes and Watson, The Hounds of Vaudeville, ’sixties tabloid gossip columnist Langdale Pike claimed Watson was a regular at Isadora Klein’s notorious sex parties.2
There were other famous faces on display: sportsmen, movie stars and politicians, all bookended by the unconventional pairing of Holmes and Watson through the years. You could track the dates not only by the clothing, but also the stars’ weight. As time went by, Holmes got thinner, his face becoming more hawk-like and drawn. The man that loomed out of the photos taken in the’seventies, all beiges and greys—seemed like a man close to death, his skin yellow, his features severe. Conversely, Watson grew bigger, years of alcohol and fine dining accreting on him like geological formations. Once Mary began to appear, red hair and freckles, she hung on the arm of a man who could have been the avuncular uncle of his former self, a man of bushy facial hair and ruddy cheeks. Throughout, Holmes haunted the pictures, a malevolent spirit waiting for his moment to pounce.
I raised myself up on tiptoes to read a small, faded newspaper clipping, announcing that the two of them were turning on the Blackpool Illuminations. They stood either side of a confused Mayor, their baggy suits billowing in the wind that blasted its way along the pier. Watson’s eyes were hooded against the sand that was being kicked up, his mouth pulled into a false grimace of pleasure. The Mayor had discovered that his ceremonial robes had become an ostentatious sail that would hurl him into the Atlantic were it not for the ceremonial chain around his neck acting as an anchor. Holmes simply stared at the camera, straight-faced, seeming impervious to the weather.
In a grisly coincidence, a fragment of the adjoining news story was still visible. A holidaymaker had been stung by a Lion’s Mane jellyfish and died. The local authorities were eager to point out that the species in question was rarely encountered so close to shore. Even in the unlikely event a swimmer did so, its sting was rarely fatal. The holidaymaker had suffered an allergic reaction resulting in anaphylactic shock. Many years later, Holmes would die in a similar manner, stung by a swarm of bees that he kept in his home on the Sussex Downs. This indomitable, intimidating man, brought down by insects.
WATSON: Careful Holmes, we’re surrounded.
HOLMES: Pathetic! You think you’re a match for me? Idiots! I have the most celebrated mind in the whole world. It was the matter of moments for me to deduce that the Red-Headed League was cover for a bank heist. I have my intelligence, you have a bunch of thugs with cricket bats; what could you possibly do to stop me?
EFFECTS: The extended sound of several men swinging their cricket bats, grunting and the smacking of skull on willow.
WATSON: [Weak] You had to ask. [Groans]
“FASCINATING,” I SAID, turning away from the news clipping as I realised I was ignoring my host.
“Like the marks parents put on walls, charting their children’s growth,” Watson replied, “but going on far too long. No children for me. Just a dead career. Sit down,let’s talk.”
I did as asked, pulling my dictaphone out of my pocket and holding it up.“Do you mind?”
He shrugged with indifference so I set it to record and placed it on the desk between us, turning it so that the red light was pointing towards me, in case it should decide to spontaneously pack-up.
“Where do you want to start?” he asked.
“Th
e book’s about your entire professional career together, from when you first met, right up until...”
“The bugger died.”
“Well, yes.”
Watson had never tried to pursue a solo career. At the time of Holmes’ death in 1984, Watson had been fifty-four and seemingly content to vanish from public life altogether. He even refused to appear in the inevitable documentaries and retrospectives of Holmes and Watson that would bubble up every time there was a viable anniversary to hang a broadcast on.3
When I’d first contacted him via his old agent I hadn’t expected to receive a reply, let alone be granted an interview. Being invited to his home had therefore been a shock, and probably the only reason my publisher had agreed to take the book.
“Were you never tempted to carry on without Holmes?” I asked.“After all, you had always played a major part in the writing of the scripts,I’m sure you could have had your choice of solo projects.”
“Nobody wanted to hire me. Not for anything worthwhile. I wasn’t going to fill a seat on panel shows or afternoon chat shows. After a year of failing to get anything commissioned, I decided enough was enough. I didn’t need the money. Nobody to spend it on but myself, and there was nothing I wanted that could be bought.”
“A shame,” I said,“the industry can be so narrow minded.”
He shrugged once more as if it was of no importance.“I’d done enough. Probably for the best.”
“Well, perhaps we should start at the beginning and work our way forward,” I suggested.“You met Sherlock Holmes when you were eighteen.”
“TB,” he said.“We both thought we were dying. Lying up in a sanatorium in Godalming. Coughs and chills. Different times. Now they just throw antibiotics at you, back then you were given food, a bed and a prayer. You might be there for years. Not so bad for the old duffers. For two young men, it seemed even worse than death. We wanted to be in pubs, going to dances, getting up to trouble. At least I did. Sherlock was unusual, even then. Hard not to be when you’re called Sherlock, I suppose. Blame the parents. Called his brother Mycroft. Even worse, sounds like a village in Kent. Met him in the garden, my first week there. Sherlock that is, not Mycroft. He was staring up at an elm tree. Seemed confused by it. He seemed confused by lots of simple things. His knowledge was vast, but the simple, everyday things were baffling to him. He told me he was trying to judge the tree’s height by the length of its shadow. I told him I couldn’t see the point.‘What else is there to do?’ he asked, and I was so bloody bored I helped him. He measured my shadow and correlated it against the shadow of the tree. The tree was sixty-four feet; quite why I remember that, I don’t know. Useless facts cluttered between the ears.
Two Hundred and Twenty-One Baker Streets Page 12