The Two of Us

by Sheila Hancock

  I was destroyed by his vitriol, although I did laugh at a typically high-camp letter from Kenneth Williams: ‘Poor old Hobson seems to be in dementia and it’s reported that she’s actually dressing up as the Pope and delivering her stuff to the paper ex cathedra.’

  10 January

  Read an article about me in Time Out full of lovely things. What a bloody irony. Russian Bride, one of my best performances ever, so I’m told, all sorts of good career things happening, and I don’t give a sod. It means nothing. John stumbled and fell outside the clinic. Face bleeding, dazed, clinging to me. ‘Sorry pet, it’s my stupid foot. Hopalong Cassidy.’ Taken in on a wheelchair. I parked the car, pelted back and there he was laughing and joking about it with the nurses and Jo.

  John was bemused that I was so upset. He gave Hobson the Back Treatment. For him a glass was half full and all the other reviews had been very good. But it is not easy to prance on stage the day after a review like that and convince people you are really enchanting and funny, whatever one venerable critic thinks. John just said, ‘Fuck ’im’ and set about finding out who the ‘pretty, witty actress’ was so that he could wreak vengeance. In her later career she never did a Morse or a Sweeney, that’s for sure. The situation was made doubly embarrassing when Hobson, who was an honourable man, was persuaded by his fellow critics that he had maybe got things out of proportion, so he came back to re-review the play. The opening paragraph of his second appraisal was along the lines of ‘I was right about Beckett, I was right about Pinter, but I was wrong about Leonard Webb.’ Our unpretentious author was likened to Anouilh and I was accredited with abattage. As Hobson adored all things French and now, it seemed, me, I knew it couldn’t be anything to do with slaughtering animals, as Tony Beckley gleefully maintained. Tony thought it dull when it turned out to mean ‘dynamism’, but was pleased that he could henceforth call me Hobson’s Choice.

  We settled in for a successful run. I was preoccupied with my family again, and John with his friends. During rehearsal he had been crashing with his pal Nicol and had now moved in with Ken Parry, and was also being fed and watered by Barbara and Ian Kennedy-Martin. It was a peripatetic existence. We saw less of each other, but on matinee days between the shows when the sun shone, we went to nearby St James’s Park and sat in deckchairs listening to the band playing on the grandstand. Or we had tea at Fortnum and Mason, quibbling over which was the best blend or the most tasty ice-cream sundae.

  16 January

  The treatment is ravaging John but he still managed a walk in Regent’s Park. It looked glorious even in winter. I wrote a letter to the gardeners thanking them. They probably never hear how much comfort their work gives. We had tea at the Langham. We do like a nice tea. When we got home he wept with weakness, but he insists on doing these things.

  For me, life was good. I was in a successful play with a congenial cast. My little house in London had been transformed by one of my Theatre Workshop pals, Harry Green, later to become well known for do-it-yourself programmes on television. Ken described going to a party at my house in a letter to Joe Orton: ‘What a posh place she has moved to! It’s all Scandinavia and patio-Spanish. V. mod, I must say. I got terribly sloshed.’

  Alec and I had bought a derelict cottage in Tarlton in Gloucestershire, which Harry was converting to provide a country escape. Maybe because I’d had no settled base as a child, creating homes became a passion. When I bought the cottage, the Cotswold stone tile roof was collapsing and there was a rotting cat and piles of dead flies inside. As each fee came in it went to a new roof, staircase or windows. The cottage was set in an acre of wilderness; Alec and I planted trees and shrubs and formed paths as I had with Daddy in Bexleyheath. It is satisfying to make gardens, which will be there for other families long after your death. My friends Brian Sack and Frances Coulson had a wonderful garden round their exquisite hotel by Ullswater in the Lake District. One day I was wandering round it, feeling a bit low, when, as I walked on the camomile lawn, for no reason my spirits soared and I felt delight. I saw no apparition and heard no voice, but I knew there was a woman with me. I questioned Frances, who told me that a hundred years ago a woman had indeed designed and lovingly laid out all the little nooks and crannies, pools, plants and statues.

  My mother enjoyed our homes and loved her granddaughter. We clashed over the importance of clean white socks and nice table manners, but she was an invaluable support. Not for me all the worry of nannies and au pairs. In working-class tradition I had my mum to help out. It all seemed too good to be true. It was. I accompanied my mother to the doctor when she complained of a pain in her side. As she re-dressed herself behind the screen, the doctor silently shook her head at me. She turned out to have a form of cancer called Hodgkin’s disease and the prognosis was bad.

  That night I told my mates at the theatre. I could hardly get through the show, so preoccupied was I with what lay ahead. The next day John called in for his usual pre-show visit. He asked me to sit on the shabby armchair and put on a pair of earphones. He clicked on the cassette player and left the room.

  When you’re weary

  Feeling small

  When tears are in your eyes

  I’ll dry them all. I’m on your side

  When times get rough

  And friends just can’t be found

  Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down

  Like a bridge over troubled water I will lay me down.

  I was deeply touched by his sweetness. Yet again this young man had realised I was less able to cope than everyone thought. For several more months I continued to do my daffy performance while dealing with horror at home. I was relieved when the show drew to an end, although it had been fun to do. I would certainly miss the companionship of the cast.

  17 January

  Recorded Just a Minute in Hastings. I thought it would be hard to be funny, but as always it was therapeutic to forget myself and, high on adrenaline, become a performer again. Mind you, after the show I fell apart and actually crashed my car. That’s all I bloody need.

  One night in the last week of the run, John asked me to drop by for a drink on the way home. He had bought a flat in Troy Court in Kensington High Street and was very proud of it. He said he had something to discuss with me before the show closed. I thought he wanted advice about his career as I knew by now he respected my opinion. He sat on the other side of the room with a drink in his hand. The ice was clinking against the glass. The traffic hummed outside. Inside our idle chat subsided and we sat in silence, looking at one another. At last he said casually: ‘The thing is . . . I have a bit of a problem.’

  Long pause.

  ‘Well, what is it?’

  A puzzled laugh. ‘Well, you see, I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love with you. It’s a nuisance.’

  Gobsmacked silence.

  ‘And the bugger is, I know this is for the rest of my life. You needn’t say anything. I just wanted you to know, that’s all. ’Nother drink?’

  It never occurs to me that I can be an object of love. It didn’t with Alec. I take a lot of persuading. This friend, as I thought of him, nonchalantly declaring his love was not convincing. I was embarrassed. Romances on tour and during shows are par for the course but were not really my style. When I recovered my wind I rattled on about propinquity and how, when the show ended, so would his infatuation. He sat, white-faced, on the other side of the room and I could see I had got it wrong. He just said quietly, ‘I don’t play games. I love you.’

  I discovered later he had already told several of his friends, including Ken Parry and his ex-wife Sally. I was the last to know. I explained to him as gently as I could that I did not play games either. I hadn’t meant to lead him on. He must not think of this as another rejection, I was just not available.

  I got into my car and sat for some time in shock. It had not dawned on me, and I would not let it now, that I too loved him. I did not do that sort of thing. I had been married for seventeen years and something f
resh and exciting was tempting, but Alec and I had a pretty good set-up in which our five-year-old daughter was secure and happy. Besides, Alec needed me, John did not.

  18 January

  Took Ray to Heathrow. John didn’t see him off. He sat in the car in the car park. Ray clung to me, crying. Those two little boys . . .

  11

  When the Journey Was Rough

  AFTER SO WHAT ABOUT LOVE? we both went our different ways. I was glad to see John’s career flourish. Having honed his comedy technique during the run of the play, he went straight into a classy TV comedy series Thick as Thieves by Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement. He and Bob Hoskins played two ex-convicts vying for the love of the same woman, played by Pat Ashton. He continued to do theatre work as well as his telly, with a success in a play at the Edinburgh Festival and another at the Royal Court, but his private life was unsettled. After his sons had left home, John’s father had remarried, to a delightful woman, Mildred, and lived comfortably with her in Marple, a posh suburb of Manchester, where John felt less able to arrive without warning if he needed his father. His brother was now settled in a good job with Ford in Brisbane; the refuge of Daneholme Road, however rough and ready, was gone, and even though he had his flat at Troy Court, he was on his own. He had a few girlfriends but none meant a lot to him and he treated them badly, often brutally walking away from a relationship without giving a reason.

  When the play closed, I too went back to sitcom land in a top-rating series called Mr Digby, Darling. It was about a firm manufacturing rat poison in which I doted on my boss, played by my old Rag Trade mate Peter Jones. Incomparable laugh-getters. I also did some plays in the theatre. I submerged myself in work and family and the nitty-gritty of everyday living. The experience with John had already shaken me, then three traumatic events hit me that radically changed my philosophy of life, insofar as I had one.

  Since my convent childhood I had been deeply religious. Indoctrination about hellfire is not easy to shake off. When I was a child my father and I would visit different churches every Sunday in a quest for the perfect sermon, the best choir, the friendliest congregation. We never quite decided on a denomination, but heads turned in visited churches as my father lustily joined in hymns, usually offering a descant or harmony. Occasionally we would have delicious giggles, crouching under the brown pew on hairy hassocks while worshippers around us leaped up and down in accordance with the ritual. We tried to fathom what was going on with the goblets and vestments round the altar and Dad’s outrageous whispered theories about priests not being able to make up their minds what frock to wear and gasping for a drink had me convulsed. Despite his irreverence, he had a simple belief in an all-loving God. He just didn’t know the best way to express it. Whenever I was on tour or in repertory I was uneasy if I could not attend at least one Sunday service.

  My mother’s illness became increasingly distressing. I prayed as hard as I could for her deliverance, at least from pain. In the event, what relief she had was from the ministrations of my friend Dilys Laye, a born carer, who supported me in nursing her. There seemed little help from on high. I tried to see a divine plan in her suffering, but it was hard to equate the indignities inflicted on this good woman, of incontinence pads and violent vomiting, with a merciful God. My father had the luxury of being a volatile delight only because my mother was the rock of the family. Like most women of her generation, her happiness was seeing other people happy. Her single-mindedness about what was ‘right’ and ‘not right’ could irk, but it was a useful yardstick to measure whether revolt or conformity was appropriate.

  19 January

  The Euro has been launched in France, but we hang on to the pound and resolutely drive on the wrong side of the road. I feel so European I cannot identify in any way with this strange obsession about a bit of paper with the Queen’s head on. John’s tube pipe taken out. Radiotherapy has shrunk the tumour. He now has a hole in his throat which he delights in making farting noises with.

  I was consumed with guilt at how I had taken my mother for granted since my father died, and tried to make up for it in her last months. I lavished as much love on her as she would allow. She bore the suffering with her usual stiff upper lip, spending what little respite she had from the pain setting things in order for her death. Dilys and I had given her an injection and she seemed peaceful but suddenly sat up and, clear as a bell, said, ‘Now wait a minute, Rick, I have things to do.’ Busy till the end, but on the way to her beloved Enrico. I believed that implicitly. I kissed her as she died, realising I had never done so before. She had kissed me on the forehead as a child when she said, ‘Goodnight, sleep tight, hope the fleas don’t bite,’ but I didn’t kiss her back. People didn’t kiss their mothers where I came from. I wished I had. I knelt by her body and thanked God for her deliverance, whatever that meant.

  The next day I was recording an episode of Mr Digby, Darling. I told no one of her death lest it should make it difficult to deliver all the rat jokes. After the recording in front of the studio audience, I crept behind the set and sat on the floor and wept. A passing stagehand crouched beside me and said, ‘Come on, Sheila love – it wasn’t that bad.’ When I told him why I was crying it was a relief to cuddle him and laugh together. I had a message of condolence from John.

  I had barely steadied myself after my mother’s death when the second blow struck. Alec was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus. If, as a result of John’s declaration, I had any doubts about my marriage, they disappeared as soon as the specialist delivered his verdict. My father, mother and now Alec, the three people who loved me unconditionally however badly I behaved. There was hope that Alec could have a new life-saving operation. That proved impossible. He was given weeks to live. Having had little outside help, apart from Dilys, in nursing my mother, I was relieved when he was referred to St Christopher’s Hospice. With the help of their palliative care in the home, Alec lived another nine months. He sweetly bore my only slightly improved nursing. During a particularly nasty procedure he said, ‘You are an angel.’

  In apology for past hurts, I said, ‘I always meant to be an angel.’

  He said, ‘Yes, a militant angel.’

  I felt ashamed, but he said it with such tenderness I supposed he had forgiven me for the bullying it implied.

  20 January

  Brian Sack from Sharrow Bay Hotel is dead. That place has been a solace throughout my life. Now he and Frances are both gone. Oh dear, everything is slipping away. The old standards are changing too. Awful pictures of prisoners shackled and covered with hoods shuffling around a prison in Guantanamo Bay, where they have no rights under the Geneva Convention, according to the Americans. This is us behaving like that, not some despotic alien power.

  Alec was a lovely man. Feckless, but with graceful charm. He did not appear to realise how unfair his life had been. He greeted the blows with a lopsided, wry smile. And now, at forty-nine, he was dead. My Christian forbearance left me. I was very angry. One year after kneeling at my mother’s deathbed, I stood by his. As I stared at his emaciated body that had so gently loved mine, I said aloud, as in prayer, ‘There is no God.’

  I felt no lightning strike me, no hellfire consume me, just profound relief flooding me. No need to ask, ‘Why suffering – why this?’ It just happened. We are human. We are born, we make mistakes, we sometimes suffer and are sometimes happy. We die. No one else is involved. It’s up to us. I entertained no thoughts of a future life. It would have been comforting to think of meeting again, but until somebody scientifically proved me wrong, I would not waste my energy on hoping. It made my sorrow more harrowing but at least it was real.

  As with my mother’s death, a misunderstanding soon had me rocking with unseemly laughter. It was a heartless requirement of the state that you go in person to register a death. My good friend Tony Beckley agreed to accompany me. He loved Alec and was as shattered as I by his death. We both looked drained and dishevelled as we slumped in a gloomy room waiting for the arriva
l of the registrar of births, deaths and marriages. He breezed in, chortling with delight, ‘And are you the happy couple?’

  Wrong – in more ways than he could possibly imagine. He was visibly shocked when we told him, through tears of laughter, that we had come to register a death. Perhaps when the happy couple arrived, they greeted their marriage with floods of tears.

  I was trying to adjust to being a single mother of a seven-year-old daughter, with all my crutches taken away, when the third challenge arrived. I read The Female Eunuch. In 1971, when I was aged thirty-eight, it threw my whole approach to life into question. At Ely Place Convent I had accepted the rightness of priests coming in to perform the holy rituals while the nuns kept quiet and watched; I was indoctrinated to believe that men were superior to women. My mother’s genuine fear of my stepping beyond the safety of home had made my ambition for myself and a career seem unnatural. My father’s belief, albeit later shaken, in the infallibility of leaders never questioned for a moment that they were all men. Up until The Female Eunuch, my search for and wish to please Greek gods had dominated my life. The book, together with my loss of faith, demanded a rethink.

  So flummoxed was I that I joined one of the women’s groups that sprang up and then formed one of my own, with three actress friends, that meets to this day. These meetings were sacrosanct. If one of the male of the species asked us out it was no longer understood that that took precedence over a date with a girlfriend. Not any more. Women mattered. They must stand on their own two feet and not look for a man to lean on, emotionally or materially. I had little choice at the time, so it made sound sense. I was enraged when I contemplated how men and we ourselves had colluded in forcing women to take a back seat in every area of life. I threw aside my angel wings and became a militant feminist. I spoke up, rather muddle-headedly, wherever I could, becoming the first woman to win the Best After-Dinner Speaker of the Year. In 2002, I won the Women in Film Award for the Most Outspoken Woman, proving that I have bored on for thirty-odd years.