More Than Just Coincidence

by Julie Wassmer

  Having been thrown into the deep end at the Knowledge Production Company, I was beginning to swim. Jools, Debbie and Tina were all single career girls, though Tina was engaged, to a successful showbiz lawyer. They were fearless: none of them knew the meaning of the word no. The main part of their business was providing production services for overseas companies, particularly in the US, who found it cheaper to make their ads in the UK. Operating to extremely tight deadlines, often with huge sums of money at stake, the girls would manage the seemingly impossible time and again in the course of a two-day shoot—finding some elusive prop or dealing with a logistical or casting problem that could have halted a production at a stroke. It was incredibly stressful work but they never gave up. In fact they seemed to thrive on it. I was learning a lot from them about perseverance and about the importance of setting yourself goals and achieving them. The girls were also encouraging me to think positively about what I might be able to achieve for myself.

  Looking back, I was probably carrying with me an unacknowledged and only half-perceived sense of having underachieved at school and even, to some extent, at university. Now, albeit belatedly, the happy hippy was compensating for that, and for the years spent on the boat doing very little, by working extra hard and pushing herself, perhaps for the first time ever.

  I was still uncomfortable with some of the sums of money swilling around the industry but I couldn’t shout too loudly as I was a part of it myself now, and it was paying me a good salary. When I’d taken the job, the girls had asked me whether I’d like to buy into the business as a shareholder with my first year’s commission, but I’d told them I was happier just working for my wages without the extra responsibility such an investment would imply. It was a short-sighted decision, as accepting that offer would have made me a lot of money when they sold the company. But I’d never been interested in accumulating money for the sake of it. To me a good job was one that afforded me plenty of time off to do something more important, and more enjoyable, like my writing.

  In the meantime, I was coming to recognise that my childless motherhood was an essential part of me. It had helped to make me into the person I was and hiding it from those who cared about me was not good for me or for my relationships with them. To have done so would have been to perpetuate the damaging family history of keeping secrets I had always so regretted. My oldest and closest friends had known about Sarah Louise for years. Jools, Tina, Debbie and I were now very close, too, sharing each other’s ups and downs, so one evening I told them about her. I studied their faces, trying to gauge their reactions, which I interpreted as a mixture of shock, sympathy and perhaps even horror at the idea that someone they thought they knew so well had been living with this private tragedy all along. It broke down any remaining barriers between us, and that was the way it needed to be.

  The girls were very supportive of me in this, as they were in everything else. Tina was very keen to get into drama and, knowing that I wrote short stories, she mentioned to me that she’d heard Channel 4 were launching a scheme to bring short films by new writers and directors to the screen. She suggested I should try to adapt one of my stories as a short film script. The films would be given proper budgets and would have to be made to a professional standard, so submissions would be accepted only from bona fide production companies. But that was no problem: we could enter a proposal from the Knowledge Production Company. It would be a potential opportunity for her to produce a first drama piece, too.

  I did try to rework a story that seemed to lend itself to film but I wasn’t happy with the result and put the script to one side. I never seemed to have enough spare time to complete a writing project. I had almost forgotten all about the Channel 4 scheme until a friend, Howard Greenberg, over on a visit from New York, told me an amusing anecdote about his grandfather’s funeral. His story gave me another idea.

  Inspired, I set to work, producing a twelve-minute script called Geh Kinde Geh, Yiddish for ‘go child go’. The main character was Stella, a possessive Jewish mother keen to use the occasion of a family funeral to marry off her gay son to the daughter of an old friend. As Stella tries to teach her prospective daughter-in-law to make latkes, potato pancakes, the exasperated girl tells her that Howard will have problems loving any woman as much as he loves his mother. Stella is angrily dismissive. ‘What do you know about love? What d’you know about latkes?’

  Amid the jokes about blinkered denial and dysfunctional family life lay the poignant story of a mother’s love and ambition for her child. Towards the end of the script, a little girl turns up unexpectedly on the doorstep, revealing herself to be the daughter of the dead family member.

  My intention had been simply to write an entertaining black comedy but, in many ways, it was as though the story had written itself. Time was passing. Sarah Louise was nineteen now, and the information she would have needed to trace me had been available to her for a whole year. Perhaps I had been driven to write the fictional happy ending that seemed to be evading me in real life.

  Tina submitted Geh Kinde Geh to Channel 4 and in due course she received a standard rejection letter—huge number of applications, you have been unlucky this time, the usual thing. We were both disappointed, though not surprised. We were well aware that there had been a lot of entries: just about every production company had submitted something, including commercials outfits like ours trying to get into drama. Even Seb had reworked a film-school script and sent it in. When we had a rejection letter and he didn’t, he thought he might be in with a chance.

  Then, suddenly, everything was turned on its head. Tina was puzzled to receive a phone call from Channel 4 inviting her to a production meeting for Geh Kinde Geh. She explained that they must have made a mistake: our project had been rejected weeks before. Channel 4 said they would check the situation and ring her straight back. When they did I was looking at her intently from my desk, trying to work out from each nod or shake of her head whether the news was good or bad.

  Tina put down the phone, her face glum. ‘Well, there was definitely a mistake.’

  ‘Too bad.’ I tried not to seem too crushed.

  A smile spread slowly across her features as she stood up and walked over to my desk. ‘They said if a rejection letter was sent out, that was the mistake. They’ve always wanted to make this film!’

  We both burst out laughing and hugged one another.

  A week or two later, Seb’s script was rejected. I knew how disappointed he must be and it was awkward for both of us as we could neither celebrate together nor commiserate with each other. And neither of us needed reminding that he was the professional and I was the amateur. On one slightly tense evening, a rather camp friend of ours fussed around us both. ‘Oh, my!’ he declared. ‘I can see this is going to be like Joe Orton and Ken Halliwell. Before long one of you is going to end up with your head stoved in!’

  Seb and I both laughed, but rather hollowly.

  Tina went to the production meeting with Channel 4 and British Screen, their partners in the project, and returned with the news that we were being given a budget of over £90,000 to shoot Geh Kinde Geh. This seemed to me an astronomical sum until Tina explained that as the drama was to be handled by Channel 4’s film company, Film Four, we would have to shoot not on videotape but on expensive 35mm film. It was going to be just like a real movie. She set about hiring a director and settled on Crispin Reece. Although he had made only one film of his own, another short, an impressive CV as first or second assistant director—which included big features like Clockwise, The Whistle Blower and the James Bond movie The Living Daylights—testified to plenty of shooting experience at a high level.

  The first thing Crispin did for us was to borrow a Bond office at Eon Productions, where we auditioned the potential cast. In an impressive room at Pinewood Studios, I sat in a green leather-backed chair that had perhaps once been occupied by Cubby Broccoli himself and met actors I had only seen previously on stage and TV. They read speeches from the script
and offered new and very interesting interpretations of the characters I had written. Tina, Crispin and I made our decisions. Bernard Spear took the part of Stella’s long-suffering husband. A prolific actor, he had appeared in Hollywood films like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and Yentl with Barbra Streisand, on stage, notably in David Mamet’s The Duck Variations, and had a list of television credits as long as your arm, ranging from The Likely Lads to The Bar Mitzvah Boy.

  As Stella, I had always wanted Maria Charles, and I managed to get my wish. I had seen her on television playing Maureen Lipman’s mother in the 1980s sitcom Agony and I felt she was perfect for the role of a wellmeaning, slightly neurotic middle-aged woman trying to exert control over a chaotic household. In some ways she reminded me of my mother.

  On the first day of shooting I was staggered to find so many people gathered on set—directors, sound engineers, crane operators, hairdressers and make-up assistants—all milling about busily. I must have looked staggered, too, because a stuntman leaned in to me and whispered encouragingly, ‘They wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.’ I allowed myself to believe that everything in my life was slotting into place. Or almost everything.

  I had no idea that shooting a film, especially a short one, could prove such long and arduous work. We were up at dawn and didn’t get to bed until very late. Overnight Crispin would be viewing rushes of the previous day’s filming and often he had to reorganise the following day’s shoot to meet our deadlines. While I’d been writing the script I hadn’t thought much about the practical difficulties of filming what was on the page. One short scene consisted of a row of undertakers being distracted from their duties by an attractive woman walking her dog. What could be simpler? But it meant casting a dog and we didn’t have enough left in our budget for an animal-handler.

  When I discovered this, I decided that my neighbour’s dog might fit the bill. I wasn’t sure what breed he was—he looked like a larger version of a chocolate Labrador—but he seemed intelligent and was always friendly when we met in the street. I put my proposition to my neighbour but he told me he couldn’t bring the dog to the set on the scheduled day because he was going to be out of town. However, since he could see that the dog and I got along, the promise of a small financial contribution was enough to secure his agreement to entrust his pooch to me.

  I duly arrived at the shoot with Rocky the Rottweiler in tow.

  Until that point, I hadn’t been aware of the dog’s true breed, and even if I had, I’d have thought nothing of it as I had no idea that Rottweilers could be dangerous. Although Rocky had always been perfectly behaved when I’d bumped into him with his owner, on set he seemed to be a different dog entirely. Any member of the crew attempting a pace faster than a brisk walk was chased and mown down. Rocky growled when petted and refused to co-operate with any of the director’s instructions. A simple visual joke was becoming a logistical nightmare. But I had learned at the feet of the masters, the indefatigable trio of Tina, Jools and Debbie, and ‘impossible’ was not a word in their vocabulary. I racked my brains until I hit upon a solution: the catering van. After a brief conversation with our location chef, thirty sausages were quickly fried up and I stuffed them in my jacket pockets. Rocky now followed me wherever I went and performed all of his tasks beautifully, and on cue. I had a new best friend for the price of some pork chipolatas.

  Within weeks the film was not only in the can, it had been edited and was ready to be shown at a preview theatre in London to an audience of cast, crew and family members. Since I didn’t have any close family, I brought plenty of friends and Mark’s parents. As the credits flashed up on the screen I couldn’t help but wonder if, when the film was finally shown on television, my nearest blood relative might see it and recognise my name. But at that stage I still had no idea whether Sarah Louise even knew my name.

  Chapter Thirteen

  18 Jermyn Street

  When Geh Kinde Geh was transmitted on Channel 4, it received good reviews. Tina and I were thrilled. In the girls’ eyes, I was now a fully fledged writer. A month or so earlier, I had been setting off for a meeting somewhere with Tina. She’d taken one look at me, said, ‘I can’t go to an important meeting with you carrying your stuff in a Tesco bag,’ and lent me a stylish Nicole Farhi store bag in which to hide it. Primed not to let her down, en route to a more recent appointment, I had been appalled to discover a large hole spreading out from under the arm of my jumper.

  ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘That’s all right, Julie,’ she soothed. ‘You’re a writer. You can wear whatever you like.’

  There had, it seemed, been a shift in my identity. Now I could look the part and be as bohemian and scruffy as I wanted.

  After the Channel 4 broadcast there was no special phone call from my daughter and no letter in the post. By this time she was twenty, and I had to face the fact that, even if she had seen the film, in all probability my name meant nothing to her. Somebody else did get in touch, though not because he had seen Geh Kinde Geh. It had been nearly two years since I’d left the Captain on the Golden Sunset and returned to London. In the interim he had written and phoned occasionally. I had been back to Menorca on holiday but not to sail with him, though he had remained in southern Spain, seduced by the cheap booze and low mooring fees. Now, ready to ‘screw the nut’, he was planning to take another long sea voyage. He asked me if I would go with him.

  I was torn. The long bridge that stretched between the Captain and me had grown more rickety with time. Part of me wanted to flee back across it before it collapsed altogether; to throw a few things in a bag, leave the rat race behind me and return to the uncomplicated freedom of the sea. But I knew I had now laid the foundations of something more solid on my side of the bridge. It was almost as if I were being tested: I wanted to stay in London, to build a settled life for myself and to carry on writing, but did I have what it took to achieve that? For my own sake, I had to give it a go.

  I would keep in intermittent contact with the Captain over the years and sadly, my fears about his laissez-faire approach to making a living from his boat, the repository of everything he had, proved well founded. As his funds dwindled, he kept having to downsize, and before long he had been forced to trade the fifty-foot Golden Sunset for a twenty-footer. I lent him some money at one stage, all of which he faithfully paid back, but it was never going to be enough to stop the rot. He would eventually end his days in the Med without, as far as I know, ever making the ultimate voyage of his dreams. But I prefer to picture him toasting the summer solstice with aquavit as fireworks light up the nightless sky over a Norwegian fjord, and to think of him fearlessly steering his beloved boat across the open seas for all time.

  Meanwhile, I had temporarily moved out of the Westy, which had become somewhat cramped owing to an influx of Annie’s visitors, to house-sit for some people who were going away on a long holiday. On their return I had been asked to do the same for other friends. Over a period of six months I had become a land gypsy, ‘caretaking’ homes in the contrasting areas of Holland Park and Stoke Newington. It had been fun for a while but I was growing tired of packing everything I owned into the boot of my little car and driving it to another part of London like a displaced Beverly Hillbilly.

  I was getting older, and finally burning my boats with the Captain highlighted my awareness of my single status. I would have liked a lasting relationship with a nice man but by now I knew that most prospective partners would probably want a family. I still didn’t feel able to cope with that after losing the child to whom I’d given birth—I still wasn’t even comfortable holding other women’s newborn babies. Mr Right would have to be a truly special person to take on the chaos of my life and guide me out of the cul-de-sac I’d taken, the street marked ‘No kids’. I couldn’t see a way out of it on my own. Perhaps my hormones were putting me under some pressure, though my biological clock was more like a cuckoo clock, with the bird inside awaiting its cue to spring out and squawk: ‘Too late!’


  I needed to grab my life by the scruff of the neck and build on the start I’d been given in screenwriting. Virginia Woolf once said that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she was to write fiction. I made a decision. A few weeks after the Captain’s phone call, I wrote a letter of application to the Church Commissioners’ Housing Association in Peckham, close to where my old friend Mark, now back in the UK, had bought a flat. He warned me that housing association flats in the area were few and far between and, remembering how my parents had waited for the best part of twenty years to be rehoused, I didn’t hold out much hope. But if I didn’t apply I’d have no hope at all, so I reasoned it was worth a try.

  To my amazement, it wasn’t long before I learned I was at the top of the Church Commissioners’ list and that a small, one-bedroomed, ground-floor flat just off the Walworth Road was about to become available to rent.

  Would I like to take it? Of course I would.

  The tiny flat in Merrow Street, south-east London, was in a grim condition. An old lady had died there: a terrible smell lingered everywhere and there were dark stains on the bedroom floorboards. I was earning enough to cover the rent and furnish the place but there was nothing left over for extras so I would just need to roll up my sleeves and try to sort it out myself.