by Kika Markham
First published in 2014 by Oberon Books Ltd
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Copyright © Kika Markham, 2014
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PB ISBN: 978-1-78319-100-0
E ISBN: 978-1-78319-599-2
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Back cover image by Terry Johnson
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For Corin
CONTENTS
Preface
PART I
Chapter 1 Our Parents
Chapter 2 Politics
Chapter 3 France
Chapter 4 On my own
Chapter 5 Billingsgate
Chapter 6 A Proposal
Chapter 7 New Zealand
Chapter 8 Difficult Times
Chapter 9 Haddock à l’Anglaise
Chapter 10 Moving Theatre
Chapter 11 Perugia
PART II
Chapter 12 June 2005 Corin Collapses
Chapter 13 June 2005 Different Hospitals
Chapter 14 Summer 2005 Corin Comes home
Chapter 15 August 2005 Springfield
Chapter 16 October 2005 Rehab
Chapter 17 October 2005 Back to Work
Chapter 18 Summer 2006 Holiday Breaks
Chapter 19 February 2007 Our Mother Dies
Chapter 20 August 2007 No Future?
Chapter 21 March 2008 AA
Chapter 22 March 2009 Going On
Chapter 23 Summer 2009 Memories
Chapter 24 April 2010 Goodbye
Chapter 25 May 2010 Highgate Cemetery
Four Years Later
Acknowledgements
Sources
List of Plates
Index of Names
Preface
Kika’s diary
Tuesday 23 June 2009
Rehab session with Dr B
We were talking about Corin’s increased drinking and the fact that he often drank alone. Whether he missed his past activities, responsibility, socialising etc. What did we miss about one another? Dr B addressed the question to me: ‘…communication, we often spoke four times a day, more when we were apart… he looked after me’.
The doctor asked Corin the same question. ‘Communication, yes…’
‘Why do you enjoy going to Paris?’ she asked.
‘Well, the wine.’
‘Just the wine?’
‘Yes, the variety, the pleasure of going to a wine shop… and choosing.’
‘What else did you like about Paris?’
‘Well, just sitting in a café with a glass of wine…’
I thought he must say: ‘Kika and I were happiest there, in our flat, going to old movies, shopping in the market in Boulevard Raspail’, but no, nothing…
‘Can I say something?’ I asked. ‘You see I don’t think Corin remembers our life at all before the heart attack, therefore there’s nothing to want to go back to that other life for, or to stop drinking for, if he doesn’t regret or wish to be together again or long for the happy times.’
‘Is it true Corin that you don’t remember your life with Kika?’
‘Yes it is true, I mean I know we were happy. And I know I loved Kika, but I can’t remember our life together.’
So what I had always dreaded and feared was in fact true. This was the first time that it had ever been acknowledged by either of us in a ‘clinical’ situation, and so honestly and simply, by my husband. Now I understood that both our lives had disappeared. For what use are memories if they only exist for one person? My memories were already shrivelling and dying inside my head. The only way that they could be kept alive was by sharing them. I was trying to keep my face normal, not grimace and howl. There was a silence. I could feel a tear falling out of my left eye, although my face was like granite. I picked up my newspaper, folded it noisily and took some gulps of water from the plastic cup.
Four years later as I read this I realise that, in fact, he had remembered the most important thing of all, our love for one another.
‘This is a common thing’, Dr B said after a pause, ‘have you ever looked at photographs together? It might be helpful.’
We agreed it would be a nice thing to do.
It was the end of the session and we walked to the car.
‘Well here’s a situation! There is a married man who has had a heart attack and four years later admits to his wife that he has no memories of their life together and that she could be an imposter for all he knows. What about that for your next play?’ I said in a horrid jovial voice.
‘That’s a brilliant idea, I could start writing almost immediately… Why not indeed?!’ answered Corin, as we drove down the leafy streets of Wimbledon in the summer evening.
So I turned it into an anecdote, which became the impulse for starting this book.
I never meant this to be a book, just a way of recording events so that at least these memories would be kept for both of us. It would be mine and Corin’s account of an extraordinary journey. I hope too, that it will bring comfort and help to people that have suffered or lived with brain injury.
Part I
CHAPTER ONE
Our Parents
Corin and I were halfway through our lives before we realised that we loved each other, although our paths had crossed many times and we were always aware of each other’s presence, however distant. In fact, researching for this book, I came across an interview Corin gave for The Times (1995) where he says ‘She [Kika] spent a great deal of her time on activities that bring people blisters on their feet and bring cold comfort. It made me love her from a distance.’
Our parents had become friends even before we were born, when they worked together at Liverpool Playhouse (before the Second World War). My mother Olive knitted a blanket for Rachel Kempson’s second baby, Corin, and Rachel knitted a cardigan for my mother’s ‘expected any day’ second baby, me. Michael Redgrave, Corin’s father, and David Markham, my father, had worked together in a film about the struggle of the miners in the 1930s: The Stars Look Down, based on the novel of the same name by A.J. Cronin. Corin wrote about it in his book Michael Redgrave: My Father:
…the man on the screen [Michael Redgrave] is thirty-one, not much older than my eldest son [Luke] – and in his cloth cap and shirt-sleeves, his long wrists too long for his jacket, his long neck and half-awkward movements, he looks and sounds not much more than a youth.
Stranger still, the young man who plays the son of the coal owner is David Markham, my wife’s father; and David looks even younger.
Both Corin’s and my parents were radical. My mother had written a poem against Hitler for Punch magazine while a teenager in Munich in 1935, and had been deported by the Nazis who had intercepted it. My father David was sent to prison for being a conscientious objector. Michael Redgrave was thirty years old when he announced to the Liverpool Echo, ‘I am a red-hot socialist, I believe in everything to do with Socialism’. As Corin wrote, ‘It was not unusual for a leading actor to say that in those days, although it would be today’. Both David and Michael had friends that were fighting and dying in the Spanish Civil War. Marxism was popular. Michael signed up for The People’s Convention, a socialist document, which ultimately had him banned from working for the BBC. David signed the People’s Pledge, which called for the renunciation of all wars. But his views were not straightforward pacifist ones.
In 1940, David registered as a conscientious objector, and was permitted conditional status providing he did forestry and ambulance driving as part of the war effort, which he agreed to. He was then offered a job with the Old Vic Theatre Company by the great visionary director Tyrone Guthrie, touring the UK with the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) and this meant the authorities couldn’t always find out where he was. According to the account of the Ministry of Labour, in a wartime letter typed on the front and back of flimsy paper, my father refused a medical examination and was then summoned to a tribunal. Tyrone Guthrie supported him in a letter dated 14 May 1942:
[David Markham] has frequently been employed by the Old Vic as an actor in classical plays. I think highly both of his talent and of his character.
Although I, personally, do not agree with his objection to National Service, I believe it to be sincere; and I hope that he may be allowed to continue to use his considerable talent and technical experience as an actor.
In this event, I would be prepared to offer him continuous work with the Old Vic, under the sponsorship of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. The latter, it will be remembered, is financed by the Treasury through the Board of Education. This work is recognised by the Ministry of Labour as being of national importance.
It is, I think relevant, that the Old Vic does not work for private profit, and that Mr Markham’s salary, since the war, has always been arranged, at his own request, at a figure which covers his expenses, but is quite incommensurate with his value in the commercial theatre, or, for that matter, with his value to the Old Vic.
My mother wrote about their experience in a book by Jonathan Croall, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? Voices from the Home Front:
Tyrone Guthrie was very good to him … But managements were certainly very unsympathetic, it was all doing things for the troops. Also David couldn’t do those war films at all. He said they were made to show how wonderful war was and just romaticized it. He refused to act in Noël Coward’s In Which We Serve, which annoyed Coward, who then circulated all the studios, saying that David was difficult and shouldn’t be employed … The Reading tribunal was very bad, they were very anti. But David’s way made it difficult for the judges to decide that it was a conscientious objection. It wasn’t religious, you see … The judge, who was almost asleep, gave him six months at first, but then somebody behind prodded him and said, “The maximum sentence is a year, my lord.” And he woke up and changed it, and said, “A year’s hard labour.”
David then went to Winson Green prison in Birmingham. I remember we had a horrible goodbye … The other prisoners were terribly kind to him. There was a gang of housebreakers who were very nice; the leader said he would teach David how to break into a house afterwards, he’d show him how to open windows, and then he could join the gang … He was in Winson Green for two months. Wormwood Scrubs, where he was transferred to, was better, there was more communication, and it was generally easier … When he came out he was completely grey, and he couldn’t talk. He had had flu and jaundice, and he just spoke in a whisper, which was horrible.
My father’s beliefs caused great difficulties in the families. Both of my parents’ brothers had fought in the war, and one of my uncles, Howard Harrison, was an RAF pilot and was shot down, but survived. Not one of them ever said a bad word about Dad. A testimony to his humanity and sweetness, and their kindness. But my mother says her father never forgave David.
Growing up under the weight of such sacrifice on many levels had a sobering effect on me. In family discussions, words and phrases like ‘Ambition’, ‘Successful career’, were used in mocking terms, whereas ‘Failure’ seemed to be more honourable. Both Corin and I had a sense of responsibility towards our fathers, which we only became fully aware of in retrospect.
After the war Dad became a prison reformer, mainly working with Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP). He also formed the Campaign Against Psychiatric Abuse (CAPA), which led to years of fighting for the release of a young Russian student, Vladimir Bukovsky, standing, often alone, in all weathers outside the Russian Embassy. My sisters and friends took turns to stand with him but to my bitter regret I never did. Other members of the campaign included Harold Pinter, Peggy Ashcroft, Iris Murdoch, Peter Hall, François Truffaut and George Steiner. When Bukovsky was finally freed he stayed for a night in my parents’ room at our home, and it became known as the ‘Bukovsky room’ for ever more.
Without the spirit of my parents, Lear Cottage has returned to being an ordinary, small, red-tiled East Sussex cottage, but while they were alive, extraordinary attributes – almost mythical – were attached to it. It lay tucked away in the middle of Ashdown Forest a mile away from A.A. Milne’s house, held in place by a field on either side and a stream that ran alongside it. Hidden from the outside world by the surrounding forest of bracken, heather gorse, brown streams and pine trees, the cottage became a refuge for anyone in need of comfort. My mother invited one of the Guildford Four down to recuperate following her release from prison after one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in recent times, and they remained lifelong friends.
My father kept rare breeds of pigs and poultry, which he loved to show at Smithfield, the biggest livestock show in the UK, held at Earls Court. We never had more than one or two pigs at a time and they all became pets. Ada, the golden-haired Tamworth, being the most admired. We took her acorn hunting through the forest, sometimes greatly alarming family picnickers. We had a red Dexter cow, Gloria, who provided us with butter, milk, and cream with which my mother made legendary strawberry ice cream, cakes and puddings when she wasn’t writing stories or poetry. There were dogs and cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, ducks and hens and a pony and trap we used for picking up stray guests from the bus stop.
My father played the violin and I was learning the piano so when I got good enough we played Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert violin and piano sonatas, only choosing the slow movements which we could just about manage without arguing. We laughed a lot and played to an audience of sleeping dogs and cats in the tiny sitting room, which was so dark in the day you could barely read the music. At the end of a piece, we sometimes heard, ‘That was nice!’ My mother’s voice floated from the kitchen.
The cottage and the forest were of great solace to me and my sisters. There were four of us: Sonia, me, Petra and Jehane. Soon after we started to live there, we were, one by one, packed off to weekly boarding school. Me aged seven, Sonia aged nine. It was like being cast out of Eden. How could our kindly ‘free-thinking’ parents have decided on such – to my mind – brutal separations? My father’s explanation was that his public school had traumatised him, it had been far worse than his experience in prison. Though Olive was equally unhappy at boarding school, she had made a close friend – Jo MacKeith – with whom she formed the Purple Thumbnail Society, which got them through. My parents believed only an alternative educational system, run on the lines of A.S. Neill (Summerhill School) would be beneficial. They were
suspicious of any traditional day school which might use the strap, and besides my father wouldn’t have been able to get us to school on time having driven back to Sussex each night from the West End, where he was acting.
So they decided that a progressive boarding school would be the kindest solution.
We cried every Sunday night. My first school was only seven miles away but it could have been China for all I knew.
Later we went to a school in Hampstead, called Burgess Hill. In its early days it was an interesting school, even from a child’s point of view. There was no uniform and you called the teachers by their Christian names. No one forced you to go to lessons, but the teaching was good so you did.
Children had weekly meetings to discuss problems in the school, which was also effective in dealing with bullying. But later, under a different head, the boundaries between pupil and teacher broke down. As a teenager I got a crush on the art master, and he began a long seduction, kissing me under the water during a swimming lesson at Finchley Pool.
‘Is there anything that could comfort me?’ I asked Dad as he drove Sonia and me to the station to meet the evening train back to school. ‘If winter comes can spring be far behind,’ he answered kindly.
These dreadful separations were something Corin and I had in common. Corin had been looking forward to boarding school at first. But he writes in his memoir:
It is quite terrifying to me now, as a father, to review this period of my life [he was nine] because I can still remember its emotions so vividly, to have been among the most turbulent of my childhood. Terrifying, but salutary, because as I read my father’s diary I see how little my grief seems to have impinged upon him. And I cannot help accusing myself of the countless times I must have been ignorant of my children’s grief.