Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  For my part, his northern frankness was what I admired — no trimming there, but I wasn’t sure how to respond one evening when we went strolling along Ostend promenade. We had bought ourselves a paper cup of ‘warme wullocke’ — whelks boiled with onions and cabbage. We chewed a whelk for half a mile, but the mollusc remained obstinately intact and increasingly flavourless. It was either swallow the whelk or spit it out. As I discreetly gobbed it into the gutter and noticed six or seven other well-chewed whelks discarded in exactly the same place, Chris suddenly turned to me and said thoughtfully, ‘I tell you what. I don’t half fancy your mum.

  17. The Burdens of Office

  ‘Um … I know we have a supervision planned for tomorrow, but I haven’t actually managed to get the entire work done … would it be at all possible to postpone it a bit …’

  There was a pause at the other end while the supervisor riffled through his diary. ‘I’m afraid I would be unable to accommodate you until next week …’

  ‘Oh dear. What a pity Perhaps we could make it then? Put the phone down, breathe steadily, walk out into the sunlight and into the nearest pub.

  Supervisors got used to my phone calls — so did I. It took guts the first time. Can I ring? What will he think? Shall I pretend I am ill? But like most self-deceptions, with practice they became surprisingly routine: ‘I’m not going to be able to make the supervision this week, bye!’

  I had been given a year ‘to catch up’ for what was a fairly simple Part Two in English. It took monumental extracurricular commitment to comprehensively waste it. I directed a lavish pantomime version of Babes in the Wood, starring Clive Anderson as Buttons. I chaired committees, shaved my head to take part in the Marlowe, sang comedy songs at smokers and wrote a convoluted play called simply Dracula on the expectation that the name itself would shift tickets at eleven o’clock in the evening. (It did and the preposterous, wordy nonsense went on to sell out at the Edinburgh Festival too:

  ‘A mild thrill at midnight’ — the Scotsman.) John Lloyd directed the best of the Footlights revues, Paradise Mislaid, and I rushed about a huge set designed by Tanya McCallum.

  ‘You had that big place in your second year, out towards the Newmarket Road,’ Charlotte reminded me. While I was astonished by my amateur theatrical career, she had quite a good grasp on the accommodation.

  ‘By the Zebra pub. Yes, I remember.’

  ‘But you swapped it in your second term.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I had forgotten. I remembered the ugly modern accommodation block. I remembered the large, separate bathroom with the huge bath. I remembered that after Charlie and Charles, my non-acting college friends, had helped me drink an entire bottle of Southern Comfort I had brought back from America, we foolishly decided to smoke the souvenir comedy cigar that came with, it. The cigar was ten inches long. It was real tobacco, but green, the Southern Comfort was sweet, and the three of us filled the bath with vomit. We were so drunk it seemed like a bizarre medical experiment.

  Later I swapped rooms with Charlie. Charlie moved out into my rooms in the Newmarket Road, and I got Charlie’s suite, back in the centre of town, in exchange. I think it had something to do with access to supplies of Scotch eggs.

  It was a pretty little set of rooms, at the top of a staircase in North Court, with an ‘oak’ (which could be sported), a minute kitchen and separate bedroom and sitting room, and (particularly lovely this) a gas fire with glowing asbestos bars, in front of which I could fall asleep whenever I picked up a book. I kept the rooms for my third year too. They should have eased the stresses of finals, except that I didn’t have any finals. Mine were postponed a year. Still, there were plenty of other distractions.

  I had arrived at the university looking like the bass guitarist in the Sweet. I left dressed as a science master in a costume drama. The seventies presented bewildering options for the impecunious popinjay In the early part of the decade, I thought I looked pretty dashing in a pair of navy-surplus canvas button-front trousers. I had a baby-blue tank top and a round-collared muslin shirt too. Perhaps I should have been wary about wearing the lot together, but I was nothing if not sartorially willing.

  I was just an amateur, of course. There was no money for any of it. There was bound to be an element of improvisation. Perhaps everyone would have started wearing duck canvas bell-bottoms eventually There was barely time to find out. It would have been simpler to stick to moss-coloured jummies from Marks and Spencer.

  Then Bryan Ferry went and looked excessively cool in his white tuxedo on the front of These Foolish Things. It was time to dump the glittery-coloured things and take to Casablanca. Charles Lambert and I went to see Louis Malle’s Lacombe Lucien and decided that members of the French Resistance had exquisite taste in tailoring even when being tortured. The Sting was a. bit tight-arsed, but the French riposte — a film starring Belmondo and Delon called Borsalino — unequivocally demonstrated to us that people just simply didn’t know ‘how to dress properly at all any more’. Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Baker, Casablanca. Look at those beautiful suits. If you wanted proper bags, there they were.

  I’m not sure that Charles, who was rather more scholarly than I was, did more than pass comment. He was all mouth and no change of trousers. I was less inhibited. On a quick tour of Cambridge’s charity shops I turned up dozens of elegant if slightly smelly outfits. ‘Demob suits’, my mother might have called them, but it seemed more probable that they were hand-tailored, slightly conservative, professorial degree-ceremony wear. King Street was lined with old-fashioned tailors — yellow gel in the windows to protect their old-fashioned stock — but they were not quite old-fashioned enough for us. Generally, the jackets looked mimsy, mid-sixties and dull, but thirty years before, the Emeritus Professor of Greek had splashed out on a dark navy wool barathea suit from the same source, and it was lovely.

  My uncle in Cardiff proved an unexpected ally in all this. Ieaun must have seen in me some slight respite from the trend to dowdiness in the rest of the family He recognized the faltering gene of dandyism. He could see that at least one nephew was going to try to pass himself off as a piss-elegant fraud. Things started arriving, jolly nice things too. He gave me a ‘cast—off’ watch. Well, he called it cast-off, and I believed him. I realize now that he was excusing his gift, the unexpectedness of it, playing down the generosity Insensitive as usual, I took it at face value and failed to spot the nuances.

  I still have it. It is a Movado gold fob, biscuit-slim, on a white gold and platinum chain, for wearing in your breast pocket — exquisite. It was attached through the button hole, but only useful, of course, if you happen to have a breast pocket and a proper ‘cut’ button hole to hang it in. There were six jet and platinum studs too. And you could only wear those if your dinner shirt was starch fronted and pompous enough to need studs. Not with a tie-dye t-shirt. The signet ring had once been the property of the first Lord Mayor of Cardiff. It was made of gold mined in the Welsh hills and bore the great boyo’s seal. He had been related to my uncle’s wife, Aunty Joan, so it cannot have been without sentimental value, but the circumstances of his giving these things to me have gone, except that he subtly informed of their ‘prettiness, what?’

  I don’t have the ring any more. I once gave it to a dresser on a set for safe keeping while I tottered off to do a sketch. He lost it. If I had reported it he would have got the sack, so I had to let it go, unremarked.

  I had little to give my uncle in return except my attention, and I wasn’t very generous with that. When Aunty Joan died and left him alone, my mother in her own widowhood gave way to mild implied triumphalism. ‘I am so lucky to have my children all about me. Poor Ieaun,’ although poor Ieaun, older than my father by ten years, survived into his late eighties.

  Still a student, I went to call on his glamorous split-level residence in Cardiff. What had seemed unbearably stuffy to a six-year-old became exotically seductive, if utterly bonkers, as I grew older. Every sq
uare inch of wall was covered with dazzling pink and yellow flower power wallpaper and hung with sickly-coloured paintings. Joan and Ieaun had imported the Nice Corniche to a suburb of Cardiff and sat amongst their glittering bibelots looking down on Radyr Golf Club. He would show me round his treasures before, inevitably, launching into his lengthy war saga.

  I was an attentive listener. He had left Cardiff when called up, gone by ship to South Africa. The garden railroad had taken him to Durban for training and Aden, where he had been a Wing Commander in charge of a hospital. (I had his tin trunk inscribed with his rank in my set alongside his old Imperial portable typewriter in my room in college.) With all its details, of cocktails and verandas, of encounters with girls in flowered frocks, with his post-war difficulties building a practice and accounts of pre—war anaesthetical inadequacies, the story usually lasted most of an afternoon.

  It was like sitting opposite a distorted mirror vision of my father. Ieaun was tall, elegant and spare, with delicate gestures and a nervous, half-stuttering manner — donnish, you might have thought, if he had read anything other than that week’s Country Life — but rather remote from the picture of a short-tempered tyrant that my mother always painted. Elwyn was short and tubby, but with the same translucent skin and the same round features and the thin but not receding hair, and inescapably the brighter. It was as if there had been a division, though. Daddy had taken the ordinary share. He wanted to be an unpretentious person, with a family and children. Ieaun had taken the rest. It was impossible to imagine Ieaun allowing his wife to choose his clothes: his alpaca monogrammed dressing gowns, his Turnbull and Asser shirts and his hand-made plus fours. My father looked at style and fashion and parties and dancing and declined them all, mooching around in his Morris Oxford and his Gannex mac. Or perhaps my uncle had already taken the lot, and there was no possible point in competing. All the same, it explained something about my father. It explained his origins in pomposity. It explained the trappings and his almost disguised dignity.

  Later in life, I rather proudly brought my uncle out to show him around a bit, to demonstrate that I had trappings too, so that others might appreciate that I had stylish antecedents beyond my dumpy old dad — not that they had ever met my dumpy old dad, but Ieaun was an agreeable substitute though he habitually embarrassed me far more than my father would ever have done.

  When Bookworm went to Cardiff I sold Ieaun to Daisy, my producer. ‘Oh, he’s terribly stylish,’ I promised and brought the wizened old stick to join us in our hotel, dressed in a purple shirt and a yellow suit far too big for him, with a tartan tie and correspondent shoes. He looked bemused by the new Holiday Inn, peering about as if the lobby and its flaming torchères had descended on Cardiff from outer space, but he rattled out most of his war stories before getting up to dance a little too intimately with the girls one by one. (He was then seventy-nine.)

  A few years later I invited him up to London to a Royal Variety Show, where he did the same at the party afterwards, taking straight to the dance floor and smooching with a startled agent. I didn’t know her. She just happened to be sitting at the table where the rest of us were gradually falling asleep. He was dragged away at two in the morning begging for one last dance. He was a ladies’ man, then. He must have taken all of that side of the sibling share too.

  When Ieaun died he left all his wealth to his accountant. It was his accountant who had decided that Ieaun was too ill to look after his own house and arranged for him to be moved into a nursing home near Newport. I visited and discovered him alone in a little room looking out over a bleak garden. He may have detested us as children but he had lost none of the good manners he had shown us as adults. He was wearing a rather fine cashmere lemon-yellow cardigan with the buttons done up wrong. The nurse brought us both tea and presented him with a chocolate bar. ‘Oh, you like the Twix, don’t you, Ieaun?’ And he nodded and reached for it. He munched with the concentrated attention of a toddler. He started talking earnestly about my Fellowship. ‘That’s quite a thing you know, your Fellowship …’

  I demurred.

  ‘No, no, to be a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, it’s recognition.’

  He wasn’t talking about any honorarium of mine, but my father’s. It had been the subject of a row with my mother on the night of my father’s funeral, and now with tears in his eyes Ieaun was somehow trying to acknowledge his younger brother’s qualifications.

  I didn’t stop him. It was a fragile and telling genetic connection. I was content to play the part of my father, to acknowledge that he was a better man than me and deserved the praise. I took it on his behalf. Confusingly, in this befuddled sibling, there were all my father’s mannerisms again, the little feminine reassurances, the same grey look in the eyes, the slight earnest urgency What was this? My father mistaking me for my father? But Ieaun knew as he talked that he wasn’t right in some way and faded. A look of panic overwhelmed him, and I tried to encourage him to talk on.

  ‘Yes, because you went to South Africa in the war, didn’t you?’ I finally said helplessly.

  For a moment he calmed. He nodded and smiled. ‘I went on the Castle Line … all the way down because …’ And he stopped. He faltered and sat quietly, and I felt bad for what I had done. Tears rolled down his face. I had only succeeded in prompting an awareness of his current condition. He was happier with his chocolate bars. He was suddenly conscious of the complete absence of memory. He was reduced to the present, to a drab room, a candlewick bedspread and a regular, rationed Twix.

  His will pre-dated his Alzheimer’s, but I got his clothes. They arrived in five or six large cardboard boxes: dainty Lobb shoes with trees, monogrammed shirts, a Sulka dressing gown, dress collars and studs in little leather boxes. I keep them for sentimental reasons.

  There weren’t many intimations of mortality in Cambridge. After wallowing in relative luxury, designing posters and directing plays and dressing up in borrowed clothes, I now faced my final year and had to go in search of somewhere to live.

  Three days before term began in October 1974, I went back a whole day early to study the small ads in the Cambridge Evening News. A room was advertised in Eden Street in the Kite, with a viewing at six o’clock.

  I left that late too. When I arrived at five past, a considerable party of students from the tech, several men in cheap suits hugging carrier bags of clothes and a clutch of desperate-looking pregnant girls were already waiting in the queue. An estate agent came and unlocked the front door. He turned to the crowd. ‘I have only two rooms in here,’ he announced. I could have left then, I suppose, but speculated that the thirty desperate people in front of me might just possibly be very, very fussy, so I waited at the utter end of the line. Both rooms were taken immediately. The estate agent marched briskly out and along the queue. ‘There’s another round the back,’ he said. We turned on our heel as one. Nobody protested, though they should have done, because the last to arrive (me) was now miraculously at the front. He unlocked a lean-to outhouse. I glimpsed a folding table and a bed. ‘I’ll take it,’ I said. Twenty-eight people behind me groaned softly.

  It cost me five pounds a week. To open the door I had to fold the table away. There was a shiny oval electric bar heater high on the wall. If I switched the fire on, the room instantly became sweltering. This seemed promising. The space was little more than the length of the bed. As the winter progressed, though, the cold out-performed the bar. The wall was only one brick thick and the heater struggled to warm up north Cambridge. So I spread my Russian flag over the bed and went to sleep at Newnham (easily done as long as I got in before ten), padding down ‘the longest corridor in England’, squeezing into Charlotte’s single bed. I was just one of a large number of illegal male friends sneaking about the nunnery.

  Life wasn’t exactly formless. I spent almost five years at Cambridge. That’s only a little less than the time I spent at secondary school. At school I had grown. At school I had progressed. My balls dropped, my voice broke,
hairs sprouted on my chin. But university is a blur of repeated impressions, as if nothing really changed, while everything was changing. But though I feel no different now — somehow damned to remain forever eighteen, with an increasingly bad back — I started a journey at Cambridge which I suppose was to become the rest of my life and I never stepped off. I never pushed the boat out. I never started the engine. I don’t recall exercising choice.

  But one day I looked up from my crud-covered trousers and realized the end was approaching. I stayed in Cambridge for another vacation to try to catch up.

  ‘I remember being furious because you got a dispensation for an extra day on your long essay,’ Charlotte told me in 2005.

  ‘Did I?’ This was marvellous. I had no recollection of that at all. It was enjoyable to reconstruct. my forgotten life, to live it again, vicariously ‘Why were you furious?’

  ‘Because I had finished mine on time and, instead of being able to relax and celebrate, I had to go around and proofread yours.

  ‘Incoherent.’

  ‘Yes, but clever; on Ibsen and Nietzsche.’

  How sweet: Charlotte was flattering me after all these years. I remembered it as being a colossal error. I had to read the whole of Ibsen, the whole of Shaw and quite a lot of Nietzsche in one vacation, only in order to point out that they had nothing in common at all.

  Six Hamilton Place was a house of postgraduates: Rose and Charles and Ian (who was in fact still an undergraduate, but a bearded one) would emerge from their studies, blinking and tottering, and make tea in the back kitchen. I moved there after a German count playing a small part in a play I was directing borrowed the room in Eden Street to change for the squash courts and lost the only set of keys. Finals were coming. The women’s college was getting tense. I knew I had to give myself over to monkish cramming in order to get by myself, and, 10, it was good. I can remember the warm spring nights, getting back up the hill under horse chestnut trees hanging over a wall, heavy with waxen candles.