Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  I knew the sweets were part of an unspoken bargain: if I took them I was expected to say hello, but often I didn’t want to go and find her, and have to look at her baggy stockings or her dry hands; for one thing, they made me think of discarded snakeskin. So in the end I usually took the sweets, ran out quickly and then felt guilty for a bit. But the guilt passed – quite rapidly in fact – so much so, that by the age of twelve I was rummaging around in her knicker drawer among the elastic supports to find the tin where she kept the chocolate and the Pastilles to help myself to a bit more.

  It was not just me. Even when they were older my half-brothers slipped in to ponce cigarettes and ten-shilling notes from her purse under the guise of a quick hello. And in general, everyone popped in and out unannounced to collect tools or light bulbs or ripening apples from the shared cupboards in her hallway. In the evenings her flat door was open to a steady stream of emergency darning, school shoes that needed polishing, or a child who needed supervising for an hour. Mostly me. I was forever urged to ‘go and see how Nunu is’.

  She lived most of the time in the kitchen at the back overlooking the garden, although she had turned it into more of a sitting room. It was sparsely furnished. She smoked forty Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes a day and ate at a green baize card table. There was an armchair, a dinner wagon, a small oak desk with green tomatoes in the bottom drawer and stamps in the top, an electric fire and a huge black-and-white television set in the corner.

  Off the room was a pantry, no bigger than a broom cupboard, fitted out with a small gas stove, a cream flat-fronted Formica dresser and a cold shelf against the exterior wall faced with fly-mesh where she kept Cheddar cheese. She had no fridge; she kept haddock and milk in our fridge upstairs – bread too sometimes. I knew if anything was hers because she put an elastic band around it.

  A shared house was never going to be easy, but from the outset Eunice was keen to be involved in life upstairs. She’d slip through the flat door like a ghost – perhaps for the fourth or fifth time that day – and the first anyone heard of her was the slow scuff of slipper on carpet, and the sound of her nails tapping on the hollow kitchen door. It was not so much a knock, as the sound of my mum’s conscience arriving. Not unreasonably Eunice felt if the children were allowed to play downstairs any time it suited my parents, and a little housekeeping and mending was expected of her, then she had just as much right to come up, but discretion and timing were never her strong points. ‘Your husband out at the pub again, dear?’ would be a typical provocative opener for my mum, who knew only too well that the opportunity to come upstairs had been presented by the first sound of the key in the ignition from the car-port. It might be followed by a shuffle to the stove and a comment such as, ‘Why do you always have to have two vegetables?’

  As my mum said, in a funny and honest portrait she drew of her in Woman magazine following her death at the age of eighty-seven:

  She was courageous, stoic, independent, and puritanical as only a Methodist minister’s widow could be. She was also self-opinionated, dogmatic, tactless and devoid of charm. She had no small talk, grew increasingly deaf and said what she thought at all times.

  Many of Eunice’s views and criticisms were contained in long, articulate, often outraged, letters and notes addressed to my mum, left dauntingly on the hall table in her spidery longhand. My mum kept the best and worst of them bundled together in a box for a kind of masochistic posterity. Clearly Eunice didn’t see herself as nosy and meddlesome in the slightest. She felt she was used when it suited everyone, but criticised when it didn’t.

  A new baby (me) in the house sharpened her interest in family affairs and gave her an excuse to be seen. She was suspicious of the stream of Austrian and German home-helps and nannies that passed through our flat, all charged with marshalling an infant and four siblings under twelve. If my parents were out at work or the pub, she would appear at mealtimes or bedtime, ostensibly a familiar face with a familiar voice. She would then catalogue her inevitable consternation to my mum in writing later that day: cot blankets were too damp; portions were too large; competence was in question.

  She found it hard to embrace my parents’ new lifestyle. She was disgruntled by my dad’s social life: the trips to the pub; the trail of musicians he brought home who stayed until three in the morning. It was so different to her previous son-in-law Ken’s life of literary friends and dinner parties. She thought it set a bad example to the children, especially when my mum was involved too. ‘Where’s Mummy?’ she is said to have asked me one Sunday when I was six. ‘At the pub,’ I am reported to have said cheerfully. She saw it all as a waste and a wilful diminishing of her daughter’s intellect. Years of opening nights at the theatre with Ken were being replaced by mindless boozy nights at the local pub with my dad.

  That’s not to say Eunice didn’t find fault with Ken. In spite of his intellect, she considered him cold and aloof and self-absorbed. Yet she reserved her strongest feelings for Tom. She soon saw him as fundamentally a poorly-educated layabout sponging off my mum, a man-child whose affection for his wife atoned for much, but not enough. She deplored his ‘ungovernable temper’ and couldn’t forgive him for throwing a pair of garden shears across the lawn ‘in front of SIMON’. When he traded in his car for a brand new model – not long after moving into the house they had all scraped the money together to buy – Eunice thought it ‘extravagant’ and vulgar, and bemoaned the unnecessary financial burden it placed on her daughter. When he dared suggest it was my mum’s idea, it made him something far worse in her eyes – ‘untruthful’. If she and Tom argued, she vigorously denounced his subsequent one-sided ‘duplicitous’ reporting of events back upstairs.

  My dad was unnerved. Just when he thought he could settle down with my mum, he found himself confronted by a fearsome adversary, and what was worse, it was a throwback to what he had run away from in Glasgow: a harsh, moralising, judgemental voice, snobbish and unsentimental. He often simply didn’t have the articulacy to battle back. ‘Mind your own business!’ he would shout at her in the garden, as she tried to intervene while he was hanging out nappies to dry. ‘You’re an old meddler! A wicked old woman!’ If he stormed out or hid behind my mum’s protection, Eunice called him ‘cowardly’. In fact, in her view, everything Tom did was designed to weaken her position with her own daughter, and the consequence, as she coldly wrote to her, was ‘undermining the little affection you have left for me’.

  Forced to choose, my mum of course stood by my dad; she’d endured so much to secure him. Yet no one likes to be the pig in the middle. The upshot was a fifteen-year running battle in which Eunice was regularly banned from the flat. Of course she retaliated in kind: children were banned from hers. I remember being told to ring the bell before collecting a bicycle pump from the tool cupboard. ‘Never forget’, she wrote to my mum icily, ‘that you alone are responsible for our living in the same house, that you told the [estate] agent you’d buy the house without even asking me or letting me see it. I was very happy in my cosy small house [in East Sheen] and hated the flat on sight.’ It was typical of many of her comments: if it contained some truth, it also contained a good measure of psychological manipulation. She had been peppery and opinionated all her life, wherever she had lived.

  In August 1970 I went on holiday with my mum and dad to Sussex, and Eunice was astonished to find herself locked out of the upstairs flat. I overheard my dad say in the car on the way down that he was fed up with her ‘snooping around’. With my half-brothers and half-sister away too, Eunice wrote two letters to my mum at the cottage where we were staying – holiday or no holiday – itemising her indignation. She pointed out sniffily that the cat had been cruelly locked in, that her sole loaf of bread was unretrievable from the upstairs fridge, that she’d had to walk to the shops before breakfast to replace it, that the window cleaner had been forced to leave the upper glazing dirty, that the family carpets would have to remain un-vacuumed, and that the stain in the sitting room would hav
e to remain untouched. Now it seems comical, a textbook version of guilt-inducement, half fact, half fiction. The stain was something neither of my parents could picture. The flat had only just been hoovered the day before they left. And the cat had been quickly released by Roly on a mercy mission – although he was told to carefully lock up again afterwards. But it was all symptomatic of Eunice’s dogmatic staying power and compulsive reluctance to let anyone enjoy themselves. She ends the second letter in a melodramatic flourish that could have been written by my own mum at any stage in her later years. ‘Even now,’ she writes, ‘as I’ve no stamp, I doubt if you’ll get this. Love, Mother. P.S. The weather this weekend has been ghastly. Cold. And gales.’

  ‘A born martyr,’ my mum has scribbled on the envelope of one letter among the several she kept, and Eunice allowed little room for others’ sympathy. Even approaching the end, she snuffed out any chance of a sentimental reconciliation. She wrote in her unsteady handwriting shortly before her death:

  I want the quietest, quickest, cheapest funeral possible. No mourners, no flowers, no cars. With recollections of the hundreds of funerals conducted by your father and the way the funeral directors took advantage of emotionally upset relatives to persuade them to have expensive coffins with brass handles, I want the cheapest. I recall being embarrassed by piles of wreaths lying outside the crematorium when your father was cremated so simply; these I discovered afterwards remained there from one funeral to another. And no urn. I want my ashes left at the crematorium.

  Under my dad’s influence, I grew up learning to mock and disparage her, and yet, with hindsight, it is of course impossible not to feel sorry for her, in spite of her sourness and pugnacity. It shouldn’t be forgotten that her husband died suddenly at fifty-nine, taking with him not only their companionship but her small cherished role in the limelight too, and that she left Cheshire for London to live in a city where she had barely any friends. As she confessed to my mum in one letter: ‘I often go up to your flat because I feel I shall scream if, having been deprived of the interests I used to have I can’t talk to someone.’ In another: ‘There have been times when life seemed so empty and living on so pointless that I could have committed suicide. But suicide is a cowardly business and you may have to tolerate me for some time.’ More manipulative melodrama maybe, but it makes for uneasy reading.

  Fourteen years after her death, my mum must have reread them all and come to the same conclusion, as she has inserted a sheet with a few words:

  1990: Looking at these distressing letters and notes I really don’t know why I have kept them. They show the fearful stresses we all lived under at Woodlands Road. I feel terribly sorry for Mother . . . but what other course was open to me? Poor, poor Mother.

  It would be wrong, however, not to remember Eunice’s eccentricities in her old age too, and how they lent an absurdist edge to the cantankerous drama that was being played out – stories that made us all laugh, and carried her legend long into family folklore. As my mum wrote in her 1976 portrait of her after her death:

  Age did not deter her in the very least. I found her (at eighty) one morning balanced on top of a chair on a table painting her kitchen ceiling. The following year, when we came back from a holiday, she had just painted half her sitting-room walls bright green because she could not reach any higher.

  At eighty-four, she was still mowing the lawn regularly, burning mattresses in the two-foot incinerator, and wreaking her will on our garden. She transplanted bushes while in full bloom, and woe betide any poor plant that failed to flower within its first six months of life. She just whipped it out. Our compost heap was a picture all year round, but you could usually count the blooms in the beds on one hand.

  She repegged all my washing on the line each week ‘so that it would dry better’. She aired brand new football boots, best jerseys and plastic gloves on top of her electric fire. She stowed away ashtrays and dinner plates ‘because we did not need so many’.

  She cut all my king-size bath towels in half ‘because they are too big for normal people’, sliced a third off a hand-knitted scarf belonging to my son ‘because it was too long’ and once sent a perfectly good suit of my husband’s to the jumble ‘because he never wore it’.

  As a boy I have strong memories of the notes she left on the hall table. I passed them on my way to and from school, or in and out of the garden. The serious ones to my mum were in small brown sealed manila envelopes with Private: June written ominously on them. The rest were scribbled out on whatever came to hand – the inside of a fag packet, a torn-out page from the Radio Times. A few have been kept. Some were just shopping lists:

  40 Players

  40 Silk Cut

  4 Wombles Milk Choc Bars

  2 large Rowntree Fruit Pastilles

  6 Fish fingers

  ½ Cheddar Cheese

  2 qrtrs Typhoo

  Others were simply designed to make everyone feel bad: Roly and Toby, Could each of you deny yourself a night’s pay at the pub to play badminton with Ben . . . or: I’ve taken my last codeine. (‘If only,’ my dad is reported to have said.) Some were unintentionally comic. Preparing to make soup she warned those who might be using the garden: I’ve hung my old bones on the line. A favourite was the day she placed a handwritten note under the windscreen wiper of a builder’s van parked across our drive: Please don’t block our entrance again. We have had to park down the road. You evidently don’t know the rules of the road. Perhaps you are a beginner. I came home from school to find the van gone and the note posted back through our letterbox. On the bottom, in pencil, was scrawled Bollox.

  For me, she has also been immortalised in the song my dad wrote the evening after she thought she had lost her dentures in bed one night, only to find them forty-eight hours later inside her spare slippers under the bed. He jumped on to the piano stool, and to a perfectly wrought twelve-bar blues – that I can still recite – sang:

  ‘Nunu has swallowed her teeth

  Nunu has swallowed her teeth

  Nunu has swallowed them, don’t try and follow them

  They have slipped right down beneath

  Nunu has swallowed her pegs

  They’re probably down by her legs

  Will she get rid of them, don’t bet a quid on them

  Better call up the police

  Oh, poor old Nunu’s lost her ’ampstead ’eath.’

  Chapter 22

  The hot summer months of 2003 wrapped my mum and dad’s flat in a somnolence that slowed the days down to a near standstill. Flies zigzagged between the rooms. I notched the fridge thermostat up a digit or two. The sports commentators on the television chugged away, filling the background to the afternoons with a soft and comforting burble of statistics and truisms, while the dazzling blue skies beyond the wraparound windows of their second-floor St John’s Wood sitting room were marked only by occasional thin silvery plane trails, high up, like long deliberate key scratches along the side of an expensive shining car.

  Care workers and link workers occasionally looked in but my dad was too proud or low-spirited to talk to them, retiring to his room at the first sound of them in the hall, leaving my mum to make small talk for ten minutes and then send them away. They were much more interested in the little visits from Luis, the porter, who would pop out to the corner shop for a half-bottle of emergency Scotch or brandy; they had had him in their pocket pretty quickly.

  And then one day in September, not long after the heatwave, following a routine check-up at the local health centre, and less than twelve months since having her womb removed, my mum was told she had a lump in her breast. Immediate surgery was recommended, and this time the procedure was to take place on the NHS. My dad would have to go back to the care home.

  I took her to St Mary’s Hospital behind Paddington Station for a preparatory meeting. We went up in a black London taxi.

  ‘This is nice, dear,’ she said, as we passed through Baker Street.

  ‘You know where we’re going
, Mum?’ I said. Had she grasped how important this was?

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said irritatedly. ‘Message received.’

  At the meeting a female doctor patiently went over the planned lumpectomy: right-hand side; small incision; less than two centimetres; take tissue from the lymph gland; check the left side at the same time; out of action for four to five days if lucky, possibly seven to ten; radiotherapy starts after two months; side effects include fatigue, sunburn. I kept glancing at my mum. She was nodding but her eyes were roving. She looked like a distracted child being lectured by a primary school teacher.

  We left. She looked exhausted.

  It wasn’t long before I had the bed manager’s direct line and the name of the ward. It was all going to happen.

  She went into the hospital the night before the operation. She was quiet on the way, but then, as I was leaving, she was momentarily galvanised and asked if I could bring her in a couple of shawls, and post a letter she had left in the kitchen, and give Luis ten pounds she owed him.

  It’s often struck me that people who have endured something serious in hospital have a unique look about them. In contrast to outpatients – who see themselves in a permanent state of passing through, who perch and fidget and sigh, look at their watches, return to the front desk to check on the delays to their busy day, stop a nurse in the corridor, worry they might be catching something off the vinyl upholstery – the proper inpatient seems to have sensed their immobility and the seriousness of an unexpected procedure in one heavy blow, knocking out any idea that they might be somehow able to influence or effect change on their bad luck. And with it, they quickly become a part of the actual fabric of the hospital. A component part. Attached to it. A parked-up vehicle to be worked on. A service that is due. And so it was with my mum when I visited her after the operation.