Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  She was on a big recovery ward up on the second floor. As I approached the bed, I knew something unforeseen had happened. It seemed her whole body had melted on to her bedclothes. She was propped up, her ashen hair streaked across the pale pillow behind her, but the muscle-tone seemed absent in her arms, her shoulders forming one long continuous contour on a relief map of creased sheets and crumpled blanket. Her face was gaunt and waxy, but for the gentle woozy softness to her pearly blue-grey eyes brought on by synthetic opiates.

  On the operating table the lumpectomy had got more serious. By the time they moved her back down on to the ward, she’d had both breasts removed in a double mastectomy.

  ‘We had little choice,’ the doctor told me straightforwardly. ‘It was worse than we’d been led to believe. But the good news is we feel it was quite contained. She won’t need radiotherapy. Not unless anything shows up in the check-ups. Unfortunate, yes, but hopefully all over in one fell swoop.’

  Another car successfully serviced, I thought.

  I looked at her, ragged and serene on the pillow, and wondered how much she knew. First her womb. Then her breasts. I told myself it was just terrible bad luck and perhaps not even that uncommon in women of her age, and I thought of Eunice her mother, who battled her way to the very end – still on her hands and knees reseeding the bald patch on the lawn just before she died – and I thought about the belief in forbearance and endurance that was part of my mum’s Methodist upbringing, and wondered if it was any solace to her now, or whether it was just bloody awful.

  The tough Methodist strain in my mum’s family dates back to my great-great-grandfather Cornelius Smith. Born in 1835 he was a Romany, one of the Smiths of Epping Forest, who along with the Boswells and the Loveridges make up three of the biggest Romany families in England. In and out of prison, a horse-dealer and clothes-peg maker, known for deer-stealing and occasional violence, he was twenty-nine and travelling with his family in their horse-drawn vardo outside Baldock in Hertfordshire when his eldest daughter Emily fell ill. They called the local doctor, who wouldn’t enter the wagon, but called the girl to the door and announced that she had smallpox. He told the family they couldn’t drive to the town as she was contagious; they would have to park up in a lane in the countryside.

  Even though it was March, the snow was on the ground and it was bitterly cold. Cornelius pulled the wagon over on Norton Lane, one and a half miles away, and pitched a tent for his wife and his four other children under an overhanging hawthorn tree. He then took the wagon two hundred yards up the road and parked it by a chalk pit in view of the tent to be the sick room.

  Cornelius’s wife, Polly (born Mary), was heavily pregnant, but made a three-mile round trip into Baldock for provisions while Cornelius tended to Emily in the wagon, but it wasn’t long before Emily’s brother Ezekiel fell sick too, and the doctor, on returning, insisted he join his sister in quarantine.

  A month of fetching and carrying and nursing followed. Polly left food on a stone halfway between the tent and wagon, in order to avoid contact with the infected. Some days Cornelius was so busy nursing that the food gathered a crust of snow before it could be collected. As the days passed Polly could not resist recklessly edging nearer and nearer the wagon to catch a glimpse of her children, but with an awful inevitability it wasn’t long before she too fell ill. Cornelius was almost distracted. He had no choice but to gather everyone together back in the tent and hope for the best. Polly gave birth, while gravely sick, and died a day later in Cornelius’s arms. Emily and Ezekiel survived and rejoined their siblings.

  The health authorities – mindful that they were Romanies – ordered that the funeral take place after dark at the dead of night. In preparation, Polly’s coffin was laid out between two chairs outside the tent and Cornelius made a bonfire for the infected clothes, but a kettle overturned and the tent caught fire and all their belongings were lost, although the coffin was untouched.

  My great-great-uncle Rodney – who went on to become a famous evangelist preacher – was one of the surviving children. He takes up the story in his 1901 autobiography:

  And now darkness fell, and with it came to us an old farmer’s cart. Mother’s coffin was placed in the vehicle, and between ten and eleven o’clock my father, the only mourner, followed her to the grave by a lantern light. She lies resting in Norton churchyard, near Baldock. When my father came back to us it was midnight, and his grief was very great. He went into a plantation behind his van, and throwing himself on his face, promised God to be good, to take care of his children, and to keep the promise that he had made to his wife. A fortnight after, the little baby died and was placed at her mother’s side. If you go to Norton churchyard now and inquire for the gipsies’ graves they will be pointed out to you. My mother and her last born lie side by side in that portion of the graveyard where are interred the remains of the poor, the unknown, and the forsaken.

  After his wife’s death, the grief-stricken Cornelius packed up and made his way with the children to Cambridge where he ran into his brothers, Bartholomew and Woodlock. They were heading to a service at the Primitive Methodist Chapel in Fitzroy Street. Cornelius and his children joined them. When the preacher asked if he was saved, Cornelius is said to have cried out in anguish, ‘No, but that is what I want.’

  Returning to Epping Forest, and still heavy-hearted, he joined his brothers on their way to another prayer meeting, this time in a chapel in Notting Hill built and run by a charismatic businessman-turned-preacher named Henry Varley. The congregation were surprised by the arrival of Romanies – who were frowned upon as untrustworthy outsiders – but the new revivalist movement of the time was opening its doors to all-comers from all classes and the brothers were admitted. By the end of the meeting the three brothers were ‘converted’. Cornelius is said to have collapsed hysterically to the floor, frightening his own children, before rising to his feet and telling the congregation he felt so light that, had the floor been covered in eggshells, he could have walked across and not broken one.

  Like her brother Rodney, Cornelius’s daughter Tilly also became an evangelist. By the age of seventeen she was singing and preaching at Salvation Army meetings in Carlisle. In 1885 she married a Wesleyan from Plymouth, George Evens, and while campaigning on a Methodist mission in Hull, gave birth to my mother’s father, Bram, on Anlaby Road – and not in a vardo, as Bram was to romantically depict his beginnings for his Out with Romany listeners when he became a radio star.

  In 1931, Rodney’s extraordinary fame as the globe-trotting evangelist ‘Gipsy’ Smith helped pay for a new Methodist church in Letchworth near Baldock, and it wasn’t long before the remains of both Cornelius and Polly were moved from paupers’ graves and into the grounds of the churchyard in Norton with a smart new shared headstone.

  My dad paid lip-service to all this backstory for several years. In spite of his vehement atheism he allowed my mum to have me christened at the Methodist church in Barnes when I was four – in her words – ‘just in case’. There is a photograph commemorating the day. I am standing holding my dad’s hand in the front garden of our house in Barnes beside the spindly weeping silver birch. My dad unsurprisingly looks good in a lightweight navy safari jacket with four matching sporty flapped patch pockets, slicked hair, white shirt, black knitted tie and grey slacks. Unfortunately I am dressed not quite so stylishly in knee-length black socks, little grey shorts, turquoise blazer and a top hat. Just for good measure I am also carrying a large pink rose. I look like a precocious child-ringmaster. The Romany fortune-teller whom my mum consulted when I was born insisted I would become a priest or an entertainer. The casual reader who knows anything about me may gasp at the accuracy of this prediction, but one look at the occupations of most members of my extended family will show it wasn’t exactly a risky guess.

  Yet as the years passed, my dad became less and less tolerant of her religious side. He was being deliberately provocative when he suggested Rodney was only in it for the money and the
girls, eagerly pointing out how he was thrown out of the Salvation Army for accepting an inscribed watch from his congregation when he was young, how he travelled first class on the Queen Mary to his multiple engagements in America, and how he married his twenty-seven-year-old secretary at the age of seventy-eight after the death of his first wife. ‘Showbiz religion,’ my dad called it, ‘from a randy old man.’

  Although remembered for his common touch and reputed indifference to material wealth, Rodney was certainly rich. I remember when his second wife, Mary-Alice, died in the mid-eighties. I visited her little mansion flat on Exhibition Road in South Kensington with my mum and Tracey, and we found a jaw-dropping treasure trove of jewels and silk and lavish gifts, many doubtless amassed from the offertories of his congregations, but others clearly bought as dazzling souvenirs and presents from his travels: pearl-inlaid make-up compacts; hand-tooled leather shaving cases and manuscript folders; drawers of silk underclothes; crocodile-skin suitcases; white kid gloves; solid silver photo frames and hand mirrors.

  If provoked, my dad even lashed out at my mum’s father’s reputation, suggesting he was an ambitious man bewitched by fame and not the humble Methodist minister in the field that he portrayed. ‘Own up!’ was one of my dad’s battle cries. He spared no one’s feelings once his blood was up, and tore down anyone he considered dishonest in their intentions, or caught playing a double game, however much pain and controversy he might leave in his wake.

  But for all his attacks, my mum dug in, and for all her reservations about her upbringing and leanings towards agnosticism, she could never quite shrug off her own history. On the day she heard of her mother’s death she instinctively got into her car and just started driving, and didn’t stop until she was miles out into the countryside, beside an anonymous plain village church, where she slipped inside and offered up a prayer.

  Years later, in Oxford, she befriended the local clergyman. (‘Invited to the next-door vicar for mince pies and a glass of wain [sic] tonight. Don’t expect I shall be accompanied. Have a peaceful Xmas,’ she faxed in 1997). Even at the flat in St John’s Wood, when she tried living on her own for a few weeks after my dad first went into the care home, she made an effort to visit the local parish church at the foot of the high street, only to be deflected by its grand Regency-style portico, and white and gold ionic columns. ‘Too High Church for me,’ she said.

  I looked at her in the bed – remote, weakened, ruthlessly stripped of any last vestige of her sexuality, uncertain of her faith, mocked yet loved by her husband, her memory fading – and I wanted to well up, to feel some surge of emotion that would make me instinctively embrace her and touch her soft grey hair and whisper in her ear, but instead I leaned back and looked into her drowsy eyes from the chair in which I sat, and she looked back at me, a momentary smile across her lips, and then just eye contact again. I reached out and took her hand. And she seemed unbowed. Enduring. Flinty.

  I wondered if she could have had her life all over again what she would have done differently. Could she have left my dad in the late seventies when it all got vicious and spiteful? She would only have been in her mid-fifties. She could have found some room to be herself again – uncriticised. She could have renewed old theatre friends, carried on writing, basked in the reflected glory of her children’s successes, gone birdwatching, indulged her Romany roots and collection of vintage postcards, raised money for her favourite local charity projects – all without fear of withering reprisals from her own husband. Or did the guilt of her own remarriage pin her down? Would it have been too shameful to admit defeat again? Maybe she feared it would be perceived as a reflection only of her selfishness and lack of stickability. I wondered too if there was a side to her that was bored by herself. Was my dad still a way out? Even in the bad years? Sharp, acerbic, still exotic. Worth withstanding. Still forgivable. Or like any of us, maybe she just needed the company, and they kept the battle going as it was the only battle they had. It was an empty house after everyone left home.

  Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,

  Shaped to the comfort of the last to go

  As if to win them back. Instead, bereft

  Of anyone to please, it withers so,

  Having no heart to put aside the theft

  And turn again to what it started as,

  A joyous shot at how things ought to be,

  Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:

  Look at the pictures and the cutlery.

  The music in the piano stool. That vase.

  ‘Home Is So Sad’ by Philip Larkin

  (pinned above my mum’s desk, 1978)

  Chapter 23

  One night in 1978, my mum was woken at around midnight by the sound of my dad coming home from the pub. She heard the click of the flat door, the tinkle of keys and the sound of hushed voices. This wasn’t unusual. In the sixties a procession of musicians came through the flat in the small hours to listen to jazz and smoke and play poker in the sitting room across the landing from her bedroom. More recently, since my dad had taken up decorating, his friends had changed. Instead of drummers and trumpet players, it was now more often fitters and roofers. She was used to them in the flat. After a few drinks at lunchtime he might bring one of them home to do some odd jobs. ‘Skipper’ was a regular visitor with his doleful bloodhound face and rough cracked hands. It was said he could take on most things, which was never entirely clear from his work: he put in a new shower that ran only hot or cold for three weeks, then laid a floor in the kitchen only to hammer a nail straight through a central heating pipe causing a leak that brought down the ceiling in Eunice’s coat cupboard in the flat below. But there was something about the voices that night that made her sit up: one of them sounded higher than usual.

  She pulled on a dressing gown and blearily stepped out on to the landing. The voices were now in the sitting room. A seam of light was under the door. She pushed it open to see my dad fixing two drinks. Perched on the sofa was a young woman in heels. She worked as a barmaid at the pub.

  I didn’t hear about it until a few days later. I overheard my mum telling someone on the phone, and saying things like she wouldn’t stand for it, but then I heard her crying quietly after she’d put the receiver down. Quite what my dad’s full intentions were I’ve never been sure. An offensive snub to my mum, no doubt. A humiliation in her own home, yes. Perhaps it was just an obnoxious show of virility. I was fifteen. His purpose was puzzling to me, but I knew it was a serious and cruel thing even then.

  A couple of weeks later, the three of us were all set to return to Lindos where we had been in 1974. At the last minute my mum had to back out as an opportunity to interview Richard Burton again had come up unexpectedly. He was staying at the Dorchester for the release of a new blockbuster war movie, The Wild Geese, and there was a star-laden party to attend as well. With my dad’s decorating income intermittent and his royalties all but dried up, she needed the money. Instead of us pulling out of the holiday altogether it was agreed I would go with my dad. He teased me in the days running up to it. ‘A chance to dip the old wick,’ he leered quietly in the kitchen, the night before we left.

  At Gatwick Airport the next morning we sat in the busy departures lounge waiting for our flight to be called. He said he needed cigarettes and I should wait for him to come back. He disappeared in the direction of the bar. A family sat down next to me with two teenage daughters. Five minutes later I saw him coming back. As he approached it was clear he had something in his hand; I thought it was a packet of cigarettes. When he was about ten feet away he tossed it at me like a Frisbee. I went to catch it but fumbled it and it bounced off my leg and landed in my lap. I looked down. It was a box of condoms. He was standing over me now. ‘You’ll be needing those,’ he said quietly, with a wink. I didn’t dare look round at the family next to me.

  On the plane I wouldn’t talk to him. I wanted to go home. He tried to order me a beer from the air hostess. I didn’t like beer. ‘Please yourself,’
he said. Three miniatures of gin were lined up on the tray-table in front of him.

  In Lindos, we had adjoining village rooms. He was matey during the day but encouraged me to ‘do my own thing’ after dark. The village was unthreatening. He said I could find him in the popular Socrates Bar. I would wander down to the village’s only discothèque and sit on the wall and watch a handful of people dancing to Wild Cherry’s ‘Play That Funky Music’ and Santana’s ‘Black Magic Woman’ on the tiny open-air dance floor, and thought how I was too young to impress anyone. Instead I hoped I might see one of Pink Floyd; it was said he owned one of the big captain’s houses in the village. I watched other families eating late in the restaurants and wished my mum was there.

  Back at Socrates Bar I’d find my dad, garrulous, telling stories to whoever would listen. A photo of Jim Morrison hung above the cocktail mixers and bottles of spirits on the rear counter. People sat on upturned logs under the dark starry night sky. Wicker lanterns hung in the trees. I watched him try to dazzle everyone, seeking out people younger than himself. He’d give me the key and tell me to let myself into the room and promise he wouldn’t be long, but I’d be woken from sleep when I’d finally hear him blunder in. In the mornings he’d have an ouzo ‘to settle the stomach’ and then I’d watch him skip breakfast. There was something demeaning about it all. He was fifty-two. I threw the condoms away.

  The days weren’t so bad. After he’d shrugged off his hangover, we’d make a few jokes and walk down to the quieter of the two beaches, and go snorkelling off the rocks among the sponges and black spiny sea urchins and the shoals of damsel fish, looking out for eels and rays, or pointing out the dogfish, both of us hovering wide-eyed on the surface of an astonishing translucent otherness; and for an hour or two we would be lifted out of our lives and exhilarated, communicating only in sign language. It felt easier.