Romany and Tom

by Ben Watt

  As for the letter, if I felt a prickle of guilt as I opened it, since reading it something has been understood, something that I once only sensed has been substantiated: the sheer punishing weight of living with a man with chronic depression. Now, in our age of therapy, and footballers who unburden themselves, it seems so clear that what she endured was beyond what anyone should have had to put up with, and yet no one talked openly about depression back then – especially the depression of a proud Scottish working-class jazz musician. In the year it was written my mum was editing an agony aunt and advice page with Katie Boyle – ‘All black dogs, love rats and adult virgins,’ she once said to me, ‘and tips on how to keep your china sparkling’ – but no one was around to give her advice when she got home. I’m glad I opened the letter. It made it real. I hugged her when I next saw her; although I didn’t mention what I’d read.

  I met my aunt – my uncle Glyn’s second wife, and yet another ‘Jean’ in this story – in the spring of 2012. She was eighty-two when I turned up at her tiny terraced cottage in Kentish Town. She had lived less than two miles from me for the past twenty-seven years – Glyn having died suddenly in 1977 and she then remarrying and relocating to London in the eighties – and I couldn’t think of a good reason why we hadn’t met more regularly, other than our family are experts at keeping their distance. We reminisced about a lot of things, but one thing that stayed with me was when she said she had always thought of my dad as ‘quite a sad man underneath’.

  ‘It was in his eyes,’ she said. ‘I felt he drank to come out of himself, to make himself braver.’

  After she’d said it, it suddenly seemed so obvious: underneath the jokes and the charm and the rambunctious exterior was a small melancholy man from Glasgow, who just wanted everyone to love him and his music. I wondered why it hadn’t struck me sooner or as clearly. And then I remembered that in 1982 a local London jazz ensemble, the Willie Garnett Big Band, had unexpectedly played a couple of his old arrangements – twenty years after he’d written them – and he’d been invited down and allowed to conduct them himself and bring them to life in front of a small back-room audience in the suburbs. He was home late that night. My mum had gone to bed and left out a note on the kitchen table, asking him how it had gone. He slept in the spare room so as not to disturb her, but not before writing on the bottom of the note: ‘I was lionised!’ Can we ever be loved enough?

  Included with the letter my mum wrote to herself that early October morning, in the same white envelope, was another note on the same paper written in the same pale blue ink, most likely around the same time. She must have written it for my dad to see, although it’s not clear whether she left it out for him, or decided against it at the last minute and sealed it up with the other one. Not that it matters. It reads:

  I don’t like myself very much, you know. I didn’t want to be matron – with all that word implies. I would have loved to have someone in charge of me – to make fun of my idiosyncrasies and look after me. But you are teaching me that people are so insignificant, so doomed, so manipulated, so corrupt, that there is no point in anything any more except jazz and Ben. Is our personal life of so little value that it doesn’t matter if we both become strangers? I suppose not.

  I don’t want to talk to you about the ‘Dear Katie’ page.

  If you had a job – an equally boring 9–5 job – neither of us would talk about our own work to each other.

  That is another of my dilemmas. I work here – basically to keep you company – but I know it’s all a charade, you being interested in what I do. It’s not natural or normal. But what else can I talk about? We never go anywhere – we have no friends – we never go out for a meal or visit anyone. I can’t help boring you. We don’t go to a play, and now, rarely watch TV.

  I am as unhappy and frustrated as you are in many ways.

  Sorry about it.

  R

  When I read both of them now they make me sad. And they bring to mind the questions my mum put to Liz Taylor in her two major interviews with her published in 1970 and 1971, questions I now realise she must have asked herself a thousand times. As they sat overlooking the ocean in San Felipe in 1970, she entreats, among a scant selection: Whose fault is it if a marriage goes stale?; Should a woman try to change her husband?; How is Richard as a stepfather?; Do you have many close friends? And then, when they met in Rome in 1971, she went on to ask: Have you thought what you would do if Richard wanted to leave you? Would you try to stop him?; Have you ever tried to change him? In context they pass by in a glamorous whirl of opulence and fame, but extracted on their own they strike me as the saddest of questions.

  The summer before the letters – the summer of 1983 – I had come back down to London from Hull with Tracey to finish writing and recording our debut album as Everything But The Girl. We were twenty. The atmosphere between my mum and dad was like an electrical storm. My half-brother Toby said we could house-sit for a few days at his tiny place in Kingston if we needed to. It was right on the Robin Hood Roundabout on the edge of the main A3 in and out of town. Behind us were the vast open spaces of Richmond Park but in front the traffic thundered past day and night. We recorded the final primitive demos for Eden there on a tiny four-track cassette deck, waiting until late at night to record the vocals when the roads were quieter. We then stayed uneasily with my mum and dad in early September while we recorded the album in Willesden at Robin Millar’s Power Plant studios. We gave my mum some money towards the phone and washed up our breakfast things before we left each day, but we barely saw each other. We’d walk half a mile across the common and catch the train from Barnes to Richmond, then change on to the Broad Street Line and travel up to Brondesbury Park. From there we’d walk the final mile to the studio. It could take an hour and a half each morning. In the evening Robin treated us to a minicab back. The day after we finished, we caught the train back up to Hull, even though term didn’t start for a couple of weeks.

  Not long after we were back on Humberside, my mum called me with the news that my dad had drunk his last drink at the Bull’s Head. In a confused garbled story it seemed he’d had a public altercation with the new manager and walked out, vowing never to return. ‘He said the new manager tried to humiliate him in front of everyone,’ my mum said. ‘He’ll barely talk about it.’ It seemed impossible at the time; the Bull’s Head was his home from home. As more came to light, there was a rumour that he was accused of ‘being caught with his hand in the till’, which, I suppose, while possible, seemed so far-fetched. Others suggested he had become too disruptive and vociferous on a regular basis, and the new manager simply wanted him out, and used the accusation as a ploy to make him leave. I have never got to the bottom of the story; suffice to say it marked a fork in the road, as my dad never did return, nor would he drink in any of the other pubs in Barnes from that day on. ‘Barnes is over for me,’ he said casually but firmly a few weeks later. It seemed oddly preposterous.

  Instead he took to quietly drinking at home. ‘At least I can keep an eye on him,’ my mum wrote. ‘He gets mildly squiffy here . . . which is so much safer.’ With Barnes cast adrift, I was suddenly conscious of a new future looming, and amid all the usual stories of a week away on a farm or a boat, or the annual visit of my dad’s mother, or birdlife at the kitchen window, an elegiac tone started to appear in her letters:

  The road is emptying. The Kentishes advertised in the Sunday Times and the Observer last Sunday and the Warhursts are also putting their house on the market . . . Even Anthony and George have sold their house. They are splitting up, I believe. The Paynes’ house had a SOLD notice. A young family move in there ‘after Easter’ . . . We got the tree surgeons to vet the poplar and they say it is rotten three-quarters of the way down, so by the end of spring, I think ours and the one [next door] will be felled.

  By 1988 our house had been sold too.

  Chapter 28

  ‘Up from London, are you?’

  The minicab smelled of Richmond Kin
g Size. Lots of them. A glass air-freshener was attached to the air-flow vent on the dashboard sweetening the fag haze with a virulent blast of vanilla. I tried to adjust my position in the back seat so I couldn’t be seen directly in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  I could half see his profile. Fishing waistcoat over a black T-shirt. Two indistinct old tattoos in smudged ink on his left forearm. A little bit of eczema on the line of his jawbone. His hair – no hairstyle to speak of, just vaguely cut round the ears – was flattened and smeary on the crown at the back. Straight out of bed and into the cab, I thought. He shuffled on his wooden-bead seat-cover so he could see me in the mirror with one eye again.

  ‘Just for the day?’

  How could he tell? ‘Yes.’

  ‘What line of work are you in, then?’ He cornered the six-year-old Nissan Primera quickly out of the mini-roundabout at the top of the road from Bristol Parkway Station, and I had to stop myself from falling sideways on the back seat. I put my right hand out but the grey velour loose cover – a prerequisite for the leaking curry bags and slopping bottles of a Saturday night’s work in town – was badly fitted, and my hand kept moving as the fabric stretched. I had to grab the door handle with my left. As we straightened out, I reached for the seat belt behind me but it jammed in the mechanism and wouldn’t come out of the roller.

  ‘That one don’t work,’ he said, half over his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, I aren’t going to kill you.’ (When my boy, Blake, first heard a Bristol accent, aged five, he leaned over to me in the cab and whispered, ‘Is he a pirate?’)

  ‘No problem,’ I said, trying to stay detached.

  His mobile rang in the cup holder. He reached out a thick hand and switched it off. ‘Only be my mum. I’ll call her back when I drop you off.’ He pulled a biro from a collection held on by several rubber bands around the sun visor above his head, and scribbled something on the memo pad that was fixed to the windscreen with a suction cup.

  We drove a little further in silence.

  ‘You down on business, then?’ he said.

  ‘No. Visiting my mum and dad.’

  ‘Can’t remember the last time I went out on the A38 up towards Tockington. Live in the village, do they?’

  ‘No. In a care home. Residential. Up out of the village on the other side.’

  ‘I see. Nice and quiet, I bet.’

  ‘Yes, it is. My half-brother lives in the next village along, so he keeps an eye on them.’

  ‘That’s nice. You need your family around you.’ He gripped the dimples on his racing steering wheel cover, lifted himself up momentarily, reseated himself on his wooden beads, and scratched the tattoos on his forearm. ‘My mum’s on her own. Hates it. Gets lonely. Sometimes I’ll have her in the cab with me,’ he said, his voice brightening. ‘Most of the customers don’t mind. I have her in the front, up here in the passenger seat, of course. She’s not in the back with the customers. Although she would be if she had her way. She loves her talkin’, she does. Your mum a talker, is she?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Ah! The strong, silent type, I bet!’

  ‘Yes, you could say that.’

  ‘Strong and moody.’

  ‘Sounds like you know her.’

  ‘Do I?’ he said with a note of utter surprise in his voice. He stole a startled, puzzled glance at me over his shoulder.

  ‘Just a joke.’

  He moved to catch my eye in the mirror. He was grinning. ‘Oh, I get it. That’s good, that is.’

  He got up some speed on the Gloucester Road, then dropped down the side of Fernhill towards Tockington, the electricity pylons strung out down the valley above our heads, the cables like metal bunting heading west towards the Severn Estuary.

  We drove through Tockington and up the hill towards Old Down.

  At the care home, after I’d paid the fare, he handed me his business card. ‘In case you need to book me in advance, or want a ride back,’ he said. ‘Mobile’s on there. I’ve got to run a lady to the hairdresser’s at 12.15, but I’m free after that.’

  ‘OK. I might get a lift, but thanks anyway.’ I shook the card at him as if to underline my gratitude, got out and closed the door.

  As he pulled away under the cluster of tall pines that flanked the driveway I looked at the card. It was like one of the ones you can print yourself at a motorway service station. Across the middle, partially covering an image of a Union Jack, in a smart italicised font, were the words Pinewood Travel, and below, in smaller print, Local and Long Distance. Safe, Friendly, Reliable. At the bottom it said Karl with a mobile number and any time 24 hrs in brackets. I put it in my back pocket.

  My mum and dad looked well. All things considered. It was April 2004. Two months since they left London. Roly had organised all of it. (‘There’s a place very near me. Seems very good by all accounts. And a lot cheaper than London.’) They each had a single room on the first floor. They had their own furniture from the London flat – the bits that we could fit in, anyway. My mum had some of her pictures up on the walls, and their two armchairs were arranged in my dad’s room so they could sit together during the day.

  ‘This was the right move,’ my dad said. ‘Very clever of Roly to suggest it.’

  One of the maintenance engineers had even screwed a small CD rack to the wall.

  ‘Are you using it, Dad?’ I said, pulling out a Bill Evans album.

  ‘I am. From time to time. If your mother can stand it.’ He nodded to the small portable boom-box on the side table.

  I remembered when my mum had told me about sitting – at my dad’s insistence – in the front row with him at a packed and sweltering Ronnie Scott’s for a Buddy Rich gig back in the old days. In the middle of a tumultuous, deafening, thirteen-minute drum solo, Rich had dropped a stick. My mum had leaned over and whispered in my dad’s ear, ‘Does that mean he has to start again?’

  We sat and chatted and ate chocolate biscuits. I could hear the crackle on my dad’s chest when he strained to reach the newspaper from the table beside him, but their eyes were gentle and their complexions good when compared with their first Christmas at the new flat in London. My mum’s red cotton blouse dropped straight down her chest; I tried not to keep looking.

  ‘Can I take your picture before I go?’ I asked.

  ‘If you must,’ she said, half joking.

  As I raised the camera she held a hand up as if to say just a moment. She then peeled off her glasses, checked the rise on her swept-back hair and the gold sleepers in her ears, before dropping her shoulders back, pushing one slightly forward and staring straight down the barrel of the lens. While I focused, it felt as though she was taking me on – still the young actress of her mid-twenties, proud, self-aware, the audience watching – and I saw that it was her spotlight for a moment, not mine, and she looked strong, and I admired it. And an image came to me – a Sunday morning when I was little, creeping into their darkened bedroom, the air sour, winter light at the edges of the closed curtains, and slipping under the covers on my mum’s side, and backing into her warm body, feeling the rough skin on her feet against my legs, the weight of her sleepy arm across me, the sound of her thick breathing behind me, and feeling I was in the embrace of a big noble animal.

  With my eye still on the viewfinder, I turned to my dad. Unflustered, he stayed sitting back in his chair but casually rested a loose fist against his cheek, his white quiff thinner but neatly combed, his goatee bushy and recently trimmed. Patches of dry skin on his face were softened by emollient. The back of his hand was brindled with a healing bruise. His nails were spotlessly clean. As usual. And as I looked at him, he gave me the same look he’d given me all those years ago when we threw pebbles against the empty bleach bottle at the Ship Inn: half affectionate; half sizing me up.

  I held down the shutter-release button and clicked.

  As I put the camera down I thought of the days in the summer holidays when he was decorating and sober. I
saw us jumping into the car on an afternoon off and driving up to Palewell Common to play on the pitch and putt course. Parking on the grass. Collecting the clubs and the golf balls and the small coloured plastic tees and the paper score pads from the groundsman’s hut. Driving off the tee in the style of different TV personalities. ‘Do it in the style of Norman Wisdom, Dad!’ We’d stroll up the eighty-yard fairways, the crows calling in the elms, buttercups and daisies springing back through the mown grass. If one of us hooked a ball into Beverley Brook I’d watch my dad miraculously produce a spare from his pocket. ‘How did you get it?!’ We’d cross the footbridge for the back holes and both climb up the verge, and I’d watch a bit of amateur cricket over the fence in the Bank of England sports ground while my dad smoked a fag in the shade, and the people following us round the course got cross because we weren’t playing fast enough. After the final hole, he’d tot up the score cards and always say ‘Let’s call it draw’ even if one of us had walked it, and then we’d drop off the clubs and buy choc ices from the café in the nearby thirties park pavilion. ‘Call it a reward,’ he’d say, ‘for all our hard work.’