Authors: Ben Watt
‘What is it?’ I said, narrowing my eyes in the brilliant noonday light.
‘Who do you
think
?’ he snorted without looking up. He cracked the spine on his book. I still wasn’t sure why he was reading something called
Nunaga: Ten Years Among the Eskimos
on a sweltering summer holiday on a Greek island. Maybe it was deliberate.
I shaded my eyes with my hands and peered again. A rough track was cut into the hillside down to the beach from the village. Halfway along it, and heading our way, was a man leading a small donkey with a load on its back. My eyes were still refocusing from looking out at the glimmering sea, so I squinted and could see the load was a person. Little puffs of dust rose from the track. I recognised the shape on the back of the donkey immediately; it was my mum. Beyond her, further up the track, a couple were ambling down ordinarily with rolled-up bamboo mats under their arms. We had been on holiday for a week and although I’d seen donkeys taking people up to the acropolis I had never seen anyone on the beach path on a donkey until now.
When they were directly above the beach, not far over our heads, my mum cried out fulsomely, ‘
Hallooo
down there!
Kalimerrrra
!’
‘Jesus,’ said my dad under his breath, still fixed on his book.
A few people on the beach turned to look. I could see someone say something to the person next to them, cupping their hand to hide their mouth, then smirking.
The donkey slowed. My mum was sitting side-saddle in a startling scoop-neck orange smock with puff sleeves; the colour screamed against the weathered, matt terrain. A dark blue pleated straw hat was tied down and secured under her chin with a black silk spotted scarf, so that the sides of the hat were pressed unflatteringly against her cheeks. All I could see of her face were big sunglasses and a grin. Her legs were covered in an ankle-length brown cotton skirt, her feet sported pop socks and sandals, and over her shoulder was a bulging lilac floral beach bag.
My dad snatched a look over his shoulder and turned back. ‘What a state,’ he muttered.
I had never seen him like this before. He seemed ashamed.
‘Darling,
woo hoo
,’ she cried from the path. ‘Have you got a few
drachma
for the man? I’ve stupidly brought no
money
. I’ve paid for the ride, just not enough for a
tip
.’
I saw my dad close his eyelids slowly and open them again. His face was like thunder. He levered himself out of his deckchair, reached underneath, fumbled in the front pocket of his shirt, took out his wallet and made his way up the beach. I watched as the donkey man helped my mum down and she let out a shrill laugh that cut through the torpid heat. It made several people look up again. I watched my dad with fascination. I felt I was seeing something new. It was as though a little cold sustained undercurrent of dislike was being allowed to rise to the surface in front of me.
In retrospect – over the weeks and months that followed – everything about that moment seemed to have triggered an attempt by my dad to start a new alliance between the two of us. I became aware of his disrespectful jokey remarks about my mum on a more regular basis – her class, her background, her friends, her appearance – in exchanges during which I was often encouraged to laugh and be complicit. Perhaps such enmity had been in there longer than I understood – and I was certainly too young to fully understand it – but whatever caused it, I began to notice it manifesting itself in streaks of jealousy and distaste that were negative and subversive.
In contrast, the family was encouraged to think that my dad had adapted successfully to his new life as a decorator and house-husband, that he was content in his middle age, and much of the time, it’s fair to say, he kept his own counsel, and cut a laid-back and imperturbable figure. If he did get drunk and confrontational it was ‘just Tom’, and I was not old enough to ask why. Yet, with hindsight, it is clear that some things still nettled him greatly, and if he was ever intimidated by my mum’s ongoing buoyant career and idiosyncratic tastes, he also struggled to reconcile the continued successes and choices of his old partner, Brian Rix.
In 1977, Brian was the subject of the popular biographical TV documentary
This Is Your Life
with presenter Eamonn Andrews. It was one of the biggest shows on television at the time, conferring star status on its special guests. Millions watched. My dad was secretly invited to appear as one of Brian’s oldest friends. It can’t have been easy for him, especially as it was the
second
time Brian had been picked to appear.
My dad dealt with it the only way he knew how. With the cameras rolling, Andrews turned to the famous onstage sliding doors with the words, ‘Your old friend, Tommy Watt.’ The doors slid back and my dad stumbled out drunk into the TV lights. His prearranged anecdote came out as a slurred jumble of incomprehensible nonsense before Andrews managed to usher him decorously to one of the guest seats at the side of the stage.
Fortunately for all concerned, the show – while presented in front of a live theatre audience – was being prerecorded, and was not live on TV. At the edit, my dad’s entire performance was unsalvageable. When the programme was finally broadcast, he was seen coming through the doors, but that was it – they cut to the next guest. The rest was left on the cutting-room floor.
They were once so close, he and Brian. Brian had been made my godfather. But after the show was screened he barely spoke to my dad again.
In 1976, my mother’s mother, Eunice, died. She had lived on in Wilmslow for several years following her husband’s death in 1943, before selling up most of her possessions and moving down to London in the early fifties to be near her daughter and grandchildren. By the time I was aware of her, it was the late sixties and she was already over eighty and living in the flat downstairs. I never knew her as Eunice; none of the children ever did, as none of them could pronounce it. Instead she had become ‘Nunu’.
I used to let myself in from school and even on the brightest days the entrance to her flat was darkened. She left her door on the latch. I was half afraid to go in, but the ground-floor front room was her bedroom, and she left me out a square of milk chocolate with a Rowntree’s Fruit Pastille perched on top on the corner of her chest of drawers just behind the door. The room smelled of mothballs. Her wide single bed in the corner was covered in a lime-green eiderdown and the sturdy elm legs at the end were raised up on silver biscuit tins, which, together with the magnet she left on the bottom sheet near her feet, supposedly ‘helped her rheumatism’ (whatever that was). There was a photograph of an old man on the mantelpiece and a barley-twist bedside table. The tumbler of water and the plastic protector around her hardback library book made me think of illness and spilling things, and the empty black wooden dressing table in the window made me think of death.
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’.