Seize the Day (34 page)

The night he died I’d only been in bed for half an hour when I had the call. There would be a taxi at the door sometime after midnight to take me to London. Dwina was happy for me to do the interviews as she felt that I would be able delicately to handle questions on personal issues, the Bee Gees’ career, Robin’s career and his enormous capacity for charitable causes, including the Bomber Command Memorial, of which more below. It was a harrowing two days of interviews with hardly any sleep, so sometimes it verged on the emotional. One interviewer asked me, ‘All this media coverage. What do you think Robin would say if he could see it?’

I said, ‘He’d say, “I’m bloody annoyed because I want to be down there, living my life and writing songs.”’

Robin was fiercely loyal to people that he felt had been supportive and even wrote and recorded a moving song about one of the early champions of both the Bee Gees’ songs and his own solo material, Alan Freeman. He went to visit Alan at Brinsworth House, a nursing home for people in the entertainment industry, and secretly wrote a very large cheque for the charity that runs it.

Robin could also be sharp and on the offensive if he felt he hadn’t been treated correctly. When the edition of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
on which he and I appeared wasn’t transmitted on the day we’d been told it would, he was on the phone demanding the tapes back, insisting that they were biked down that minute. He calmed down when it was re-scheduled, although we didn’t do too well. During the run-through in the afternoon, which is played as if for real, we notched up £250,000, but cometh the hour, where were the men? We couldn’t answer that. We did get to £20,000, but then we blew it and didn’t
make as much for Shooting Star Chase as we’d hoped. We weren’t sure whether to stick at £20,000, I seem to recall, although I could be wrong, but I do remember trying to catch the eye of the tireless Karen Sugarman for a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’. I couldn’t work out why I didn’t know who’d won that year’s FA Cup Final. Nor could a bewildered John Inverdale, who thought he might be called up on ‘phone a friend’ for something a little more challenging than saying ‘Chelsea’. It was only later that I realised I’d been in Jamaica at the time.

In 2012 I was drafted onto the Lords and Commons Entertainment Committee, working with Macmillan Cancer Support to raise money for cancer care. This long-running institution meets every month in preparation for an annual show each March in which the participants are all MPs or peers. For the 2013 event, I wrote and directed a show titled
100 Years of Prime Ministers and Prime Music
, with Margaret Jay, Jeremy Hunt, Danny Alexander and me narrating. I became chairman of the committee that spring and put together and directed the 2014 show,
Best of British,
celebrating our music, poetry, art, literature, architecture and sport. The narrators included Michael Fabricant, who decided to do his own thing, which rather threw the timing and created a slightly anarchic and unwelcome twist to the evening. I feel rather privileged at being the only person that’s not a member of the Lords or Commons to perform. You may surmise, and you’d be correct, that putting words into the mouths of politicians isn’t that easy, nor is asking them to learn new material so that the shows have some degree of variation from year to year. Yet somehow, after weeks of writing and hundreds of phone calls, emails and texts, it comes together. Shows always do, but it’s often a close-run thing. My maxim has always been to wait at the spot where the rollercoaster will inevitably come to a stop and then deal with the situation, rather than taking the white-knuckle ride, screaming and shouting en route while fellow passengers’ minds are otherwise engaged. I’m in and out of Parliament so often that that the gatekeepers have suggested that I
should have my own peg in the Lords cloakroom now! As one of the policemen of the door put it, ‘Are you sure you’re not a Lord? You’re in here more than they are.’ Measure me for my ermine.

In May 2013 I undertook my first solo gig for a long time, appearing at Paul Clerehugh’s prestigious Crooked Billet, near Henley-on-Thames, and performing several of my own songs in the set, including ‘Grief Never Grows Old’, ‘In Flanders Fields’ (from
Dead Poets’ Society
) and ‘Myfanwy’. Fortified by an enthusiastic response I played an entire two-hour show of my songs and poetry as the final night of the Wantage Literary Festival.

Uncertain of being able to hold a sell-out crowd with material they might well not know, I landed on stage with a certain amount of trepidation. It worked so well that is was decreed one of the most popular events of the festival. A dangerous pronouncement. A year later there was a UK tour … two nights at the Crooked Billet (with Elliott Frisby) playing all my own songs and a return to the Wantage Festival as well an appearance at the Fawley Festival. At Fawley I played and sang with Chas McDevitt and Sam Brown in Chas’s skiffle group, the personnel for ‘Freight Train’ having changed a tad since he performed it to a US TV audience of forty million back in the summer of 1957 on
The Ed Sullivan Show
.

There was a further flurry of activity at the end of 2013, with Santa (Alan Williams from the Rubettes) and his Christmas Crackers recording ‘Christmas Day’, another festive offering I’d written with Elliott. Another track that escaped over Christmas 2013 is a single written by my first radio boss, Neil ffrench Blake, coupled with a rocky version of ‘Good King Wenceslas’. Neil is far from well but facing what future is left with fortitude. It was fun working with him again.

In 2014 I went back into the studio to record a new album, with John Mitchell, the lead singer with It Bites, producing. As I’d written music to the words of various World War One poets and with the hundredth anniversary looming I thought I might put together an album along those lines. I already had collaborations with Rupert
Brooke, John McCrae, Alan Seeger and Siegfried Sassoon, but found myself veering away from World War One specifically and bringing in other conflicts as well, including World War Two and the American Civil War. Alan Seeger was the uncle of Pete Seeger, the pioneering folk singer, civil rights campaigner and champion of international disarmament, and one of the first US soldiers to be killed in World War One. Only after presenting an obituary on the BBC for Pete Seeger, who died in January 2014, did I think that maybe I should have sent him a copy of my setting of his uncle’s poetry. Not for any commercial reason, except that it would have been a good thing to do. It’s always too late, isn’t it?

M
Y FIRST ENCOUNTER
with history was being taught to play chess by a friend of my parents, John Liulf Swinton. John was some twenty years older than my mother, but enjoyed a similar intellect, and he taught me to play before I even started school. Where's the history in that? The answer is in the stories that came out while he was trying to instruct me on the King's Gambit or the Bishop's Opening, for John's father was Major General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton KBE, CB, DSO, RE, credited with inventing the tank and appointed official war correspondent on the Western Front by Lord Kitchener.

Being the son of such a man must have been a hell of a thing to live up to. That's possibly why I remember John as a somewhat nervy man whose wife rather dominated him. Ellen Schroeder Swinton certainly scared the life out of me when I was young. Later, for reasons best known to herself, she became our cook, but I found her food quite unpalatable, the main reason being her long, greasy hairs that got entangled in the contents. She'd frequently, and rightly, scold me for folding over the bread on a jam sandwich when I should have been cutting it, but I'm sure she had a good heart as she often gave me her loose change. Even as a kid always on the lookout for some
extra sweet money I was loath to take her coins, though, as they were always dirty and stuck together with something unsavoury of, I suspected, human origin. I always gave the money a seriously good clean. Indeed, even as I write this a historic queasiness washes over me. I always thought she was Swedish or Norwegian. It turns out she was Danish. The actress Tilda Swinton is related somehow – I believe Ernest was her great-uncle, which makes her John's niece, but that doesn't really affect the action here.

Putting history on hold for a moment, unless you count the history of cooks, let me wander briefly onto the subject of cooks. Our first was Cookie Dawson, who had a rather bland brown dog and still wrote to Father Christmas. I chanced to see her list of festive wants one year and it was headed by something called a ‘dunlopillo,' which seriously made me question whether I'd go on writing to Santa when I got to an age where a dunlopillo was the one thing that would make me shriek with joy on Christmas morning. Cookie Durr was tall and quite austere, while Ann Brice, a Geordie through and through, was jolly decent and sent me birthday cards and the like. Somehow she never had the ‘Cookie' tag attached to her like the others. Her son Leslie, who was to die tragically young in a road accident, gave me my first vinyl records. Whether it was stuff he'd grown out of and suddenly found uncool or whether it was simply a philanthropic moment I couldn't say, but I was certainly grateful and it started me on a long and winding road.

In any child's life there is a queue of adults asking you the tricky question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?' My answer, even at a tender age, was that I had no intention of growing up. I'd seen the film
Peter Pan
and knew categorically that such a thing was possible. On the off-chance that I was wrong I usually went for veterinary surgeon or archaeologist. Once I'd ascertained that a vet dealt with sick animals and not frisky types that were full of life, I came down firmly on the side of archaeology. Uncle Jack Haslam (Uncle Zak when I was younger as I had some trouble with my ‘J's) had other
ideas. He was a larger-than-life, dominant character who felt that my future was in the chemical industry of the north. I didn't quite see it that way, but was reluctantly wheeled around massive and forbidding factories that neither excited nor inspired. Bleaching, dyeing and other unnamed aspects of it had, I suspect, been founded the previous century to work in tandem with the great Lancashire cotton industry. It was not talked about that much, but there was an underlying sadness, in the only son of Jack and his wife Dorothy having been killed in a car accident. More than that I was never told, nor did I seek further information. Their house was called Brooklands as Jack had raced there in his younger days, and by coincidence I would attend Brooklands College years later. I must have been seen as the lad designated to step into the role they'd assumed their son would take, with a view to one day becoming lord and master. My dreams and aspirations, though, lay elsewhere and not in the dark satanic mills of Lancashire, where affluence and effluence had become acceptable bedfellows.

I guess I was about eight years old when I went on my first
archaeological
dig. Not an official dig, you understand, but Ken Lewis, the father of two friends of mine, Brian and Jeremy, invited me to join them on their part-time forays into the past. I warmed to it immediately and was soon identifying arrowheads, scrapers, borers, sickle blades and other prehistoric tools. Spotting knapped flints, the bulb of percussion and those little fissures incurred by the shock of knapping became second nature. If I'm walking over likely terrain, I still look to the ground, where others may look to the sky. As other children gathered flowers, conkers, acorns or tadpoles, I'd arrive home with pockets full of stones. My mother was supportive, my father bemused.

I haunted Weybridge Museum when I could, listening to the stories of the curator, Dorothy Grenside, herself, I suspect, a great age. I discovered later that this lovely old lady had been a champion swimmer, a tennis player, an eminent watercolour artist and poet, and one of the pioneering women motorists. I only knew her as someone who fired my enthusiasm for exploring the past. I was able to
track down and buy a copy of her 1917 book of poems,
Open Eyes
. Museums now have a designer air about them; then they had nothing more than rows and rows of display cases with the name of the piece and the donor handwritten in ink on a small, yellowing card. Having had a deep fascination with history from an early age, the lure of a museum was great.

A favourite spot for us flint hunters was somewhere we called ‘Flint Hill'. That wasn't its proper name, if indeed it had one, but it was close to the deep railway cutting between Walton-on-Thames and Weybridge and the excavations a century earlier must have churned up thousands of Neolithic implements, many of which ended up in our box room jostling with the model railway for shelf space. I found looking for flints exacting, rewarding and highly compelling. Complete arrowheads were something of a rarity as their fragile tips tended to snap easily, but the more solid tools were usually complete and slipped comfortably into your hand. Great workmanship, and it was extraordinary to wonder who had held it in 4000 or even 9000 BC, only to be discovered in an age that those toolmakers could never have imagined. Our findings were fashioned before the discovery and use of copper, bronze and iron, and on the site of what to them would have been a terrifying vast iron road haunted by monsters with red eyes that pierced the night, shrieking and belching steam.

When I left home I donated thousands of Palaeolithic and Neolithic flints, Roman pottery, ammonites, crystals and a whole range of historic goodies to the Weybridge Museum. I kept one tin trunk full, but on a clear-out one day my father tipped the contents out into the garden. ‘Well it's where they came from,' was the reply to my indignant pose. I made sure that I was well out of reach before chipping in with, ‘Huh, if it had been a trunk full of golf balls you wouldn't have thrown them away.' My mother, more of a garden habituee than my father, encountered New Stone Age craftsmanship for years to come, almost breaking her ankle on the bigger items and snapping many of the more delicate pieces.

At Brooklands College, alongside my classes in English literature and British Constitution and art, I started to go out with Vivien Berry, with whose sister I was studying. Vivien lived at Laleham, some 7 or 8 miles from Walton-on-Thames, but I was happy to miss the last bus back to Walton for a few extra minutes with her. Those ‘extra minutes', though, were often taken over by Major Berry with a few tales of life in the military. I knew any canoodling had come to an end when he marched in with the opening gambit, ‘Have I ever told you about this particular skirmish in Burma…?' The pipe would be filled, tapped on the hearth, lit and the tales would begin. In youth it drew a sigh of exasperation; as an adult the response would be, ‘Hey look, we can kiss goodnight anytime, but these Burma tales are gripping.' It's good that our paths still cross and Vivien and I are able to catch up and flatter each other that the years haven't altered us too much! At least we recognise each other so it must be vaguely true.

While I was at Brooklands College I got involved in a major archaeological find after a series of aerial photographs that had been taken of the River Wey just by the ‘wall of death', a steeply banked section of the old Brooklands motor racing circuit, revealed the grass growing in a different direction. This was intriguing. It seemed in all probability that the meadow we'd all sat on and walked on had once been a reasonably substantial building. Very slowly, once the dig began, the outline of a sizeable structure emerged, but it was, of necessity, an extremely pedestrian process. The eventual consensus was that we had located the lost manor of Hundulsham, once the domain of Bishop Odo, William the Conqueror's half-brother. Research revealed that it had passed through many hands over the centuries but the family that held it the longest were the Wodehams. In 1290 they had 2 acres at the rent of one rose per annum. Very romantic. By 1324 they held 80 acres at a rent of 6 shillings, the area later expanding to almost 100 acres.

All was well until the late fifteenth century, when the descendants of Sir Bartholomew Reed, former Lord Mayor of London, seized Hundulsham from the Wodehams, who later would contest the ownership.
When challenged over the legality of his claim, William Reed denied that there had ever been a manor there. The Reeds were very powerful, with many connections, so whether he demolished the manor to prove a point or whether nobody dared question his word and it fell into disrepair, we'll never know. There is no further reference to the building or to any future families living there, so it seemed that we were the first to re-discover the lost manor of Hundulsham. One of the areas that I worked on was a room where a tiled hearth had gone from vertical to horizontal, so maybe the Reeds did destroy the property. I had some of the tiles at home for many years. I'm not sure where they went, but I can make a shrewd guess. Maybe a future historian will discover them cheek by jowl with the Neolithic tools and be totally baffled. The demolition of Hundulsham would hardly have mattered to the Reeds, for they had other houses, including Otelands (later Oatlands), which they gave to Henry VIII in a part-exchange deal, and plenty of land. How marvellous it would be to stroll down the meadow today and look for any artefacts that still remain. Marvellous but impossible.

The site is now home to a delightfully attractive sewage plant, easily visible from the train as it leaves Weybridge station heading
south-west
. Underneath it somewhere is a rose that was handed over for a year's rent. How indiscriminate progress is. I haven't checked to see if I am a descendant of the power-hungry, avaricious, bullying Reeds of Weybridge. Surely not?

The great British inventor Barnes Wallis had his office at Vickers Armstrong, later BAC, on the Brooklands site and came to the college to give us the odd lecture. He was inspirational, engaging and still so full of excitement for the future. He would show us, by demand of course, unseen footage of the testing of his revolutionary (pun intended) bouncing bombs at Reculver in 1943. One of his sons was our chemistry teacher at Woking.

Even in the years at Radio One and TV Centre, my enthusiasm for the past didn't dim and on more than one occasion I managed to
sneak something historical into the shows. On
Saturday Superstore
in the mid '80s, I did several outside broadcasts from a major dig at York, complete with hard hat and trowel, for the York Archaeological Trust alongside historian Richard Kemp. The site of Anglo-Saxon York had apparently been a puzzle for many years, but now it had been located on the area previously occupied by the Redfearn
Glassworks
at Fishergate. The extensive dig also produced finds from a nearby twelfth-century former Gilbertine priory, which assisted with study into the cemetery population, health, diet, appearance and life expectancy. The Gilbertines were unique in that they were the only totally English religious order, having been founded in the 1130s by Gilbert of Sempringham (later St Gilbert), a parish priest from Lincolnshire. They disappeared with the Dissolution of the Monasteries, so it was fascinating to re-discover elements of their existence. We dug, uncovered, washed, examined and filed. I was also delighted to launch the trust's Archaeological Scholarship. I was enrolled onto its committee of stewards and received various papers for discussion, but alas geography and travelling time meant me falling by the wayside after a while. That summer they did find part of a Roman helmet in pretty good condition with an embossed rosette. An exciting dig. I still have my certificate confirming that I am not only a fully fledged Viking but also a comrade in arms of Erik Bloodaxe and ‘entitled to conquer, plunder or trade in any lands encountered'. Take me on and you're also dealing with my pal Mr Bloodaxe.

On a broadcasting trip to Jamaica a year or two back with Adventures in Radio we were informed of an old site that had just been uncovered when some dense undergrowth had been cleared. The remains were of old Colonial buildings, with even older Spanish architecture underneath, the homes of those long gone. I was invited into what had been a crypt. The question as to what had happened to the occupants was answered as we stumbled across a handful of old graves. These were the last resting places of English settlers. All was still, hot and humid with not a breath of wind, as someone muttered,
‘There must be ghosts in a place like this.' The supervisor overheard and turned on us with a loud mocking laugh, barking, ‘There are no such things as ghosts.' At that very moment we heard a mighty crack and looked up to see a massive section of a huge tree break away and crash towards us from a great height. Weighing, we guessed afterwards, somewhere in the region of half a ton, it missed one or two of us by no more than a couple of feet. There was absolute silence. Everyone was shocked. Our organiser, Tim Jibson, went as white as a sheet and was shakier than an amusing jelly in the shape of Shakin' Stevens. No such things as ghosts?