Romany and Tom Read online

  She came back in with the coffee.

  ‘You must have done this between RADA and Stratford,’ I said, holding up the programme.

  ‘What?’ she said waspishly, anticipating provocation. She peered at me. ‘You know I can’t see it from here.’

  ‘J. M. Barrie. Dear Brutus. West of England Theatre Company.’

  ‘Oh, that.’ She lightened. ‘Probably all nonsense.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s great. Sounds like fun. How long were you in rep before Stratford?’

  ‘A couple of years, I think.’ She huffed. ‘You must have heard all this. Why are you asking again?’ she said suspiciously.

  ‘I like hearing about it. You must have gone to RADA right after the war, yes?’

  She put her coffee down. ‘Yes, I would have gone sooner but Mother wouldn’t let me. She thought a doodlebug would fall on my head if I went up to London during the war.’

  I remembered how – after the information was declassified – she’d told me about her time in the Women’s Royal Naval Service and her work on the fringes of Ultra signal intelligence, playing a small part in the decryption of the German ciphers and the breaking of the Enigma codes. She’d finished her education at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and joined in 1943. She was posted initially to the empty Gayhurst Manor, a huge Elizabethan house in acres of parkland less than ten miles from the main centre of operations at Bletchley Park. A hundred and fifty Wrens were stationed there. Some were out in the woods, some in the house itself. Bunks were thrown up in the grand ballroom. New arrivals often had to construct their own beds out of reclaimed bed-frames. Doors were left unlocked to rooms stacked with priceless antique furniture, paintings and china.

  The round-the-clock working conditions in the Nissen huts out in the woods were hot, noisy and smelly, the air rank with the stench of oil from the decoding machines. The shift work was stressful and tedious. At night, exhausted, they’d walk back through the looming darkness to the house, under the canopy of trees, picking their way between the tiny headstones of an overgrown dog cemetery by moonlight. Towards the end of winter, the woods were filled with a carpet of snowdrops. There was a chapel in the grounds, and a beautiful dovecote and turreted stables, and out in the parkland war planes were draped in camouflage waiting to be pressed into service. During the late-autumn weeks, as the light drew in, the walk to the huts was accompanied by the unsettling throaty sound of roaring stags and the clash of antlers.

  Later she moved to the base at Eastcote, where she made the most of her time off and proximity to London by helping to organise entertainments, putting on dances and concerts and amateur dramatics, keeping everyone’s spirits up, and dreaming of the day she could get away and do it for real.

  For years, before she was allowed to talk about it, she could only hint at her involvement. ‘What did you do in the war?’ I’d ask both my parents when I was young. ‘I helped sink the Bismarck, darling’, was all she would say, to which my dad once responded, in front of the whole family, ‘Yes, she sat on it!’ It became a family joke for years until its underlying heartlessness made me stop laughing when I was older. ‘And what about you, Dad?’ I’d ask. ‘I flew around in Tiger Moths and played the piano,’ was always the nonchalant reply.

  ‘So you had to wait before you could enrol at RADA?’ I said, as she picked up her coffee again.

  ‘When the war ended I went straight there. I was still in uniform.’

  ‘Did your mother know?’

  ‘Yes. She knew she couldn’t stop me. Not that she would have done. And Dad had just died. It was all I ever wanted to do,’ she said, shuffling some papers together.

  Her first experience of acting came in 1938 when she was fourteen. Her father, the Reverend G. Bramwell Evens – while still a Methodist minister – had become a radio star among children in the north of England, since accepting an invitation from the BBC in 1932 to write and deliver a couple of five-minute stories drawn from his abiding passion for wildlife and the countryside. They went out on Children’s Hour, broadcast from Manchester. His anecdotes and soothing unflustered style proved popular and soon led to a regular weekly half-hour programme called Out with Romany that followed him (‘Romany’) on a nature ramble accompanied by two children and a dog. The programmes gave the illusion of a country walk complete with Romany’s impromptu descriptions of plants and animals and their habits, but were all scripted with sound effects and made entirely in the studio, much to most of the listening public’s surprise when the techniques were exposed some years later; even the two children – Muriel and Doris – were actually two grown-up actresses putting on children’s voices. My mum’s mother, Eunice, helped with the script editing, and my mum herself was written into a few episodes as a young girl, and was even give a little time off school to perform.

  Her father was a gifted communicator, bringing nature to life through people’s wireless sets, with a style of programme that would blossom at the BBC under later broadcasters such as David Bellamy and Sir David Attenborough. He refused to rehearse the scripts in order to give them a natural informality, and at the programme’s height, during the war, it provided the perfect escape from the blackouts and the bombs, and an estimated thirteen million listeners – adults and children alike – tuned in to its prime time slot half an hour before the six o’clock news.

  My mum once told me she had dreamed of being an actress since before her radio debut, but admitted the moment the red light first went on was ‘utterly thrilling’. Yet I have often also wondered how she felt to have her father pinch her name when she was only nine years old, and then become a star with it. He had previously written articles for newspapers and magazines under the pen-name ‘The Tramp’, and it is said the idea to change it came to him on the spur of the moment, when put on the spot moments before he first went on air. Admittedly she had always been known as a child by her middle name, June, and loved the extra attention she got at school when her father became famous with her first given name, but I doubt it was ever fully explained, and I wonder if she sometimes felt as though a piece of her had been taken away.

  It was perhaps symptomatic of her father’s self-absorption. A gifted public communicator maybe – he also went on to write a string of children’s books based on the radio programmes – but he was reportedly hopeless domestically, and happiest alone in the field: traits that are dutifully, and perhaps too easily, forgiven in his wife Eunice’s 1946 memoir, published shortly after his death, Through the Years with Romany.

  Reflecting on their childhood in a letter to my mum in the seventies her older brother Glyn – then in his sixties – described their father as ‘fundamentally a nice, honest, Wordsworthian sort of man, who should never have had children’. Sent away to boarding school in London as a child, Glyn describes how he only ever remembered his parents visiting him once in six years; they were too parsimonious and wrapped up in their own world of radio fame, he thought. Even at half-term his father refused to pay his train fare back home to the South Pennines. He had to spend long lonely days, ‘bitterly unhappy’, wandering the playground and playing fields of an empty school, fed by the caretaker or a resident housemaster, too proud and hurt to complain, while all his friends went home to their families. Eleven years older than my mum, he was too old to be very close to her, a restless teenage brother, who teased and goaded his little sister in frustration. Of their childhood caravanning holidays he remembered mainly ‘intolerable boredom, punctuated only by visits to the Spa Ballroom in Whitby’, and endless futile hours spent throwing darts against the stable door. In a car journey to Whitby as a boy he claims to have spoken out, calling their father a ‘petty domestic tyrant’, and was ordered out of the car and left in the road while his mother burst into tears but didn’t have the courage to call him back. ‘You were lucky to come second,’ he wrote to my mum, ‘as I had won all your battles for you.’

  Among my mum’s cuttings and souvenirs is a comprehensive archive of her father’s career –
pages of newspaper articles and photocopies, obituaries and fan letters, all carefully filed and labelled. In 1996 she was asked to help relaunch the Romany Society, a small organisation dedicated to preserving his name and works, that had been dormant for thirty years. Celebrity fans were unearthed who had been captivated by the original Out with Romany programmes as a child (including Sir David Attenborough). Terry Waite – at the time famous for his years as a hostage in Lebanon – became their patron. Money was raised to recondition her father’s vardo that until its recent move to the Bradford Industrial Museum had stood in a small memorial park in Wilmslow, the town where he died suddenly from a heart condition in 1943 at the age of fifty-nine. His death caused widespread sorrow among many schoolchildren in the north. Local papers carried the news on their front pages and some schools even had to close for a day of mourning.

  My mum must have been only nineteen when he died – it was during wartime and she would have been away from home, hearing the news unexpectedly – and I can’t help thinking in all of her industrious archiving is still the little girl with the shared name, trailing silently behind her father in the fields, voiceless, uncertain of his approval, still seeking his approbation.

  Chapter 19

  ‘No reoffending, Tommy. We don’t want to see you back in here any time soon,’ said the carer, as he helped my dad out of the lift and into the lobby. ‘You’ve done your time. Going straight now, aren’t we?’

  My dad was smiling.

  There can’t be many people they check in, then actually get the opportunity to check out again, I thought. We made our goodbyes and the glass doors opened and I helped him out to the car.

  ‘Not a bad bunch,’ he said, as I reached over him to clip in his seat belt. ‘I’ve met worse.’

  I was half relieved, half anxious to be taking him back to the flat but I tried not to show it. ‘You’re still alive, at least.’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘You’ll get visits from the link worker once you’re back,’ I said, injecting a serious tone. ‘Help you get yourself sorted. Mum’s looking forward to seeing you.’

  ‘Don’t know what we’d do without you, Ben,’ he said. He had on his sincere face.

  I shut his door and went to put his wheelchair in the boot. Parked in front was a white van with the side door slid open. A man in white dungarees was wiping a paintbrush on a rag, the inside of the van a jumble of pots and buckets and mastic guns.

  As we set off back to the flat, my dad said, ‘Very satisfying, decorating.’

  I pictured him in his old whites. ‘You always liked it, didn’t you?’

  ‘A sense of achievement.’

  We slowed behind a grid of traffic.

  It was in the early seventies that he sidestepped all of us by announcing he was quitting music for good to become a painter-decorator. He’d always been handy with a brush around the flat, and had taught his skills to my half-brothers when they were looking for work to supplement their university grants. He’d even decorated for a neighbour in the road. But it was still a surprise when he said he’d arranged to take up ‘an apprenticeship’ (his words) at the small local decorating firm based in East Sheen where he used to shop for supplies. When the day came, he’d bought himself a white boiler suit and a new set of brushes, and when he turned up to work the firm greeted him affectionately as ‘Young Tommy’ even though he was nearly fifty.

  After buffing up his expertise, he set up on his own, and began shopping for paint at a little decorator’s shop in Barnes called Gaytrends and I heard him use phrases I’d never heard before like ‘feathering’, ‘laying off’ and ‘cutting in’. It coincided with his passport renewal and he joked he might change his listed occupation on the form from Musician to Musician and painter. Most of all, I became aware of how much more settled he and my mum were for a while. My mum started cooking again in the evenings; they’d watch a little television, have one drink, not several, and both be in bed by 10.30. I’d even see him for breakfast in the mornings before school, as he’d be up at 7.15 and out of the house by 8.30. It was a huge change for him: for most of his working life he’d played until the small hours and not got up until lunchtime, but he seemed content to be earning an honest wage for an honest day’s work, earning some ‘walking-around-money’ while my mum forged on as a showbiz feature writer earning the ‘paying-the-bills-money’.

  If my mum was out working late, he knocked off early to be at home when I got in from school. He used to buy my favourite loaf of bread – a poppy-seeded bloomer – and some freshly sliced garlic sausage from the high street on his way back. I’d burst into the flat and shout ‘Yes!’ if I spied them on the counter – much to his quiet delight – and would eagerly make myself a sandwich, full of stories from school, while he stood smiling at the kitchen window with a cup of tea, his face freckled with paint.

  The summer I was twelve he was decorating in a flat above a local shop and I was allowed to meet him on a sunny lunchtime during school half-term. We walked from his workplace to Macarthur’s – my favourite hamburger restaurant at the time – for a special treat for ‘no reason in particular’. The doors were folded back and we sat in the window in warm sunshine, sharing crinkle-cut chips and sweetcorn sauce and a slice of blackcurrant cheesecake, until it was time for him to go back to work, and he seemed relaxed and there was light in his green eyes, and I was aware that I was pleased that he had somewhere to go where he was needed. I thought it made him happier.

  In the evenings my mum came home from work. Sometimes she brought me an autograph or – if I was in luck – an extravagant signed publicity photograph from her latest assignment. I wasn’t choosy; everyone seemed exotic and cosmopolitan. My prized collection included Noel Edmonds (then the BBC Radio 1 Breakfast Show DJ), Wings (To Ben, love from Linda and hubby, Paul McCartney) and James Galway (To Ben, from The Man With The Golden Flute). My dad’s work benefited from my mum’s contacts too. Interviewing a young rising actor in their new unfurnished flat, or a celebrity in their recently acquired period house, usually threw up a moment for her to drop in a neatly placed recommendation, and within a fortnight my dad was round with his brushes. For several years afterwards, evenings at home in front of the TV were punctuated with my mum saying things like, ‘Oh, look, Tom, Honor Blackman: you made a nice job of her downstairs loo.’

  At weekends, my dad’s whites were folded up neatly in the hall on top of a pair of paint-flecked moccasins ready for the following week. When he was working and sober he was very approachable, even first thing in the morning. I loved it if he was in a good mood. As a boy I remember standing in the doorway after breakfast on Saturdays and listening to the slow, steady buzz of the electric razor as he shaved while humming jazz phrases to himself in the bathroom mirror. He fastidiously towelled himself down after his shower – in between the toes, the crack of the arse, the inside of the foreskin (‘Always dry the old fella well’) – and then liberally dusted his bollocks and armpits with a cloud of medicated talc, until the bathmats looked as if they had been dusted with icing sugar. He never cared if I was there; he carried on happily, making jokes, passing comments. Dropping his small stainless-steel plate of false front teeth into a glass of effervescing Steradent he used to catch my eye in the mirror and wink, before turning round and saluting with a stupid toothless grin, and exclaiming something like, ‘Aha, Jim-lad! I’ll make ’e walk the plank, that I will!’ He then vigorously brushed his teeth and and his gums and his tongue, and rounded it all off with a furious gargling of mouthwash. It was all done for laughs. With a flourish he then popped his teeth back in, hung up the towel, coughed, and – if the coast was clear – casually strolled across the flat stark naked (‘Oh, Tom!’ from my mum) to get dressed.

  It was jockey briefs first, and vest tucked in, which struck me as a bit unmanly, and then some exercises that passed for keeping fit. He touched his toes (or almost) ten times, rotated his upper body at the waist with his hands on his hips, then tucked his hands under his
chin with his elbows raised out sideways and flung his arms open once or twice with a groan, before finishing with five (sometimes three) press-ups. It was all a bit desultory, and a leftover, I suspected, from the RAF.

  As for his clothes, the fashions changed over the years, but the peacock’s instinct didn’t. I was too young to remember much about his sharp hand-made Savile Row suits from the early sixties when he was a bandleader, although I used to finger them where they hung at the far left of his built-in bedroom wardrobe for years afterwards, admiring the buttons, the slanted ticket pockets, the racy silk linings; some of them were still in polythene from the dry-cleaner’s, but the fronts would be slashed to ‘let them air’.

  The first thing I can visualise him in is relaxed but expensive open-neck cotton shirts in pale purple or dusty pink – we’re talking late sixties – with the sleeves immaculately turned up to the forearm. These gave way to fishermen’s smocks and tunic shirts in the mid-seventies, and then – in the early eighties – he went back to collared shirts in understated bird’s-eye checks, worn with cravats (purple chiffon, gold cotton) and a silver woggle, straightened with a dainty dapper precision, and topped off with a tan suede – or perhaps a bottle-green-leather – bomber jacket.

  He was not a tall man. Five foot six. Shirt-sleeves needed metal elasticated armbands worn at the biceps. After the suit era, his trousers became neutral low-rise slacks worn below his little paunch with a Spanish leather belt. His feet were small and beautifully pedicured, not professionally, but by himself with clippers and files. Fresh socks went on with a comic grunt – a short ‘Ooh’ and a stifled ‘Ahh’ – his calves and hamstrings stretching under the effort, until finally he’d cry, ‘Success!’ and standing up, smile and proclaim, ‘Ta-da!’ with a look of satisfaction and relief. If it was chilly perhaps he’d reach for one of his V-neck lambswool sweaters; they were invariably dry-cleaned at the first sign of an oil spot or ash mark. Everything was well laundered, well ironed. In fact, whenever I think of him – from the tailored suits and thin knitted ties of my earliest childhood memories to the open-neck shirts and woggles of his fifties – it was always Era-Appropriate Jazz Gear.