It was February 2003 and a blast of unexpected fresh air cut across the hall of the flat.
‘I managed to open a couple of windows,’ said my mum, greeting me, ‘but I can’t shut them, and now there is a gale force wind threatening to blow us back to Oxford.’
I laughed and went into the sitting room and slid the window shut. A newspaper was strewn across the floor. I gathered it up and placed it back on the sofa. ‘You’ve made it nice for Dad’s return,’ I said, walking back into the hall.
‘He’ll probably go straight to bed,’ she said mordantly. ‘But I shall stay accommodating if it kills me.’
I followed her into her little study. ‘Been tidying in here too, I see.’
‘Yes, if you must know.’
A box of papers was open on the desk.
‘I’m going to make a small coffee. Do you want one?’ she said.
‘Not for me, thanks.’
‘Please yourself.’ She went out to the kitchen.
I sat at the desk. It was the same box containing her Stratford souvenirs that I’d looked through on the day they moved in. To the side was a large certificate. The thick paper crackled as I opened it. Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. This Diploma is awarded to Romany Evens as a special recognition of talent. April, 1947. Next to it were two theatre programmes I hadn’t noticed before. I flicked one open. The West of England Theatre Company. Dear Brutus by J. M. Barrie. December 1947. In the part of Lady Caroline Laney – Romany Evens. I smiled. The whole cast had signed the programme. The tour was a tightly routed journey through Exmouth, Yeovil, Chard, Bridport and Sidmouth, and several more towns of the South-West.
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.