‘Is my mother still alive?’
We were sitting as we always sat, in the solitude of my mum’s little room, the TV off, the brightly lit soft hubbub of the communal lounge with its ring of upright armchairs out of earshot. The direct question seemed to deserve a direct answer. Unsure how she would respond, I answered simply, ‘No, Mum.’
‘No, I thought not,’ she said lightly, with a small nod of the head, as though she were pleased to have worked out something that was true and concrete in everyone else’s real world, and not just in her imaginary one.
‘How long ago did she die?’
‘Over thirty years ago.’
She stared ahead. A cloud passed across the sun and the light shifted in the room. ‘How odd,’ she said, momentarily perplexed. ‘Was she not here?’
‘No.’
‘What is this place?’ she said, her face earnest.
‘The care home. Near Bristol. Where you live now. You’ve been here over five years.’
She said nothing at this, and after a moment’s silence, tucked the nail of her index finger in between the gap in her two front teeth, and flicked it out making a clicking noise. Her eyes darkened. ‘Who are you?’ she said, turning to look at me fixedly.
It startled me, but I tried to see the moment from her side: dealing with the slow decrements in capacity; the illusions and the uncertainties; the fleeting facts; the mutating faces; shadows on the wall; snipers on the roof. ‘Ben,’ I said gently. ‘Your son. Your youngest.’
‘But you are thin,’ she said, with a tetchy exasperation. ‘If you were fat, like you were as a little boy, I might remember you more easily.’
I laughed. ‘Thanks, Mum.’
‘And your hair. Very short. And you’re bald. At the back. When you turn round. I’m not used to it.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ I said sarcastically, still laughing. ‘Thanks for reminding me. Not sure why it all fell out. Dad – Tom, I mean – had lovely hair.’
At the mention of Tom, she turned towards the window and fell silent. I sat still. Someone marched past the half-open door. Outside, a car edged slowly off the green verge.
‘He’s not been lately,’ she said quietly. ‘He’s away.’
‘Who?’
‘Tom.’
‘Where is he? Do you know?’
‘In prison.’
At 8.45, on a cold quiet Saturday morning on 27 October 1962, at Surrey County Council Register Office, opposite Norbiton Station, in front of no one except two witnesses, my mum and dad finally got married. After all the years of waiting, all the desperation, as an occasion it could not have been more low-key. No invitations were sent out. There was no reception. There are no photographs. I knew my mum was almost eight months pregnant with me. Was she camera-shy? It seemed unlikely. Did they just not plan it in time? They’d certainly had long enough. All those letters, all the anticipation – didn’t they finally want to tell the world about the love that couldn’t be extinguished? It would seem not. So what happened?
I knew one version of the story: it started just over a month earlier in the small hours of a Tuesday morning on 18 September 1962. My dad had left the old Ronnie Scott’s jazz club on Gerrard Street in Soho with trombonist Ken Wray, after a night out watching the Tubby Hayes Quintet. It was a five-minute walk to the car. They turned right into Newport Place and right again into Lisle Street. Safely inside the parked car, Wray had the beginnings of a joint in his hand when a face appeared at the window. My dad grabbed the cigarette paper and the crumbled hash, but it was too late; the police officer was already tapping on the windscreen. Confiscating the cigarette paper and its contents, the officer then found twenty-eight grams of ‘Indian hemp’ in my dad’s possession and arrested both men. ‘Look, I am a fairly important man,’ my dad was reported to have protested. He suggested the officer was taking it all a bit ‘seriously’. It made no difference. The officer was taking it seriously.
‘The first we knew about it was when Romany rang the next day,’ Elspet said, when we last met.
‘She was in a terrible state,’ added Brian. ‘She said Tommy had been arrested and had already been down to Bow Street Magistrates’ Court, and he’d been convicted already, and they’d given him six months. He’d lodged an appeal but he needed the bail money.’
Brian leapt into action. He rang his friend and colleague, the theatre director-producer Wally Douglas, and the two of them headed immediately for Bow Street.
‘We just had to get him out of there,’ Brian went on. ‘Wally had been a prisoner of war. He was very, you know, stiff-upper-lip, and he’d seen everything, but he couldn’t take the seediness of it all. There was talk they’d thought Tommy was a dealer. It was like having fifteen teeth out without anaesthetic for poor old Wally; but we signed the forms and paid the money, and got Tommy out.’
The next day The Times ran a news report. Under the headline Composer and Musician Had Indian Hemp, it read:
Thomas Mitchell Watt, aged 36, a composer of Woodlands Road, Barnes SW said by Detective-Constable W. Huckleby to be earning between £2,000 and £3,000 a year, was sentenced at Bow St Magistrates’ Court yesterday to six months’ imprisonment for being in unauthorised possesssion of Indian hemp in Lisle St, Soho, W.
With him on the same charge was Kenneth Wray, aged 35, a musician of Fairhazel Gdns, Kilburn NW, who was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. Both pleaded guilty.
The Daily Mail ran a similar, but longer report the same day, mentioning the appeal, and soon everyone knew. Letters arrived at Woodlands Road from concerned friends offering to help. Aunts wrote hoping it was all a ‘silly mistake’ and it would all ‘turn out for the best’. Tom’s father wrote – a great rarity – referring to it as a ‘sordid matter’ that he was relieved hadn’t made the Scottish newspapers or been the subject of gossip on the factory floor.
The court appeal, when it came, not long after the sentence, featured two brilliant cameos from Brian and Wally who stood up and, in matchless theatrical aristocratic voices, vouched for my dad’s first-rate character and RAF record, while drawing touching attention to the imminent birth of his first son, his essential work for the BBC, and his recent effective adoption of four stepchildren. It was, by all accounts, a tour de force. My dad – much to everyone’s ample relief – got off with a fine of £150 and the sentence was quashed. Ken Wray got off too. ‘Brian’ was also later inserted into my middle names (for a long while it was only going to be ‘Thomas’) as acknowledgement of his selfless and sterling efforts to clear my dad’s good name at the eleventh hour.
So surely there was great cause to celebrate. Why didn’t they? What prompted my mum and dad’s long-awaited marriage to take place on that cold inauspicious early Saturday morning before breakfast, opposite Norbiton Station, squeezed in before all the day’s other well-planned ceremonies with their limousines and flowers and hats and happy tearful relations?
The answer came when I was researching this book. I found out the date of the appeal. I’d assumed – and my parents had implied – that it was within a couple of weeks of the original sentencing back in the September, but it was in fact on 31 October 1962 – not only the very day of my dad’s thirty-seventh birthday, but also four days after the wedding. They married because they didn’t know if my dad might be going to prison a few days later. They married so that there wasn’t a chance they might have to do it in prison before I was born. They married in the hope that it would read well at the appeal and with any luck I’d be born without my father in jail. No one was at the ceremony at Surrey County Council Register Office that morning because no one was supposed to witness that hope; it must have felt so threadbare; as if, after all those years of waiting, nothing could be properly celebrated.
In the end, I was late. Reluctant to come out. Story has it that no amount of sulphurous baths or heart-thumping walks up and down the stairs at home could tempt me. The sub-zero temperatures of the bitter winter of 1962–63 were probably to blame; but finally, with London gripped by a murderous fog on a Monday night in early December, my mum took herself to the old Middlesex Hospital in town, where she was sure I must emerge at any minute, while my dad played the piano at Grosvenor House, clock-watching nervously.
The next morning, Tuesday 4 December, a thick layer of acrid, green-and-yellow smog was covering the whole of London. It was to stay for three days. As Wednesday stumbled into Thursday, two hundred and thirty-five people were admitted into the city’s hospitals. The government was recommending ‘do-it-yourself’ masks made from thick cotton gauze or woollen scarves. Coal fires and bonfires were banned. Windows were kept closed. Black ice covered the roads. By the Thursday morning ninety people had died, and the fog was spreading across the country.
Inside the relative safety of the Middlesex Hospital on the Thursday afternoon I was finally induced. My dad was rehearsing an episode of Brian’s new TV series, Dial Rix, for which he had written the music. My mum managed to get a message to him and he crawled across town by car in near-zero visibility just in time to be at her bedside as I finally emerged at 7.35 p.m. on 6 December 1962.
My mum remembers the look on my dad’s pale face as he first saw me – one of adoration, disbelief and relief. I’ve wondered if it wasn’t dissimilar to the look on his face as I greeted him that last time I ever saw him in hospital a few days before he died. As he reached out to pluck me from the cot, it’s said he stumbled over the oxygen tank, half dropped me, then caught me again inches off the floor.