The Two of Us Page 3

  Little girls should be seen and not heard.

  Blessed are the meek.

  Don’t blow your own trumpet.

  Keep yourself to yourself.

  Keep out of trouble.

  By the end of it I was convinced the country was the Dragon Wood, and I was no St George. I was an eight-year-old girl, with a solid rock in my chest and a huge lump in my throat. The train steamed in and my fifteen-year-old sister dragged me away from my father. We undid the leather strap of the window in the corridor. He shouted through it, panicky, ‘Bum Face, what’s your identity number again? In case you get lost.’

  ‘CJFQ29 stroke 4.’

  As the train chuffed out of the station I saw my father bent over, his hands on his knees, head hanging down, unable to look at us as we disappeared waving, weeping.

  26 February

  Sweet ceremony in Oxford giving Colin Dexter the freedom of the city. After we had a romantic meal and a night at the Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. We were like a couple of kids. Agog at all the luxury, you’d think we’d be used to it by now but we still feel they might turn us out if we misbehave. Which we did in the privacy of our luxury suite.

  My sister and I were billeted in Wallingford, then in Berkshire later to be transplanted into Oxfordshire, on an old couple called Mr and Mrs Giles. They had no children but doted on a snuffly Pekinese called Dainty, who rode in the basket of Mrs Giles’s sit-up-and-beg bicycle. Dogs they understood. Children were a mystery. The big girl was OK, pretty and self-possessed, but the little ’un was a puzzle. I was painfully thin on wartime rations, monosyllabic with despair, face contorted with a tic. Every few minutes my mouth gaped wide open and described a circular movement. Then my teeth clamped shut into a tight grin and my shoulders shrugged up to my ears. It made me look demented. Trying to comfort me, Mrs Giles made little egg custards from real eggs. I had only had dried eggs since the war started. Too frightened to refuse one, I forced the slippery pale yellow spoonfuls down my contracting throat. Half an hour later my stomach dissolved. I was given a torch and made my way down the garden path to a hut at the end. Inside was a hellhole. A black pit over which was a scrubbed wooden seat. My feet could not touch the ground and I clung to the sides, vomiting now as well. My bottom was much smaller than the hole, I could disappear and never be seen again. Or alternatively be bitten by the tarantulas hanging above my head. I cleared up my sick as best I could by torchlight with the neatly cut squares of newspaper that hung from a piece of string on the door. The endless path back to the house, surrounded by pitch blackness, was definitely the heart of the Dragon Wood.

  I was settled in for the night on an old brown leatherette settee. Everyone else went upstairs. The latch of the wooden door at the foot of the stairs clunked shut. I stared out of the window at the stars, begging them to watch over my mum and dad. As I lay there, the pillow either side of my face became wet with tears although I dared not make a sound. Then I felt a warmth in the bed. I had soiled it. Like a baby. I lay unable to move or speak to ask for help, my cosy world disintegrating. The Blitz had been fun but this strange country world was dreadful.

  My sister Billie soon went back to London to pursue her dancing career, dodging the bombs in London and all over England on tour. Later she joined ENSA (the Entertainments National Service Association) and weaved between torpedoes to Africa, where she ventured into godforsaken places to brighten up the troops. She was fifteen when she started, so she grew up fast. I worshipped her. She was so glamorous in her uniform and she and her variety friends were outrageous and funny. This separation from her and the rest of the family was grievous. I knew there was a very good chance they would be killed in the inferno I was leaving behind.

  1 March

  Taking a break in France before Peter Pan. Stopped off at Vasaly on the way down to Provence. I wanted to climb the steep hill to the church to light a candle for Jack who is having his brain scan check-up today. We passed an ancient building on which was a plaque which said some saint had stopped there on his journey and founded this hospice on the site. John struggled on a bit, panting, then sat on a stone, lit a fag and said, ‘I think I’ll stay here and found a hospice if you don’t mind, kid.’ I snarled, ‘Well, I hope it’ll be a non-smoking one,’ and went on to the top. He’s nine years younger than me, for God’s sake.

  2

  The Boy

  IN THE YEAR OF John’s birth all the church bells rang. Up until then they had been silenced, only to be rung when Britain was invaded, but a victory at El Alamein in 1942 marked a turning point in the war, and Churchill ordered the bells to celebrate it. But, always brutally honest, he warned, ‘This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’

  1942 did, however, mark the beginning of the life of the boy. On 3 January of that year, John Edward Thaw was born in Longsight, Manchester.

  Churchill was right to be cautious about premature rejoicing over El Alamein. In the same month as John’s birth, two ugly events had illustrated that further horrors were being planned. Both prompted television programmes later in the life of that baby, who was destined to become one of the medium’s biggest stars.

  Reinhard Heydrich, right-hand man to Himmler, held a secret meeting in which a group of Nazis cold-bloodedly planned the extermination of the Jews – the Final Solution. Sixty years later, Heydrich and his team’s clinical decision to set up gas chambers and killing camps was chillingly portrayed by Kenneth Branagh and his fellow actors in Conspiracy. John, no longer able to perform himself, watched it with profound admiration.

  The British also embarked on a programme of mass killing in the month of John’s birth. Bomber Harris decreed that his Bomber Command force would ‘scourge the Third Reich from end to end’ with blanket bombing that had no specific military target but was aimed at lowering the morale of the German people. With our modern approach of so-called clean bombs and avoiding collateral damage this may seem shocking, but perhaps it is more honest. John’s portrayal of Bomber Harris on television in 1989 pulled no punches but, with his usual empathy for the characters he portrayed, he made it easier to understand how the man and the country felt, bearing in mind that simultaneously news came through of the slaughter of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. Hatred was in the air. Into this grotesque world came the baby who had ‘the whitest hair and bluest eyes you’ve ever seen’.

  His mother, born Dorothy Ablott, was one of ten children. His father, John Thaw, commonly known as Jack, was one of seven, two of whom had died in childhood. They married when Dorothy was nineteen and Jack twenty. Their engagement party did not bode well for the relationship of the two families. Aware that the Ablotts were even needier than they, Jack’s mother dispatched her daughter Beattie with her fiancé Charlie on the long walk from their home in West Gorton to the Ablotts’ home in Longsight, with a laundry basket full of crockery for the party. The party itself was an awkward affair as the families sized each other up but all went reasonably well until the day after. Beattie and Charlie returned with the empty basket to collect the loaned dishes. ‘You’re not touching them pots till she gets ’ere to see what’s what,’ said Mr Ablott, despite the obvious superiority of the Thaws’ precious best china to their own.

  3 March

  Bought some pretty new plates in Marseilles plus a desk, bookshelves and chair in flat packs from Habitat. John cursing and growling in the salon trying to understand the diagrams. I put World Service on loud and do a lot of cooking. Eventually I am summoned to search for various nuts and screws he’s lost and share his disgust at the ‘fucking idiots who designed these things’. He is inordinately proud of the slightly skew-whiff bookshelves and wobbly desk and chair that he completed. I tightened a few nuts while he was in the garden.

  Dorothy’s father was a frightening man. A cripple from birth, he had a deformed hip and a shortened leg on which he wore a hefty raised boot. In later life John too had a withered leg, which he put down to copying his grandfa
ther’s walk, although a more likely explanation was a neglected ankle injury from a car accident causing him to drag his foot and therefore under-use his calf muscles. If Dorothy and her siblings were scared of their father’s physical violence, they doted on their mother. A tiny woman, with several fingers missing on one hand from an accident at work with an industrial sewing machine, she managed to keep the family going despite her husband’s brutality and habitual unemployment.

  As a result of the engagement party débâcle, none of the Thaw family attended the wedding at St Cyprian’s Church round the corner from the Ablotts’ house. Jack and Dorothy started married life in a rented house in Stowell Street, West Gorton. The terraced rows of two-up, two-down houses had back-to-back cobbled yards with one outside lavatory shared by four neighbours. Once a week, a thorough wash was done in a tin bath in front of the kitchen coal stove, the water shared to cut down on the boiling of pans to fill the bath. Jack’s mother and father lived next door, his sister Beattie and her now husband Charlie up the road, his sister Doris and her husband Mark on the opposite side. The Thaws ruled the roost in Stowell Street, especially Jack’s mother.

  Mary Veronica Mullen, Grandma Thaw, was an ebullient woman of Irish descent, fat and raucous and overflowing with energy. On top of running her family she worked as a caterer in Hunter’s Restaurant during the day and at Belle Vue Pleasure Gardens in the evening. She was a wonderful cook and fed anyone who was down on their luck with leftovers she brought home from work. Every Christmas George Lockhart, the famous ringmaster in the annual Christmas Circus, chose to stay with her. One year an entire Welsh Rugby Team, playing a Christmas match at Belle Vue, camped out in the various Thaw houses.

  Mary Veronica thrived on work. On her marriage certificate, instead of the usual blank for the bride’s rank or profession in that period, she is listed proudly as Grocer’s Assistant. Her husband is entered as an Iron Slotter, though sadly not a lot of iron needed slotting and he was frequently unemployed. He could play any tune on the piano, a useful skill for a family that enjoyed a good old sing-song. On one occasion during the war, Grandma Thaw was enjoying just such a knees-up in the local pub when a buzz bomb cut through the roof and landed at the back, mercifully failing to explode. Everyone fled but Grandma, who, surrounded by debris, refused to go till she had finished her Guinness.

  I once caught John with tears in his eyes as he watched a TV performance of mine as the battling mother in D. H. Lawrence’s Daughter-in-Law, because I reminded him of his gran. She was a Catholic. Her husband disapproved, so she gave her children rather ambiguous moral guidance by sending them secretly to the local monastery to buy holy water: ‘Don’t tell your dad.’ She fought many battles against injustice for her neighbours, but was not best pleased when her small daughter was banned from the local football ground for a month when she ran on to the pitch and beat up a player who had kicked her brother.

  Into this rumbustious environment Jack brought his young bride. A feisty peroxide blonde, smart and knowing, she kept a clean house and got on well with everyone. Perhaps too well with some. A year after the wedding their first son, John, was born.

  10 March

  The family arrive. This is a wonderful place for the grandchildren. They can run wild. They play with the Romany kids camping in the hameau – everyone plays boules with the locals. We relish one another in the sun. How lucky we are.

  The war made it difficult to have a stable married life. Jack was exempt from military service as he had broken his spine as a child, playing leapfrog over apple crates, so he worked making munitions in Fairey Aviation Factory, often working nights. He was also a volunteer rescue worker with the Fire Brigade. After one raid his sister Beattie, who worked on a mobile canteen, came across Jack crying and vomiting into the road, having just dug out of the debris a pair of child’s wellingtons with the feet still inside.

  Twenty-year-olds everywhere were exposed to horror but Dorothy still managed to have a laugh. She kept her son and everyone else amused when she went down the public air-raid shelter in the nearby croft, but mainly they got under the table or the stairs if there was a bad raid. She fell about when she heard that Beattie had refused to leave her new bedroom suite when the bombs got close, resolutely holding on to the mirror until the planes passed over. In 1944 another son, Ray, was born. At the same time Jack was sent to work in the mines and was away even more. It could have been worse. Many of their friends who had been at the front were missing or killed in action.

  The end of the war was greeted with great rejoicing. Ray and John attended street parties dressed in their MacDonald tartan kilts in honour of their great-grandmother, called illustriously Flora MacDonald. The implications of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not allowed to spoil their celebration at having, against all odds, got rid of something vile. Heedless of the war-weariness of the grown-ups, Ray and John, now two and four years old, began to have the time of their lives.

  11 March

  Our dear friends David and Liz took us for a picnic right up in the Luberon mountains at Silvergue. Magic.

  With the war over, Belle Vue, just by Stowell Street, regained its former glory. Founded by John Jennison in 1836, it had grown to be a wonderful pleasure garden for the working class. Sixty-six acres of it. John and Ray went to the speedway track with their dad and mum. They watched the rugger and football, getting in free because Uncle Charlie was a coach. Sometimes their dad, fag hanging from the corner of his mouth, would play football. They rode on the helter-skelter, the scenic railway and the magnificent Bobs roller-coaster. There was an open-air ballroom alongside a lake for the grown-ups, where many a romance blossomed. Young women in their Sunday best danced gracefully to Bonelli’s Band, hoping someone beautiful would have the last waltz with them and walk them home. John’s mother got a job as a barmaid at the Longsight Gate where Grandma Thaw was still working as a cook. The zoo housed camels, lions, polar bears, tigers and monkeys. Phil Fernandez, the Indian elephant keeper, lived over the road, and the two boys helped him march extra elephants through the street, from the station to the zoo, for the annual circus. Young John became very fond of Ellie-May, mucking out her stall and having rides, clinging on to her huge back. Very often the gibbons and monkeys escaped over the wall into the surrounding streets. The kids helped round them up in nets. Belle Vue was their huge back garden.

  John heard his first classical music when the great Halle Orchestra played at Belle Vue, as well as developing a life-long passion for the brass bands he heard there. One year the magnificent annual pageant, culminating in a spectacular fireworks display, was made doubly exciting when his father got a walk-on part. Jack always maintained that his role in the Belle Vue pageant demonstrated the talent that he bestowed on his offspring. His delivery of his one line, ‘Seize that man’, dressed in a toga, holding a spear, was apparently the talk of Manchester. His grandchildren later conceded, when he frequently re-created his triumph for them, that his profile was acceptably Roman, but his accent less so. He challenged them to prove it was less Latin than their posh English.

  12 March

  Lovely to be in France. Weather really hot. John slaving to learn his lines for Peter Pan. He doesn’t have to, it’s a broadcast, but he says pointedly, the live audience will be short-changed if he has his head in the script. They’re not paying anyway – so sod it, as far as I’m concerned. Asked me how to pronounce ‘floreat Etona’, Hook’s dying words. When I joked, ‘Why? Didn’t you learn Latin in Burnage?’ he snarled, ‘We didn’t even learn English. Mind you, we’d have rowed the arse off those Eton tosspots on Belle Vue lake.’

  Grandad confessed that his chief motivation for appearing in the pageants was the three and six a week he got for doing it, a Brechtian attitude that his son inherited. As soon as the young Thaw realised he had a talent for entertaining he used it to make money.

  He started to hone his potentially lucrative gift in his Auntie Beat’s house in Stowell Street. Uncle Charlie acquired
an old microphone and rigged up a studio for John under the stairs. As a four-year-old, he seated the family in the front parlour to give them a wireless performance. Like me, his speciality was impersonation. Crouched in his cupboard, he mimicked radio personalities like Al Read, Stanley Holloway, Max Miller and Jack Warner.

  A paucity of toys made him adept at make-believe. His first bosom friend was his ‘mulk nut’ – a coconut brought back by Uncle Charlie on leave. Auntie Beat became alarmed by his unnatural attachment to this nut, which grew hairless and filthy as a result of all his hugs and kisses, so she accidentally-on-purpose smashed it – a trauma the young John took in his stride, transferring his affection to an imaginary motorbike. Everyone was forced to do a detour round this treasured vehicle. He polished the phantom bike meticulously, sometimes forcing his cousins, Sandra and Jackie, to join in. They thought it was pretty soppy, but his ferocious seriousness cowed them into a halfhearted compliance.

  The career John would have chosen at the time would not have provided the money for a motorbike. He longed to be a coalman. He wanted to drive the horses that pulled the cart; he practised with cushions heaving the sacks on his back and emptying them down the coal hole. One day he overacted the tipping part and hit his chin on the rung under the table. His dad carried the bleeding child to the local hospital to patch him up, but he bore the scar on his chin for the rest of his life.

  Accidents and illness were much feared. Doctors were seldom used, except when absolutely necessary, in those straightened circles, until in 1948 the newly elected post-war Labour Government brought in the NHS with its free cradle-to-grave care. People were depressed by the slowness of recovery from the war. Rationing continued, there were some dreadfully hard winters, and the divorce rate rocketed as men and women had to adjust to normal family life after the separations of the war.