Memories of Milligan. Norma Farnes
Читать онлайн книгу.
we do it to?’
‘If we go to Orme Court we’ll hear Ravel. Please, not the Bolero, because I know you’re into Ravel, or the Beatles.’
‘Okay. Jazz.’
‘If you go to my place. You’ll hear the Beatles and you’ll hear jazz, but I don’t know about Ravel, so let’s go to my place.’
But we didn’t. We went to Orme Court. The same gauche, gangly person getting very involved with the music, stopping the tape and saying, ‘Did you hear that bit? That was particularly good.’ And I said, ‘Spike! I’ve got nothing on and I’m cold.’ And he said, ‘I think it’s time we went home.’ So that was our first, as it were.
I didn’t fall in love with Spike, but I loved him. I thought, ‘Here is a man I could spend any amount of time with.’ The humour had to grow, because don’t forget the surrealism that was the Goons, and was Spike of course, was something new. We’re talking pre-Monty Python and pre-everything else. So I loved it because I was a great fan of Alice in Wonderland, and that was the sort of thing he was tapping into. He would talk and talk and then say, ‘I’m talking too much. You talk. You’re the one with the degree.’ He was obsessed with people who had been to university and as a result thought he had been deprived of a whole layer of formal knowledge. He was quite wrong. ‘Ah,’ he’d say. ‘Yes, that’s what I’ve been missing.’ Little did he know that when I was going to meet him for supper, I would bone up on the New Statesman, New Scientist and Time magazine. I got my science and politics all ready in a superficial way and I’d blind him with this because I knew he didn’t have time to read these magazines.
No academic, but the man could put the erudite to shame with his colossal knowledge of what made the world tick. And he was no egoist. However humble the opinion you might offer, he would listen so intently it was almost embarrassing. And then say, so wistfully, ‘You see, you went to university. I never did.’ Silly man! Renaissance man. A hugely sensitive friend and lover.
He was someone you wanted to hold on to and listen to. I wish he’d done more with [his talent], particularly his music. I remember The Snow Goose. It was lovely. He was too clever by half and he didn’t know what direction to really milk. He was so proud of the Goons. Once I offered to get his portable typewriter cleaned and he told me to handle it carefully because he had written all the Goon Show scripts on it.
The humour was obviously there, but he didn’t practise humour when he was with me. He talked seriously most of the time. He didn’t talk about relationships. He didn’t talk about people in his life, and I thought that was odd because I rattled on about everything. I got married, got pregnant, and he put his hand on my enormous tummy and said, ‘I wish this little person’ – because they didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl in those days – ‘I wish this little person was mine.’ And I thought it was the most delightful thing he could say. Suzy was born on 16 April, which is his birthday. Spike added, ‘And Hitler’s birthday as well!’
NORMA: Spike always said that he and Hitler were born on the same day and it’s not true. Hitler’s birthday was 20 April. I told him a thousand times but he always chose to ignore it. I asked Liz if she ever had a serious disagreement with him because he could be very argumentative when he was in that sort of mood.
LIZ: Funny thing! I only remember disagreeing with him about two things. One was the shape of lines in a crazy pavement and I said to him, ‘I think these are made in a kind of design although it’s called “crazy”. If you look carefully –’ He snapped at me and said – ‘You are not looking carefully. You are walking all over them.’ And I said, ‘No, stop! The rain is falling on them and they are shiny. They are like a piece of art and they zigzag this way and that way. It’s very good.’
He shouted at me, ‘IT’S RUBBISH! IT’S FUCKING RUBBISH! Workmen have been here. They’ve hacked the pavement to bits and you think it’s arty. Typical, bloody typical.’
I remember another disagreement. He was very close to a man called Harry Edgington, an army friend. I never met him, but Spike did go on and on about him, and I think I said something very ill-conceived. I once suggested that his love for Harry was quite unusual and amazing. He said, ‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’ He stamped out of the room and when he got back to the office he got his revenge by tearing a leaf out of a leather-bound volume of Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall. He’d been presented with it for selling 25,000 copies, so it was special and he sent me the page that referred to Harry Edgington. I must have hit a nerve because his reaction was so over-the-top and I could never understand why. To suggest that there was anything homosexual in Spike was absolute rubbish, although I have to say he wasn’t your jumping up and down, wahey, hairy-chested lover, and that was nice, but satisfying? ‘I ain’t got no satisfaction.’
It was an extraordinary friendship. It certainly had nothing to do with sex at all. He seemed to know what I was going to say before I said it and, I’d like to flatter myself, quite often I knew what he was going to say. I just needed to know that he was in my life because as the years went on I thought, ‘Here is a rich and famous man and he bothers with me.’ That was tremendous. I remember when I was in the throes of my divorce. The divorce papers weren’t yet on the table and my husband and I were trying to make one last go of it by having a second honeymoon in the Algarve, which was a disaster because he would get up early just so that he didn’t have to look at my face over breakfast, and go off with his camera into the mountains. I didn’t see him all day, so I would go down to the beach where there were little rocky coves and I sat in a small cave with the sea coming right up to my knees, and then it washed out. It was very nice, so I wrote in the sand, ‘Spike – you are the one I love’, and then I watched the sea wash it away. Then I did it again and that’s how I spent a whole morning in the Algarve. I knew that the man I was married to was not a man I could be at one with, whereas Spike I could. I also think a lot of it was ego. I thought, ‘This man is interested in me and I need my ego building.’ The fact that he was willing to spend time with me was very flattering.
He never proposed. The only things he proposed were when he thought it was time I left or that we should have a race in our Minis. And yet when he was working in Australia or South Africa he wrote to me two or three times a week, not ordinary love letters. Sometimes they would begin ‘Hi, Cowley.’ I remember he once wrote, ‘Some people might even say I miss you. I haven’t said that.’ So he was always on the defensive.
Spike never liked formal dates, though once I took him to a movie, The Way We Were, starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. Perhaps selfishly I felt it mirrored so much of my own past and might help him to understand where I was coming from. As we left the cinema I expected some sort of sympathetic comment. What I got was, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’ I realised then that my part of the world, rapidly receding the longer I stayed in England, struck few chimes with him. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t marry. That and the fact that he never asked me.
NORMA: The film reflected West Coast, leftish academe, a world away from the tourists Spike wrote about so scathingly in letters he sent when he was doing his one-man show in Australia in 1972.
Liz, with her lovely face, as lively as a linnet, and her memories of Spike that will never fade, looks many years younger than she is. She remembers Spike’s kindness and his requests to meet up in the early hours. There is no sadness in her reminiscences.
LIZ: Perhaps it’s a cliché, but isn’t the mark of a really great man his ability to stop and do little things to help others? When I very nervously started a short series of late-night chat shows on Radio 1, I asked Spike – by then running just to stand still – if he could possibly take part in a ‘fathers and daughters’ debate. There wouldn’t, er, be any money in it but we could send a taxi. He agreed immediately and brought along his daughter, Laura. Thus my humble, local first programme got off to a flying start.
When I began a series for teenagers on BBC1 he came up trumps again, agreeing to sit in as an ‘agony uncle’, offering advice to young people alongside agony aunt Lulu. Now this