Amy, My Daughter. Mitch Winehouse
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At some point during Amy’s numerous moves, a box of family photographs had been lost, and she had clearly come across it that morning. ‘You’ve got to come over.’
In the end I drove over in my taxi to Camden Square and parked outside her house. ‘I’m just popping in,’ I said, knowing full well how hard it was to say no to her. ‘You know I’m busy today.’
‘Oh, you’re always going too quick,’ she responded. ‘Dad, stay.’
I followed her in, and she had the photographs she’d found spread out on a table. I looked down at them. I had better ones but these obviously meant a lot to her. There was Alex holding new-born Amy, and there was Amy as a teenager – but all the rest were of family and friends.
She picked up a photo of my mum. ‘Wasn’t Nan beautiful?’ she said. Then she held up the picture of Alex and herself. ‘Oh, look at him,’ she added, a mixture of pride and sibling rivalry in her voice.
She went through the collection, picking up one after another, talking to me about each one, and I thought, This girl, famous all over the world, someone who’s brought joy to millions of people – she’s just a normal girl who loves her family. I’m really proud of her. She’s a great kid, my daughter.
It was easy to be with her that day: she was a lot of fun. Eventually, after an hour or so, it was time for me to go, and we hugged. As I held her I could feel that she was her old self: she was becoming strong again – she’d been working with weights in the gym she’d put into her house.
‘When you’re back, we’ll go into the studio to do that duet,’ she said, as we walked to the door. We had two favourite songs, ‘Fly Me To The Moon’ and ‘Autumn Leaves’, and Amy wanted us to record one or other of them together. ‘We’re going to rehearse properly,’ she added.
‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ I said, laughing. We’d had this conversation many times over the years. It was nice to hear her talking like that again. I waved goodbye out of the cab.
I never saw my darling daughter alive again.
* * *
I arrived in New York on the Friday, and had a quiet evening alone. The following day I went to see my cousin Michael and his wife Alison at their apartment on 59th Street – Michael had immigrated to the US a few years earlier when he’d married Alison. They now had three-month-old twins, Henry and Lucy, and I was dying to meet them. The kids were great and I had Henry sitting on my lap when Michael got a call from his father, my uncle Percy, who lives in London. Michael passed the phone to me. There was the usual stuff: ‘Hello, Mitch, how are you? How’s Amy?’ I told him I’d seen Amy just before I’d flown out and she was fine.
My mobile rang. The caller ID said, ‘Andrew – Security’. Amy often rang me using the phone of her security guard Andrew so I told my uncle, ‘I think that’s Amy now,’ and passed the house phone back to Michael. I still had Henry on my lap as I answered my phone.
‘Hello, darling,’ I said. But it wasn’t Amy, it was Andrew. I could barely make out what he was saying.
All I could decipher was: ‘You gotta come home, you gotta come home.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘You’ve got to come home,’ he repeated.
My world drained away from me. ‘Is she dead?’ I asked.
And he said, ‘Yes.’
From the start I was besotted with my new daughter, and not much else mattered to me. In the days before Amy was born, I’d been fired from my job, supposedly because I’d asked to take four days off for my daughter’s birth. But with Amy in the world those concerns seemed to disappear. Even though I had no job, I went out and bought a JVC video camera, which cost nearly a grand. Janis wasn’t best pleased, but I didn’t care. I took hours of video of Amy and Alex, which I’ve still got.
Alex sat guard by her cot for hours at a time. I went into her bedroom late one night and found Amy wide awake and Alex fast asleep on the floor. Great guard he made. I was a nervous dad, and I’d often peer into her cot to check she was okay. When she was a very young baby I’d find her panting, and shout, ‘She’s not breathing properly!’ Janis had to explain that all babies made noises like that. I still wasn’t happy, though, so I’d pick Amy up – and then we couldn’t get her back to sleep. She was an easy baby, though, and it wasn’t long before she was sleeping through the night, so soundly sometimes that Janis had to wake her up to feed her.
Amy learned to walk on her first birthday, and from then on she was a bit of a handful. She was very inquisitive, and if you didn’t watch her all the time, she’d be off exploring. At least we had some help: my mother and stepfather, along with most of the rest of my family, seemed to be there every day. Sometimes I’d come home late from work and Janis would tell me they’d eaten my dinner.
Janis was a wonderful mother, and still is. Alex and Amy could both read and write before they went to school, thanks to her. When I came home I’d hear them upstairs, walk up quietly and stand outside their bedroom door to watch them. The kids would be tucked in either side of Janis as she read to them, their eyes wide, wondering what was coming next. This was their time together and I wished I was part of it.
On the nights that I didn’t get home until ten or eleven o’clock, I’d sometimes wake them up to say goodnight. I’d go into their room, kick the cot or bed, say, ‘Oh, they’re awake,’ and pick them up for a cuddle. Janis used to go mad and quite right too.
I was a hands-on father but more for rough-and-tumble than reading stories. Alex and I would play football and cricket in the garden, and Amy would want to join in – ‘Dad! Dad! Give me the ball.’ I’d prod it towards her, then she’d pick it up and throw it over the fence.
Amy loved dancing and, as most dads did with their young daughters, I’d hold her hands and balance her feet on mine. We’d sway like that around the room, but Amy liked it best when I twirled her round and round, enjoying the feeling of disorientation it gave her. She became fearless physically, climbing higher than I liked, or rolling over the bars of a climbing frame in the park. She also liked playing at home: she loved her Cabbage Patch dolls, and we had to send off the ‘adoption certificates’ the dolls came with to keep her happy. If Alex wanted to torment her, he’d tie the dolls up.
When I did come home early I read to the children, always Enid Blyton’s Noddy books. Amy and Alex were Noddy experts. Amy loved the ‘Noddy quiz’.
She would say, ‘Daddy, what was Noddy wearing the day he met Big Ears?’
I’d pretend to think for a minute. ‘Was he wearing his red shirt?’
Amy would say, ‘No.’
I’d tell her that was a very hard question and I needed to think. ‘Was he wearing his blue hat with the bell on the end?’ Another no. Then I’d click my fingers. ‘I know! He was wearing his blue shorts and his yellow scarf with red spots.’
‘No, Daddy, he wasn’t.’
At that point I’d give in and ask Amy to tell me what he was wearing. Before she could get the words out, she was already giggling. ‘He wasn’t wearing anything, he was … naked!’
And then she’d put her hand over her mouth to stifle her hysterical laughing. No matter how many times we played that game it never varied.
We weren’t one of those families that had the TV on for the sake of it. There was always music playing and I sang around the house. We used to get the kids to put on little shows for us. I’d introduce them and Janis would clap and they’d start singing – well, I say singing … Alex couldn’t sing but would give it a go, and Amy’s only goal was to sing louder than her brother. Clearly she liked the limelight. If Alex got bored and went off to do something