Amy, My Daughter. Mitch Winehouse
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and had to be brought home.
Amy left a lasting impression on her Year Two teacher, Miss Cutter (now Jane Worthington), who wrote to me shortly after Amy passed away:
Amy was a vivacious child who grew into a beautiful and gifted woman. My lasting memories of Amy are of a child who wore her heart on her sleeve. When she was happy the world knew about it, when upset or unhappy you’d know that too. It was clear that Amy came from a loving and supportive family.
Amy was a clever girl, and if she’d been interested she would have done well at school. Somehow, though, she was never that interested. She was good at things like maths, but not in the sense that she did well at school. Janis was really good at maths and used to teach the kids. Amy loved doing calculus and quadratic equations when she was still at primary school. No wonder she found maths lessons boring.
She was always interested, though, in music. I always had it playing at home and in the car, and Amy sang along with everything. Although she loved big-band and jazz songs, she also liked R&B and hip-hop, especially the US R&B/hip-hop bands TLC and Salt-n-Pepa. She and Juliette used to dress up like Wham!’s backing singers, Pepsi & Shirlie, and sing their songs. When Amy was about ten she and Juliette formed a short-lived rap act, Sweet ’n’ Sour – Juliette was Sweet and Amy was Sour. There were a lot of rehearsals but, sadly, no public performances.
I was devoted to my family, but as Amy and Alex got older, I was changing. In 1993, Janis and I split up. A few years earlier, a close friend of mine, who was married, confided in me that he was seeing someone else. I couldn’t understand how he could do it. I remember telling him that he had a lovely wife and a fantastic son: why on earth would he want to jeopardize everything for a fling? He said, ‘It’s not a fling. When you find that special someone you just know it’s right. If it ever happens to you, you’ll understand.’
Unbelievably I found myself in a similar situation. Back in 1984 I had appointed a new marketing manager, Jane, and we had hit it off from the start. There was nothing romantic: Jane had a boyfriend and I was happily married. But there was definitely a spark between us. Nothing happened for ages and then eventually it did. Jane had been coming to my house since Amy was eighteen months old and had met Janis and the kids loads of times. She was adamant that she didn’t want to come between me and my family.
I was in love with Jane but still married to Janis. That’s a situation which just can’t work indefinitely. It was a terrible dilemma. I wanted to be with Janis and the kids but I also wanted to be with Jane. I was never unhappy with Janis and we had a good marriage. Some men who stray hate their wives but I loved mine. You couldn’t have an argument with her if you tried: she’s such a sweet, good-natured person. I didn’t know what to do. I really didn’t want to hurt anybody. In the end I just wanted to be with Jane more.
Finally, in 1992, I made up my mind to leave Janis. I would wait until after Alex had had his Bar Mitzvah the following year, and leave shortly afterwards. Telling Alex and Amy was the hardest thing; I explained that we both loved them and that what was happening was nothing to do with anything they’d done or not done. Alex took it very badly – who can blame him? – but Amy seemed to accept it.
I felt awful as I drove away to live with Melody in Barnet. I stayed with her for six months before I moved in with Jane. Looking back now, I was a coward for allowing the situation to go on for so long, but I wanted to keep everybody happy.
Strangely, after I left I started seeing more of the kids than I had before. My friends thought that Amy didn’t seem much affected by the divorce, and when I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, she said, ‘You’re still my dad and Mum’s still my mum. What’s to talk about?’
Probably through guilt, I over-indulged them. I’d buy them presents for no reason, take them to expensive places and give them money. Sometimes, when I was starting a new business and things were tight, we’d go and eat at the Chelsea Kitchen in the King’s Road where I could buy meals for no more than two pounds. Years later, the kids told me they’d liked going there better than the more expensive places, mostly because they knew it wasn’t costing me a lot.
Two things never changed: my love for them and theirs for me.
Amy in a contemplative mood. My birthday card in 1992.
Wherever I was living, Amy and Alex always had a bedroom there. Amy would often stay for the weekend and I’d try to make it special for her. She loved ghost stories: when I lived in Hatfield Heath, Essex, the house was a bit remote and quite close to a graveyard. If we were driving home on a dark winter’s night I used to park near the graveyard, turn the car lights off and frighten the life out of her with a couple of grisly stories. It wasn’t long before she started making up ghost stories of her own, and I had to pretend to be scared.
On one occasion Amy had to write an essay about the life of someone who was important to her. She decided to write about me and asked me to help her. It had to be exciting, I decided, so I made up some stories about myself but Amy believed them all. I told her I’d been the youngest person to climb Mount Everest, and that when I was ten I’d played for Spurs and scored the winning goal in the 1961 Cup Final against Leicester City. I also told her I’d performed the world’s first heart transplant with my assistant Dr Christiaan Barnard. I might also have told her I’d been a racing driver and a jockey.
Amy took notes, wrote the essay and handed it in. I was expecting some nice remarks about her imagination and sense of humour, but instead the teacher sent me a note, saying, ‘Your daughter is deluded and needs help.’ Not long before Amy passed away, she reminded me about that homework and the trouble it had caused – and she remembered another of my little stories, which I’d forgotten: I’d told her and Alex that when I was seven I’d been playing near Tower Bridge, fallen into the Thames and nearly drowned. I even drove them to the spot to show them where it had supposedly happened and told them there used to be a plaque there commemorating the event but they had taken it down to clean it.
During school holidays we had to find things for Amy to do. If I was in a meeting, Jane would take her out for lunch and Amy would always order the same thing: a prawn salad. The first time Jane took her out, when Amy was still small, she asked, ‘Would you like some chocolate for pudding?’
‘No, I have a dairy intolerance,’ said Amy, proudly. She’d then wolfed down bag after bag of boiled sweets and chews – she always had a sweet tooth.
Jane used to work as a volunteer on the radio at Whipps Cross Hospital, and had her own show. Amy would go in with her to help. She was too young to go round the wards when Jane was interviewing the patients, so instead she would choose the records that were going to be played. Once Jane interviewed Amy, and I’ve still got the tapes of that conversation somewhere. Jane edited out her questions so that Amy was speaking directly to the listeners – her first broadcast.
One link I never lost with Amy when I left home was music. She learned to love the music I had been taught to love by my mother when I was younger. My mum had always adored jazz, and before she met my father she had dated the great jazz musician Ronnie Scott. At a gig in 1943, Ronnie introduced her to the legendary band leader Glenn Miller, who tried to nick her off Ronnie. And while my mum fell in love with Glenn Miller’s music, Ronnie fell in love with her. He was devastated when she ended the relationship. He begged her not to and even proposed to her. She said no, but they remained close friends right up until he died in 1996. He wrote about my mum in his autobiography.
When she was a little girl, Amy loved hearing my mother recount her stories about Ronnie, the jazz scene and all the things they’d got up to. As she grew up she started to get into jazz in a big way; Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan were her early favourites.
Amy loved one particular story I told her about Sarah Vaughan and Ronnie Scott. Whenever Ronnie had a big name on at his club, he would always invite my mum, my auntie Lorna, my sister, me and whoever