MY MOTHER’S BRUSH WITH THE FAMOUS 2024/06/14
I went to live in London when I was 17, having been thrown out of my father’s house. My best friend, June, had wanted company when her parents were out of town and my father had a hissy fit when I said I would be staying at her house. He said I wasn’t allowed to. I defied him, coming home in the early hours. The next morning, he asked me to leave saying “I was beyond his control”. Weird that, given I was working full-time, buying my own clothes, and going to evening class, how was it he still thought he should be able to control me.
I do think, in his defense, he wouldn’t have thrown me out if he hadn’t of known my mother was around and available. I’d been up to town a few months earlier, around Whit Sunday 1, and I’d came back less attached to my father’s whims and edicts.
So that summer of ’57, I went and lived with my mother. She had been living in Malaya, about 100 miles north of Kuala Lumpur, and came back to get divorced from my first stepfather, Major Perez, who was very abusive. My mum told me he used to whip her, lock her in the cupboard, throw food at her, screaming invectives. She realized she had to leave him after she saw her mother-in-law watching it all and didn’t step in to stop him.
He must have had PTSD, though of course, in the early 50s, that wasn’t a recognized condition. He had been captured by the Japanese in WW 2 and was sent to work on the Burma Road 2. He’d come back, to all intents and purposes, unmarked by the experience. In public he was fine. In private, he wasn’t. I met him once, just after my mum and he got married. We went for tea at Lyons Corner House 3, where he said how delighted he was to get an almost grown-up daughter. I was eight, and both proud and somewhat disconcerted that he said that about me. After all, we’d only just met.
I am not sure what my mum, back then was doing to earn a living, but she had enough funds to rent a basement apartment in Gloucester Square, in the old kitchen space. She left, a year later, to go to Edinburgh, in Scotland, to get married to her fiancée, Major Ian Allwright 4 of the Scots Guards 5, and when he retired, went with him to Jamaica where he was hired by the government to set up the Jamaican Defence Force 6. I wanted to stay in that apartment, but in the end had to leave and move to a tiny, tiny bed-set in Manchester Square, which I shared with a friend from Israel.
My cousin Alison, one of my most favorite people in the world, was living at home in Kingston at the time, going up to London every day to school at the London Poly. Through her I met, and dated, guys from all over the world, Rio de Janeiro, Macao, Hong Kong, Lisbon, a Sikh from Kashmir, a Greek from Wad Medani, in Sudan, and she and I would cruise the coffee shops in the evening or at the weekends. I danced all night at the Albert Hall and Wembley Stadium, going to work the next morning at my hum-drum receptionist job, bleary-eyed and lacking even more focus than usual. And I sat three rows away from Jacqueline du Pre playing the cello at some concert hall and, at that point, fell in love with the Bach cello concertos. I don’t remember who I went with. I just have this picture in my mind of her almost wrestling with her cello, drawing these phenomenal sounds out of it, with such fire, and fierceness, and power.
Later, in the mid-60s I went to free concerts on Hampstead Heath, sitting on the slopes of Parliament Hill, listening to The Steve Miller Band playing Sweet Georgia Brown and other bands, Procol Harum, Pink Floyd, and Yes; and going to Hyde Park on a hot summer’s day to hear The Rolling Stones, with the crowd so large, I was far enough away I could hardly see them. Somewhere in there, I was at a Cream concert where they played Sunshine of Your Love, and saw The Who at a jazz festival in Richmond. I found Buffy St Marie and Bob Dylan., that last in Tony and Thelma’s home in World’s End, then a run-down part of London, me trying to play the guitar and singing a hard rain’s gonna fall.
After my second stepfather died, my mother finding him, after lunch, dead with his head on the desk, she decided to continue living in Jamaica and got a job managing Ocho Rios 7, the vacation estate and resort owned by Lord James Graham, a distant cousin of mine. One day she phoned me, excited, because the Rolling Stones were coming to stay. She was an inveterate name dropper, being proud of having been introduced to Princess Anne, and going to the Palace when her husband Ian Allwright was presented with a commendation from the Queen, so meeting Mick Jagger and the rest of the band, would, she thought, be as exciting.
A couple of days after they arrived, she called, very troubled, angry and upset. Mick et al. had turned out, in her world, to be monsters. They openly used marijuana and other drugs, drank heavily, and walked around naked in front of the staff. According to my mum, they never stopped partying and trashed the vacation cottages, leaving a filthy mess which took the staff several days to clear up. I don’t know how they treated her, personally, but she was mortally offended by what they did and how they behaved.
My mum retired shortly afterwards and came back to London, getting a job in Crystal Palace, as an assistant matron in what we, in America, would call an assisted living facility. I visited her there, in her room on the ground floor, with a view out to the North Downs, by the little artificial pond, covered in chicken wire so the local heron couldn’t catch the goldfish.
The photo is of my mother and Iain in London, shortly after visiting the Palace. My mum is wearing the commemorative brooch. Photographer unknown.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitsun
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma_Road
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Lyons_and_Co.
4 https://www.commandoveterans.org/IanAllwright9Commando
5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_Guards
6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_Defence_Force
7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocho_Rios