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Bantam • Biography: general
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CHAPTER ONE
'O ROMEO, ROMEO! WHEREFORE ART THOU ROMEO? OH NO, I'M OUT OF HERE!'
And so, on 1 May 1951, my life began. In true romantic style, my mother was playing Juliet and my father Romeo with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon when she was caught short on stage by her waters breaking as Henry Antony Cardew Worrall Thompson gave notice of his arrival, unusually for him, three weeks early. The story goes that I was born in the Green Room of the theatre but, knowing how prone my mother was to exaggeration, I suspect I actually made it to the nursing home before bouncing on to the world's stage.
I was Henry after Henry IV, the Shakespearean role my father loved the best. Antony, my mother's choice, and the name she later decided to call me by, was inspired by her favourite Shakespeare play, Antony and Cleopatra. My third given name, Cardew, was taken from my maternal grandfather's family tree, which could be traced back to Cornelius Cardew, the mayor of Truro in 1797. My ancestor had owned two schools near the Cornish city and, on the evidence of historical records, he was a right bastard. He governed his schools with the stick rather than the carrot, using the Church as an excuse for his fire-and-brimstone approach to education. It was a type I was to encounter later in my childhood.
The nursing home was on the banks of the Avon. I was told that my father's understudy, rowing up the river one day, found me in a cot in the garden and deposited a Welsh threepenny bit in my hand with a note reading: 'Richard was here.' I promptly swallowed the coin. How this was discovered I never really found out, but when it was there was uproar, with Matron apparently threatening to call the police unless the perpetrator of this hideous crime owned up and apologized. To keep the peace, he did. I would love to have seen Richard Burton, that famous Welshman, being reprimanded and scolded like a naughty child.
Richard became one of my 'luvvie' godfathers. But don't get too excited, folks - I saw him on no more than half a dozen occasions during my lifetime. Still, I guess it's quite nice having his name on my curriculum vitae, especially as he was my father's understudy rather than the other way round. My father's name was Michael Worrall Thompson, though he went by the stage name of Ingham, and he came from an acting family. While I never knew him that well, I was always very proud of him and of his reputation as a good, if not great actor.
It is obvious from the stories of my early life that I was a bit of an inconvenience. Soon after my birth, my mother, Joanna Duncan, was asked to play the lead role in Brigadoon, which involved an eighteen-month tour of the UK. Not surprisingly, my father was appalled that she was considering doing any such thing and pleaded with her not to go. Fat chance. Till the day she died my mother was strong-willed to the point of being pig-headed. So she went, and so did I. Touring with a baby was not much fun for either mother or child, especially in the days of terry-towelling nappies, buckets of bleach and clothes lines strung between water pipes in the dressing room. When we were featured in two or three of what would now be described as red-top rags - the Daily Sketch dubbed me the '18,000-mile baby' - fortune smiled on my mother in the form of an American company which picked up on the story. They were in the advanced stages of testing the first disposable nappies and offered her a free supply of them for the rest of my babyhood. I wonder if she ever entered them on her tax return. Anyway, I duly became Britain's first 'disposable' baby. It's funny, but now that I've gone 'green' and try to do my bit to save the planet, I'm dead against disposables because of the time they take to decompose. Apologies to any new mothers, because it's probably not what you want to hear, but it's true.
During my eighteen months with Brigadoon I was dragged from pillar to post, with hundreds of landladies at digs all around the country acting as surrogate aunts. As for my poor old dad, it must have been tough on him, rarely seeing my mother apart from on the odd Sunday, and it is not surprising that he fell by the wayside. In the 1950s affairs weren't the public issue that they are today, and the press wasn't nearly as cut-throat, but theatre luvvies, then as now, loved to gossip and it wasn't long before my mother was acquainted with my father's infidelity. He was immediately given his marching orders and no amount of pleading, tears or remorse would change her mind. He loved my mum but she, being pig-headed, was unforgiving. Personally, I think it was a decision she would come to regret.
Yet even before my father's affair things hadn't been going well between them. The particular pressures and lifestyle of the theatre made it easy to fall into the habit of drinking too much, and they both did that. Money was scarce, and rows and bickering were the order of the day. Dad was partial to the odd flutter on the horses, and, inevitably, what began as the odd flutter gradually turned into an obsession. In the end he was betting every day. It fell to my mother to place his bets and she soon worked out that, given his less-than-glittering success rate, it made sense to keep the money instead and simply pay out if and when the occasional nag came up trumps. What he didn't know couldn't hurt him, after all. Things went swimmingly at first, and Mum was able to supplement her meagre theatrical income quite nicely. I guess it was just robbing Peter to pay Paul, really, and if my father had had the money he would only have drunk it.
But disaster was just around the corner. One day, just as he did on many other days, Dad placed a combination bet, a yankee. He always picked horses with long odds, so he had more chance of being struck by lightning than of winning. But, you've guessed it, on this particular day the yankee came up. The sum of £14,000 had been lost by my mother's own gamble. My dad had been standing at the gates of heaven only to be snatched away at the last moment and thrown into hell. It was the beginning of the end, and their relationship would never be the same again. My father's affair, it seems, was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
Getting divorced was not the common occurrence in the 1950s that it is today. It brought shame upon the whole family, or so my maternal grandparents thought, anyway. The marital home in Chelsea had to be sold and it was arranged for my mother to be dispatched to a flat in Hove. It might as well have been purgatory as far as she was concerned. She was a wild one, and she loved London. That was where her friends were, and where she wanted to be, but she had me to consider.
As for me, I was blissfully unaware of all this. The only recollection I have of my father at this time is of being wrapped up in a camel coat with a velvet collar, velvet beret and brown, buckled shoes at the age of three to be towed by a male visitor around the Lanes in Brighton on a pub crawl. This was Dad's first and last attempt after the divorce to spend time with his son. I was not to see him again until I was twenty-five.
My mother was dominated by an even more powerful woman: my grandmother. Gran was an upper-crust type of the old school, and a fearsome woman, or so I thought. I dreaded the visits she demanded. For one, I had to behave, I had to pretend to be nice. Mother insisted on this because, while I was a total inconvenience to her, I was at the same time her lifeline.
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© Transworld Publishers |
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More Information
Publication Date: 02/08/2004 • 512 pages • 198 x 127 mm
• ISBN: 0553814362
Territory: UK C/Wealth + Can, EU |
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