Читать книгу Spike: An Intimate Memoir - Norma Farnes - Страница 13

On 7 November 1968 Spike wrote in his diary, ‘I should shoot her.’ I got married the following day. To me he said, ‘Keep your own flat and let him keep his. You’ve been very happy for nearly a year together. Don’t cock it up.’

John Hyman was everything I considered I was not: educated, professional, liberal and only too ready to agree that there were grey areas which needed to be discussed on most topics. He was quite different from Spike, who shared a number of liberal ideas with him, but did so vehemently leaving little room for argument. John seemed well-balanced and reliable. He was an extremely successful solicitor, with offices in Harrow and Regent Street, and did not expect me to give up the job I enjoyed.

I was so busy that sometimes I wonder how I fitted a private life around it. We met on New Year’s Eve. I was dating a BBC director but he was in Scotland and snowed in. A friend dragged me out to a party in Pinner and I was immediately charmed by him.

We did not follow Spike’s advice and moved in together. Spike’s version of married life was not an example I wanted to follow. There was no doubting Spike and Paddy’s tremendous mutual attraction. Within minutes of meeting he told her, ‘I’m going to marry you.’ But their relationship oscillated between tender love and furious rows. They would argue, she would not give in, he would accuse her of being an iceberg and then move into Number Nine. As well as his office he had a large sitting room on the next floor up. It was furnished in the style beloved of Edwardian gentlemen, with a fireplace, deep armchairs, oil lamps and walls lined with bookshelves. Once he had taken up residence he would greet me in the morning and still be there when I left at night.

During these periods he always asked if Paddy had phoned, just as he would when he was in a depression. She would not sit in at home, however, as Spike thought she should, but went out with friends. I am certain she never had an affair. Which is more than could be said of him, although he loved her very much. She did not only have to deal with Spike’s depressions; when he was living at Number Nine Spike would also spend time with what I came to call the Bayswater Harem. He did not try to hide it from me, indeed he claimed he had slept with three leading ladies during one theatre run. He was not the first man who thought there was one rule for him and another for his wife, but if you had asked him he would have professed a complete belief in a faithful marriage. Once I asked him, straight out, what he was up to. He gazed at me sadly out of his blue Irish eyes. ‘Oh, Norma. I’m sleeping with some of them. One day I’ll pay for my sins.’ He had not entirely forgotten his Catholic upbringing.

There seemed to be anything between half a dozen and a dozen women in the harem at any given time. While he embraced the sexual emancipation of the Sixties and Seventies and enjoyed cocking a snook at authority, Spike still lived part of his life according to Victorian values. He always stood when a woman entered a room, helped her into a chair, arranged corsages when they were his guests at dinner and insisted on paying their taxi fares home. Nearly all his intimate girlfriends were friendly with one another and few seemed jealous about taking their turn in his bed. He seemed to have the knack of persuading them that there was nothing unusual about such an arrangement.

Spike’s love life was his business and I was determined not to sit in judgement. To paraphrase Johnny Speight, he did not trouble me and I did not trouble him. I soon got to know Liz Cowley, his long-standing girlfriend, a diminutive, bubbly and highly intelligent Canadian journalist who became Deputy Producer of the BBC current affairs flagship programme, Tonight. She was at least his intellectual equal and great fun. Sometimes he found it difficult to cope with her independence. Because she did the same as him and slept with other partners he also considered her amoral. It takes a man to work that one out. She never showed the slightest jealousy and I think that irked him more than he liked to admit. I always thought she was ideally suited to him. They continued to meet until two years before his death. Spike would say to me, ‘Ssh. I’m in town because you need to see me.’ Then came a grin and a wink.

He and Liz first met when she was working for Reveille, an armed forces orientated newspaper, which wanted a feature on The Goon Show. There was an immediate attraction, he said, and he invited her to dinner, the first of scores. He told me he could never understand why she enjoyed their conversations.

‘She’s a real highbrow – went to university and I didn’t.’

The lack of formal education was something that bugged him all his life. I reminded him that his friend, Robert Graves, had written that Spike was ‘the most educated uneducated man’ he had met.

His response was vintage Milligan: ‘What fucking good is that?’

Another of his girlfriends was Roberta Watt, also a Canadian journalist. She was tall and statuesque like Paddy, in contrast to Liz. Roberta committed the gravest of all sins as far as I was concerned: she fell in love with him. Fatal. I warned him about it but I think her devotion fed his ego. In an effort to prevent things going too far I took her aside and warned her of his black moods, volatile temperament and other girlfriends, of his devotion to his children and belief in marriage. I might as well have been speaking Urdu. She vowed that she wanted to protect and devote her life to him. Apparently, no doubt in the aftermath of one of their rows, Spike had told her that Paddy made him ill. That is as may be, I told Roberta, but he still loves her. She would not accept that he did and confided she would like to have his child. I was horrified.