Читать книгу Kenneth Williams Unseen: The private notes, scripts and photographs - Russell Davies - Страница 9

Gyles Brandreth: ‘It was when we were doing the autobiography that he told me that his father had committed suicide and I said to him that he must put that in the book. He said, “I can’t put that in the book while Louie’s alive because she doesn’t believe it and won’t believe it. But it is the case.” It is because he knew his father had committed suicide that when Kenneth took his own life I was not totally surprised. It is a well-established phenomenon that people who commit suicide sometimes come from families where suicide is part of the heritage. That almost, as it were, your forebears and family have given you permission: this is one of the ways this family does. So in a sense he was almost licensed to commit suicide because of the way his father had gone.’

But why in mid-April 1988? There was indeed work to be done, none of it the most congenial he’d ever been offered, but healthy enough. Kenneth had never been rich, but poverty had not threatened for many years. Certainly the multiple pains were a factor; back pain and ulcerations in the digestive system. The diary records his sufferings exhaustively. Peter Cadley, a new friend from Michael Whittaker’s circle, was unlucky enough to catch the rising tide of complaint.

Peter Cadley: ‘The health was always an issue. He talked about it constantly. He talked about health constantly and he talked about sex constantly. The two seemed to combine, but there was also a very puritan streak to him. If we were out for dinner and perhaps drank too much he’d go home and sometimes use an enema to purge himself of the decadence of the evening. There were definite times where you could see he was in a great deal of pain with his ulcers, and either he’d talk about it or be very stoic about it and not mention it at all. There was a lot of medication being taken, a lot of pills, a lot of kaolin and morphine. It was a constant battle at the end to keep the pain at bay. And I was always surprised, I have to admit, that nobody could seem to do anything about it. You would think with the advances in medical science that having an ulcer isn’t completely incurable. Before he died there were plans to go into hospital and have something done, which frightened him quite a lot. I could see there was a great deal of fear in having to go into hospital to have major surgery.’