Authors: Dawn French
Mum became very quiet and soft in the days leading up to the funeral. I think she was girding herself for it and trying not to die of the misery which was threatening to swallow her whole. She told me that David could sleep in my room. I was gobsmacked! Under her roof it was her rules, and this was a
definite
no-no ordinarily. But this wasn’t ordinary and she wanted us to have all the comfort we could. So, for the first time, David and I slept wrapped up in each other in my tiny single bed in my teenage bedroom surrounded by my dolls and my posters of Steve McQueen and Steve Harley. I cried a lot and woke up startled in the night many times, reliving again and again the shock of what had happened. David was there and he held me close through each night.
The funeral was excruciating. It was in the church where you and Mum were married in St Budeaux, behind the old Blue Monkey pub which has gone now. We always called it the Blue Monkey church. Following the hearse was harrowing, Gary and I on either side of Mum, all clinging on to each other for dear life. Yes, dear life. I was so touched when we pulled up outside the church, and I saw so many of my friends there, who had all loved you, Dad, who wanted to say goodbye, or ‘chio’ as we say in Plymouth. I can’t remember the service except being fixated on that box where you were – but I do remember getting back in the awful big black cars and, again, following the coffin, with you inside it, up to Weston Mill Crematorium. Up, up the hill, and into that little chapel where there was more pointless blether. More platitudes and clichés and metaphors. Blah blah. Shut up! You didn’t know him. Then, it happened. That woeful moment when the vicar is saying something about committing you to God and suddenly a buzzing starts and the curtains begin to close around your coffin like a macabre matinee finale. Curtains closing, obstructing my view of you, of where you lay, of where you were. This was suddenly a palpable, final, finite moment. I wasn’t ready for it, it was too much and I started to
sob
uncontrollably with Mum and Gary. I have never before or since felt such aching despair.
We couldn’t face a ‘do’ after the whole dreadful thing was over. The family were probably perplexed by this, but we preferred instead to go home, get the dogs and go for a long walk on the beach at Rock. We were closer to you there, where we had often walked, where we had laughed and loved each other as a family. Looking out at the sea that day, the significance was overwhelming. I realised that your suicide was the wave crashing on the shore. The wave was sinking back into the ocean, and I was left standing on the shoreline without you, utterly lost.
The next week, bruised and broken, I left home and went to college in London …
MUM WAS RIGHT
, as always. It made sense to go to college straight away, and not to delay. I was distracted from my big you-grief by the thousands of new things that were suddenly happening.
A friend of a friend’s daughter had a room to let in a flat she shared in Leighton Gardens, Kensal Rise. I didn’t know London at all really, except for the few times I’d been there with you and Mum when I was little, to do tourist stuff like visit Madame Tussauds – outside which a man placed a monkey in my arms and another in Gary’s and we had our photo taken. One of the more surreal memories I have of childhood and marking the day my monkey-love began. After that, I nagged you to get me a pet monkey about twice a week, till I was 16. That’s a lot of nagging that resulted in no monkey. It’s OK though. I’ve forgiven you for not getting me a simian best friend, ever since I found out they try to hump your earholes whenever they can. How very impolite. I’m glad I didn’t have a monkey. I hate them now, I reject them and their ear buggery.
So, anyway, the flat in Kensal Rise. Yes. Well, I didn’t really have a bedroom – it was one of those awkward half-rooms where you might store an exercise bike or perhaps a Hoover. Just large enough to fit a single bed if the last six inches were sawn off. Large enough for that, but nothing else other than that. Just the mini-sized single bed touching the walls on three sides, that’s all that fitted in there. Well, no, maybe I should take my foot off
the
exaggerator, there was also room for a cup of tea on the floor, so long as you were inside and the door was shut. I did, very briefly, consider kipping on a chair instead, which would free up a couple of square feet for a chest of drawers, but decided against it in the end in favour of sleep.
I didn’t know my flatmates very well and when I discovered that one of them, a guy, was taking copious amounts of drugs, I retreated further and further into my little cubbyhole. I should have been living in the new, exciting, huge buzzing city, but in reality I was living in a cupboard. I couldn’t afford to venture out much, I was gobsmacked at how much everything in London cost, especially travel – the flat was a long way from the college in Swiss Cottage and practically all of my grant was spent on travel. The grant itself was another problem. The amount was calculated by the local authority at home, who took into account the income of you and Mum. The figure they gave me for the year was supposed to include support from both of you. Of course, you weren’t around any more, Dad, on top of which Mum was dealing with a bankful of enormous debt. She was already having to sell the house and buy a flat in Plymouth on Mutley Plain, she was broke, I couldn’t ask her to stump up more. I went to the bank and organised a small loan, but no spotty student was allowed much, and luckily one of the hero trio of uncles stepped up to help out a bit. Uncle Terry lent me enough to get through the first year, on the strict understanding that the loan would be paid back by such-and-such a time with such-and-such interest. I know he was teaching me a lesson about borrowing, he was trying to be a substitute for you, Dad, helping me to manage a budget. Once all the books and equipment for the course were
bought
and my rent and travel was paid, I was left with less than two pounds a week to buy toothpaste and other essentials. Like food. Of course, I should have bought vegetables and pasta and made big hearty soups that would sustain me and last all week, but I chose a different, edgier route. This was the first time I had ever lived on my own, away from any adult guidance. No one could tell me what to do, so I did what I ruddy well liked thank you and went cocking crazy and spent all of the two pounds on chocolate milk and crisps. Every day. For a year. Wild. Sometimes I even left the bloody fridge door open and I very rarely made my mini-sized bed. Honestly, dude, I was out of control …
My journey to college each day found me at Finchley Road station with a long walk to Central, which was great for exercise but added hours on to my day, and was a bit scary when, as was often the case, we finished late at night. It was odd that I had just come from living in New York, widely regarded as one of the most dangerous cities in the world, and yet I was more afraid walking home in the dark in Kensal Rise.
My first day at Central was a shock. I was a couple of days late because of the funeral, so I was nervous that I hadn’t been part of those crucial first few moments where everyone is in the same boat. By the time I arrived they were already on their boat, it had left harbour and I was rowing furiously behind in my little dinghy to catch up. (A bit like you and me, Dad, in that awful fibreglass home-made kit boat we nearly died in on the River Camel, remember?) The first class of the day was Movement. I had no idea why something was called ‘movement’. I knew how to do movement. I did it all day, didn’t I? That’s how I got
about
generally, by moving. I had the same confusion about classes on the timetable labelled ‘Breathing’ or ‘Voice’. For a misguided instant, I imagined that perhaps only West Country people knew how to move, breathe and speak. Perhaps these natural skills weren’t as widely practised as I had taken for granted. Wow. I was an advanced mover, breather and speaker already, without even trying because, frankly, I’d been doing all three my whole life! These other suckers better catch up.
Oh, how very wrong I was. I clambered into the regulation black leotard and tights with added ugly jazz shoes and slunk into the movement studio. A terrifying space with huge mirrors and barres. Terrifying because we could see the full horror of what we looked like in the black all-in-ones. Leotards don’t look good on ANYONE. Even Madonna. And she looks better than everyone else who’s ever worn one.
So there we were, the teachers’ course class of 1977–1980, known as ‘T80’. A sorrier bunch of stooped, bewildered, crushingly embarrassed subhumans you have never seen. This was the environment in which I first laid eyes on Jennifer, my beloved Fatty. Her disdain for the whole leotard experience was obvious. She barely made an effort with the shake-out and warm-up, and the leg-swinging was an affront. Somehow, in this torture chamber of lycra lunacy, she maintained an air of cool. She was as lumpy as the rest of us but she refused (publicly at least) to acknowledge the humiliation of the leotard, so her controlled demeanour remained intact. No nylon nightmare was going to ruffle her. I noticed this seeming self-assurance immediately and chalked her up as unattainable, out of my league, too sophisticated. Again, utterly wrong. She didn’t make much eye contact with me, but
then
again, outside the class I
did
wear beige corduroy A-line skirts and a back-to-front baseball cap and I did call biscuits ‘cookies’ and think everything was ‘neat’. That’s what happens when you have no taste and you live in America for a year when you’re 19 years old. I mistook Jen’s lack of connection with me as low-level loathing. I now know how shy she can be, which is an explanation for her sometime coolness, alongside the equally likely probability that she was mostly distracted by thinking about what she might have for her tea. Fatty is a consummate daydreamer. Unlike most of us amateur daydreamers though, she doesn’t visit woolly, blurry places where your mind can have a little dance and a rest, or if she does, it’s only for a short time. No, her mind whisks her off to vivid, fresh places where she can live at the pace her brain is constantly working at, which is quite a lot quicker than most mortals. She is constantly running a cynical, internal parallel tape of her real life, what she sees, hears, reads, eats, loves and hates, and it never ceases to amuse her. It’s this sharp skill of observation that gives her the comedy spurs she uses to jolt her mind on from a trot to a canter when she is improvising or writing. On the surface, though, all is calm. Calm to the point of catatonia, while she floats in a warm sea of procrastination until the moment the urgency kicks in. It’s usually a deadline that provides the fear and that is the cue for her to switch to shark mode. It’s as if she has smelt the blood in the water, her eyes focus and she swims very fast, very skilfully towards the target, using all the muscle of a new idea that’s been slow-cooking during her reveries, as the power to thrust her forward. It’s an awesome talent to witness. Back then, though, I thought she was a snobby git.
After a year of Kensal Rise and only seeing David on the odd weekend only, he was sent to India to work for Lipton’s. It was ironic really, one of the reasons he had left the navy for the tea trade was that we didn’t want to have so much time apart and now here he was, off to abroad. I didn’t want to stay in the pot-reeking flat any more and I was overjoyed when one of my favourite college mates, Gilly, mentioned that her boyfriend Malcolm, who owned some properties, had a new conversion available for eight flatmates to share in Steele’s Road, Chalk Farm. This meant only a ten-minute walk to college and a spanking new flat. The rent was more expensive than I had been paying so I knew I would have to share my room. No problem, my fiancé was away in Calcutta, it wasn’t as if I was going to need privacy. I knew my old schoolfriend Angie was looking for accommodation, and I knew we would get on sharing a room together, so that was that. Gilly was putting together a group of us to share the flat, some people from college, an American student called Cici, one single guy called Tom, and she said that Jennifer Saunders from our course was also interested. I was definitely underjoyed by the prospect of that. It wasn’t that we actively disliked each other, not at all, just that we had been on the same course for a whole year by this point and not really found each other, not really bothered, both assuming that the other wasn’t our type. I thought she might be the only one in the flat I wouldn’t be able to relate to …
Then we moved in and, of course, within days we were walking to college together and getting to know the virtual strangers we were to each other. She made me laugh so much, she was bright, and leagues and layers deep. She was, and is, incredibly attractive
in
lots of ways I didn’t expect. She is a bit mysterious and it takes an effort to know her well, but once in her orbit it’s a very cockle-warming place to be. We could subvert any seriousness about our college course by finding it all a bit ludicrous, and taking the piss. We equally sought out chances to puncture any pomposity or pretension we saw around us. This meant that, by very early on in our friendship, the only point of each day was to make each other laugh. In fact on one memorable occasion we decided to see what it would be like to laugh heartily out loud, non-stop, from the second we stepped out of our flat till we reached the steps of college. Of course, loud laughter is pretty funny and contagious so by the time we reached college we were uncontrollably lost in genuine laughter, exhausted, and suitably damp of crotch.
It was so good to find a buddy to laugh with like that. I needed to laugh – there hadn’t been much to laugh about for a year or so. In fact, probably the last time was with you, Dad. Laughing with you remains a powerful memory for me. I remember how much John Cleese made us laugh in
Fawlty Towers
, helpless, falling-off-the-sofa laughing till we were begging him on the TV to show mercy and stop being so funny. Cracks and gags and affectionate teasing were a mainstay of our life together. To share a sense of humour is such a privilege, such an intimacy and such a love. I wasn’t at all surprised to find, then, that this was the same for Fatty and her dad. I went to her home in Cheshire that November because her parents were having a bonfire party. Their house was big and rambling and friendly. I suppose she must have told her parents about my situation having just lost you, and from the moment I met her dad, he took great
care
to ladle me with lots of love. I suppose it’s unthinkable for another loving dad to imagine his own daughter left fatherless, so he always winked me into his little gags and asides so as to include me. I will never forget his kindness at a time I was starved of dadness.