Clapton_ The Autobiography - Eric Clapton [89]
George, Paul, and Ringo also played, only missing John, who later phoned me to say he would have been there too if he had known about it. How that came about, I’ll never know; suffice to say I had little to do with the invitations; but a great opportunity was lost for the Beatles to reform for one last performance. Pattie had also made the mistake of giving our bedroom to Mick Jagger, who was in the early stages of his romance with Jerry Hall, so we couldn’t go to bed, which I thought was completely ridiculous. So I decided to target a friend of Pattie’s named Belinda, who I was convinced was going to make herself available to me at any moment. I hid in a cupboard, with the intention of pouncing on her at some point, but instead I fell asleep and woke up later that day to find a mess that was to take two weeks to clean up.
Among the guests at this wonderful party was my mother Pat, who had become part of my life again after the death of my half brother, Brian. Her loss had put a lot of strain on her marriage to Mac, which had gradually started to erode. To get away from it all, she came back to Ripley, where, as she slowly rekindled all her childhood friendships, she eventually decided to stay. At first she lived with Rose, until I bought her a little house on the village high street, right next to a restaurant called the Toby Jug. Initially, I was rather frightened of Pat. She had a quick temper, and our relationship was inclined to be tempestuous. I’d seen so little of her in my life that most of what I knew about her had come from outside sources, and I was never really sure just what the truth was.
At that stage in my life, however, I made the decision that this didn’t really matter, and that instead of constantly stirring things up, I should just learn to get on with her and have fun. I liked the surface that I saw, because she was very like me, particularly in the things that made us laugh, so I decided that we should use Ripley and its social scene as a way of getting reacquainted. She enjoyed a drink, so we went out to pubs to drink and socialize and use the company of others to get to know one another again. It may not have been a very direct approach to the relationship, because I didn’t spend much time alone with her, but it worked very well, and the fact is that, as an alcoholic, I wasn’t well enough to know how to deal with deeper things.
Soon after her return, Pat struck up a friendship with her childhood friend Sid Perrin, a charismatic man, handsome, not in the Errol Flynn mold but rather more like W. C. Fields. Sid was extremely popular and well loved, and a kind of hero in Ripley through his achievements as a good cricketer and footballer, but most of all as a singer. He had a tenor voice in the style of Mario Lanza that was a bit melodramatic, almost a caricature of a voice, but he could actually carry a song very well with a great deal of emotion. He was very gregarious and loved the spotlight, though only on a small scale, because given the opportunity to step onto a stage, which I gave him from time to time—for instance when we played local gigs, like the Guildford Civic Hall—he would blanch with fear. In his own environment, however, in the village pub or the cricket club, he shone, and Pat adored him. This made me happy, too, as I had always hero-worshiped him, and I hung out with them a lot.
My developing relationship with my mum was also greatly helped by the fact that she and Pattie got on really well and had become firm friends. They also shared an irreverent sense of humor, as I did, which could be sarcastic and cruel at times, though without any real malice. This form of humor was a Ripley trait, and a number of my boyhood friends, like Guy, Gordon, and Stuart, were all fast-witted in this area. Their repartee was fast and cutting, with a lot of teasing involved, and if you could handle yourself in those situations, then you were in.
Since I had begun to develop a bit of a home life with Pattie and the Ripleyites, my English humor was in full flow, and unfortunately