Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [234]
As the N90 finally disappears, leaving me laden down in a dimly lit, anonymous Pimlico Street, at a quarter to one in the morning, shouting ‘Keep Smiling!’ at the top of my voice, I find it rather pleasing to think that 24 hours ago I was the star of a New York film premiere.
Eventually find a cab who has no moral, ethnic, financial or personal reasons for not taking me to Oak Village, and I finally arrive home at 1.30, it having taken me nearly half the time to get from Heathrow to Oak Village as it took me to get from New York to London.
Thursday, April 21st
Wig-fitted by an excited Scotsman at Wig Specialities, who greeted me with a little clap of the hands, ‘I’ve seen your bottom simply everywhere.’ (I suppose Jabberwocky has made modesty in my case rather superfluous.)
A tall, gangly lady, with attractive bony knees rather like Helen’s, was also being wig-fitted. It turned out she was Fiona Richmond, star of most of Paul Raymond’s sex shows – like Pyjama Tops and Let’s Get Laid. The little Scotsman couldn’t control himself after she’d gone. ‘Well I never,’ he said. ‘Two of the country’s top sex symbols in here together!’
I’ve taken the rest of today off to escort my Ma to Jabberwocky. She arrives at Liverpool Street on the 11.30.
To Old Compton Street for tea at Patisserie Valerie, then to the 5.40 showing of Jabberwocky at the Columbia. It’s only about 150 souls full, but the audience does seem to enjoy it and only three people (young, rather attractive girls) walk out. I try to hide myself in my coat, but am spotted by the usherettes, who are frightfully excited, and rush up, saying very nice things about me.
My mother seemed to enjoy it a lot, and I felt that same feeling of enjoyment which I had when I first saw it put together. There are faults, but at least Terry has made a film which, for most of its length, involves, amuses and entertains an audience – with striking and original images and a brilliantly effective evocation of the crumbling mediaeval world. The modern allusions seem to be the ones which sit most uneasily within it. But I felt again what a good piece of work it is.
Saturday, April 23rd
Woken at 7.15 by Tom telling me the phone was ringing. It’s Granny. Father is not expected to live much beyond lunchtime. She is just off to the hospital. I promise to get up there as soon as I can. Feel dreadfully bleary and tired. Tell the children. Willy says, quite seriously, that he hopes Rachel (who’s got a slight cold) won’t be dead by lunchtime too.
Ring Angela. By a quarter to nine Veryan has brought her round and I have woken up sufficiently to drive us both up to Blythburgh. It’s a sunny day, which helps to keep the gloom from settling too heavily. Angela natters on compulsively about her job – her social welfare work in Croydon sounds far more harrowing than anything we are experiencing today.
Arrive at Blythburgh Hospital just after eleven. As we walk from the car, neither of us, or certainly I myself, have any real idea of what to expect. I have never been near anyone dying before.
Daddy is breathing heavily and noisily on his back in bed, eyes almost closed, one half-open, glazed and unseeing. His skin is pale and parchment-like and drawn tight over the bones of his face. Mother sits at the bedside, hardly wracked with grief. Indeed she greets us very matter of factly, as if we’d just arrived at a coffee morning.
A marvellously sane and intelligent middle-aged lady doctor takes us into her room after examining him and tells us that he has pneumonia on the top of one of his lungs and is not likely to survive. She has brought us in here, she says, because, although he is unconscious to all intents and purposes, one never can be sure about the sense of hearing. This worries me a little, as I had, when I arrived, rather loudly queried whether it was terminal.
The doctor, grasping my mother’s hand in a firm, comforting, but unsentimental clasp of reassurance,