The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [97]
Gemma called on 11 December to say that Ma had a bad cold and I rushed over to see her, knowing how frail she was and how the slightest setback can escalate into something more serious with vulnerable old people. We had a great old time and she was very perky and I left feeling relieved that she seemed to be fine, but the next morning Gemma called to say that she had died in her sleep. Apparently she had eaten well, drunk well, as usual, smoked her fags and gone to bed very happy – and they hadn’t been able to wake her the next morning.
When I went in to see her, she looked so peaceful and almost as if she was smiling. I held it together as I kissed her for the last time, but first Gemma – who had been very fond of my mother – burst into tears and then I did, too. I thought back over fifty years to the day Dad went off to war, when she had said to Stanley and me – he was only three and a half and I was six – ‘You’ve got to take care of me now your father’s gone.’ She had made little men out of us then, but I couldn’t hold back the tears now. Gemma and I held on to each other and sobbed our hearts out before I managed to get a grip and we went outside to see the rest of the staff, who were waiting with the usual British solution in times of grief – a cup of tea.
Ma’s funeral took place on a cold, wet London winter’s day. Stanley was ill with pneumonia and couldn’t come, so Shakira and I were the only family members there. I was very conscious – I think anyone losing a parent is, no matter at what age it happens – of her passing as the end of an era, of the loss of the last link to the previous generation, a chapter closed. Or so I thought . . .
But the past wasn’t quite ready to let me go. In the spring of 1991 I was filming Noises Off in Los Angeles. 1990 had been a grim year in the aftermath of the stock market crash in 1989 and the hurricane that had swept across Britain. 1991 had started even more grimly with the first Gulf War. Although we couldn’t escape the news, it was a relief to escape the cold weather in Britain and we were delighted to find ourselves back in the Californian sunshine. We were even more thrilled to hear that Natasha had been given a place at Manchester University – it felt as if a new chapter was opening for the whole family.
One Friday afternoon, just as I’d got in from a day’s filming, the phone rang. I picked it up without a thought – and in an instant the story I thought I knew about my family changed forever. The guy on the other end was a reporter from the English tabloid newspaper The People and he was calling to say that they had discovered the existence of my half-brother.
My mother’s first child, a son called David, was born illegitimate and with epilepsy in a Salvation Army hospital in 1924. In those days there was little treatment available for epilepsy and as a result of the fits he had as a child, during which he would bang his head repeatedly on the stone floors of the workhouse, he became brain-damaged and would remain in an institution for the rest of his life.
It was a terrible shock to me and to Stanley. I had had absolutely no idea of David’s existence – and neither had my father or any of our large extended family. My mother had kept him a secret for sixty-seven years, and yet she had visited him every Monday, except when we were in Norfolk during the war. Shock soon turned to admiration when I found out what she had done and how loyal she had been to him. And I started to think back to our childhood and to wonder how she had managed to keep this secret for so long.
I was never aware of her absence on Mondays, as a little boy – when we were babies she probably took us with her, but I have no memories