The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [98]
What is extraordinary is that it took so long for the secret to emerge. Apparently my mother always carried a Bible in her handbag and would get any new members of staff, first in the asylum and then in the nursing home, to swear to keep the fact that David was my half-brother a secret – and no one ever spilt the beans. But as I’ve thought more and more about it over the years, some little things begin to make sense – little oddities that had never been enough to arouse any suspicions on their own, but that all came together with this incredible revelation. Whenever we were in the UK, Ma used to visit Shakira and me in the country every Sunday and she would be driven back to London the next day. One day, the driver mentioned that she always insisted on getting out at the bus stop on Streatham High Road, rather than being taken back to her house. The penny never dropped, of course, but she must have been going straight off to the asylum to visit David. And then there was Ma’s incredible consumption of sweets, biscuits and chocolates. She always used to leave us on Monday morning piled up with packets and boxes and yet when I’d go there and see her on a Wednesday for a cup of tea and ask for a biscuit, she’d always insist that she’d eaten them all. And I’d think, bloody hell, she gets through all these chocolates and biscuits very quickly – but of course she was saving them to take to David.
The People had got hold of the story completely by accident. They had sent a reporter to do a piece on conditions in the old lunatic asylums – by now they were all shut down and the former inmates had been transferred to more humane nursing homes – and he was interviewing a group of people, amongst whom was David’s girlfriend, who was more lucid than the others and who could also speak distinctly. ‘Do you see that man over there?’ she said to the reporter. ‘Do you know Michael Caine, the actor?’ ‘Yes . . .’ said the reporter, obviously not quite sure what was coming. ‘Well, he’s his brother.’ And of course the reporter went – ‘Wait a minute . . . I’ve got a scoop here!’ I was very impressed by the way the paper handled it all. They rang me straight away and they didn’t try to make anything salacious out of it at all. In fact what they went with was the story that really matters: the story of my mother and her incredible loyalty to her son.
My first reaction was to jump on a plane straight back to England to visit David, but Noises Off was way behind schedule and I couldn’t get there for a couple of weeks, although Stanley went in the meantime. According to the matron of the nursing home, David knew all about us; he had seen Zulu on television and my mother had given him a picture of her with me so he knew I was his half-brother. When I eventually got home from LA – Shakira insisted on coming with me because she could see how shaken I was by the news – I went straight to the nursing home. Although the nurses had warned me that David was very handicapped, it was still a terrible shock to meet him. I went into his room and there he was: a very small man, with dark, slightly greying hair, in a wheelchair. No one knew who his father was – and he certainly bore very little physical resemblance to Stanley or me. Most upsetting of all was that when I held my hand out to shake his, I realised that he couldn’t speak – or at least not in a way that I could understand. The nurses hadn’t mentioned this,