'Funnily Enough' - a true story

APRIL ~ He maketh me to lie down

England 1991

9^th April ~

Extraordinary weather; blue sky, blue lake, brilliant sunshine – all the daffodils and cherry blossom out at once, and then very suddenly, snow. Not sleet, but great big flakes falling out of a grey sky almost as if the cherry blossom was coming off. It’s a bit like what’s happened to me.

I’m ill. Or not ill, but totally exhausted, enfeebled like a sea creature stranded on a beach with the tide receding. Everything was going well until I conked-out at work. I’ve been taken off my series and sent home by the BBC doctor. For an indefinite period.

I suppose that when you just can’t move there must be something wrong. My father had to bring me back to Gloucestershire. Me, a girl, aged thirty, feeling like a seven-year-old child. I sat slumped in the car, shaking and unable to speak, only grateful not to have a husband and small children to look after. I’m going to stay in my old bedroom, here on the farm, and get fat and fit and well.

I’d better be careful; It’s quite easy for stranded sea creatures to start feeling sorry for themselves. I knew an actor who had a small part playing a sand monster in Doctor Who. His scenes were filmed on Brighton beach in January. ‘We monsters had to lie under a layer of sand, staying still until the director shouted “Action!” Then we would emerge and bear down, scarily, on the Doctor and his assistant.’ They ended up having to do it again and again, take after take.

‘I got used to being buried and waiting around for the crew to set up the shot.’ After the seventh take the monster found himself lying under the sand for what seemed like hours. ‘I thought I would just take a peek to see what was happening.’ The entire beach was deserted. It had started to drizzle. The crew must have moved on to the next location. ‘I felt so stupid. I didn’t have any money on me and had to trudge back through Brighton to the unit hotel, all cold and stiff in the sand monster costume, trying not to frighten children in pushchairs.’

 

10^th April ~ There are stars above my bed here in my room high up at the top of the house. The windows are set in the eaves and look out into the treetops and across the lake. Our house is in a deep wooded valley so you are wrapped in sound - birdsong and rushing water as the lake spills over, falling into the river that flows past the mill and away down to the sea.

‘I wish you wouldn’t interfere, Martin.’ I’ve heard this war cry from childhood. It’s my mother in normal state of chaos bustling about and shouting at Dad, who presumably, was trying to help. I’m going back to sleep.

 

11^th April ~ I have the concentration of a five-year-old and can’t do a thing. This is my symptom. It’s no good; I’m meant to be working. My throat is on fire.

Perhaps I should have done a bunk and stayed in South Africa. It wouldn’t be cold there and I wouldn’t be ill. I’d be riding across the plains with the wind in my hair and wild animals all around me.

Apparently I have a syndrome: post-viral fatigue. Yuppie ’flu, of all things. The doctor at work took a long time examining me.

‘How long did you have to prepare for this drama series of yours?’

‘Three weeks, but I caught ’flu so it ended up being less.’

‘And how long do you normally need?’

‘Oh, three months. But I only finished editing the last series in February and couldn’t start any earlier.’

‘Why didn’t you take some leave, Sophie?’ he asked.

‘I did, I took two and a half weeks’ holiday and went to Africa. It was lovely.’

‘I’m surprised you came back.’

‘I had to.’

‘So you got off the plane at 6.00am and walked straight into a meeting.’

‘How did you know?’

‘Yes, well you have to be pretty fit to do your job.’ He became very strict. ‘You can’t attempt to do it when you’re in this shape. I don’t want you to return to work unless you can look me in the eye and say you’ve been playing tennis every day for ten days. End of story. Keep a diary of how you feel, even if you only write five words a day, and take a list of symptoms to your G.P.’

It’s a bit of a shock. And a real nuisance. It could just have been a bug I caught on the aeroplane flying back from Johannesburg. My family doctor gave me antibiotics, which had made me feel so much better that I’d returned to work as soon as I could. I couldn’t not. We had rehearsals, I had scripts to prepare, and we had meetings, lots of them, and there were numerous locations to find.

In effect, I didn’t say ‘Cut’ early enough. I’m always forgetting to say ‘Cut’ and then stand around wondering why the actors continue to walk down the street. I should have stopped myself sooner. I collapsed after the first day of filming. Very embarrassing.

 

12^th April ~ Census day, of all things. The media seem obsessed with it. England can be so parochial. I dreamt about warthogs last night, and zebra running in the dust; there were great herds of eland and giraffe standing against the mountains while I was riding past on an Arab horse. I wonder if heaven will be like that? Do you think we’ll get there and find it covered in wildebeest?

I seem to sleep all the time. My friend James is always nodding off and he seems ridiculously healthy. I hadn’t seen him for ages but he drove up from Bristol especially to see me today, bringing my old boyfriend Alastair. They both happen to be working at the BBC Natural History Unit and smelt all officey. It was lovely to see them but a bit jarring:

‘How are you?’ James shouted, in his cheery Etonian voice.

‘Not feeling very well.’

‘Never mind,’ Alastair shouted back. ‘A couple of days in bed will sort you out.’ And giving me a slap on the back he took James off to look for a hobby. Hobby as in bird of prey. They only returned to eat. Why Mum is so enchanted by these two I don’t know.

‘Oh, but darling,’ she said, as soon as they were out of the house, ‘Alastair is tall, dark and good-looking and I suppose you could describe James as cuddly. Don’t you want to marry them?’

‘Not just at the moment.’

After supper Alastair gave James a plate of ice cream, not realising that he’d started snoozing on the sofa. James woke so suddenly he flung the bowl against the wall. The ice cream went splat! and dribbled, melting, down the radiator.

 

13^th April ~ must focus on getting better.

It’s quite busy here. I’ve been living in London for so long that I didn’t realise what my family was up to. Araminta Blue has come to stay. She’s my niece, aged one, and has arrived with an extensive wardrobe of baby-grows. My incredibly efficient sister Perry has left instructions: pinned to the mantelpiece is a schedule of what Araminta has to do and when.

 

• 7.00am Wakes

• 8.00am Eats

• 10.30am Sleeps

• 12.30pm Eats

• 2.30pm Sleeps

• 5.00pm Eats

• 5.30pm Bath

• 6.00pm Plays

• 7.00pm Sleeps

 

What a life.

Perry has gone to make an advert for British Gas, her blonde hair bobbed, her pink suit pressed. She left in a furious temper because she slept the night in Mary-Dieu’s old bedroom. The smoke alarm kept going off every half-hour like an alarm clock. It was indicating that the batteries were running down. Poor Perry. She didn’t know this and ended up sleeping in Dad’s study, as there’s a bed there. Except that she was unable to sleep due to my coughing. 

 

14^th April ~ Mum’s been trying to lose weight again. It puts her in such a bad mood. Her classic way of dealing with anything is to scream. It usually works; we all leap into action and scurry about doing things for her. The screaming is exacerbated when she hasn’t had enough to eat. Surely after all these years she must realise that dieting doesn’t work for her. The problem is that she insists on wearing baggy sweatshirts and tracksuit bottoms, which are most unflattering. They would make me look podgy and I’m a size 10.

‘I don’t care what I look like, for you lot,’ she shouted, turning on the whizzer to make more spinach soup. ‘I want to look slim for a part I’m going up for at the King’s Head in Islington.’ I bet the play doesn’t even get off the ground. She’s always going to futile auditions, despite the expense. She couldn’t resist auditioning for Peter Pan once. My sisters and I somehow couldn’t imagine her in flight.

‘Not to play Peter. I thought I might make a good Mrs. Darling.’ Once at the theatre she had to stand on the stage, looking out into silent darkness in the old fashioned way, and sing a song. ‘I sang By yon Bonny Banks, as it’s about all I can sing, and had just got to the bit about my true love, when a voice from the back shouted, “Stop. Stop. Stop! You don’t look a bit like a sexy green crocodile.”’ And that was it. ‘They were looking for a Mrs. Darling who could double as the crocodile in a sparkly bikini thing.’ Mum was most disappointed. ‘I’m sure I could play a reptile if it was required.’

Dad has had an argument with his rotavator. He calls it a tiller. It’s a big red and white machine with handles like a plough and four rotary blades that churn up the vegetable garden.

He’d lent it to a friend who had managed to wear out the drive-belt. Instead of replacing it with an expensive Honda belt, his friend thought he’d buy a cheap one. This idea has nearly killed my father. When he put the tiller into reverse the drive-belt slid off and the whole thing leapt back at him, with the heavy blades turning madly between his legs. And I mean right between his legs. They could easily have gouged out his stomach. As it was they caught his trousers, tearing and whipping the material round until his bottom was exposed and his right thigh was held in a tourniquet. The lower blades just missed his knees, slicing through the rubber of his gumboots. Fortunately the engine then cut out. He couldn’t move though; he was pinned to the thing and awfully embarrassed about crying out for help, as he was quite naked around the middle. He said that luckily he found a hanky, which he put over his private parts.

As the vegetable garden is down the lane, 400 yards from our house, Dad knew we’d never hear him and became rather worried about whether he’d ever be found. In his desperation he hacked away at the material twisted round his leg with a piece of stone and finally managed to get free. He’s a bit shaken. Mum is trying to be sympathetic but thought the whole episode very funny.

 

15^th April ~ A huge Get Well card has arrived, signed by my entire cast and crew. It’s a picture of a crocodile in bed with a thermometer in its mouth. Not a very sexy looking one. My P.A. had written ‘Rest: don’t feel guilty about spending time in bed, you work too atrociously hard.’

I’m reading a book about the French Revolution but I can’t take it in; my brain seems to have shrunk to the size of an apricot.

Mum went around in a police car today with a video camera, in an attempt to catch speeders speeding. The life of a J.P. (Justice of the Peace.) She absolutely adores being a magistrate. Having always complained about public lavatories, it gives her a title suitable for bullying people to do something about them. She has always had an aptitude for prosecution. I can remember waiting at the traffic lights when we were little when Mum sharply informed a boy on his bike, ‘It’s getting dark, you should have your lights on.’

‘So should you lady,’ he answered back. He was right; she hadn’t turned her own headlights on.

Alastair came to see me, leaving a trail of destruction. It comes naturally to him. In the last few years he has broken the dishwasher, sloshed coffee all over the Persian carpet and split open our pink bath. He stood in it. For some reason he got in without any water, which was just as well as Dad found a live electric wire running underneath. Rats had gnawed off the plastic insulation.

It’s sweet of Al to come over, but it’s rather enervating having him around. Like many high achievers, he switches from being frantically outgoing to being totally self absorbed. I just wish he could understand that we love him for who he is and not for what he can achieve.

Alastair is even more engrossed in his work than I am. His great passion in life is birds and he loves, loves, loves making films about them. I once asked him what was the most important thing in his life, thinking he might talk about his faith or his family, his health or even perhaps me. He said, ‘Peregrine falcons.’

‘Oh. What’s the second most important thing in your life?’

‘White fronted bee-eaters.’

James says he finds it somewhat annoying; not the bird fetish so much as the desire to get up so early in the morning. Al says he’s sure everyone thinks he’s bonkers but doesn’t care. The great thing is that one is whisked along with his enthusiasm and where it takes you; out to see gannets on the Farne Islands in sparkling sunlight and high seas or off to remote parts of Morocco to find the flamingos and egrets he last filmed in the Camargue. Surprisingly good fun. A group of us girls went out to Kenya one Christmas to see him when he was making a film on the white fronted bee-eaters with Simon King. Al was so focused on the project that when we returned from a long and adventurous journey to Lake Turkana he didn't even say hello. Mind you, he was battling to complete a sequence with a mongoose. (They predate on bee-eaters.) It wouldn’t do what Alastair wanted at all and that can be extremely frustrating. I had the idea that Marmite might smell like a female on heat. They got a shot of the mongoose sniffing a bit but somehow the Marmite got everywhere. Under Alastair’s arms, on Simon King’s pigtail, all over the mongoose, and I was covered in it. Mongooses don’t smell very nice either. The idea of making wildlife films suddenly lost its charm.

 

16^th April ~ My littlest sister Mary-Dieu, aged nineteen, has a baby girl aged one. She’s called Daisy, has no schedule at all and arrives with a huge pile of laundry. It’s pretty difficult looking after her as she normally sleeps in bed with my sister and objects to being plonked in a cot. But she’s come to stay because Mary-Dieu wants to go ‘Clubbing’. Night clubbing. The thought alone exhausts me.

Daisy is a delight. Her big eyes and curls make her look like a little imp with a question mark on top of her head. I really didn’t know what to do with her, but found Araminta’s baby-walker behind the sofa. Daisy thought this was great and spent all afternoon whizzing about my room. I rather need a baby-walker myself.

Nicola, one of my best friends from school, came over. She looked at Daisy with horror and then said in a small voice, ‘I’m pregnant,’ sounding like a frightened sixteen-year old. She isn’t sixteen; she’s twenty-nine and has been married for two years. I think it’s exciting that she’s going to have a baby. I showed her the schedule, which is still hanging on the sitting room mantelpiece.

‘Oh, Sophie, I thought that was for you.’

‘Yes. I suppose it could be.’

‘Do you manage to keep to it?’

‘No, we’re always behind.’

Daisy is sleeping with Mum in her bed and my father has migrated to his study. I lie alone in my high four-poster, looking at the card of the crocodile.

Mary-Dieu (Dieu as in mildew) was nearly four when we adopted her. I was fifteen. She was the sweetest little thing, easygoing, bright and extremely articulate. Our only problem, and it was quite a hazard, was that she was, and still is, radically outspoken. She could state the obvious at embarrassing and inopportune times. We all had to go to court for her formal adoption. Mum knew that the old judge only had one hand. The other had been replaced by a hook. We were all terrified that Mary-Dieu would declare, ‘You’ve got no hand,’ and had been drilling her frantically. Instead, she walked into the court, paused in the doorway, and when sure of everyone’s attention, looked at the judge, looked up at Mum and said, in her clear piping voice, ‘I no say anything about the hook. I just tell him to be careful of the crocodile.’

For more please see: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Funnily-Enough-Sophie-Neville/dp/1466213485/