The yr is 1959 and the place is Melbourne. A 25-year-old actor with a passion for Samuel Beckett, booze, poetry and outrageous pranks has simply bought married for the second time, to a wonderful ballet dancer. Keen to flee the stultifying suburbia of his childhood, he and his new spouse board a steamer certain for London — which he hoped could be a bit extra swinging.
The pair discovered themselves much less swinging than sinking — in a Notting Hill basement dwelling in Patrick Hamilton-style penury. It shouldn’t be clear what might need change into of them had Barry not bought wind of one other couple of Australians who had additionally escaped the cultural desert Down Under and have been occupying a tall terraced home in north London. He sat down to write down to them.
I don’t have the letter that Barry Humphries, who died last week aged 89, despatched to my dad and mom — however I bear in mind my mum’s account of it. She had simply had a second child (me) and was in no temper for rescuing a few random, destitute compatriots. But his letter was so humorous and so exactly anticipated her dismay at buying some antipodean albatrosses, she stated sure.
There have been two empty, if shabby, rooms on the high of our home, which Barry and his spouse Rosalind may have in return for what he describes in his autobiography More, Please as “a modicum of household help”. The thought was that this assist, which might contain taking care of my sister and me, was to be carried out by Ros, whereas Barry appeared for work within the West End.
As it turned out, he discovered nothing however Ros bought a job dancing — leaving Barry because the household’s de facto au pair. I don’t know if Mum had noticed by then that he wasn’t the most secure pair of palms, or if he was already beginning the day with what he known as a “grappling hook”, a combination of brandy and port. Either method, one afternoon she left me in his care and went out.
On returning, she bought off the 214 bus exterior our home, and noticed a well-known pram being pushed up the entrance steps. The individual propelling it was a stranger — a sinister lady, tall with pointy glasses and a gash of lipstick. It could be good to say that my earliest reminiscence was wanting up from my pram and seeing a prototype of Edna Everage.
Instead, I consolation myself with the concept I’ll have been the one individual in historical past to be so unmoved by the sight of the housewife celebrity — who went on to convulse the world and as soon as rendered the then Prince Charles and Camilla helpless with mirth by merely turning up of their field on the London Palladium — that I slept by the entire thing.
The Humphries’ stint upstairs lasted about three years, though the association might need failed sooner have been it not for Mum and Dad’s affection for Ros. Barry’s ingesting made him a legal responsibility as a lodger (and presumably much more of 1 as a husband), and though Dad got here to disapprove of him he additionally revered him, much less for his hilarity than for his critical curiosity in artwork and poetry.
Mum was inclined to forgive anybody who might be so humorous about making ice cream — which was his subsequent job after taking care of us. Having proved unsuitable as a nanny he was snapped up by the Walls manufacturing facility in Acton, making raspberry ripple in tunnel 9, earlier than lastly getting an appearing job because the gravedigger in Lionel Bart’s Oliver!
Even after they’d moved out, Barry’s voice lingered in our home as we’d take heed to his document from 1962, “Wild Life in Suburbia”, on the gramophone. I can nonetheless hear the gradual, droning whine of his alter ego Sandy Stone, Australia’s most boring man. I can see my mum, who had heard it so usually, laughing and mouthing together with the phrases.
Sometimes through the ’60s, the Humphries got here spherical for Sunday lunch. On one go to, Barry recounted a time when he’d walked down our terrace with an open can of Heinz Russian salad hid in his coat. He’d doubled up and made sick noises as he poured the salad on to the pavement — solely to take a spoon from his pocket, wipe it with a handkerchief and begin consuming with relish.
His description of this trick, which he went on to carry out on aeroplanes utilizing the in-flight sickbag, had highly effective enchantment to me again then: I don’t assume every other story from my childhood excited me a lot. It seems you didn’t should be seven years previous to assume this humorous — the stunt was sufficiently outlandish and subversive to make it into a lot of his obituaries final week.
In 1976, when Barry was on the wagon, on to a brand new lady, a worldwide star and considerably estranged from the Kellaways, he despatched us tickets to his sellout present in London. I was thrilled to be in the perfect seats watching somebody I had as soon as recognized who had change into so well-known. I may see Edna was the work of genius however couldn’t fairly snort. Maybe it was that the morphing of the acquainted man together with his floppy darkish hair into the croaking, gladioli-throwing Edna was an excessive amount of. Or possibly it was one thing I noticed within the woodshed as a child.
Lucy Kellaway is an FT contributing editor
Find out about our newest tales first — comply with @ftweekend on Twitter
