RUTHIE: We are a family of girls. There are the four of us, and now
there are four granddaughters. My poor father. When we were all at home he
had to build himself another bathroom because he couldn’t get near the one
we had. He’s had to do a lot of adjusting, and I don’t think anything in his
upbringing prepared him for it. My parents’ first child was a little boy who
died when he was 4½ hours old. My mother wasn’t allowed to see him, but my
father did, and when he went home that night to his parents in tears, his
own father told him to pull himself together. It just wasn’t done, or seen
as helpful, to give way to emotion.
Living with four incredibly emotional daughters has been a huge learning curve
for him. All of us have said things and done things over the years that must
have absolutely horrified him, but he took it all on — our noisy emotional
ups and downs, our terrible relationships — and allowed us, very
graciously, to grow up. We’re all daddy’s girls, without a doubt. I think
that must be quite hard for my mother, because whatever’s going on, we take
his side. And if we’re upset or in trouble, it’s him we go to.
My mother is very dramatic. She’ll go: “Oh, my God! David!...” My
father’s much more even. He’s possibly the least judgmental person I know.
If you go to him with a problem, whatever it is, and however far outside his
own experience, he’ll say: “Okay, let’s figure this out.”
His confidence in his relationship with all of us has been totally rocked by
losing Noel; it’s made him wipe out everything that has gone before. The
problem was that Noel felt such a sense of failure about her life, she was
very careful not to let any of us know what was really going on. Her death
has been awful for all of us, but it’s been absolutely horrific for him. Not
only has he lost a child, but he’s lost a child who was in the worst place
in her life, and he couldn’t do anything about it. What he doesn’t realise
is that there’s nothing he or any of us could have done to change what
happened. Noel had made her decision. If she’d wanted to, she would have
reached out and said: “Help me.”
At one point she was given a 50/50 chance of survival, so there was a terrible
rollercoaster of emotions going on the whole time. Seeing my father, this
incredibly strong man, crying was unbearable. When she died, the hospital
chaplain said: “Be prepared to be very angry with each other.” And we’ve
been through that. Lots of anger. Lots of not understanding each other’s
grief.
I still find it shocking that Noel’s gone. I feel it like a physical
pain. There’s a song in the show called How Did I Get to Where I Am? I
imagine that’s where she was the night she took the overdose, and I cry
throughout that song every single night. It’s a kind of therapy. But I
don’t want to remember her dying and dead. I want to start trying to piece
together who she was when she was alive — we all do — but it’s so hard to
wipe those images out.
Dad is not the man he was, and he never will be, but he’s become even more
loving as a father. He’s totally there for us, and nothing, however small,
is taken for granted any more. I’ve always been either up or down
myself — I don’t live in the middle. As I get older, I worry less about what
people think, and that’s like being set free. But it’s been a tough ride. My
father always says: “Ruthie, I don’t worry about you.” But he’s said that to
every single one of us and I know he worries about us all.
I’ve tended to keep the really dire stuff to myself until I’m out the other
side, simply because I don’t want to worry him. But there have been a couple
of times when I’ve sat at the kitchen table and howled because I was so
depressed. I could see him literally wracking his brains, trying to think of
a way to help, but there’s absolutely nothing a father or mother can do to
make it go away.
The trouble with me is that nothing is ever enough, and this is the struggle.
I’ve been there for my children an awful lot, but when I perform, it’s like
someone turns on a light. The theatre is my church — that’s the only way I
can describe it.
Unlike me, Dad has always been on a totally even keel. What’s changed is that
he can’t hide what he feels any more, and he doesn’t try.
When I was a child, I was abused by a family friend. I was 4½ the first time
and it was pretty violent. It happened again when I was eight and nine. I
was so terrified, I told no one. I thought I could just block it all out,
but it doesn’t work like that. It instantly took my childhood away.
I thought it was my fault, and as I grew up it permeated everything in my
life. I was so incredibly angry, and at the same time very scared of men.
The only man I really let in was my father. Dad’s a survivor and he gave me
my survival instinct and my sense of hope. He used to say: “Things are
always better in the morning.” And you know what? They are.
He still writes, still has his deadlines. If he stopped working, he would feel
as if he’d been put out to pasture. I think he is proud of what I do, but I
have to be honest and say, I don’t know. My father is not a gusher. My
mother will go: “Darling! You’re the best thing in it! There’s nobody like
you!” With my father it’s “Well done. Jolly good.” I think the attention
I’ve had must have been quite hard for my sisters at times — and he’s all
for not making a fuss.
Dad often looks after my girls, not just to help, but because he loves to.
He picks them up from school, he takes them on little trips and he finds real joy
in them. I think he found joy in all of us, too, and I love him for that. He had
no role model for fatherhood.
He just allowed it to engulf him. And in doing so he became the kind of father
each of us needed him to be.
DAVID: The headmistress at Ruthie’s primary school was the first to
notice she could sing. She said: “Have you ever thought about sending Ruthie
to theatre school?” We hadn’t, and we didn’t really understand what she
meant until Ruthie sang in some production her sister was directing and this
voice nearly blasted us out of our seats. Quite extraordinary.
She was always the leader of the pack, smoking behind the bike sheds, all
that. She was terribly naughty. You dreaded parents’ evenings with Ruthie:
you never came out smiling. My father gave her his beautifully maintained
Ford Escort, and the first day she had it she loaded it with all her friends
and wrecked it against an oak tree outside the village school.
She’s never been very good with things, Ruthie, but she’s very careful with
friends. She’s very loyal and they all go back a long way. She still talks
to [Prince] Edward and John Gordon Sinclair. Edward came to our little
cottage, which is tiny, several times. Once we borrowed some tables from the
village hall and had a party in the garden, with rather a lot of wine. The
royal family were very good with her, and we got used to it all, but I never
saw that relationship as something that would last. Ruthie is so lively, I
think she would have found it hard to behave herself in the long term.
She has quite a social conscience, and I don’t think she gets that from us.
Her mother and I tend to be a bit selfish. We’ve always looked after
ourselves well but we’ve been rather less good at looking after people
outside the family.
I sometimes think maybe we should have cared a bit more. My children always
said: “We can talk to you about anything.” But, you know, I’m not 100%
certain that they actually did. Noel didn’t tell you a great deal; she
tended to keep her problems to herself, and I think that might have been my
fault. I said to all of them: “If you’ve got problems, come to me, but at
the end of the day you’re probably going to have to work them out for
yourself.” Perhaps she felt she couldn’t talk to me. I don’t know.
There’s so much guilt, so many questions, and we’ll never know the answers.
The family has been wrecked by Noel’s death — things are just not right, and
they’ll never be right again. We spent so many hours on the phone and I just
wish she’d said: “I’ve got a problem, Dad, and I don’t know what to do.” I’d
have dropped everything and gone over. But the call came too late.
Ruthie took it to heart the most, because she and Noel were so very close;
they were always talking on the telephone, and even she didn’t detect
anything. None of us picked up the clues. What happens after something like
this is that you pick over everything that happened in her life and you
think: “Did we do enough of the right things?”
When I was younger. We drank far too much, we threw lots of parties, we were
pretty extravagant, and it affected the girls quite a lot. To some extent it
was the time and the culture, but in the back of my mind I know I didn’t set
a particularly good example. Ruthie was in her thirties when she told me
she’d been abused by someone within our circle of friends. I’m afraid
I lost it a bit. I sort of exploded. I began to understand how people take revenge.
I felt murderous for quite some time — I used to dream about bumping him off
— and that’s a frightening state to be in. In the end, common sense
prevailed and I wrote him a letter saying that the family would have nothing
to do with him and that if I ever came within spitting distance of him I’d
kill him. I still feel suffused with anger every time I think about him.
Once again, if only Ruthie had said, “This is what happened, Dad,” I could
have done something at the time. But she was four and scared stiff. I try to
lose sight of it, but some things you just can’t shake off. There’s this
feeling that you’ve somehow lost. That not only was this all wrong, but you
can’t take revenge without causing more problems, more heartbreak. If we’d
pressed charges, the world would have known, and Ruthie didn’t want that. I
still regard the fact that I didn’t do anything as a weakness.
Perhaps as a result of all this I have a much deeper relationship with Ruthie
than I ever thought I’d have. And I think we understand one another a great
deal better. All of us now understand the depth of feeling that exists
within the family. We’d always taken our love for one another for granted.
It isn’t until you hit tragedy or some awful happening that you talk about
it and begin to realise just how important and how deep this love within the
family is, and how dangerous it can be if you let go at any time.
I think having her own family has helped Ruthie a great deal. I was so proud
of her, because she stepped aside from the business to look after her
children when they were very young, and I think that was quite hard for her.
She and Tim are a bit overindulgent, though — and I do believe spoiling
children is the prerogative of grandparents. I do all kinds of silly things
with the little ones. They’re hard work but such fun.
My daughters still fill our house too. They’re always coming over for lunch
and retreating here after getting involved with hopeless, unreliable men.
It’s a sign that we must have got something right. We like to think
we’re still looking after them, but it’s possible that they think
they’re looking after us.
Interviews: Caroline Scott. Portrait by Louis Quail
