Longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2014
Ben Watt's father was a working-class Glaswegian jazz musician--a
politicized left-wing bandleader and composer--whose heyday in the late
1950s took him into the glittering heart of London's West End. His
mother, Romany, the daughter of a Methodist parson, was a Shakespearean
actress who had triplets in her first marriage before becoming a leading
showbiz feature writer and columnist in the '60s and '70s. They were
both divorced and from very different backgrounds, and they came
together at a fateful New Year's Day party in 1957 like colliding
trains.
Romany and Tom is Ben Watt's honest, sometimes painful, and often
funny portrait of his parents' exceptional lives and marriage, depicted
in a personal journey from his own wide-eyed London childhood, through
years as an adult with children and a career of his own, to that
inevitable point when we must assume responsibility for our own parents
in their old age. Spanning several decades--and drawing on a rich seam
of family letters, souvenirs, photographs, public archives, and personal
memories--it is a vivid story of the postwar years, ambition and
stardom, family roots and secrets, big band jazz, depression and drink,
life in clubs and nursing homes. It is also about who we are, where we
come from, and how we love and live with one another for the long term.
