wrote the essay and handed it in. I was expecting some nice remarks about her imagination and sense of humour, but instead the teacher sent me a note, saying, ‘Your daughter is deluded and needs help.’ Not long before Amy passed away, she reminded me about that homework and the trouble it had caused – and she remembered another of my little stories, which I’d forgotten: I’d told her and Alex that when I was seven I’d been playing near Tower Bridge, fallen into the Thames and nearly drowned. I even drove them to the spot to show them where it had supposedly happened and told them there used to be a plaque there commemorating the event but they had taken it down to clean it.
During school holidays we had to find things for Amy to do. If I was in a meeting, Jane would take her out for lunch and Amy would always order the same thing: a prawn salad. The first time Jane took her out, when Amy was still small, she asked, ‘Would you like some chocolate for pudding?’
‘No, I have a dairy intolerance,’ said Amy, proudly. She’d then wolfed down bag after bag of boiled sweets and chews – she always had a sweet tooth.
Jane used to work as a volunteer on the radio at Whipps Cross Hospital, and had her own show. Amy would go in with her to help. She was too young to go round the wards when Jane was interviewing the patients, so instead she would choose the records that were going to be played. Once Jane interviewed Amy, and I’ve still got the tapes of that conversation somewhere. Jane edited out her questions so that Amy was speaking directly to the listeners – her first broadcast.
One link I never lost with Amy when I left home was music. She learned to love the music I had been taught to love by my mother when I was younger. My mum had always adored jazz, and before she met my father she had dated the great jazz musician Ronnie Scott. At a gig in 1943, Ronnie introduced her to the legendary band leader Glenn Miller, who tried to nick her off Ronnie. And while my mum fell in love with Glenn Miller’s music, Ronnie fell in love with her. He was devastated when she ended the relationship. He begged her not to and even proposed to her. She said no, but they remained close friends right up until he died in 1996. He wrote about my mum in his autobiography.
When she was a little girl, Amy loved hearing my mother recount her stories about Ronnie, the jazz scene and all the things they’d got up to. As she grew up she started to get into jazz in a big way; Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan were her early favourites.
Amy loved one particular story I told her about Sarah Vaughan and Ronnie Scott. Whenever Ronnie had a big name on at his club, he would always invite my mum, my auntie Lorna, my sister, me and whoever else we wanted to bring. We saw some fantastic acts there – Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett and a whole host of others – but for me, the most memorable was Sarah Vaughan. She was just wonderful. We went backstage afterwards and there was a line of about six people waiting to be introduced to her. When it was Mum’s turn, Ronnie said, ‘Sarah, this is Cynthia. She was my childhood sweetheart and we’re still very close.’
Then it was my turn. Ronnie said, ‘This is Mitch, Cynthia’s son.’
And Sarah said, ‘What do you do?’
I told her about my job in a casino and we carried on chatting for a couple of minutes about one thing and another.
Then Ronnie said, ‘Sarah, this is Matt Monro.’
And Sarah said, ‘What do you do, Matt?’
She really had no idea who he was. American singers are often very insular. A lot of them don’t know what’s happening outside New York or LA, let alone what’s going on in the UK. I felt a bit sorry for Matt because he was, in my opinion, the greatest British male singer of all time – and he wasn’t best pleased either. He walked out of the club and never spoke to Ronnie Scott again.
Amy also started watching musicals on TV – Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly films. She preferred Astaire, whom she thought more artistic than the athletic Kelly; she enjoyed Broadway Melody of 1940, when Astaire danced with Eleanor Powell. ‘Look at this, Dad,’ she said. ‘How do they do it?’ That sequence gave her a love of tap-dancing.
Amy would regularly sing to my mum, and my mum’s face would light up when she did. As Amy’s number-one adoring fan, who always thought Amy was going to be a star, my mum came up with the idea of sending nine-year-old Amy to the Susi Earnshaw Theatre School, in Barnet, north London, not far from where we lived. It offered part-time classes in the performing arts for five- to sixteen-year-olds. Amy used to go on Saturdays and this was where she first learned to sing and tap-dance.
Amy looked forward to those lessons and, unlike at Osidge, we never received a complaint about her behaviour from Susi Earnshaw’s. Susi told us how hard Amy always worked. Amy was taught how to develop her voice, which she wanted to do as she learned more and more about the singers she listened to at home and with my mum. Amy was fascinated by the way Sarah Vaughan used her voice like an instrument and wanted to know how she could do it too.
As soon as she started at Susi Earnshaw’s, Amy was going for auditions. When she was ten she went to one for the musical Annie; Susi sent quite a few girls for that. She told me that Amy wouldn’t get the part, but it would be good for her to gain experience in auditioning – and get used to rejection.
I explained all of that to Amy but she was still happy to go along and give it a go. The big mistake I made was in telling my mum about it. For whatever reason, neither Janis nor I could take Amy to the audition and my mum was only too pleased to step in. As Amy’s biggest fan, she thought this was it, that the audition was a formality – that her granddaughter was going to be the new Annie. I think she even bought a new frock for the opening night, that was how sure she was.
When I saw Amy that night, the first thing she said to me was, ‘Dad, never send Nan with me for an audition ever again.’
It had started on the train, my mum piling on the pressure: how to sing her song, how to talk to the director, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that, look the director in the eye …’ Amy had been taught all of this at Susi Earnshaw’s but, of course, my mum knew better. They finally got to the theatre where, according to Amy, there were a thousand or so mums, dads and grandmothers, each of whom, like my mum, thought that their little prodigy was going to be the new Annie.
Finally it was Amy’s turn to do her bit and she gave the audition pianist her music. He wouldn’t play it: it was in the wrong key for the show. Amy struggled through the song in a key that was far too high for her. After just a few bars she was told to stop. The director was very nice and thanked her but told her that her voice wasn’t suitable for the part. My mum lost it. She marched up to the director, screaming at him that he didn’t know what he was talking about. There was a terrible row.
On the train going home my mum had a go at Amy, all the usual stuff: ‘You don’t listen to me. You think you know better …’ Amy couldn’t have cared less about not getting the part, but my mum was so aggravated that she put herself to bed for the rest of the day. When Amy told me the story, I thought it was absolutely hysterical. My mum and Amy were like two peas in a pod, probably shouting at each other all the way home on the train.
It would have been a great scene to see.
Amy and my mum had a lively relationship but they did love each other, and my mum would sometimes let the kids get away with murder. When we visited her, Amy would often blow-wave my mum’s hair while Alex sat at her feet and gave her a pedicure. Later my mum, hair all over the place, would show us what Amy had done and we’d have a good laugh.
* * *
In the spring of 1994, when Amy was ten, I went with her to an interview for her next school, Ashmole in Southgate. I had gone
