Amy, My Daughter Read online

  When I was a little boy I had choked on a bit of apple and my father had panicked. So, when Alex choked on his dinner, I panicked too, forcing my fingers down his throat to remove whatever was obstructing him. It didn’t take Amy long to start the choking game. One Saturday afternoon we were shopping in Selfridges, in London’s Oxford Street. The store was packed. Suddenly Amy threw herself on to the floor, coughing and holding her throat. I knew she wasn’t really choking but she was creating such a scene that I threw her over my shoulder and we left in a hurry. After that she was ‘choking’ everywhere, friends’ houses, on the bus, in the cinema. Eventually, we just ignored it and it stopped.

  * * *

  Although I was born in north London, I’ve always considered myself to be an East Ender: I spent a lot of my childhood with my grandparents, Ben and Fanny Winehouse, at their flat above Ben the Barber, his business, in Commercial Street, or with my other grandmother, Celie Gordon, at her house in Albert Gardens, both in the heart of the East End. I even went to school in the East End. My father was a barber and my mother was a ladies’ hairdresser, both working in my grandfather’s shop, and, on their way there, they’d drop me off at Deal Street School.

  Amy and Alex were fascinated by the East End so I took them there often. They loved me to tell them stories about our family, and seeing where they had lived brought the stories to life. Amy liked hearing about my weekends in the East End when I was a little boy. Every Friday I went with my mum and dad to Albert Gardens where we’d stay until Sunday night. The house was packed to the rafters. There was Grandma Celie, Great-grandma Sarah, Great-uncle Alec, Uncle Wally, Uncle Nat, and my mum’s twin, Auntie Lorna. If that wasn’t enough, a Holocaust survivor named Izzi Hammer lived on the top floor; he passed away in January 2012.

  The weekends at Albert Gardens started with the traditional Jewish Friday night dinner: chicken soup, then roast chicken, roast potatoes, peas and carrots. Dessert was lokshen pudding, made with baked noodles and raisins. Where all those people slept I really can’t remember, but we all had a magical time, with singing, dancing, card games, and loads of food and drink. And the occasional loud argument mixed in with the laughter and joy of a big happy Jewish family. We continued the Friday-night tradition for most of Amy’s life. It was always a special time for us, and in later years, an interesting test of Amy’s friendships – who was close enough to her to be invited on a Friday night.

  I spent a lot of time with the kids at weekends. In February 1982, when Alex was nearly three, I started taking him to watch football – in those days you could take young kids and sit them on your lap: Spurs v. West Bromwich Albion. It was freezing cold, so cold that I didn’t want to go, but Janis dressed Alex in his one-piece padded snowsuit, which made him look twice his size – he could hardly move. When we got there I asked him if he was okay. He said he was. About five minutes after kick-off he wanted to go to the Gents. Getting him out of that padded suit was quite an operation, and then it took another ten minutes to get him into it again. When we got back to the seat, he needed to go again so we had an action replay. At half-time, he said, ‘Daddy I want to go home – I’m home-sick.’

  When Amy was about seven, I took her to a match. When we got home Janis asked her if she’d enjoyed it. Amy said she’d hated it. When Janis asked why she hadn’t asked me to bring her home, she said, ‘Daddy was enjoying it and I didn’t want to upset him.’ That was typical of the young Amy, always thinking of other people.

  At five Amy started at Osidge Primary School, where Alex was already a pupil. There she met Juliette Ashby, who quickly became her best friend. Those two were inseparable and remained close for most of Amy’s life. Her other great friend at Osidge was Lauren Gilbert: Amy already knew her because Uncle Harold, my dad’s brother, was Lauren’s step-grandfather.

  Amy had to wear a light-blue shirt and a tie, with a sweater and a grey skirt. She was happy to join her big brother at school, but she was soon in trouble. Every day she was there could easily have been her last. She didn’t do anything terrible but she was disruptive and attention-seeking, which led to regular complaints about her behaviour. She wouldn’t be quiet in lessons, she doodled in her books and she played practical jokes. Once she hid under the teacher’s desk. When he asked the class where Amy was, she was laughing so much that she bumped her head on his desk and had to be brought home.

  Amy left a lasting impression on her Year Two teacher, Miss Cutter (now Jane Worthington), who wrote to me shortly after Amy passed away:

  Amy was a vivacious child who grew into a beautiful and gifted woman. My lasting memories of Amy are of a child who wore her heart on her sleeve. When she was happy the world knew about it, when upset or unhappy you’d know that too. It was clear that Amy came from a loving and supportive family.

  Amy was a clever girl, and if she’d been interested she would have done well at school. Somehow, though, she was never that interested. She was good at things like maths, but not in the sense that she did well at school. Janis was really good at maths and used to teach the kids. Amy loved doing calculus and quadratic equations when she was still at primary school. No wonder she found maths lessons boring.

  She was always interested, though, in music. I always had it playing at home and in the car, and Amy sang along with everything. Although she loved big-band and jazz songs, she also liked R&B and hip-hop, especially the US R&B/hip-hop bands TLC and Salt-n-Pepa. She and Juliette used to dress up like Wham!’s backing singers, Pepsi & Shirlie, and sing their songs. When Amy was about ten she and Juliette formed a short-lived rap act, Sweet ’n’ Sour – Juliette was Sweet and Amy was Sour. There were a lot of rehearsals but, sadly, no public performances.

  I was devoted to my family, but as Amy and Alex got older, I was changing. In 1993, Janis and I split up. A few years earlier, a close friend of mine, who was married, confided in me that he was seeing someone else. I couldn’t understand how he could do it. I remember telling him that he had a lovely wife and a fantastic son: why on earth would he want to jeopardize everything for a fling? He said, ‘It’s not a fling. When you find that special someone you just know it’s right. If it ever happens to you, you’ll understand.’

  Unbelievably I found myself in a similar situation. Back in 1984 I had appointed a new marketing manager, Jane, and we had hit it off from the start. There was nothing romantic: Jane had a boyfriend and I was happily married. But there was definitely a spark between us. Nothing happened for ages and then eventually it did. Jane had been coming to my house since Amy was eighteen months old and had met Janis and the kids loads of times. She was adamant that she didn’t want to come between me and my family.

  I was in love with Jane but still married to Janis. That’s a situation which just can’t work indefinitely. It was a terrible dilemma. I wanted to be with Janis and the kids but I also wanted to be with Jane. I was never unhappy with Janis and we had a good marriage. Some men who stray hate their wives but I loved mine. You couldn’t have an argument with her if you tried: she’s such a sweet, good-natured person. I didn’t know what to do. I really didn’t want to hurt anybody. In the end I just wanted to be with Jane more.

  Finally, in 1992, I made up my mind to leave Janis. I would wait until after Alex had had his Bar Mitzvah the following year, and leave shortly afterwards. Telling Alex and Amy was the hardest thing; I explained that we both loved them and that what was happening was nothing to do with anything they’d done or not done. Alex took it very badly – who can blame him? – but Amy seemed to accept it.

  I felt awful as I drove away to live with Melody in Barnet. I stayed with her for six months before I moved in with Jane. Looking back now, I was a coward for allowing the situation to go on for so long, but I wanted to keep everybody happy.

  Strangely, after I left I started seeing more of the kids than I had before. My friends thought that Amy didn’t seem much affected by the divorce, and when I asked her if she wanted to talk about it, she said, ‘You’re still my dad and Mu
m’s still my mum. What’s to talk about?’

  Probably through guilt, I over-indulged them. I’d buy them presents for no reason, take them to expensive places and give them money. Sometimes, when I was starting a new business and things were tight, we’d go and eat at the Chelsea Kitchen in the King’s Road where I could buy meals for no more than two pounds. Years later, the kids told me they’d liked going there better than the more expensive places, mostly because they knew it wasn’t costing me a lot.

  Two things never changed: my love for them and theirs for me.

  Amy in a contemplative mood. My birthday card in 1992.

  2

  TAKING TO THE STAGE

  Wherever I was living, Amy and Alex always had a bedroom there. Amy would often stay for the weekend and I’d try to make it special for her. She loved ghost stories: when I lived in Hatfield Heath, Essex, the house was a bit remote and quite close to a graveyard. If we were driving home on a dark winter’s night I used to park near the graveyard, turn the car lights off and frighten the life out of her with a couple of grisly stories. It wasn’t long before she started making up ghost stories of her own, and I had to pretend to be scared.

  On one occasion Amy had to write an essay about the life of someone who was important to her. She decided to write about me and asked me to help her. It had to be exciting, I decided, so I made up some stories about myself but Amy believed them all. I told her I’d been the youngest person to climb Mount Everest, and that when I was ten I’d played for Spurs and scored the winning goal in the 1961 Cup Final against Leicester City. I also told her I’d performed the world’s first heart transplant with my assistant Dr Christiaan Barnard. I might also have told her I’d been a racing driver and a jockey.

  Amy took notes, 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 there some twenty-five years earlier and Alex was there so it was a natural choice for Amy. Incredibly, my old form master Mr Edwards was still going strong and was to be Amy’s house master. He interviewed Amy and me when I took her to look round the school. We walked into his office and he recognized me immediately. In his beautiful Welsh accent, he said, ‘Oh, my God, not another Winehouse! I bet this one doesn’t play football.’ I had made a bit of a name for myself playing for the school, and Alex was following in my footsteps.