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different wording but expressing the same sentiment. And you could never argue with him about it.

      If he was on location or on tour there would be a litany of conditions. Most important was that he had to have a quiet room. Indeed, he would inspect every one in the hotel to make sure they had given him the quietest before he could settle for the night. Once he left a comfortable bed and tried to sleep in a wardrobe because there was less noise. He was obsessed with sleep, not being able to sleep for worry about insomnia, it seemed to me at first. It never changed. He told me that if he possessed the world’s top secrets and enemies kept him awake for three nights he would tell all. Once, much later, when Prince Charles invited him to spend the weekend at Highgrove, the bedroom was not quiet enough for him. So he took the blankets off the bed and slept in the bath where there was less noise to disturb him. Years later he sent Charles a blue plaque inscribed ‘Spike Milligan Slept Here’ to be fixed in the bathroom. And that, I am told, is what happened to it.

      He could switch from euphoria to deep dismay in a second. After touring with The Bed Sitting Room he was heaped with praise from every quarter. In an interview director Peter Brook pronounced him ‘a free genius’. ‘Spike Milligan is the greatest of all theatre artists of our time.’

      Spike returned to the office in buoyant mood. One day he said he wanted to show me his handiwork in Kensington Gardens. ‘We’ll look at the Elfin Oak, walk through the park and have lunch at Fu Tong in Kensington High Street.’ He was very proud of the Elfin Oak, for without his efforts it would have disintegrated. It was a 600-year-old tree in Richmond Park which had been carved by a sculptor, Ivor Innes, in 1911, before being uprooted and moved to Kensington Garden nineteen years later, when his wife, Elsie, published a children’s book, The Elfin Oak of Kensington Gardens. Innes maintained the Elfin Oak until he died in the Fifties.

      Spike was fascinated by elves, goblins and fairies and had been held in thrall by the book as a child. In 1964 he took his daughter, Laura, to see the tree and found it very neglected, the delicate carved figures all chipped and peeling. Laura was disappointed.

      ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘what a pity someone can’t mend it.’

      That was all Spike needed to spur him into action. He recruited a team of helpers, persuaded Rentokil to preserve the tree and British Paints to provide the waterproof paint. The restoration was a labour of love and now he wanted to be the one to give me my first glimpse of his beloved tree.

      It was one of those spring days when the sun had the warmth of an early summer morning. He bounded, and I walked, over freshly cut grass. Then yards from the unprotected Elfin Oak he stopped abruptly. His face moved from horror to ineffable sadness. I asked what was wrong. It was the tree. Part of one fairy’s wing had been snapped off.

      ‘We must go back to the office. Now.’

      We walked in silence. At Number Nine he went upstairs to his room and locked the door. I had never seen anything like it and found it difficult to believe that this upset could plunge him into such despair. Over the years little things could and did tip him into depression. He possessed a vein of sensitivity that reacted all too often, sometimes unpredictably, and produced hurt unimaginable to most of us. On that occasion he stayed in his office for three days and nights, never once eating, perhaps not even drinking. His silence unnerved me. I had yet to learn to slip notes under his door when it happened. When at last he emerged and came into my office his face was grey, his body stooped. It was amazing to me that the ‘vital’ man Peter Brook had described in such adulatory terms was the one standing before me – all because of an act of vandalism. A week later I asked what had made him so ill.

      ‘I’m not ill,’ he said. ‘I’m suffering from contemporary society. The sickness of it. Think of all the care that went into restoring those little people and animals living in that tree – and some sick yobbo snaps off a wing. They are the ones that are ill. Me? I just want to write scripts and books, poetry and music, to make the world a better place. I’m not the one that’s ill. They are.’

      In the late Sixties and Seventies Spike’s mental state was extremely fragile. It was not only the damaged fairy on the Elfin Oak that could trigger a depression. A picture on the wall hanging out of true could do it. As time passed it came to seem almost normal for him to lock himself in his room for days.

      Inevitably this meant I spent a lot of time on the telephone to Paddy and came to know her well. She warned me that he was a self-medicator. As the tablets were on prescription he should not have been able to get them without one, but he had a supplier. He consumed Tryptozole, a damaging anti-depressant drug, with as little concern as children pop Smarties, up to six tablets a day. Paddy advised me to put placebos in his tablet bottles, so I did when I could. He did not seem to notice the difference.

      How Paddy lived through the start of a depression and his brooding, raging moods I shall never know. She loved the man and to her it must have been torture. One refuge was spending, and then there were her uncontrollable splurges of gorging. ‘I might as well be living in the fridge,’ she told me more than once. Spike found this difficult to cope with and when he had had enough he moved into the office, which caused her to eat even more. Once he was locked in his office she would ring to talk to him, but he would not take her calls, so she either rang me or came to Number Nine to find out how he was. Although he would not talk to her he always wanted to know whether she had called. This was small comfort to Paddy. When her weight ballooned it was her turn to pop pills – diet pills. Never a week passed without her trying some new slimming aid. When those failed she found doctors who could be persuaded to give injections to curb her appetite.

      During one episode she came to the office and her appearance was shocking. I told her things were bad with Spike. She sat down quickly, dived into her handbag and broke off a piece of chocolate.

      ‘Please have some. It’s Lindt and very nice.’

      When I shook my head she burst into tears. ‘I can’t help myself when he gets a depression.’

      The stress of being married to Spike must have been horrendous. The longer I worked with him the more fascinated I became by this complex character. One day he was totally incapacitated, the next a man brimming with ideas and energy enough to charge round a squash court. Why was he so driven, so talented, often impossible but so vulnerable? In a way his outrageousness was compelling; you never knew what he would do next, and so often he seemed to get away with it. For example, he suddenly announced, ‘I have had this bloody black and white television on rental from Granada for nine years. Write to Sydney Bernstein [Granada’s top man] and tell him I have paid for it twenty times over and he should give it to me.’ I did and Sydney obliged. And when once I explained I would have to leave the office for an hour to do the household shopping, he told me not to be so ridiculous. He picked up the phone, dialled and handed it to me. ‘Harrods. Give your order and they’ll deliver it.’

      ‘Don’t be silly. I don’t have that sort of money.’

      ‘But I do and I need you here.’

      So Harrods delivered our groceries.

      There was also the challenge of such remarks as ‘I’m always being overwhelmed by time wasting and you’re the biggest waster of my time.’

      ‘Get on with it’ became my response.

      It was probably a combination of all these factors that made me stay with him. At times he made me furious, but my heart ached for him at the first signs of depression. I learnt to recognize them. Sometimes it would be caused by something in particular, like the Elfin Oak episode, at others it just came upon him. The first indication I would get was a slowing down of his normally lightning mental responses and bouts of exercise. Then the lethargy became total. The normally open office windows were closed, his blinds drawn, the electric fires put on, food ignored. I would sit with him when I sensed he needed the presence of another human being. Neither of us would speak. On other occasions he preferred to be alone. I once asked him to explain how he felt at such times and he gave me this poem, ‘Manic Depression’, published years later in Small Dreams of a Scorpion.

      The pain is too much

      A

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