My Mother

An earlier version of this essay was first published in My Choice Of Words (Paragon Press 2021). I have returned to it again on hearing of the death of Tom Wilkinson.

The day before my mother died I found myself in Watford. It was not a place that I had ever been before. But it was where she had been born.

I found myself there twice that day. A storm had brought down power lines between Watford and Euston and travel to and from London was only possible on the Underground. Euston we have a problem.

I was living in Shropshire and had a voice-over session at a sound studio in Soho. The client was NFU Mutual, an insurance company, and the voice artist was Tom Wilkinson. He had a recognisable voice, northern, but classless, and one that was underexposed in advertising. 

He had recently been Gerald in 'The Full Monty’ and Hugh Fennyman in ‘Shakespeare In Love’ and was already a household name in Britain. 

His career as a Hollywood star was also firmly on the upward trajectory that would see him create memorable roles in: ’The Girl With A Pearl Earring’; Michael Clayton’; ’The Eternal Shadow OF the Spotless Mind’ and ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’. 

As well as steal the show from Johnny Depp as the villainous Nathan Cole in Jerry Bruckheimer’s wonderfully silly ‘The Lone Ranger’.

To be honest, I’d been quite surprised when he said yes. The session went well. He told me that he had previously been suspicious of advertising work but that he liked the script and he liked what he knew of the client. I told him that I was writing a screenplay myself and he wished me luck with it. He was charming and professional and had, as I should have expected, done his homework.

Walking back to Euston, my brother Michael called me. Our Mother’s condition had deteriorated, and the doctors thought it unlikely that she would live to see tomorrow.