Peter Viney's Blog

At our age, there are so many to remember from the extended family.

My mind is on the two non-family members we often saw on Christmas Day. Both were at Bournemouth School, both in the same year, though not friends.

Uncle Nick – Nick Keeping. An honorary uncle, just as my mum and dad’s close friends were honorary uncles and aunts.

Nick had the same drama teacher as Karen. They were in Henry IV Pt 1 at Bournemouth School, the first year the girls from Bournemouth School For Girls took part, then in various plays. At Anglo-Continental, we had the weekly sketch show, but once a month did a rehearsed and costumed reading of a play. It was an experiment. Colin Granger, who ran the shows, decided to do Playboy of The Western World by J.M. Synge. We had only three women teachers in 1971 and about fifty men. Normally, outside help was brought in for the plays. Nick suggested Karen, as she grew up ‘in Ireland.’ He failed to mention it was Belfast, not the West, nor that she left at nine and the reason she had had a drama teacher was to eradicate her Belfast accent.  Anyway, she arrived. None of us knew her. (Colin tended to avoid casting Nick because of the scene stealing). She walked the length of the restaurant which converted to a 350 / 400 seat theatre space.  Love at first sight. She was brilliant in the play and Colin Granger, in charge, immediately signed her up for the weekly sketch shows. When we packed up, we said, ‘We always go to the pub in Charminster for a drink afterwards.’
‘No,’ she said decisively, ‘My bus goes from the town centre. We’ll go there.’
We all meekly trailed down to the town centre. I got her phone number from Nick before anyone else did.

Once she joined the sketch team, Karen was the first to ask why we did extracts from plays rather than original material at the students’ level. That was two years before she became an ELT teacher. We started writing together. We became a basic team of four” Nick, Guy, Karen, Peter. It was like being in a band. After the 1972 pantomime (Aladdin), the school’s owner, Fritz Schillig, told Karen that students were asked to do a post-course survey and she was was easily the most popular teacher in the school. ‘But I don’t teach here. I just do the shows.’
‘So when would you like to start?’ he said.

We co-wrote annual pantomimes for host families with Nick (basically he chose the music and wrote his own part as the dame). Nick loved musicals. And he loved ‘My Way’ which we never let him sing as the dame, though it was suggested every time. ‘The Impossible Dream’ appeared more than once.

Nick was one of the two witnesses at our registry office wedding, along with Bernie Hartley.

Then when we had kids, Nick would always arrive after Christmas lunch, and play with the kids. They adored him. My mum was often there. I remember one year, she’d moved from 300 yards away to a mile away. I called her a taxi at ten. She was furious, ‘Your father would NEVER send anyone home in a taxi on Christmas Day.’ I pointed out that I’d had at least a bottle of wine and was not allowed to drive.
’That wouldn’t have stopped your father!’
Nick stepped in, ‘Laws have changed. And Peter would never send you home alone, Doreen. Obviously I’m coming in the taxi with you.’
She was mollified. Nick got on with everyone he ever met.

Nick could have been a great actor (if only he’d learned not to scene steal, but he was so popular with audiences, we lived with it). He was married three times, to a Serbian-Venezuelan, an Italian, and a Greek. He had two daughters. He spent much time in Venezuela, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Italy and Greece. Nick could pick up languages very fast.

We saw little of him in the last few years. We moved here in 1993 and Nick duly turned up after Christmas Day lunch. He took me on one side and asked if I could loan him money to get a mortgage, as my books were selling well. I explained that we had taken a bridging loan to buy this house, and still hadn’t sold our previous one. At the same time, my mother had become distressed living in a flat on a busy road. We’d moved her to a McCarthy & Stone flat which we paid for, and had another bridging loan on her unsold previous one. We were stuck for cash. He never spoke to us again. A huge regret.

Nick died in 1999. We had done our last show with him in 1985, when we were at the Regent Centre in Christchurch for a week with ‘English As A Funny Language.’ Nick was a victim of the NHS. They detected a heart problem and gave him an appointment for an operation six months later. He died a few weeks later on an ELT marketing trip to Poland. They had to force the door when he didn’t come down to breakfast.

He is in our minds always, but especially at Christmas.

Then John Wetton. I knew him from age fourteen when he joined The Palmer James Group. We ended up at Bournemouth College together and whiled away happy hours in coffee bars and listening to music at a friend’s flat, who introduced us to modern jazz. I had the courage to ride on the back of his motorbike. I still have nightmares from when he went between a bus and a car and got paint on both crash bars. By 1967, we were a gang of four – Rick Palmer, John Hutcheson, John Wetton and me. Three of them formed Tetrad, then Ginger Man with Bob Jenkins on drums.

They used to bemoan my appalling sense of rhythm (it’s not THAT bad) otherwise I could have drummed. Rick went on to Supertramp and a long career as a songwriter. John went on to Mogul Thrash, Family, King Crimson, Roxy Music, UK, Asia and Icon, plus solo with the John Wetton Band.

From around then, Boxing Day was lunch at John’s parents. They had a small hotel, which was closed in the winter, and on Boxing Day we and girlfriends came to a full traditional lunch. Karen joined us in December 1971, and was a great favourite of John’s mum. She would say, ‘I always wanted a daughter like you! And I ended up with two sons.’ John and his brother Robert would look up at the ceiling. They had heard it before.

It was probably 1972 when we were asked to leave Splinters restaurant in Christchurch, a great favourite at the time, on Xmas Eve after burning a cork and applying Zapata moustaches.  That was the year when John was in the band Family. A band member was going out with one of Max Bygraves’ daughters and after our lunch John went on to Max’s for the evening. He told me the next day it was a real ‘singalonga Max’ and the most fun he’d ever had at Christmas. That was the year John helped us move flats. Family had bought a ten year old Bentley as group transport and John used it when they had days off. John moved us from one tiny rented flat to another. All our wordly goods went in the cavernous boot.

Fast forward to the 90s and 00s. John would often have Christmas lunch with his mum and brother, phone, and join us for the cold meat and pickles in the evening. Some years he came on Boxing Day for the day. One year he cooked us a Christmas Eve dinner with his producer Mike Stone. He inherited his mum’s culinary skills. Again, he loved being with our kids.

When our oldest got a place at an American university in 1999, John took him out to lunch. I thought I was going along, but John said, ‘No, you’re not invited. What I’m going to tell him isn’t for parental ears. It’s the advice I give my young band members on their first trip to the USA.’ I never found out what it was. Daniel just said ‘it was explicit.’

John died in January 2017. It seems impossible to believe it was that long ago.

We miss them. RIP.