Simon Williams remembers midnight meetings with his actor father

THROUGHOUT MOST OF my childhood my father, the actor Hugh Williams, was working in drawing-room comedies in the West End, some of them written by him and my mother, Margaret. In those days, French windows were de rigueur in the theatre, the way dry ice is today. He would get home around midnight and one of my earliest memories is of him getting me up to ‘pot’ me. He’d sit on the floor beside me with his tumbler of whisky, chatting. Sometimes he’d do magic tricks.

He smelt of theatre, of greasepaint, tobacco and Trumpers hair oil (honey and flowers), and was at his most genial, so I soon learnt to hold back my pee to prolong the secret time with him. As I grew older I would drink copiously at bedtime so I’d wake up for our midnight tryst. He’d have cold roast beef and claret, and I’d have a bowl of cereal. ‘It was a good house tonight,’ he’d say, ‘packed.’ With the hours he kept, I thought he must be a burglar.

When I was old enough I was allowed to see him at work. There he was, wandering about the stage in his usual clothes, speaking quite normally, giving people drinks and kissing women who weren’t my mother. Money for old rope – all you had to do was take your glasses off. In his dressing room I liked to watch the ritual of his preparation. With The Archers on his Roberts radio and his deaf dresser polishing his shoes, he’d rub greasepaint into his face and darken hi s moustache. When they c a l l e d ‘Beginners please,’ he’d finish his Bell’s whisky and stub out his Craven A. For me the die was cast.

I’ve always liked the story of the boy who tells his dad, ‘ When I grow up, I want to be an actor.’ His father replies, ‘You’ll have to choose son, you can’t do both.’ When I summoned the courage to tell Dad I wanted to follow in his footsteps, he was seemingly distraught and said he’d cut me off without a penny.

I asked, with due respect, how that was possible with him being an undischarged bankrupt. After a longish pause, while my heart was thudding, he began to roar with laughter. Two years later he wrote a part for me in his new play, His, Hers and Theirs, and we set off around the country on a pre-london tour.

After the show we’d sit together in stage-door pubs till closing time – it was as if I’d been practising the late-night drinking with him since I was two.

Dad said he’d cut me off without a penny. I asked how that was possible with him being bankrupt