‘Mr and Mrs Eric Thompson… RIDICULOUS!’

It started with a corduroy jacket and a kiss in the back of a bus… Actress PHYLLIDA LAW recalls how she and her late husband, The Magic Roundabout narrator Eric Thompson, finally said ‘I do’

It must have been when my brother James had his motor accident that Cupid lit a very long fuse. The news came when I was playing Julia in The Rivals at Bristol Old Vic (in 1956). There was no way I could leave to see James in hospital in London and there were no details about his injuries, except that they were serious. Mother was in Glasgow getting dire, inaccurate details on the phone. Everyone else was somewhere else.

Even though I hadn’t seen him for months, it was Eric Thompson, known as Tom, that I thought of. I rang him. It wasn’t a long call: he didn’t need any details. He just went. He was the mate who had met every train to Exmouth from Bristol when we were touring. Even now I remember how when an actress fainted in her dressing room, Tom asked for a window to be opened and just picked her up in his arms and carried her there. I found myself wishing it was me.

I knew he watched me if I played the piano and we’d had a snog in the back seat of a touring bus, but I was 23 and most of the time rather taken with an older man. It’s a phase.

Then there was his jacket. He always wore an old corduroy jacket, pin cord it was called, and it had aged beautifully. I always said the jacket was the clincher. A comfort blanket. If I took his arm and he was wearing the jacket, I felt at home.

We found ourselves together again in the pantomime at Bristol. We had the Christmas party at the ballet school and on Boxing night I was clearing up the detritus of a wild evening in the dance studio when I found a figure crouching in the half-light cast by a large Christmas tree decorated with candles. Tom. He was staring at the floor with an empty glass in his hand. As I took it from him he said, ‘Will you marry me, Philly?’ I thought he was drunk.

We remained strangely silent, those last few days of the year. I heard him telling someone that we were, apparently, not talking to each other. He didn’t look at me much. He wasn’t sulking, he just didn’t look at me much. It was dismal. And New Year’s Eve can be rather challenging in circumstances like that, can’t it? I was snivelling in my dressing room and washing my feet in the basin. It’s difficult. Good balance is required and weeping is not recommended.

Some people can create atmosphere by themselves. Mr Thompson did. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him doing the crossword with a baby on his lap. Any old baby. Or to have seen him playing bridge and playing with the baby, smoking Gauloises, with a mug of PG Tips – very strong, two sugars please.

‘Ask him,’ I said to Fred, the assistant stage manager, ‘if he’ll ask the question again.’

Fred came back rather swiftly

We moved into a condemned attic in a condemned house. Very La Bohème