‘People say we’ve given them hope’
Features Timothy West tells Judith Woods how meandering Britain’s waterways has kept he and his wife, Prunella Scales, close
At home with Timothy West and Prunella Scales in their rambling house in Wandsworth, South London and their library could pass for a film set. The walls are lined from floor to ceiling with a full set of Grove’s, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Feydeau plays, Donne poems and countless biographies. There are quirky objets d’arts, a baby grand, cultural clutter representing a lifetime of collection – of recollection.
I have come to talk to West about his new book, Our Great Canal Journeys: A Lifetime of Memories on Britain’s Most Beautiful Waterways, a wonderful coffee table tome chronicling the couple’s love affair with the countryside, and each other.
“I was in EastEnders for a year and I thought ‘that’s it, I’m going to be stopped all the time and asked for selfies’, but no,” chuckles West – 83, and still an imposing bear of a man.
“Canal Journeys on the other hand is watched by so many people who don’t mind coming up and talking to us and telling us how much they enjoy it.”
The pair’s televised canal trips have meandered through eight series and taken them to such places as Ireland, Sweden and Kerala.
It’s the very definition of slow television; their boat travels along at just four miles an hour. And at the heart of every episode is the portrait of a marriage, of two people still utterly devoted to one another after 54 years, yet struggling beneath the spectre of dementia. Over a decade ago, Pru was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. In West’s words “she is disappearing, bit by bit.”
Their programmes could have been artfully edited; there would have been neither shame nor difficulty in airbrushing her illness out of the picture. But the pair elected not to cover it up.
“At the very beginning we asked ourselves, ‘do we want to show this?’” says West of his wife’s often visible confusion. “But by then many people knew about her condition so if we didn’t bring it up it would have been dishonest and unfair to Pru and to me.
“A lot of people do get in touch with me and say ‘I’ve got a wife or husband who is suffering from Alzheimer’s and you have given us hope’.”
The couple have two sons together, including actor son, Samuel, and a daughter from West’s previous marriage, as well as six grandchildren and two great grandchildren.
Every trip they take on-screen is a glorious testament to the human spirit. And in those moments when Pru, now 85, suddenly looks lost and her smile turns vacant, it’s a little bit heartbreaking.
“It’s deeply saddening because you’re saying goodbye slowly to a person who has meant so much to you, who has been so full of life and energy and encouragement,” reflects West.
“You mustn’t dwell on what has been or you would go crazy; you have to live each day as it comes. There’s no point talking about the past and no point planning for the future, the only thing certain is today.”
Just then Pru enters the room, tiny and fragile as a bird but eyes wide, brimming with joie de vivre.
“Cold paws! Sorry I’ve got cold paws!” she chirrups as she energetically takes my hand in hers.
West instructs her with the faux bellicosity familiar to all wives, to come over and sit for a minute so the photographer can take their picture.
Pru acquiesces with the sort of good humour that drives all curmudgeonly husbands to distraction.
She wrote the foreword to Our Great Canal Journeys, a prologue in which she refers to her “condition”. I tell her that I found her words very gracious.
“Ooh do you hear? I’m gracious! Did you know I was gracious?” she giggles to West.
And then, suddenly Pru falters. She wonders aloud if she might see the foreword as she’d like to read it.
Her husband instantly senses her bewilderment and swiftly distracts her – me – by harrumphing about getting the photographs done.
I feel awkward, an eavesdropper to their intimacy. But the moment passes quickly. The only small mercy of memory loss, West says, is that even the sense of loss is soon forgotten.
When we are alone, he tells me they have a live-in housekeeper-cum-carer who looks after Pru.
“The good thing is that Pru doesn’t get depressed or agitated,” he says. “She gets bloody cross of course when she can’t remember things, but that’s to be expected.”
Throughout their life together, they have enjoyed Britain’s waterways. The peripatetic nature of the profession, plus West’s own restlessness, have led them to steal away whenever possible.
“A canal is not taking the direct route, because it follows the landscape’s contours,” says West.
“It’s winding along, passing places you would never get to by any other means or for any other reason.”
It remains a salve for West, one of the finest classical actors of his time – which he emphasises is not yet over – who has commanded stage and screen throughout his career with his presence and charisma.
“I’ve played Lear, Macbeth, Uncle Vanya, I’m too old for many parts, but I believe I’ve still got a John of Gaunt or a Polonius in me,” he says.
When I wonder aloud whether he ever felt drawn to doing more comedy – he memorably played the straight man in the Lee Mack comedy Not Going Out – I am met with a vigorously barked objection.
“Comedy is life!” he retorts. “I hate these artificial sub divisions that casting directors impose. If there’s a
‘You mustn’t dwell on what has been; you have to live each day as it comes’
funny line and the actor says it and the audience laughs then he can “do” comedy.”
Yet as humans – and viewers – we crave stories, and the moving story of West and Pru, moving gently through Britain’s canalways, offers something really rather precious.
“Pru and I agree that canals are a reminder of a quieter Britain. You have space for thoughts you have never had before, you see things that remind you of your own life; I love thinking about my own past.”
It is all the more cruel then, that Pru is gradually losing her connection to their shared history. But she has no choice; West reserves his exasperation for the Facebook generation which has carelessly cut itself off from real life in pursuit of virtual thrills.
“Young people are losing out on an awful lot by not having conversations face to face,” he says.
“When every thought, every opinion is reduced to Twitter level there is no depth. Nobody ever feels a need to justify their stance on anything. If anyone disagrees they just yell ‘shut up!’ across cyberspace.”
He chuckles and looks stern simultaneously, before deciding that everyone in the country should be obliged to spend a long weekend a year travelling along Britain’s backwaters by boat.
“They would just have the water, the scenery and their own thoughts,” he says. “At that speed you regain a sense of perspective, and without that, where would any of us be?”