Whatever time of the year you set off along its mainly chalk encrusted paths it’s best to remember that the seasons are never to be trusted.
Sometimes it's as though they conspire to lay-in-wait
for the passing traveler, before unleashing their armory upon their unsuspecting
gargoyle-wearing prey as they innocently wander the nooks and crannies of the supposed
sleeping giant.
Twice the elements have forced me from the hills and
down into the sparsely populated and welcoming valleys.
On both occasions I found myself in Fulking, the home
of Carry On scriptwriter, Talbot ‘Tolly’ Rothwell. And on the second occasion
it was he who gave me refuge.
I turned up at his door wet, tired, hungry and
unannounced. He cured me on all of the first three accounts. At the time Tolly was working on his
final Carry On script, ‘Dick’, and he wasn’t in the best of physical or mental
health.
His study door was open and screwed up pieces of paper
were littered across its floor. I was, for that night, to be his sounding
board.
Tolly felt that it wasn’t just him who was feeling his
age. The Carry On series itself was, with ‘Dick’, about to ring in some
unwanted changes.
For a start it was to be the last appearances of Sid James (after 19 entries in the series) and Hattie Jacques (after 14 entries).
Then, of course, the film also brought down the
curtain on Tolly’s eleven year reign as scriptwriter for the Carry Ons.
Plus, it was also to be Barbara Windsor's final acting
role in a Carry On film. The times they were a changing!
Tolly could read the changes of the South Downs weather much better than I could, and early the next morning
I was on my way.
I left a troubled, but much loved, man alone with his demons
and failing health. The Carry Ons were in terminal decline also.
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