Bill Laws

 

I met my second husband in Tokyo.  He was British, younger than me by two years.  He was very smart, very funny, and came from a working-class background but because he was so smart he was streamed in school and eventually got a scholarship to Cambridge  University where he received a degree in Japanese and a Masters in Far Eastern Studies.  He worked for the British Tourist Authority and was in Tokyo with his wife covering the Far East from China on to Australia.  He traveled a great deal but when he was in Tokyo he too devoted many hours to TADC (Tokyo Amateur Dramatic Club) an interest that his wife Susan did not share.

Susan was very anorexic and eventually died of the disease.  However, not before he and I became an item and she moved back to London.  Prior to that, she had some strange thing with my first husband, Bruce.  Not quite sure what that was all about.  Basically, TADC was a hotbed of intrigue and affairs and commingling.  I think we took the 70s to heart and did our best to be as outrageous as possible.  Tokyo was cutting edge and we were all part of it.


Bill and I rented an enormous half western, half Japanese house in Azabu near the Azabu Hotel.  It used to belong to the French tutor of the now-dead Empress.  Our landlady was Miss Kawai who had lost her fiancé in the Philippines in WWII.  She was a Christian and would make annual pilgrimages to the Philippines with her church group.  We called her Ping and her little messages Pinggrams.  She was forever about to commit Hari Kiri over something.  The heating never worked, the house nearly caught on fire three times due to faulty wiring.  We forever had tabi-footed workmen scrambling all over trying to keep the old place going.  It has since been torn down and replaced with a 20 story apartment building.


We were a very international group: American, Japanese, Australian, English and very sociable: after rehearsals or read-throughs we always went out for drinks and a bite to eat.  The American Club was a favorite hangout.  And a pub called Gaslight was another.  Bill and I were assigned to direct Orwell’s Animal Farm.  It was a great success.  And of course, we became closer and closer.  Bruce and I were estranged by then and much to our shock discovered he was having an affair with Bill’s wife.  So, it was the 70s, go mad as they say.  We were married on Valentine’s Day 1974 in a civil ceremony that I did not have to be present at – the same as when we got divorced: I didn’t have to be present at that either.  Meanwhile, Bruce and I did get divorced in Geneva, very amicably, and remained good friends for the duration.   He actually fell in with an Australian woman, married her, and ended up in Kenya.  I have long lost touch with him.


So Bill and I moved into a huge old Japanese house in the Azabu area of Tokyo.  We had a great time together.  Lots of traveling, lots of parties, lots of drinking and smoking.  By this time I was working for IBM Japan for legal counsel Michel Berthier.  This was during the US Government vs. IBM.  A very interesting case and IBM would never be the same again.  Bill was restless with BTA claiming the head guy was a Russian spy.  He hooked up with this Australian chap and they were going to run a hostel in Kurashiki in Southern Japan.  That plan fell through when the other guy backed out.


Anyway, we returned to England.  I met his parents for the first time.  They lived in an 800-year-old house in Penn, Bucks.  His mother, Margaret, was originally from Bristol and had been a school teacher.  His father, Jim was the village greengrocer and used to have his shop in the front of the house in what was now called the front room.  His father, who had lost a leg while working for British Rail in London, lived with them.  Clumping downstairs every month slamming his rent money on the kitchen counter and uttering “Here’s rent.” To anyone who happened to be listening.  He was a very annoying man and eventually died at the age of 96 of natural causes.  He apparently started to go downhill when at age 90 he could no longer put up his summer runner beans.


They didn’t like me and I didn’t care for them.  She was very possessive of Bill and the father-in-law was gaga to the point that you could not have a conversation with him.  Today we call it Alzheimer’s or early-onset dementia.  She was one of the worst cooks I have ever come across in my life save for Ann Turner by way of New Zealand, my BFF in Tokyo.

 
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Michael Berthier