The woman who really knew Spike

Nick Morrison meets the woman who was by Spike's side for over 30 years.

NORMA Farnes found it easy to tell when Spike was coming out of his depression. He would lock himself in his room for days at a time and ignore the notes she pushed under the door, but one day she would turn up and find a piece of paper pinned to the door and she knew he was getting better if the note read 'F*** off and leave me alone'.

For 36 years, Norma was personal assistant and agent to Spike Milligan, trying to manage his unpredictable genius. She had to cope with both his black moods, which sometimes lasted for days or even weeks, and his hyperactive exuberance, and by turns was left humiliated, angry, grateful and proud. But somewhere along the way Norma also became his friend. She was there for him, and he was there for her.

"He was kind and very, very, very generous, he was compassionate, he was cruel, he was heartless, he was warm, he was foolish. There were two people there: when he was good he was very good, and when he was bad he was horrid."

But Norma only ever planned to stay for three months. After working in television in her native North-East - she was born in Thornaby on Teesside - she moved to London in 1962 and had spent four years temping when she spotted an advert in the Evening Standard. 'Personal assistant to showbusiness personality in Bayswater,' it read. So she went along to the Alfred Marks Bureau in Notting Hill to inquire about the job.

"The girl said it was Spike Milligan, so I said 'I don't want to work for him'," Norma recalls. "I had heard all the stories about the depressions and the unreliability, but she said 'Actually, he is a very nice man'. I thought it was only three months out of my life, it was only 4d on the Tube, so I went along."

So she duly presented herself at Milligan's first floor Bayswater flat on a bitterly cold January day, to find him standing in a small room with the French windows open.

"The first thing I said to him was 'It is freezing in here'. He said, 'Yes, I know. I don't like the Americans.' He pointed to the central heating, which was switched off. I didn't know whether I should tell him the central heating was invented by the Romans."

As she debated whether to take the job, she noticed there were two packets of Swoop, wild bird seed, on the top of a grey filing cabinet. "I thought if he is kind to the wild birds in winter he can't be that bad," Norma says.

So began an extraordinary relationship - captured by Norma in her newly-published memoir - with the man she calls a "cantankerous, eccentric, extraordinary bloke"; and who, in turn, called her "a bloody stubborn Northerner". For, despite the rows, they stayed together, in an sort of love affair. According to one of Spike's closest friends, Eric Sykes, while Spike's three wives knew the outside of Spike, only Norma knew the inside.

Orme Court in Bayswater was full of comedians, including Frankie Howerd, Eric Sykes and writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, writers of Hancock's Half Hour and Steptoe and Son. Years later, Norma found they had taken bets on how long she would last.

Shortly after she was hired, Spike fell out with his agent, and asked Norma to handle some negotiations. She demurred, still harbouring ambitions of being a tv producer, but Spike insisted, the negotiations went well, and she stayed.

"Nothing was planned, everything seemed to slot in place and we seemed to get on almost straight away," Norma says. "We used to have real humdingers of rows, and someone once said it was a battle with a job tagged on the end. It was a huge challenge all the time, but we got carried away and one year led to the next."

But if Spike could be hard work, he could also be very generous. When Norma was going through a difficult divorce in 1974, Spike suggested she collected his letters and publish them as a book, using the advance and royalties to pay off her debts. His illness - he suffered from manic depression all his adult life - meant he was two different people.

"Ray Galton said, 'It is the illness that stinks', and I think it probably was. He was very mercurial: up in a minute, but then down in a minute, but he never held a grudge. He had an expression when we had had a fall-out. He used to say, 'If you don't want to stab me in the back, shall we have a cup of tea?'."

On one occasion, Spike had brought all the electric heaters to his office and locked himself in, as was his habit when he got depressed. Norma's notes went unanswered, until one day she had no sooner arrived home when she got a phone call asking her to go back. When she arrived, it was to find the room was suffocatingly hot and Spike was the worst she had ever seen.

'He said he couldn't go on, didn't want to go on and there was nothing to go on for. Everything was black and for the first time he thought it was never, ever going to get any better," she says.

Spike walked over to his grey filing cabinet, and took out what looked like a large, brown cigar case. It was a holster and he took out a gun and handed it to Norma.

"He said, 'I couldn't ask anybody else to do this. You could do it for me. I will make it so much easier for you. I will turn my back and you could do it.' He was silently crying and I thought: 'I can do this for him', as you would, if somebody was suffering so much. But I said, 'What about Paddy (Spike's wife)? What about the children and your poor mother?' We must have talked for hours, and it was the worst thing I ever went through in my life."

Like the others, this depression passed, and when Spike was well he was a lover of life, always going to Ronnie Scott's jazz club or out to the theatre, although he disdained the showbiz life, refusing to go to parties with an insistence he wasn't turning out for "peanuts and sherry". And when Norma was having a hard time, Spike was there for her - looking after her mother when her father died, helping her then-husband through his depression.

"If you get that from somebody, then you have to give something back. That is the way it works," she says. "He was a good man. He was kind and he was compassionate. Just because he had an illness, you couldn't leave him."

It's now nearly two years since Spike died, at the age of 83. He was having dialysis three times a week, but right to the last he was determined to cling to life.

"He was fighting like a bastard at the end." Norma's eyes start to fill as she remembers. "I stood and looked at him and it was the hardest thing I ever said to him in my life, because I think he could hear me. I said 'Spike, please let go. For once in your life, just let go'. He had to go, it was his time.

"I miss him like hell. The dynamo has gone out of my life. I miss him. I miss him a lot. It is nearly two years. Two years in Feb," she says, gazing into the distance.

She misses the 30-40 phone calls a day, particularly the way he never said hello or goodbye. She misses the kindness, and she probably misses the tantrums too. Most of all, she misses a friend.

"Somebody asked me how I remember him, and without any hesitation I said 'As my best friend'. As I was driving home, I thought 'What the hell did I say that for, with all the ups and downs?' But you forget the cruel bits. You forget all that."

* Spike: An Intimate Memoir (Fourth Estate) £20.