Timothy West, Prunella Scales and a Poignant story of love in dementia’s shadow

352pp, Michael Joseph, £18.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£22, ebook £10.99

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In her early 70s, Prunella Scales began forgetting her lines. At the Theatre Royal Haymarket, they improvised giant prompt cards in the wings to help her through A Woman of No Importance. That was in 2003. A diagnosis of vascular dementia didn’t follow for another 10 years. This month, another 10 years on from that, she and fellow actor Timothy West celebrate six decades of marriage. Scales has almost no recollection of any of it.

Pru and Me is an act of loving reclamation: a memoir pieced together by the spouse with all the memories. It’s a collaboration by virtue of Scales’s letters, written on the road and often blockquoted, and she’s the snappier phrase-maker. “I eat, sleep, sew, write letters and purr,” she wrote to her mother as she sailed to New York for her Broadway debut in 1955. And Scales will read from those letters in the audiobook, a final venture for a thespian couple who first met and acted together in a BBC play in 1961.

But in this book, mostly the voice is West’s, and its default setting is Pickwickian jollity. “Just in case you haven’t seen A Question of Attribution,” he interpolates, of Alan Bennett’s play, “and there’s every chance you might not have…” The tone suits the memories West wishes to revisit – of their early courtship and the rackety family home they made in Wandsworth. There’s splendid farce when West tries to extricate himself from an unwise first marriage using an unhelpful private detective. The nostalgia is at its most vibrant when conjuring up the bygone era of rep, when West had to dash through snowstorms to get from London to Blackpool for curtain-up.

Or the time in Salisbury when Scales fell asleep as a murdered Desdemona and, waking with a

start, had to whisper to Othello, also dead, to do her in again.

“LDO,” inscribed one actor in the visitors’ book of a boarding house frequented by travelling players. West had to have this encryption explained: “Landlady’s daughter obliges.” It’s impossible to imagine him taking advantage, but even if he did he wouldn’t tell us. He has an old-school discomfort with candour. As a child he was vouchsafed no meaningful conversations with his parents, and admits to perpetuating this failure with his daughter, Juliet, after that ill-starred first marriage failed.

His instinct to withhold is expressed in bumbling locutions and reconstructed conversations. His less charming quirk is to deploy the book’s title as a form of ungrammatical branding: “Pru and me had been in love for many months”; “When Pru and me were married…” And while his restraint is admirable, it’s sometimes an impediment. In 1980, when West was programming the Old Vic, he handed creative control to Peter O’Toole to mount a catastrophic Macbeth. Bryan Forbes, parachuted in to direct, dubbed West a Judas – “which I thought was a bit unfair”.

Several stories have been told before. But it’s charming to hear West report his wife’s early thoughts about Sybil Fawlty, whom she couldn’t play until she knew how she’d got trapped in that angry marriage. Then there’s West’s famous performance as Edward VII which, because ITV never repeated it, is sometimes misremembered. One member of the public insists that he played Henry VIII. “Have it your own way,” West eventually tells him.

His wife doesn’t remember who he’s played either, but the true Pru is still in there somewhere. “Thank you for a lovely life,” she says to West one day in Vietnam, when they’re filming their last canal journey for Channel 4. Only towards the moving conclusion does West betray something of his loneliness: “Having to repeat oneself ad nauseam every day when you’re in your late 80s can be a little exhausting at times.” Instead, he lives for two, remembers for two, and writes for two in this gentle tribute to a woman of every importance.