3 hours ago
4
I am sure I must have cried as a child, but by the time I was a teenager it had stopped. It was probably a boarding school thing. Very stiff upper lip. My parents are not the most emotionally available human beings, either. I like to tease them by saying: “I love you.” You can see the panic in their eyes. They will normally say: “All right then, bye.”
My gran died when I was about 18, and I was sad, of course, but in terms of tears there was nothing, no water. I never cried at movies. I didn’t cry on my wedding day, nor at the birth of either of my daughters. It never alarmed me. I actually thought I might have underactive tear glands. Looking back, it was probably all about control.
In 2023 I went to see the musical Operation Mincemeat for the first time in the West End. What struck me was the humour – a lot of it was taking aim at the public school culture I grew up with. I didn’t cry then but I did have the urge to see it again. I think it was maybe the third or fourth time of going when the song Dear Bill got me. It appears halfway through the musical and the lyrics take the form of a letter from a woman to her husband, who is away fighting in the second world war. I was shocked to find myself crying. I had to go back to see it with my wife, Yael, to prove to her that I could now cry. She definitely thought I was a bit emotionally repressed. When the song came on I took her hand and dabbed it on the side of my eye. Her face was one of utter shock.
I’ve thought about why it unlocked something in me and I think it’s because the song itself has so many layers of repression to it. The character who sings it, Hester Leggatt, rarely shows any emotion. And the lyrics themselves only talk about the heartache of separation through the metaphor of tending to roses. There’s a line about how the flowers are dull and not thriving. I thought: is that how my wife and children see me?
As the song continues, we witness the gradual release of Hester’s true feelings: anger, guilt, all sorts of emotions pour out. One line – “Why did we meet in the middle of a war, what a silly thing for anyone to do” – was written in the real-life letter the song is based on. That added another layer to it.
One thing you notice on maybe the third time you go is that, halfway through the song, Hester accidentally says the name of her former love, Tom, rather than Bill, the pretend character she is writing the letter to. That moment is especially poignant. I’ve now been to see Operation Mincemeat 29 times, with trip number 30 already booked. I often cried at Dear Bill, but then it moved on to other songs, such as Useful, which is about the women whose important wartime work went largely unrewarded. Now when I see the show I’m almost crying when I get there. It’s like a Pavlovian response as soon as I hear the intro music.
I’ve been to see the musical on Broadway too with my family, and I have met the cast at the stage door. I’m a teacher and I have taken my year 6 kids to see it. I think I heard some sniffles during that, and it wasn’t just me.
I have since found myself crying in lots of situations outside Operation Mincemeat. It has been like learning a new skill. I always cry now when I watch the film Interstellar. When my class watched Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, one of my pupils said: “Look, Mr Allen’s crying!” I even cried at a bloody Brandi Carlile concert and that’s not my type of music. She sang a song that was basically a farewell to her children’s innocence, and I had tears streaming down my face. Even Yael thought that was a bit much – and she will cry at a Dove advert.
I have definitely become a more rounded person. When a good friend of mine, Josh, died of stomach cancer at 34, completely out of the blue, I went to the funeral and was an absolute mess. Josh knew what I had been like before, so I liked to imagine him looking down at me sobbing and finding it hilarious. But in a strange way it felt good. To sit there and repress it would have been terrible. Instead, this was cathartic. We went for drinks afterwards and it felt as if I had really got it all out. Without Operation Mincemeat, I’m honestly not sure I would have been able to.
