Untold Stories (27 page)

11
April, Wandsworth
. What strikes you about a prison is not that it's unlike any other place you've ever been in, but that it's quite like all sorts of places you use quite regularly. It's not unlike a hospital, for instance, or a state school, a big post office or even one of the new universities. Here
are the same harassed but well-meaning staff, short-handed, crippled by lack of funds, struggling to make the institution work despite all the curbs and cuts imposed by a penurious and ill-disposed government.

After umpteen TV series the look of the place is quite familiar too, though not as lofty as the prison in
Porridge
, and cosier altogether than the prisons in movies. But then this is the wing where most of the sex offenders are, or the prisoners who are likely to be attacked. Many of them are quite old, or seem so anyway; maybe they're just in their fifties. I look at them, bald, stooped, one of them only half there, and wonder what it is they've done, wishing that they carried a notice of their crime on their chests so that one could place them in some sort of spectrum, fit the face to the offence and so somehow make sense of it.

There's no particular smell but this wing is said to be the cleanest, with no slopping out, the remand wing the worst because there the inmates are certain they are going to get off so treat the place like a pigsty. Decent bearded art-school teachers is what one or two of them look like but whether these are prisoners or civilian staff I can't tell. Two gay men take me round the well-stocked library, dressers they could be on a film set or assistants in a provincial outfitters, opera buffs probably. There are two-tone walls, a century of paint over the bricks and lots of studded doors – cottage doors almost. Some dinky warders, in short-sleeved shirts, dark ties and epaulettes, not quite giving you the wink but certainly a cheeky stare.

Read and then answer questions though without feeling I do much good or do anything more than pass the time. I note, though, my presumptions, made out of sheer politeness rather than liberal prejudice, that most of my audience have been wrongly imprisoned and that I'm anxious not to be thought personally responsible for this.

26
April
. To Holland for the Vermeer exhibition. Travel to Delft separately from the rest of the group, who make up a coach party. R. hopes that this expedition, which includes prominent bankers, lawyers and industrialists, all benefactors of the National Gallery, will nevertheless be overtak
en by the ethos of rather different English coach parties abroad, chanting ‘'
ere we go!' ere we go! Ver-meer! Ver-meer!
' at the startled burghers of The Hague, while elderly connoisseurs moon out of the coach windows. One understands this did not happen.

With much of his life a mystery and the content of his paintings so simple and accessible, one reason for the popularity of Vermeer is that he eludes the art historians. With Vermeer expert knowledge doesn't take you far. There may be symbolic significance in a discarded broom, say, or an unemptied laundry basket, but that is not the point of the painting. The paintings are about women and about loving women, as he must surely have done; most of the men in differing degrees ninnies. Miracles of light, the paintings are also miracles of space as, for instance,
The
Milkmaid
, where the space behind the stream of milk coming from the jug is almost palpable. I have a sense of vertigo, though, in the presence of great paintings, as when standing on a cliff and feeling oneself pulled to the edge. ‘If I were to put my fist through this painting,' I think, ‘things would be irrevocably changed and my whole life be seen as leading up to this act.'

The rooms adjoining the Vermeer exhibition contain part of the Mauritshuis's permanent collection, and passing from the presence of these few simple, utterly unassuming pictures into a room containing at least half a dozen Rembrandts, including
The Anatomy Lesson
, it's startling to find how clamorous these other masterpieces now seem to be. Though there is often something going on in the Vermeer paintings (a woman reading a love letter, or writing one, or just admiring herself in the glass), the inner peace of the pictures and the unassertiveness of the sitters, nearly all of them women, are so simple and direct that even two of Rembrandt's most famous self-portraits, one at either end of his life, seem almost coarse by comparison. I'm sure it's the tranquillity of the Vermeers rather than its small size, that makes it an untiring exhibition to see. And how small some of the pictures turn out to be, some of them scarcely larger than the postcards on sale in the museum shop.

27
April, Delft
. A tangle of bicycles dredged up from the canal. Grey with mould and mud and with bright patches of rust, they are dumped on the quay where, surrounded by chic galleries and art establishments, one isn't certain that bicycles is all they are. Is this art?

The Dutch in the seventeenth century were famed for their neat houses and the orderliness of their lives, qualities celebrated not so much in Vermeer as in the paintings of his contemporaries, particularly de Hooch, which form a companion exhibition at Delft to the Vermeer show at The Hague. Though they're as bad at drink as we are (the carriage from Rotterdam to Brussels dominated by a group singing and shouting), and though they're as prone to graffiti, the Dutch are still noticeably neat in other aspects of their lives, as in the acres of carefully cultivated allotments which lie along the railway. The plots are quite modest, but all seem to come with a hut that is less of a garden shed than a summerhouse and outside which, this warm Friday afternoon, oldish couples in skimpy bathing costumes are taking the sun and one old man naked except for a G-string. I imagine the owners of these plots and pavilions live in the high flats nearby, though such a tempting display of civility and order would not long survive proximity to similar flats in England.

9
May
. Vanity: my sixty-second birthday. Someone behind me in M&S says: ‘Are you all right, young man?' I look round.

11
May
. On the Leeds train the conductor announces: ‘The trolley will shortly be coming through with a selection of hot and cold snacks, tea and coffee and other beverages. For your information, pushing the trolley this morning is Miss Castleford 1996.' And Miss Castleford duly comes through, though hardly the busty, brazen apparition one expected, but a rather quiet, shy-looking girl who, not surprisingly, is covered in confusion and fed up at having to cope with the jokes of the bolder passengers. Or customers, as we now are.

16
May
. Classic FM continues to irritate. Tonight we have a recording of
Elgar's
Dream of Gerontius
, the gap between Parts One and Two filled with various promotions (‘The haunting music of the Pan pipes'). Gerontius having achieved death, his soul begins its journey to judgement, lucky, I suppose, not to be seen off with a cheerful message from Henry Kelly. With it being
Gerontius
I'm surprised the whole thing isn't a plug for Saga's ‘specialised insurance for those of fifty and over'.

Excepted from these strictures about Classic FM is Michael Mappin, who keeps the bad jokes to a minimum, isn't wearingly cheerful and has some specialised knowledge, lightly worn, i.e. he is like an announcer on Radio 3. Most of the others are scarcely past the stage where they snigger at foreign names.

17
May
. Despite the vindication of the National Gallery in the filmed restoration of Holbein's
The Ambassadors
, the cleaning controversy rumbles on. One misconception that fogs the argument is to do with the nature of time. Michael Daley, the NG's chief critic, represents time as a benevolent mellowing process whereby paintings grow old gracefully, their colours maturing, the tints changing, but all at the same rate and in the same fashion, so that the composition arrives in the present day, veiled a little perhaps but still much as the artist intended. This is, of course, nonsense. Paintings more often than not have quite violent and eventful lives; they are loved, after all, and so naturally they get interfered with and touched up and, their admirers being fickle, when they get to seem a little old-fashioned they are dressed up a bit to suit the taste of the time. They limp into the present coated with centuries of make-up but still trying to keep body and soul together. ‘Mellowing' is just not the word.

19
May
. Come out this morning (still grey, still cold) to find smack in front of my door a fish – a wet fish actually, about nine inches long, still glistening as if just caught. Pinkish in parts (a mullet?) dropped by a seagull perhaps or hurled into the garden by a dissatisfied customer? Except that the wet fish shop in Camden High Street has long ago been ousted by
yet another emporium selling leather jackets. Anyway, a fish. I leave it for a while to see if it catches a gull's eye, then put it in the bin.

24
May
. Run into Frank Dickens the cartoonist walking down the stalled escalator at Camden Town tube. Says that in Bristow, his strip in the
Standard
, he's about to introduce the concept of Desk Rage, with frenzied attacks on other people in the office. About the same age as me, he still cycles but not as sedately as I do: Frank goes racing cycling and even wears Lycra shorts. He has several bikes, and when someone else in his club admired one of them and offered to buy it, Frank made him a present of it. When they were out cycling next, the young man to whom he had given the bike kept just behind him, mile after mile, until Frank slowed down and waved him on, whereupon the young man streaked away into the distance far faster than Frank could go. Afterwards he asked him why it had taken him so long to pass and the young man said: ‘Well, I did-n't feel it was right to pass you on your own bike.' The existence of such an unmapped social area and the delicacy required to negotiate it would have delighted Erving Goffman.

31
May, Chichester
. The city has streets and streets of immaculate seventeenth-and eighteenth-century houses, particularly round Pallant House; they're manicured and swept clean and at night are as empty as a stage set. It's quiet too, except (and this is a feature of English country towns) in the distance one suddenly hears whooping and shouting and the sound of running feet as young drunks somewhere make their presence felt and kick out against this oppressive idyll.

1
June
. When Jeremy Sams directed
Wind in the Willows
in Tokyo he had many practical problems, chief of which being that the actors did not trouble to make themselves heard. He was well into rehearsals before he found out that this was because they were all miked, as actors generally are in Japan. Another dilemma was almost philosophical: the cast were anxious to know about other characters like their own – other Moles, for
instances, other Toads. ‘But there are no others,' explained Jeremy. This the actors were unable to grasp or the fact that
Wind in the Willows
was not a type of English play and that there was no other with which it could be compared. All the plays in Japanese theatres are genre plays, variations on a theme or set of themes; the idea that a play might be unique seemed to them very strange indeed.

27
June, Chichester
. Talking to Maggie Smith about the number of grey heads in the audience for
Talking Heads
, I compare them with a field of dandelion clocks. She says that she's read or been told that the Warwickshire folk name for these was ‘chimney-sweeps' so that Shakespeare's ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust' is thus explained. I had always taken chimney-sweepers to be a straightforward antithesis, poor and dirty boys and girls the opposite of clean and bronzed ones. This, of course, doesn't bear close examination, though what probably planted it in my mind was a nightmare I used regularly to have as a child in which a chimney-sweep or coalman rampaged through our spotless house. I look up chimney-sweeps in Geoffrey Grigson's
The
Englishman's
Flora
(shamefully out of print) and find that, the flowers being black and dusty, chimney-sweep and chimney-sweeper are Warwickshire slang for the plantain, particularly the ribwort, and that these were used to bind up sheaves of hay; children, whether golden or otherwise, used to play a game not unlike conkers with the flowers on their long stems, in the course of which, presumably, the flowers disintegrated, or came to dust.

1
July
. Watch Stanley Kubrick's
Full Metal Jacket
, which was shot in England, the Isle of Dogs doubling for Vietnam. It's remarkable chiefly for the language of the Marine instructor, a wonderfully written and terrible part, which takes language into areas certainly undescribed in 1987, when it was made, and not often since. For example: ‘You're the kind of guy who'd fuck someone up the ass and not do them the courtesy of a reach-around.'

3
July
. Silly programme on
Timewatch
last night attempting to rehabilitate Haig. (‘Acid-bath Haig?' ‘No. Blood-bath Haig.') It was just historians playing see-saw with no new evidence forthcoming and no examination of the sources, his diaries, for instance, treated as trustworthy when it's pretty certain Haig rewrote them to fit in with his version of events. If the fact that he never visited the actual Front was the only count against him it would be sufficient to condemn him. But how like a man not wanting to see the suffering lest he be upset. People always complain about muck-raking biographers, saying: ‘Leave us our heroes.' ‘Leave us our villains' is just as important.

4
July
. In the evening go across the road to the newly empty No. 55 for a kind of book fair. Francis Hope died in the Paris air-crash in 1974; pressed for space, his widow Mary Hope is now, twenty-two years later, disposing of his books and has asked some of his friends round for a glass of wine and to take away whatever they might want. It's an odd occasion, the sort of thing that might kick off a novel, with a group of middle-aged friends revisiting their youth and remembering some of the books they read then. There's Camus and Sartre, Colin Wilson and Lawrence Durrell – not quite the literary equivalent of flares but inducing something of the same incredulity: ‘Did we really read/wear these?'