Untold Stories (34 page)

The square is taken up almost entirely by a huge open-timbered market hall which is, I suppose, seventeenth or eighteenth century, a vast edifice with a roof like a cathedral. We sit outside the local pool-hall café and watch the comings and goings. Were such a building in Otley and not the Garonne it would be high on the English tourist trail; here, thank goodness, no one bothers. And of course this is Europe and more stained by history than England ever is. These beams will have seen ropes flung over them for hurried hangings in the Terror and the White Terror that
followed, and the Occupation and the retribution that followed that, dark shapes swinging among the beams. So it is not like Otley, which just nurtured Thomas Chippendale, who made chairs. No, we are not a serious people, as how should we be?

26
August, L'Espiessac
. After years of sniggering English tourists having themselves photographed next to the town sign, the burghers of Condom have at last woken up to the fact that they are sitting on a gold mine. So now, though there is some doubt whether the town has any connection with prophylaxis at all, a Musée des Préservatifs has opened and the decent old-fashioned sepia postcards of this fairly ordinary provincial town have been banished in favour of highly coloured jokey views: a landscape in which the poplars are green condoms, the clouds white ones; monks have condoms as cowls and even the chaste tower of the twelfth-century cathedral has been sheathed in a condom.

None of which would matter much had not some enterprising mayor decided that the town could do other things besides exploiting its eponymous connection, so the decent little square in front of the cathedral now boasts half a dozen gleaming steel flagpoles, with the flags, I suppose, of all condom-using nations. Still, one must be grateful they are flags and not themselves condoms. Worse, there is a ‘water feature', a pool from which water overflows down a ramp of artificial stone crossed by a shallow steel bridge which tourists are encouraged to think of as an ideal photo opportunity. In due course someone will throw a coin in the pool and all that will start. It's almost English in its vulgarity.

Apropos the cathedral (and French churches in general): I never understand why they are so dull. There are generally no monuments, no ancient clutter, just sickly nineteenth-century statuary, virulent stained glass and bits of modish ecumenicalism. Why there is no evidence of society in the shape of tombstones, plaques and inscriptions no one seems satisfactorily to explain. I suppose it's the Revolution, but how was it so comprehensive as to leave not even a paving stone to bear witness to the society it displaced?

31
August
. Drive by back roads to Leeds, avoiding the Bank Holiday traffic and stopping en route to look at a church at Broughton near Skipton. The vicar comes over to open the door, a bit dishevelled as he's just back from a car-boot sale to raise funds to restore the bells so that they can ring in the millennium. At first sight it's quite a plain church, though with some good fourteenth- and fifteenth-century woodwork round the family pew of the Tempests, the local gentry who were (and are) Catholic. This helps to explain a tomb cover propped against the wall which is a communal gravestone for those who died in the Pilgrimage of Grace, the northern rebellion against the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1537. Mutilated around the same time are two effigies of the Virgin and Child, the head of the Virgin knocked off one, the head of the Child knocked off the other and both found buried outside the north wall sometime in the nineteenth century.

The guidebook implies that burying the statues was a further stage in the iconoclasm which knocked the heads off, but it might equally well have been done out of reverence and to preserve what was left, this neatly exemplifying one of the current controversies in sixteenth-century historiography: the degree of persistence of Catholic belief after the break with Rome.

A leaflet explains how the red sandstone from the tower came from the foundations of the Roman fort in nearby Elslack, some of the stones still blackened from when the Scots attacked the church after Bannockburn in 1314. Near the gate of the churchyard is the tomb of Enoch Hall, who was one of the escorts accompanying Napoleon to St Helena and who stayed there ten years before coming home to Broughton to be thirty years the local schoolmaster.

We sit outside listening to the wind streaming through a huge copper beech and talk about this ordinary enough church which has been bound up with great events in the nation's history: a conventional thought, though one which would have excited me when I was fifteen and first took to visiting churches and which excites me still, fifty years later, when, thanks to Rupert, I've taken to visiting them again.

Then over the deserted moors and down into Keighley, an empty Leeds and the train to King's Cross.

10
September
. Watch some of a programme about Dennis Potter, but the assumptions it makes about the relationship between art and life are so naïve and wide-eyed and scarcely above the tabloid level that I don't persist. It takes Potter at his own self-valuation (always high) when there was a good deal of indifferent stuff which was skated over. One of his best plays,
Where Adam Stood
, an adaptation of Edmund Gosse's
Father and
Son
, is not mentioned, as it seldom is. The programme also interviews some of Potter's heroines, and once the actors start talking about what they see as the significance of the words they're required to speak there's no telling what nonsense comes out, some of it very solemn.

13
September
. Wake early on Sunday morning and short of something to read find a copy of the
Torrington
Diaries: Tours through England 1781–94
of Hon. John
Byng, and this passage:

There are echoes of Aubrey here but also, in the comments on roads and ‘a general society', of almost anybody writing about the state of England any time in the last forty years; one just needs to substitute ‘TV' for ‘a general society' and it's a contemporary cliché.

30
September
. Finish reading
The Guest from the Future
by György Dalos, an account of Isaiah Berlin's visit to Anna Akhmatova in Moscow in November 1945 and its disastrous repercussions on Akhmatova's career, or, at any rate, on her relations with the authorities. Neither the poet nor the philosopher comes out of it particularly well, though right at the start I have a problem with Akhmatova, who is universally acknowledged as a
great poet but whose poetry, of which snatches are printed here, seems in translation commonplace and banal. This is thanks, no doubt, to the shortcomings of the translation, as I remember feeling much the same about Pushkin when I was in the army on the Russian course, my rudimentary Russian never sufficient for me to appreciate him in the original. So one has to take the greatness of the poetry on trust, which is what Akhmatova does herself, her conviction of her own greatness another stumbling block. Indeed both she and Berlin take for granted their role at the centre of history, which again is unappealing. What they both lack, Akhmatova in particular, is a touch of Kafka.

Had I known about this meeting twenty years ago I might have thought of making it a companion piece (or a pendant, as they say in art history) for
An Englishman Abroad
, an account of another Moscow visit, though the Berlin–Akhmatova encounter furnishes fewer jokes other than the comic (but portentous) appearance in the courtyard of Akhmatova's apartment house of the drunken Randolph Churchill.

Run into David Storey in M&S. Never in high spirits, he always cheers me up. Today he is trailing round the store a couple whom he has spotted shoplifting. He often does this apparently, I suppose because he is a novelist, and says the shoplifters' technique is always the same. Those intending to pinch go into the store, find the security guard and ask the whereabouts of, say, soup or sandwiches. The guard shows them and then, since they have established themselves as bona fide customers, takes no further notice of them. David S. says he has never reported anyone, though, like me, he's tempted to do so when they shoplift so blatantly as to insult the intelligence of anybody who might be watching.

6
October
. I have been reading, courtesy of Keith Thomas,
Bare Ruined
Choirs
, Dom David Knowles's account of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Four hundred and fifty years after the event I find myself actively depressed by the destruction and vandalism it involved, so when R. says to me this morning, ‘You seem a bit low,' it's not because my mind has been on Kosovo but on how the King's Commissioners even grubbed up
the floor tiles at Fountains in 1538 in order to sell them off in the chapterhouse as architectural salvage. And like Randolph Churchill reading the Bible and saying, ‘God, isn't God a shit!' so have I never quite taken in the full horror of Henry VIII (whom, typically, the English just think of as a joke).

Knowles, of course, is a Catholic historian but he's hardly propagandist, not bothering to bring out some ironies I would have found it hard to resist. Latimer, for instance, one of the Oxford martyrs burned by Mary, was himself present and preached at the much more savage burning of a friar, John Forest, in 1538. I had always thought both Ridley and Latimer saintly figures but Latimer seems to have been pretty coarse-grained and a clown and was lucky to have friends who made sure he had a quicker end than he gave Friar Forest. Conversely there is Thomas More, venerated as a saint but himself a burner and harrier of heretics, though that is not dwelled on by Knowles or, more lately, by P. Ackroyd. So it's not inappropriate this morning that I sign an appeal by the National Secular Society on behalf of Peter Tatchell, charged under some ecclesiastical nonsense Act of 1860 with indecent behaviour (i.e. demonstrating) in Canterbury Cathedral.

It occurs to me that there is something
rollicking
about many Protestant divines in the sixteenth century and which comes from indulging in constant controversy. It's the same coarsening detectable nowadays when bishops are too much on television.

19
October
. Alan Clark and Kenneth Clarke resurrected this lunchtime to comment on the arrest of Pinochet. Both routinely acknowledge Pinochet's crimes, although Clark A. is careful to refer to them as ‘alleged', probably because he didn't actually hear the screams of the tortured himself. Both have that built-in shrug characteristic of eighties Conservatism, electrodes on the testicles a small price to pay when economic recovery's at stake. They both talk contemptuously of gesture politics as if Lady Thatcher having tea with the General isn't gesture politics too, the gesture in question being two fingers to humanity.

25
October
. At Broadcasting House I run into Richard Wortley, now a distinguished drama producer and who was at Oxford with me, where we both had digs in Summertown with a Mrs Munsey. Mrs Munsey had a middle-aged daughter, Dulcie, who was excessively shy and who bolted noisily into the back room if she ever heard one coming. There was also a large old cat which used to crap in the bath. In the way of things when one is young, none of this seemed at all strange to me.

Mrs Munsey was a good soul, every morning providing a huge cooked breakfast brought up on a tray by Dulcie and laid reverently outside the bedroom door. All I want in a morning is a cup of tea and a bit of toast, but perhaps sensing that this huge breakfast was a source of pride to Mrs Munsey I never had the heart to point this out, leaving me with the daily problem of disposing of a fried egg, two rashers of bacon, baked beans and a slice of fried bread. I eventually evolved a routine whereby I parcelled the lot up in yesterday's
Times
(stolen from the JCR), which I deposited in the used-ticket receptacle at the bus stop in Banbury Road. So skilled did I become at this daily deposition that I could punt the parcel in as I cycled by without even slowing down, and I can see myself doing this the hot Whitsuntide morning at the start of Final Schools in 1957 (when such a breakfast was particularly unwelcome), never thinking that I would remember this silly moment all my life.

1
November
. Lord Tebbit writes to the
Times
saying that homosexuals should be banned from sensitive cabinet posts lest they be in a position to do each other favours. This is taken to be just an eccentricity on the part of the noble lord, though exactly the same argument used to be advanced, and with about as much substance, against Jews. Tebbit, of course, has always gone out of his way to be unsympathetic, the single moment he achieved pathos when he was being dug out of the wreckage of the bombed Brighton hotel in his pyjamas and was weakly trying to shield his balls from the waiting cameras.

By chance I am reading
French and Germans, Germans and French
, Richard Cobb's book on France under occupation in the First and Second
World Wars, and, on the same day as Tebbit's letter, come across this: ‘Perhaps homosexuals will always welcome some dramatic turn in national fortunes or misfortunes as an opportunity to move in and secure the best jobs.' Cobb doesn't offer much evidence for this unexpected statement other than the fondness of the French Right for youth organisations with bare knees. Generally a superb historian (and very readable), Cobb is sometimes a little too pleased with himself for not making moral judgements – torturing for the Milice, for instance, and selling nylons on the black market just different points on the same scale. It's the reluctance to condemn which makes his assertion of gay opportunism seem so startling. It's not a subject on which there can be a sensible or a productive argument, but it would be just as true to say that in a crisis homosexuals would welcome some dramatic turn in national fortunes in order to put themselves in positions of great personal danger, and that the late Bunny Rogers, who used the opportunity of a fierce German bombardment to touch up his eyeliner, is just as typical as any knee-fancying collaborator.