Untold Stories (42 page)

18
May
. Last week was Charlotte next door's birthday and we give her a little
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
. It's divided into subjects … Family, Age, Morals, etc. and I figure in several departments, though with the same lumbering extracts that are in the larger dictionary, few of which I would have thought memorable at all. Somewhere in Larkin's interviews he speculates about the lines for which he will be remembered: ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963' of course; ‘Books are a load of crap'; ‘Nothing like something happens anywhere'; and of course ‘What will survive of us is love', though he professes to think most of what he's written isn't particularly memorable.

I feel much the same, though I compiled a list a few years ago of what I thought was worth quoting and look it out to see what I think of it now, and though I don't find any of them imprint themselves on the mind, they're better than the ones in the
ODQ
.

Legs always leave something to be desired, do they not? It is part of

their function and all of their charm. (Wilde parody,
Forty Years On
)

A butterfly is an event. (
Forty Years On
) That awkward gap between the cradle and the grave. (
Getting On
)

When we are on our best behaviour we are not always at our best. (
A Question of Attribution
)

Life is generally something that happens elsewhere. (
Writing Home
) (Also said by Milan Kundera, though not cribbed by me.)

There is no such thing as false modesty. All modesty is false otherwise it's not modesty. (Not included in anything so far.)

Cheek, though not quite a virtue, belongs in the other ranks of courage. (Obituary of Russell Harty, 1988.)

The good is better than the best or what does society mean. (
The Old Country
)

If you have a secret there's no point in making a secret of it. (
The Old Country
)

Sooner or later in life everything turns into work, including work. (One of the prefaces to the plays, I think.)

One of the functions of women is to bring an element of trouble into the otherwise tranquil lives of men. (
The Lady in the Van
)

In England age wipes the slate clean. If you live to be ninety in England and can still eat a boiled egg they think you deserve the Nobel Prize. (
Single Spies
)

Still, my favourite lines, though, are ones which while having an internal consistency in the play in which they occur, when taken out of context appear utterly absurd, e.g.:

‘You can't knit bootees for the Nicene Creed', a line spoken by the Virgin Mary in
Kafka's
Dick
. And from the same play:

19
May, Yorkshire
. Going into Settle this morning we pass a lorry at Austwick loaded with the carcasses of slaughtered sheep and find the main car park now given over to vehicles, bulldozers and all the paraphernalia of this dreadful travelling circus. Though for the soldiers and the slaughter-men the work must now be just a wearisome routine, cars still slow to watch the mounds of carcasses slither down the ramps and it's hard not to think it's but a step from this to the more terrible slaughters that go on in Eastern Europe. To date it has not quite come to our village, the cows on our two farms still unaffected, though a convoy goes through early this afternoon to start picking sheep off the fells.

30
May
. It's a little life, my mother would say as my father killed a wasp or even an ant. Left to herself she was more predisposed in favour of some
insects than others. To lift a plant pot and find it boiling with woodlice made her shudder, but to come across one on a solitary and hazardous trek across the fleecy rug was hardly a matter for revulsion and she would coax it onto a piece of paper before chucking it out of the door.

A similar rescue operation would be mounted whenever she found a daddy-long-legs. These insects, both ungainly and unthreatening, somehow commended themselves to her and she would strive to catch them in her cupped hands before releasing them into the unwelcoming street, her capture and subsequent liberation of them sometimes involving the loss of at least one of their elaborate limbs so that Dad growled unhelpfully: ‘By the time she's finished saving their lives they're dead.'

14
June, Yorkshire
. Much in the local papers about how the ‘hefted' sheep will not be easily restocked, having been born on the fells and thus bred up to know its ways and its weather. They keep (and teach their lambs to keep) to their own patch and do not wander at will. They lamb every year by the same sheltered wall, come lower down when they sense the cold is coming or a storm expected and all in all these sheep know a good deal and the farmers know that they know it. I wonder, though, if there are other things the sheep know which the farmers do not acknowledge. Do they know that their male lambs will be taken away a few months after they are born? Do they know or do they wonder where they are being taken on the vast two- and three-tier lorries that ship them halfway across the country to market? If they know so much by instinct perhaps that is not all that they know and they perhaps deserve to be treated differently on that account. In fifty years' time I am sure that we will not handle animals the way we do now and to succeeding generations our behaviour will seem as barbarous as bear-baiting.

The beginning of a film: a boy and a girl collecting branches in seventeenth-century costume, the day idyllic, the pair of them in love, possibly.

‘Here's a good one.'

‘Here's a beauty.'

They collect an armful of branches each and then hand them over to a
jovial good-natured man who is stockpiling wood. It is for a public burning, the wood green to make it burn more slowly. The victim is already on the pyre. The boy and girl settle down to watch.

26
June
. En route home from the National we drive up Drury Lane and then on towards Camden Town. Waiting at the lights in Bloomsbury Square R. spots a fox, gaunt, grey and long-legged, seemingly waiting for the lights too. It then trots unhurriedly across. A tall elegant creature, old I would have thought, its delicacy and silence making it seem almost wolflike as it turns down a side street and vanishes into Holborn.

1
July
. Listen to Nick Hytner on
Private Passions
, Michael Berkeley's always excellent programme, a superior and more interesting
Desert Island
Discs
without its tiresome conventions. Most of Nick's musical choices are quite spare (or ‘transparent' as Nick calls them), not caring for music as a warm bath, which is generally where my musical appreciation stops. So there's Handel, Janácek, Sondheim, Haydn and Britten and ending with a wonderfully slow and sexy rendering of ‘Bewitched' by Ella Fitzgerald, with the words ‘I'll sing to him, each spring to him/ And worship the trousers that cling to him.'

Nick doesn't mention the stories of singing as a boy in the choir with the Hallé under Barbirolli or how he was winkled out of Jewish prayers to bolster the singing of the Christian hymns, at Manchester Grammar School. But it reminds me of the stories as Nick told them to me and how vivid and touching they were, so after the programme I make notes to see if I can turn these anecdotes into a film.
*

9
July, Yorkshire
. With there being so few visitors to the village and no walking in the countryside generally, even in this comparatively short space of time nature has reasserted herself. I've seen a deer bounding off the fell below Buckhaw Brow and A. has seen a couple. A heron comes to
the garden now and W., who occasionally mows the lawn, has three times seen a kingfisher below the bridge. Meanwhile, uncropped and ungrazed, the fields look more and more unkempt and every gathering of cattle inspires dread. The vast mechanised farm just before the Skipton bypass is now silent so I imagine their stock has been culled. It's such an ugly sprawling place with huge piles of tyres and rows of system-built hangars that it's not easy to feel much regret. It's more like a factory than a farm and hard to locate the actual farmhouse or to think there may be a family grieving there. Or not; the amounts of possible compensation said to be colossal.

12
July
. I'm brushing my teeth in the bathroom this morning when a little school passes – or a class anyway – on an outing, to the zoo probably. Ethnically mixed with Muslim women in headscarves in attendance, a couple of tired-looking teachers and young fathers too, one with a rucksack on and a child in either hand. A poor school by the looks of it as distinct from the two other schools in the neighbourhood (green-uniformed children delivered by four-wheel drives). But the simplicity of this little column, the tired goodness of it, reaffirms … what? A belief in common decency, is it, and hope, as the green uniforms and four-wheel drives do not? Though it's hard not to think that against this trusting little column the four-wheel drives and the green uniforms will prevail.

A mad letter forwarded by the BBC apropos one of my
Telling Tales
programmes. ‘I was intrigued by your references to certain Sexual Experiments which took place in your street-located Air Raid Shelter (but you didn't mention the opposite sex?) Was it MB? Fellatio or Cunilingus (
sic
) … please put me out of my misery on the subject. But it turned me on. I had to MB.' Odd to think of an old man wanking at the memory of an innocent short-trousered little boy playing in an air-raid shelter sixty-odd years ago.

‘She is frail but it's deceptive: get her behind a supermarket trolley and she turns into Von Rundstedt.'

16
August
. It occurs to me at Brian Brindley's funeral that one thing about the Catholic Mass is that it attracts and is open to anybody who just happens to be passing. There's almost an ‘Ah, Bisto!' aspect to it so that even at the smartest requiems there are these oddities who, not having anything better to do, have just wandered in. And that way, maybe, salvation lies.

Another thought: the first requirement in any assembly is
to be heard
. I come home and tell Nora, my cleaning lady, about the Mass. ‘Oh, that's a nice thing. I'll always go to Mass myself. And I do believe in God and all that so that people would say I was very devout. But when you're dead I think it's a case of Bob's your uncle.'

3
September
. Very much enjoy Mark Ravenhill's
Mother
Clapp's
Molly
House
at the NT. It has frequent references to ‘wandering' … I suppose in the play it means cruising, though the simple boy in the first act seems to wander without knowing why or to what it might lead. This is like I was in my teens, wandering the streets of Headingley at night though without anything ever coming of it.

Then I come across an article about Roger Mayne, the photographer, of whom it was said, ‘His eyes were wide open but he was a shy young man. It is the shy boy, not the streetwise, who goes wandering.'

11
September
. Working rather disconsolately when Tom M. rings to tell me to switch on the television as the Twin Towers have been attacked. Not long after I switch on one of the towers collapses, an unbearable sight, like a huge plumed beast plunging earthwards. I go to put the kettle on and in that moment the other tower collapses.

15
September
. Lynn in New York says that people in the city so want to be together they stand outside so that though New York is quiet there are many people on the streets, the atmosphere kindly and unthreatening, everyone courteous and not at all like New York. She had gone down to the Odeon when the first tower was hit and found the restaurant turned into a dressing station. She was out on the street when the second tower
fell and had to flee the dust cloud, not stopping or looking behind her until she got to Canal Street.

1
October
. Meet on Leeds Station Brian P., to whose home in Cookridge I used to deliver meat as a boy. He and his brother went to the Grammar School but we knew each other at the Crusaders Bible class, where I was even more conscious of my lowly status as delivery boy. We talk of battling through the snow in 1947 and he remembers how the canyon through the snow on Cookridge Heights was cut by German POWs. The height of the chasm was that of a double-decker bus and along this towering passage the POWs cut out embrasures for seats, grottoes almost, for the good people of Cookridge. He pats me on the shoulder and says how much he has enjoyed my work, a pat which had it been administered when I was thirteen would have made my day.

2
October
. An obituary in today's
Guardian
of the novelist and poet Amy Witting who taught her classes French by writing the words of Charles Trenet's
La Mer
on the blackboard and getting the class to sing it. I see her … or a teacher in a play … pointing to a boy to take a line and maybe a young black boy whose voice hasn't broken singing it perfectly.
*

4
October
. To Robinsfield, the primary school in St John's Wood where I sometimes go to read. I do some
Winnie the Pooh
but the poem they really like is Michael Rosen's ‘Don't' (with the line ‘Don't put mustard in the custard'). They spontaneously ask questions afterwards, where did I buy the book I'm reading from? What was the first book I ever read? What was the first book I wrote? A multi-racial school, the children so friendly and attentive to one another and so gentle it's hard to see anyone even of the most extreme views withstanding such serious innocence. The teachers are plagued by the requirements of inspection and assessment, a party due round this very morning, the same time-wasting bureaucracy that
clogs every institution in the country be it the National Gallery or a tiny primary school in north London. As I'm leaving one boy of mixed race who's maybe five or six runs after me and asks if I have heard of a play called
A Midsummer
Night's
Dream
and what is it about?