Untold Stories (50 page)

Over at Rievaulx we film in the rain and in the cavernous latrine below the monks' dormitory. With a lighting cameraman this would have taken most of the day, but brought up in the brisker school of music video Ben Taylor, who looks not long out of school himself, polishes off the whole sequence in a couple of hours.

10
May
. Filling a pot with water to take a huge bunch of peonies L. has sent for my birthday I slip on the wet flags and fall down three or four stone steps into the area. It's a fall long enough for me to think, ‘This is quite serious,' as it's going on, but when I get up I find I'm all right and
it's only when I've had a bath and am having a lie-down that I realise that this is one of those accidents that usually occur on or around my birthday, previous experience showing that I'd be well advised to spend the whole octave of that festival in bed and out of harm's way.

18
May
. We sit in the stalls of the Lyttelton having a last notes session before the press night. There are no nerves as we've had a week of enthusiastic and sometimes tumultuous previews, the theatre is sold out for the whole of the first booking period and the play will run on word of mouth regardless of what the reviews are like. This is no guarantee of good notices, though, and Nick H. explains this to the cast, particularly the boys, few of whom have had a first night before. He also says how he's never had such a good time with a play. I say the same, though with more melancholy, as my part in it is almost over.

Afterwards I sit on the terrace outside the Lyttelton, reading my messages, and watch the audience begin to arrive. It's only when I go inside for a dutiful drink with the sponsors that Bob Crowley tells me that the theatre is in chaos.

One of the recurrent themes of the play is the unpredictability of things or, as Rudge puts it, history is just one fucking thing after another – a point made in the play by the death of Hector on his motorbike and the crippling of Irwin, his unlooked for passenger. And all the time we were sitting joking in the stalls thinking it was all sewn up and everything taken care of, a fire was smouldering in the flies. An hour before curtain, with the theatre empty and the stage management on their break, the flame sets off the sprinklers, and when next someone steps onto the stage it's ankle-deep in water.

There is no light at all as the power has immediately to be switched off and when I go into the auditorium (the first-night audience now waiting in the foyer ready for the start) there are dim figures moving about the sodden stage, torches flashing in the gloom and firemen clambering up the rig. It's all very theatrical, though not quite theatre as we'd planned it.

Not all the firemen have found the supposed blaze. Backstage the
various auditoriums for the National are notoriously difficult to locate and when I go through I come upon a helmeted fireman, axe at the ready, wandering down a dressing-room corridor and who asks me to point him in the direction of ‘this Lyttelton Theatre'.

Eventually all the stage crews from the other theatres are mobilised to mop the stage and the curtain goes up an hour late. The actors are dribbled on throughout the performance but the audience, possibly because of the free drinks they've been given while they've been waiting, are happy and responsive and the play goes well.

21
May
. Give a talk at the London Review Bookshop and answer questions, in the course of which I mention how, when I was seventeen and hitchhiking through the Llanberis pass in Wales, I was rather ineffectually touched up on the back of a motorbike much as Hector's pupils are in the play. The
Sunday Times
must have been lurking in the audience and a reporter rings the NT press office the next day asking them to confirm that a master touched me up as a boy, thus blighting my schooldays. They don't confirm it, and emphasise how trivial the incident was. No matter. The
Sunday Times
prints the story exactly as it wants it to be, making the whole play some sort of expiation. I often read Anthony Powell's
Journals
, where a recurring theme is the stupidity and bad behaviour of journalists by whose crassness Powell was always unsurprised. So no change there.

26
May
. Do a question-and-answer session at Warwick Arts Centre. The talk is preceded by a book signing at which, having had her book signed, a woman leans low over the table to confide in me: ‘I'd like to be buried in a little grave right next to yours.'

When I say I hope this won't be quite yet she says, ‘Well, I'm the same age as you,' as if this somehow made our posthumous propinquity more of a likelihood.

27
May
. Ashcroft, the US Attorney General, applies for the extradition of Abu Hamza, the radical Muslim cleric. No friend to freedom and from
the extremity of his utterances not an attractive figure, Hamza is additionally demonised by the hook he has instead of a hand, so that his fellow prisoners at Belmarsh hang a sheet out of the window inscribed ‘Sling Your Hook'. At which point I suppose the Home Secretary pours himself another drink.

Under its current administration I would not extradite a dog to the United States, whatever the crime. In a country where the rule of law can be set aside by executive decree, prisoners kept outside the law and imprisoned without trial or legal representation, Hamza is likely to disappear without trace. If there is evidence against him he should be tried here and if he's found guilty, imprisoned here too.

The case comes up on BBC1's
Question Time
later on, when the sleek and suited Peter Hain, now Leader of the House of Commons, maintains that Hamza should be handed over to face justice (
sic
) in the United States, the same sort of justice (though nobody is indelicate enough to say this) as there used to be in South Africa at a time when Hain saw things rather differently.

Nor does anyone point out that while Hamza is an extreme Muslim fundamentalist the evangelical Ashcroft is his precise Christian equivalent, only Ashcroft wears a suit and is surrounded by young men in suits rather than disciples in djellabas and, having no hooks for hands, is the voice of respectability.

1
June
. Success (like death) brings letters and I spend most of the morning trying to clear my table. Then, just as I'm putting stamps on a score or so of envelopes, the letter box goes and another jorum of mail cascades over the doormat. It's a scene from a Frank Randle film I saw as a child when Frank is in the army, doing fatigues and peeling potatoes. He is just peeling the last spud with the shed all clean and bare when a trapdoor in the roof opens and another ton of potatoes comes cascading down.

10
June
. Were I a schoolmaster like Irwin in the play, instructing pupils about the Dissolution of the Monasteries, I would begin with the ancient
oak tree still standing at the crossroads at Caton on the Kirkby Lonsdale– Lancaster road. It was at this tree that the monks of Cockersands Abbey on the Lune estuary would sell their fish, the fish said to have been hung from its branches. One day in 1536 or so the fish-monks didn't turn up, so for the people of Caton in the Lune Valley the Dissolution of the Monasteries simply meant no more fresh fish. Caton, though it has some good houses, is now a dormitory village of Lancaster. It's also on the Lune, just as Cockersands is on the estuary, so perhaps it was that the monks brought up the fish by boat, sailing up on the incoming tide. Easier anyway than humping it round Lancaster over the heights of Quernmore.

Apropos
The History Boys
, I have been thinking about dons. When I was at school I never quite knew what the word meant, associating it (the Spanish flavour and the gown, I suppose) with that cloaked and mysterious figure who used to advertise Sandeman's port.

Most dons at my own college were shy in some degree, except for the Senior Tutor, Dacre Balsdon, but not being a squash player, a Rhodes Scholar or someone of a refreshingly extrovert temperament, I never really took his eye. It was partly his exaggerated utterance that put me off (he was the Brian Sewell of his day), meeting him always a hazard of going round the front quad. I was dull and he made me feel even duller.

Far and away the most distinguished of the Fellows in my time at Exeter was Sir Cyril Hinshelwood. A Nobel Laureate, he was President of the Royal Society, President of the Classical Association and had the Order of Merit and honorary degrees galore. He spoke half a dozen languages and it was said he could learn a new one in a fortnight. He was not a sociable man, the only person allowed in his room said to be Cantwell, one of the older scouts, who reported that Hinshelwood was also an accomplished painter. Like Dacre Balsdon he was a bachelor and lived in College but no two dons could seemingly be less alike, Balsdon sociable, expansive but not a distinguished scholar, Hinshelwood shy, introverted but a great figure in the world.

One afternoon around tea time I came out of the JCR and went over to
the buttery to get my tea, and saw Hinshelwood hovering about at the foot of the JCR staircase. He was still there when I came back and it was only when I was sitting in the window having my tea that I saw, like a scene out of Proust, what it was that was happening. On the other side of the quad on the ground floor were the rooms of Watkins, one of the chemistry scholars, and as I watched he came out and went over to the buttery to get his tea. Hinshelwood waited a moment then hurried over to the buttery too. Five minutes later they came back together, Hinshelwood's not entirely accidental arrival in the buttery at the same time having enabled him to ask the young man up to his rooms to share his tea. Furtive though it seemed it was of course entirely innocent, the kind of thing Balsdon would have had no need to engineer, just shouting his invitation across the quad (‘Tea, dear fellow? Oh how delightful!'). Still, Hinshelwood and Balsdon were more like each other than either would have wanted, which was another reason for the rumoured antipathy between them.

What lesson I learned from this incident it would be hard to say, though it should be something to do with solitariness and futility.

20
June
. Sent a postcard this morning of a painting I've never seen reproduced by an artist I've never heard of. It's Napoleon in hell. He's wearing the usual hat and has his arms folded in the customary way and is looking very stern as wild women wave in front of him the severed limbs of their loved ones, presumably slain in his wars. The painting by Antoine Wiertz (1806–65) is in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, and though Wiertz is hardly an old master, about suffering he wasn't wrong either.

25
June
. As I leave Robin Hope's birthday party at the Old Sessions House in Clerkenwell Square someone says that England scored in the first minute against Portugal. The pubs I pass seem oddly subdued, with none of the usual crowds spilling out onto the pavement or the roars from within, so I take it the match is all over, shouting included. It's only when I get home to Camden Town and switch on the TV that I find it's still going on, with a penalty shoot-out in progress. I catch Postiga's elegant
deception of the goalkeeper, who jumps the wrong way so that the Portuguese can just tap the ball in. It's like an expert squash player who, after everybody else has been banging and smashing, casually trickles the winning shot down the back wall. As always, having dreaded an English victory I am mortified by their defeat; the truth is I want them neither to win nor to lose, though the frenzy after the first goal is a reminder of how intolerable we would have been in victory.

14
July
. There seems scarcely a mention of President Bush in the Butler Report though there is no doubt that he did the original mischief and persuaded our blameless prime minister that he ought to make war. Nothing that I've read about the report alters the obvious verdict that, having decided on war, Blair then looked round for reasons to justify it. And had everybody else looking, too. Once he'd let it be known what his will was (the whole country knew) and government being what it is, there were plenty of people in the cabinet and outside it ready to help the prime minister along. And so much
nodding
, and from Jack Straw in particular, still nodding on the front bench today like a dog in the back window of a Fiesta. The newspapers fall for Butler's smooth speaking even when they know how specious it is. One of his predecessors as master of University College Oxford was another smooth operator, Lord Redcliffe-Maud, smoothness something of a University College tradition.

27
July
. In good time, as I think, for Paul Foot's funeral, I get to Golders Green to find outside the station what seems like a political rally in progress, with trade-union banners and a steel band just leading off towards the crematorium. The crowd entirely fills the Finchley Road and as we trudge along in the hot sunshine the march, ragged, unceremonious and heartfelt, is almost Indian in its disorganisation and spontaneity, with people coming out of houses and leaning from cars to ask who it is who's died.

I see no one I know and they're an odd mixture. ‘He would have been pleased by the turn-out,' says a voice behind me. ‘Possibly,' says a tall,
stately old man, who sounds as if he's from the East End, ‘but I am of the opinion the dead can't see us anyway.'

At the crematorium, the mourners separate into those with cards and those (like me) without. I see the coffin in then go into the loggia, where there's another huge gathering listening to the relay, some sitting on the grass, others squatting down by the pillars or crowded round the relay screen. I manage to find a sort of golf cart and enthroned on that hear the proceedings in more comfort than if I'd been inside.

I never knew Foot well, though occasionally I would write to congratulate him after some vindication (and if one waited long enough he was generally vindicated and so often got things right). I'd last spoken to him when I was writing
The History Boys
apropos ‘Kek', F. McEachran, the charismatic schoolmaster who had taught him and some of the
Private
Eye
people at Shrewsbury. What was almost unique about Foot was that he was a crusader who never lost his sense of humour so that he could get the (often very conservative) audience of
Any Questions
on his radical side simply by being funny and running rings round the other speakers. He had a kind of moral charm which made one want his approval.