For the Time Being (17 page)

Now, Jeffrey Archer, as one might guess, has a very jolly cover for
his
book,
A Twist in the Tale.
Light, clear, easily spotted on the counter. We even have a full-frontal picture of the author on the back. No simple ‘mug shot' this, but a glossy portrait rather like something from a BHS catalogue: from highly polished shoes right up to the Cheshire-cat grin.

But alas! This is no Maugham, no Dahl, no Saki … not even a Capote. A bundle of little stories with all the bite and crispness of tinned asparagus. I fear that I guessed the so-called ‘twists' in the tale pretty quickly. Good aeroplane reading if you are doing the shuttle to Glasgow, but don't take it to Gatwick.

Daily Telegraph,
10 September 1988

The High Road
by Edna O'Brien (Weidenfeld)
Working for Love
by Tessa Dahl (Michael Joseph)

My word, Edna O'Brien whips up a huge romantic whirlwind, and she
can
write – even if she is a lazy writer. It's taken her eleven years to get this one going. But she is a writer, despite forgetting some of the rules. ‘Plonked' and ‘thwack' seem a little sloppy, especially as ‘thwack' is used during sexual intercourse. Ladies to Ladies, you understand? And then we have the following: ‘It had begun to rain, drops that did not get heavy, but fell silently, were eked out of the sky.' Well, all right, if she must. But ‘eked'?

Anyway, romance we have here in yards, with only a few ‘begorras' and ‘top o' the mornin's' to make one shudder. This is a very Irish-Romantic-Trip. None of your dainty bodice-heaving, eye-fluttering from the delicate paws of a Magenta-Persian, pussy-patting Mrs Cartland. You've got a real woman up there, with a lived-in face.

The story. A lady of a certain age quits London in despair and failure (sexual) to ‘find herself. She ends up on some unidentified Spanish island (Minorca was never so beguiling), alive with falling oranges, honey-coloured skies, sun zig-zagging over bare arms (female), the scent of flowers overwhelming all about. We even have the usual Irish Drifter for local colour, and, among the picturesque wreckage of foreigners washed up on this glowing land, the aged Sloane Ranger who has retired to plant beanshoots and weed her garden. We also have, ah ha!, the irresistible Local Girl who is a bit of a riot in bed with the ladies, has a quite remarkable range of language and finally causes all sorts of troubles.

This is strictly a woman's world and not for a feller at all.
The High Road
is well written, well constructed, and awash with verbs
and close observation. When Miss O'Brien sees a loaf it isn't just a loaf. It's a loaf with raisins in it. And we have them described in translucent detail. Frankly, I just can't get on with this description of Middle-Aged Lady coupling with ravishing Local Girl: ‘ … slipping through a wall of flesh, eclipsed, inside the womb of the world, and throughout it all her words, faint, sweet as vapour.'

Well, come on now.
What
vapour? Is it always sweet, Miss O'Brien? And what the hell is ‘the womb of the world'? Nonsense, dear. Everything ends, naturally enough, in sultry Spain, in mincemeat, and the true plot is finally revealed. This
is
Romance, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Only don't believe a word.

Now Tessa Dahl isn't really into the writing scene, yet. But there is no question that she is on her way. Although she strongly denies it, her first novel,
Working for Love,
is pure autobiography, and very compelling stuff it is. She's altered a few names, jigged it about, and. I hope, written out her desperate sense of loss and betrayal by Mummy and Daddy and various gentlemen along the way. But she writes cleanly and economically, as with a scalpel. There is no fluffy detail here. We get on with the savagery of sadness and cruelty.

It is a book flowing over with an astonishing candour of hopelessness, of loss and of recovery. Above all, it is a blistering account of a young woman who has sought quite desperately for love and affection all her life and just got the sums wrong. When she has sorted out this
roman a clef
, got it out of her gut, and
if
she can find another, wider, subject to stab away at, she will be very well worth watching.

Daily Telegraph,
29 October 1988

1. Hampstead, 1926, aged five

2. This reprehensible photograph was taken by my father on my last 48-hour leave, just before l)-l)ay. I am wearing his boots and breeches from the Royal Artillery in the First World War, and my own tunic from the Queen's Royal Regiment. The disgraceful mix of uniforms I cannot explain. Maybe I had been riding that morning on the Downs?

3. With Bertrand Tavernier on the set of
Daddy Nostalgie (These Foolish Things)
in Bandol, southwest France, in 1991

4. At the Olivier Theatre, during one of half a dozen sold-out ‘concerts' which I gave there in the course of book promotion in 1993

5. Charlotte Rampling photographing me for
Elle
magazine in the Long Room at Le Pigeonnier 111 June 1985

6. With Joseph Losey, who had just come out of hospital, filming
The Servant
on location in Royal Avenue in 1962

7. Theo ‘Thumper' Cowan in 1976

8. With Brigitte Bardot at Pinewood in 1954

9. With Kathleen Tynan on Venice Beach, California, during the filming of
The Patricia Ncal Story
in January 1981

10. At a Hatchards signing in the nineties. Editor's choice!

11. With Katharine Whitehorn after receiving our Honorary Doctorates of Letters at St Andrews University on 4 July 1985

12. Russell Harty and ‘The Drummer Boy' on the terrace of Le Pigeonnier during the shooting of the Yorkshire Television special in 1986

13. With Luchino Visconti at the Hôtel des Bains, Venice, in 1970

14. With Norah Smallwood, my first editor, at Le Pigeonnier in 1980

15. With Glenda Jackson beside the pond at Le Pigeonmer, shortly after our wretched experience in Hollywood in 1981

16. With my English mastiff, Candida, in the early sixties

The Journey Back from Hell: Conversations with Concentration Camp
Survivors
by Anton Gill (Grafton)
I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust 1939-1945
by Henry Orenstein (OUP)
A Cup of Tears: A Diary of the Warsaw Ghetto
by Abraham Lewin.
Edited by Antony Polonsky (Blackwell)

I can remember the day very well, even after all these years. It was a clear, cold, April morning. The 17th or 18th, not certain of the date, one seldom was in the war. But someone said that the Germans had pulled back a few kilometres, abandoning a large concentration camp, and we ought to ‘swan off' and have a look. I was anxious, I recall, to acquire a pair of German boots … better than ours, and I had no more idea in my mind than that. We got the unexpired portions of the daily ration (bully beef sandwiches, thick and inedible unless starving) and set off in the jeep to Bergen-Belsen.

I don't know what I expected to see. I had known for some time that the camps existed – we saw them on our aerial photographs often enough – but it didn't really occur to me that through the greening larches and under a clear, hard, blue sky, the last traces of snow melting in the woods, I would be entering a hell which I should never forget and about which, for many years, I would be unable to speak. Sometimes, perhaps if I'd had a drop too much, I might try to explain and usually ended in unmanly tears. People anyway didn't want to hear about the camps, and if they did listen, it was always with a slight look of embarrassed disbelief. Which made me angrier and sillier. So I stopped trying to explain.

Now, reluctantly, I have agreed to read three books on the subject of the final extermination of the Jews. Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp. They just got it so overcrowded by
moving people away from the Russian advance that typhoid and typhus flourished and people died in their thousands from that and from starvation, and not all of them were Jews; there were all kinds of people, Albanians, Dutch, Greeks, Italians, French, gypsies, socialists, homosexuals – all manner of men and women who had been rounded up. But, mainly, they
were Jews.

I Shall Live
by Henry Orenstein,
A Cup of Tears
by Abraham Lewin and, the best of these,
The Journey Back from Hell
by Anton Gill. These are the books. Mr Gill's is a hefty one. Nearly 500 pages of agonizing reporting. Wisely he has left the survivors to speak for themselves without any kind of interruption. The result is terrible in its very matter-of-factness. Unspeakable things are spoken of casually. Children, too small for burning, are flung alive into the gutters of running fat from the bodies of the adults. The fat was used for soap. A man standing shoeless in the freezing cold for hours on the Appellplatz is dragged away finally, leaving his feet behind him, glued by the ice to the bitter earth. Nothing to it. A tiny part of the day's infamy. Far worse things were happening all over Europe in the camps. Thousands and thousands were stripped, shaved, shoved into the gas chambers, the children thrust over their heads to fill up any space, and suffered an agonizing death, which usually lasted about forty minutes. Later they got it down to a convenient quarter of an hour.

Well: all right. Now we all know what happened to the Jews in detail. We know how many were destroyed, how few survived, and many of those who have survived are in Mr Gill's excellent book. They have come out of the shadows of the past to speak clearly, calmly, bravely. And with an amazing lack of hatred in general. But the absolute terror and fear of the Germans still persists, not so much for the younger Germans, who could not be held responsible, but for the big, noisy Germans, male and female, of that hideous generation.

They are still there; I have seen them and I too feel fear and revulsion. I remember very well Fassbinder, the director, warning me in Germany never to ask anyone of my age and generation what they did in the war. And even now, on the fiftieth anniversary
of the dreadful Kristallnacht, in Bonn the following was stated: ‘As far as the Jews were concerned, had they not aspired in the past to a role which should not have been theirs … had they not perhaps even deserved to be put in their place?'

‘… put in their place'!
Why
is the Jew so loathed? Why is that tribe so feared and hated? I asked myself this again and again after that terrible April day in ‘45 … watching the cheerful women guards, trim and neat in uniform, blond hair in immaculate waves and curls, red nail varnish gleaming, chucking (two to a corpse) the dead into pits squashy with slime and decay.
'Juden kaput!'
one called up to our blanched faces.

One of the main things which went against them was their total lack of assimilation. They simply wouldn't join or become a part of their community and this was resented bitterly. But there was bile-rising jealousy of them too: they were successful in all they attempted: the newspapers, the theatre, the cinema, the music, medicine, business of all kinds, from the stall in the market to the fifty-storey building exuding prosperity and profit. And the other thing which was so detested was the nepotism. And the fact that, whatever country they lived in, it was always felt that they were ‘foreign' and came, originally, from somewhere vaguely ‘north of India'. And, alas, the fear and the dislike still exist today, especially in Austria, in Poland, in France, and even here in our own country, Great Britain.

I had two wonderful servants, in the early 1950s and 1960s. They were from Vienna. He had fought, and was severely wounded, at Stalingrad. Gentle, kind, warm and deeply loving, they were a part of my life for eleven years. Eventually they found a better job, for far more money than I could afford, in the United States. I took them, weeping, to the boat train and helped them with their luggage into the compartment. There were two rabbis sitting in a corner. Helmut spat viciously into both their faces and, with his sobbing wife, sat on his luggage in the corridor all the way to Southampton.

And could it happen here? In England's green and pleasant land, we asked each other this, in the jeep bumping back from the camp, and we agreed, in 1945, that, yes it could. ‘Wembley Stadium to
start with, then shove them all off to Catterick Camp or any other military hell-hole; you'd get all the guards you needed to beat the hell out of them and then ship them all back to wherever they came from.'

No one was absolutely certain where that might be. But ‘abroad' – for in ‘45 ‘abroad' was indeed that, and ‘foreigners' were ‘foreigners' and ‘if you give ‘em an inch they'll take an ell … am I right?'

I remember this conversation vividly. I was swimming with tears, sick twice, and dreamt of it all for nights and months of nights.

But I had it easy: Belsen was a holiday camp in comparison to Treblinka. There, in one day from 6 a.m. until 5 p.m., they drove the naked Jews into pits which they had had to dig themselves to the blaring of dance music and jolly marching songs: 17,000 were finished off in this way.

I was twenty-four then; now I am sixty-seven. My actions are a little more controlled. I just leave the elevator if a German enters. It's the voice which disturbs me so dreadfully; rather a futile gesture, but I make it none the less. These three books might have the same effect on you.

Daily Telegraph
, 26 November 1988

There were actually two in my opinion … but I'm only allowed the one so it has to be without question,
Love in the Time of Cholera
(Cape) by Gabriel García Márquez. He has written the most gloriously heart-wrenching story of love that I have, perhaps, ever read. Gentle, subtle, persuasive and as elegant and fastidious as his heroine, Fermina Daza; as atmospheric and nostalgic as the opening of a long-closed chest redolent of the faded scents of camphor, cedar and lavender.