Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (69 page)

Much waiting around whilst the various delegations sort out my future. Am introduced to my interpreter Irena, a slightly nervous, greying-haired lady in mid-50’s with a sensitive and kind face. When we are out walking she emphasises ‘everything I say is only my own point of view and shouldn’t go further’.

On to a special showing of the film [
A Private Function
] for university and embassy people. I introduce the film in English. As soon as it begins I go off on my own for a walk into the old town, across the Charles Bridge. Quite magical.

Back at the screening, I’m buttonholed by a red-eyed English teacher from the university. He warns me darkly against getting too involved with the ‘embassy crowd’ and that ‘You’ll never meet any real Czechs, ’cos they don’t know any’. I arrange to meet him tomorrow.

Irena and her husband Dick take me to eat. Dumplings and red meat seem to be a Czech speciality. Then I’m taken to a ‘Theatre of Small Spaces’ – in effect an intimate cabaret-style club. A group called Ypsilon sit about on stage … loosely structured, talk, discussion, maybe leading to a sketch. Place is packed. In the second half I’m called up on stage. Perform a little and then sit there grinning idiotically whilst the Czech banter swirls around me.

They know all about irony and apparently they put across a lot of criticism, cleverly veiled so the authorities won’t see it. A sort of intellectual second economy.

Sleep seven hours despite great heat from air conditioning. As I sit on the lav wrestling with the unperforated toilet paper, I try to sort out a few thoughts for my various public appearances today. Scrambled egg, good strong coffee, then meet Dick, who is going to walk me round this morning.

His wife and two children wanted to visit friends in York in 1977, but she had to apply to the Ministry for permission and was at first given the stock reply ‘apply again in seven years’. But she knew the wife of a top official and the whole process was speeded up. As Dick tells me such things he drops his voice – as if the streets themselves might be bugged.
From habit probably. I shouldn’t think he is aware of how odd this behaviour looks to me.

We pass Kafka’s house. He shrugs and smiles a little bleakly when I ask if Kafka is still read in Czechoslovakia … ‘Oh, he’s read … but he’s not published.’

He takes me into a wine bar – a Vinerana – a small, smoky, whitewashed room, with plain wooden tables and counters. We have a couple of glasses of excellent, fruity Moravian white. He tells me that Jan Schmidt of Ypsilon apologised after the show last night for not talking to me more on stage, but as the house lights went up to welcome me he noticed two men from the Ministry of the Interior sitting at the back. These are the shadowy government ‘cultural officials’ who can close their show at any time, so he decided to play safe.

We talk about Britain. Dick says that the Czechs think of Britain as a golden land of freedom and cannot believe things are bad there. The football riots made the worst impression, everything else bad they regard as government propaganda and discount it. Dick says that the Czechs are very racially prejudiced and would agree with Enoch Powell.

Then we walk up the hill to the splendidly-sited British Embassy, to which Her Britannic Majesty’s ambassador has summoned us for lunch. Very formal, lots of servants and polite introductions to a number of Czech theatrical folk who have been rounded up to meet me.

Then whisked away to a screening of
Private Function
.

Another speech, translated this time, more flowers, champagne, and, at last, driven back to the Jalta by Mr Green. By now it’s six and within ten minutes the phone rings to announce the arrival of my teacher friend and his colleague – studying Czech, from Lancaster University. Both fairly classic types. Anti-London, anti-privilege, beer-drinking in quantity. But not lost for a word and soon we are in a long, old, vaulted room, simply, almost austerely, appointed, full of all manner of Czech – man, woman and child – drinking beer.

Then up the hill to another pub – this is the Black Cat. Some Czech ladies at the table next to us in a merry state. Czechs have very bright, humorous eyes when they want to use them. Have long since forgotten what the teachers and myself have been earnestly talking about, but we agree to repair to the hotel as all the pubs have, quite sensibly, closed.

Wake after eleven o’clock. Feel a heavy pain in my right hand. Head not too bad, stomach queasy. Lie there as if hit by a bulldozer, then ease myself out of bed, cursing myself for missing my looked-forward-to morning walk round Prague, and a little concerned that I’ve probably missed breakfast and within an hour I shall have to get myself across town to Sunday lunch with my interpreter.

Only then do I become aware that things are not too good. There is a line of bloodstains on the pillow and sheet and duvet. My hand is quite grossly misshapen and, though I have no usual feelings of hangover, my face is uncommonly sallow. I wash and shave and clean my teeth with difficulty. Usual exercises out of the question. Just getting dressed is an athletic feat. But with my hair washed and a fresh shirt and a set of clothes on, I feel that I can at least venture out. A cup of coffee and a glass of fruit juice washed down with mineral water, then out into the town. I vaguely remember trying to have a bath, falling … but not much else … Oh, dear …

After my lunch I find myself in the southern part of town, pushing open a door of a grubby apartment block and walking into a lobby which smells of old meat. Upstairs to the flat above the butcher where the cultural attaché and his wife lives.

They were burgled two days ago and the police could not have been more thorough until they suddenly broke off the inquiry, leading Green to suspect an inside job. But he’s like the best and worst of the English … quite stoical and unemotional about the whole thing. Takes it with a pinch of humour. At one point he leans forward, and without a change in his tone of voice, warns breezily … ‘By the way, this place is almost certainly bugged … I don’t know if they’re listening at the moment, but it’s best not to mention any Czech names of people you’ve met.’

After supper we go into the centre to a concert in a grand, excellently-restored, neo-classical hall. The government gives an awful lot of money to the arts … but of course they must be officially approved.

We end up drinking Czech liqueur and talking about the various celebs who’ve passed through Prague. The actors he liked, the musicians, especially orchestras, he found rather loud and apt to behave in Millwall-ish fashion at airports.

To lunch with two men from the Czech film organisation. Officials, probably Party members. The older man asks me to describe Margaret Thatcher’s policy. Monetary control, tight legal restraints on opponents, intolerance of debate and discussion, strong defence capability … as Irena says afterwards, I could have been describing the Czech Communist Party.

She puts me on the 4.45 plane home. I give her a four-day-old
Guardian
and any other English literature I can find – a
Listener
, a copy of Larkin’s ‘Whit Sunday’ poems and Anita Brookner’s
Hotel Du Lac
. She slips them quickly, discreetly into a brown cotton bag.

Up to the Royal Free by 10.45 to see Mr Morgan. A Lowryesque collection of the old, infirm, squat, bent and shuffling gather around the desk at Clinic 4. A man next to me talks of his brother-in-law … ‘We put him away last Friday. He was a great racing man, lived for the horses, so you know that bit of the funeral service where they throw earth on top of the coffin? Well, I threw in a betting slip, along with the earth.’

After a wait of 40 minutes or so I am called in. Today Mr Morgan is surrounded by seven or eight students. He grasps my hand effusively and I let out a yelp of pain. He looks at my still-swollen right hand and I tell him what happened in the bathroom in Prague (grins from the reverential students) and he says he will get someone to look at it right away.

Within a half-hour I’m down at Orthopaedic, signing an autograph for a porter, chatting to a boy who’d broken his leg acting, and being shown into Mr Wilson’s room. He looks, squeezes, has me X-rayed (long chat with radiographer about
Brazil
, and then shows me that I did indeed cause myself more than a bruise in Prague. I can see clearly a fracture in a bone on the side of my hand – the metacarpal, he tells me. He puts the side of my right hand and little finger in an aluminium-backed splint, which I shall have to wear for three weeks. It will be six weeks before it completely heals.

Feel on remarkably good form, but writing isn’t easy and I shall have to take to the typewriter. Ah, well, it all fits in with this year of doing things I’ve never done before. Like breaking a bone.

On returning from the Mansfield Road grocery store with a bottle of milk in either hand, I hurried across Elaine Grove to avoid an oncoming car and felt my trusty 15 quid shoes, which have been my mainstay for seven or eight years, slipping on the hard-packed snow and I was upended.

Instinct made me protect my be-splinted right hand, which threw me off-balance, and I ended up lying on the ground with the broken glass of a milk bottle sticking from the base of my left thumb. (The other bottle, I’m pleased to say, was safe and sound in the three fingers of my broken right hand.) I remember staring for far too long at the chunk of glass which had inserted itself into my flesh like a wafer stuck into soft ice-cream. Then I picked the glass out, and I was aware quite coolly that I had hurt myself rather badly. Still managing to carry the other bottle, I squeezed my hand over the wound and walked home. The driver of the car rolled down his window. ‘You alright?’ ‘No,’ I said. He grinned and drove on.

I was then driven to the Royal Free. Even as queasy as I was, I did appreciate the regularity of my visits there so far this year. I was stitched up and Diana [wife of my friend Sean Duncan, and a doctor] stayed with me for the hour and a half I was in there. Apart from the ‘freezing’ injection into the wounds before they were stitched, I felt remarkably little pain, nor had I lost much blood, nor, thankfully, and according to Diana very luckily, had I cut any tendons.

At Walkden House [T2000 office] I begin the first of many explanations. Susan H thinks the sight [of two bandaged hands] almost uncontrollably funny. A lot of gasps and ‘Oh, no’s’.

We walk across Melton Street to the grey marble slab of Rail House [British Rail headquarters]. Up to the meeting, which is in Room 101 – though no-one alludes to the significance. Grant Woodruff, British Rail’s Director of Public Affairs – grey-haired with a young face – opens the meeting briskly.

We have a briefing on the Channel Tunnel
¹²³
and we’re asked to
help put pressure on the customs and excise to make checks on trains which they at present refuse to do, and to cause a fuss over Section 8 (grants for freight transport) at the DTP [Department of Transport].

Lunch is up on the seventh floor. There are about 15 of us altogether, including three out of the four past executive directors of T2000. I feel that the BR attitude throughout is brisk, a little patronising, as if we’re seen quite clearly as a bunch of weirdos, as you get in all societies of the world, and are really only there to make good, honest businessmen’s work that much harder. They’re the do-ers, we’re the talkers.

The side-effects of my two accidents seem almost entirely beneficial. I’m improving the speed of my typing, I get washed in the bath by Helen and I’ve slept long and well for the last three nights.

At half past twelve a brown, plain-clothes police car, grubby inside and smelling of stale cigarette smoke, picks me up to take me to Kentish Town nick, where I (with my Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb hands) am to be guest of honour at a lunch. The topics of conversation are predictable. Camdenspeak – the name given to the attempts by our council to purge the language of any words with sexual or racial connotations – is high on the list. So onto the scrapheap of progress go such words as ‘chairman’, ‘ladies’, ‘midget’ and, of course, ‘black’. Officers are completely bemused that Accident Black Spots cannot be called that any longer.

All present, and there must be 20 senior detectives in the annexe room with brick wallpaper, agree that things are ‘getting worse’. Nearly all are against the decision to put armed police into Heathrow … indeed every one is against arming the police force any more than at present. They don’t like political duties – either in Nottinghamshire or Wapping. There are few obvious heavies, but equally few who can make intelligent conversation. An air of benevolent philistinism.

One stands head and shoulders above the rest – a man called Blair, who has written a seminal (dare one use the word in this context?)
textbook on rape and is sharp, soft-spoken and acute. Either he will rise like a rocket or else he’ll resign.
¹²⁴

About three and a half hours later I’m driven in an official police Rover through Kentish Town. ‘What a dump,’ says the driver. ‘I wouldn’t bring kids of mine up here.’

Yet another visit to the doctor’s starts the day. This time to have my wound looked at. Nurse says it’s healed well and removes the stitches. Back home to write copy for the
Limericks
book, then take Rachel by Underground to County Hall, where she is to receive a prize for being one of the six winners out of 10,000 entries in an ILEA poetry competition.

County Hall is enormous – built with such pretension and high expectation, and now beleaguered and rather sad, a cross between a school, a hospital and a parliament house in the Third World. No colour, no pictures on the walls – it feels like something that has been stripped to its bare essentials, robbed of any respect it might once have had. Across the river from its windows can be seen the Gothic pretensions of the Houses of Parliament, where the fate of County Hall was sealed last year [When the Greater London Council was abolished].