The Fry Chronicles (16 page)

Many Cantabrigians might read the foregoing and recognize not a line of it. Plenty of students eschewed with contempt anything close to a blazer or a glass of Pimm’s, most never lined the river on a May Bumps afternoon, never sipped planter’s punch in the Master’s Garden, never
cunted up the Pam to Grantchester, nor once had to be helped to an ambulance and a stomach pump on Suicide Sunday. There were a lot of Cambridges, I am just trying to remember mine, nauseating as it may be.

As well as all these parties there were plays. Queens’ College’s drama club was called BATS, supposedly because of the flittermice that wheeled and squeaked in the sky above the Cloister Court during its end-of-term outdoor presentation, one of the most popular and distinctive regular features of May Week. This year’s production was to be
The Tempest
, and the director, a Queens’ second-year called Ian Softley, cast me as Alonso, King of Naples. Being tall and boomy I was nearly always given the role of a king or elderly authority figure. The young lovers, glamorous girls and handsome princes were played by students who looked their age. I never looked mine, but given that almost everyone was between eighteen and twenty-two, looking older was a distinct advantage so far as casting went.

Ian Softley now directs motion pictures –
The Wings of the Dove
,
Backbeat
,
Hackers
,
Inkheart
and so on – but then he was a student with black curly hair and an appealing way of wearing white trousers. The cast included Rob Wyke, a graduate who was to become a close friend and, playing Prospero, a most extraordinary actor and even more extraordinary man, Richard MacKenney. In the middle of writing his PhD thesis, ‘Trade guilds and devotional confraternities in the state and society of Venice to 1620’, he could already speak not only fluent Italian, but fluent Venetian, which is quite another thing. While waiting for the cast to turn up (he was always exactly punctual himself, as was I) he would pace up and
down at high speed, humming every note of the overture to Mozart’s
Don Giovanni
. If we were still not quorate by the time that had been got through he would move on to Leporello’s opening aria and keep at it until everyone was present, singing all the parts perfectly from memory. On one occasion Ariel was half an hour late owing to some confusion about time and venue (there was no way to text or call in those days), and when he at last arrived, red and gasping, Richard broke off from his singing and turned on him furiously.

‘What time do you call this, then? The Commendatore’s dead and Ottavio is swearing on his blood to be revenged.’

Richard was a magnificent actor, his King Lear was astonishing in one so young (a receding brow and faux-grumpy manner made him appear fifty although he can’t have been much older than twenty-three or four) but he hid his artistry under an obsession with pace and volume. ‘All you’ve got to do,’ he said, ‘is get down the front of the stage and have a good old shout.’ He once gave the entire cast a bollocking for adding five minutes to the running time. ‘Unforfuckinggivable! Every extra second is so much piss on Shakespeare’s grave.’

I watched one afternoon as Ian Softley squatted in front of Barry Taylor, who was playing Caliban. ‘Do you know the work of the punk poet John Cooper Clarke?’ he whispered, sorrowful brown eyes gazing deeply into Barry’s.

‘Er, yes …’

‘I think, don’t you, that we can afford something of that street anger in Caliban. Some of that rage?’

‘Er …’

‘Oh forget about that,’ said Richard, who had been pacing up and down, hands clasped firmly behind his back.
‘Just get down the front of the stage and have a good old squeak and a gibber.’ I don’t suppose, with all due respect to Ian and John Cooper Clarke, that there has ever been better advice given to any actor playing Caliban in the 400 years since
The Tempest
’s creation.

One morning I noticed a poster in the street for an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum. They were going to bring out some of the Blake drawings, paintings, prints and letters that usually, due to their marked sensitivity to light, were kept hidden away in dark drawers. I mentioned this to Richard and asked if he was going.

‘William Blake?’ said Richard. ‘Couldn’t draw, couldn’t colour in.’

MacKenney is now a history professor at Edinburgh University. I hope they value him properly.

Dave Huggins stopped me in Walnut Tree Court one afternoon.

‘My mum’s coming to see your play tonight.’

‘Is she?’ I was surprised. Dave wasn’t in the drama world, and it seemed odd for a parent to come to a production that her child wasn’t in.

‘Yeah. She’s an actress.’

I consulted my memory to see if it could offer any data on an actress called Huggins. It had no suggestions. ‘Er … well. That’s nice.’

‘Yeah. So’s my dad.’

‘Might I know them?’

‘Dunno. They both use acting names. She’s called Anna Massey and he calls himself Jeremy Brett.’

‘B-but … good God!’

Anna Massey, coming to see me in a play? Well not expressly to see
me
, but coming to a play that I was in.

‘Your father won’t be there as well, will he?’

‘No, they’re divorced. He’s gay.’

‘Is he? Is he? I didn’t … well, well. Goodness. Blimey. My word.’

I tottered off, numb with excitement.

We had our four or five performances under the fluttering bats; Ariel sprinted about, Caliban squeaked and gibbered, I boomed, Prospero got down the front and had a good old shout, Anna Massey graciously applauded.

In the meantime I had been helping prepare for the May Ball.

It so happens that the Patron or Visitor of Queens’ College is, appropriately enough given the foundation’s name, whoever might happen to be Queen at the time: a position she holds until her death. From the 1930s to the 1950s the queen was, of course, Elizabeth, wife of George VI. After George died, now styled the Queen Mother, she remained in place. There’s a point to all this.

We are at a meeting of the May Ball Committee. Much of the time is taken up with the particular details that you might expect – how to run the roulette table without falling foul of the gaming acts, who will be in charge of escorting the Boomtown Rats to the tent set aside as their changing room, whether or not there will be enough ice in the champagne bar, the usual kind of administrative trivia. The President turns to me.

‘Got your Magdelene and Trinity invitations yet?’

‘Yup, and Clare.’

One of the perks of being on a May Ball committee was that you received free invitations to other May Balls. Aside from our own, I was going to the ball at Clare, one
of the prettiest of the colleges, where my cousin Penny was also a fresher, and to the two grandest of all, Trinity and Magdalene. So grand were they that gossip columnists and photographers from the
Tatler
and
Harper’s & Queen
attended. You could get away with a dinner jacket at Clare and Queens’, but Trinity and Magdalene insisted on white tie and tails. The hire companies did a roaring trade. Only King’s, a mixed college and proud of its radical and progressive ethos, refused to hold a May Ball. Their summer party was called instead, with dour literalism, the King’s June Event.

‘Good,’ the President of the Committee says to me. ‘Oh. One other little thing. Dr Walker sent me a note saying that if the Queen Mother dies the college has to go into mourning for a week, during which no entertainments or celebrations of any kind can be held, certainly not a May Ball. Perhaps you might look into insurance to cover that?’

‘Insurance?’ I try to sound casual and unconcerned, as if arranging insurance policies is something I have been doing since I was an infant. ‘Ah … right. Yes. Sure. Of course.’

The meeting ends, and I slip into the public phone box in the corner of Friar’s Court and start ringing around insurance companies.

‘Sun Life, can I help you?’

‘Ah, yes. I’m calling up about getting a policy …’

‘Life, car, commercial or property?’

‘Well, none of those really.’

‘Marine, travel or medical?’

‘Well, again. None. It’s to insure against having to cancel an event.’

‘Abandonment?’

‘Er … that’s the term is it, abandonment? Well, yes, abandonment then …’

‘Hold please, caller …’

I wait until a tired voice comes on the line.

‘Special services, how can I help?’

‘I’m ringing about getting a policy to insure an event … I think you call it abandonment?’

‘Oh yes? What sort of event?

‘Well it’s a party.’

‘An outdoors event, is it?’

‘Well, it’s a ball. Mostly on lawns in tents, but some parts are inside.’

‘I see … and you want rain cover. Partial or complete abandonment?’

‘No, not rain cover so much as reign cover.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Sorry, no. I mean … well, it’s to insure against the Queen Mother dying.’

The sound of a receiver being banged on the desk followed by a blowing down the earpiece. ‘Something wrong with the line. Sounded like … never mind. Could you repeat that please?’

Here in the twenty-first century there are probably only two insurance companies left in the world, called Axxentander or something equally foul, but in 1979 there were dozens. I tried the Royal, Swan, Prudential, Pearl, Norwich Union – all those I had heard of and a dozen that I hadn’t. In each case, once I had succeeded in getting the agent to understand what was required, I was asked to call back. I imagine that they needed to consult higher up the chain of command. It might be said that they had abandonment issues.

This kind of insurance is, of course, nothing more nor less than gambling. You bet your stake (which insurance companies call a premium) and should your horse win (house catch fire, car get stolen, royal family member die) you collect your winnings. The relationship between the premium and the amount collected is determined by balancing the value of the insured thing (the indemnity) against the odds and statistical probability of its being threatened. Bookies use the form and stud books together with the market flow of betting to determine their prices; insurance companies use a similar mixture of market trends and their own history and precedent books, which they call actuarial tables. I can understand that. Had I wanted an abandonment policy against snow and ice, they would have looked at the value of the May Ball and seen that they would have to shell out £40,000 if it was cancelled. They would also see that blizzards in early June are incredibly rare, even in Cambridge, so they would probably charge a fraction of a fraction of 1 per cent of the indemnity: £20 would be ungenerous, but then only an idiot would bother to insure against so remote a contingency in the first place. With a rain policy the insurers might decide, after consulting forecasters and local records, that there was, say, a fifty-fifty chance of precipitation in which case the premium would be a whopping £20,000. But then, what kind of an idiot would arrange a summer party in England which was so weather dependent that it would have to be abandoned if the heavens opened? Abandonment policies are not very common, that is the point, but there are nonetheless fairly obvious mechanisms in place for resolving the issue of price when it comes to natural disasters like weather, fire and earthquake. The death of the monarch’s mother, on the other hand … how could an actuary be expected to calculate the odds of that? She was seventy-nine years old.

I decided that I would give the companies three hours before calling back for a quote.

Did the insurance clerks go into her family history and check out the longevity of the entire Bowes-Lyon clan? Did they call up Clarence House and inquire into the Queen Mother’s health, diet and exercise regime? Did they take into account her reputed fondness for gin and Dubonnet? I can only imagine the discussions they must have had in their offices.

In the case of each firm, when I called back, the actuaries appeared to be very gloomy about the old girl’s hopes of making it through the next few months: 20, 25, 23 per cent chances of her surviving until the middle of June were implied by the gigantic premiums they proposed. The cheapest offer, 20 per cent of the indemnity, was way beyond our reach. I had been given a budget of £50.

‘I am afraid,’ I tell the President of the Committee after returning from the last of the calls, ‘that we are simply going to have to pray for Her Majesty’s continued good health. If she does die I will undertake to keep the news from the Fellows if I have to steal every newspaper and radio in the college and lock them all in a cellar to do so.’

‘I may hold you to that,’ the President said, a worried look furrowing his youthful brow.

I do not suppose that a queen’s life has been prayed for more assiduously since the days of Boudicca. Sadly, the Queen Mother did die, though happily for us, not for another twenty-three years. When she finally left the world in 2002, she was thoughtful enough to do so in March, meaning
that the college’s period of mourning would be well over by May Week. It was just such examples of kindness and consideration that endeared her to so many during a long, varied and vigorous life. Some time in the 1990s, sitting next to her at a dinner, I considered thanking her on behalf of the college for so thoughtfully delaying her death, but shyness and good sense got the better of me.