Writing Home (19 page)

‘Alan would be very flattered,’ he says.

‘Why?’
‘To think that his name is so much at the forefront of my mind.’

His choice of poems is dull, and I read indifferently; Judi as always with great sweetness and lots of light and air in her voice. She wears the same dress she wore when we did my
Evening
With
thirteen years ago, and I am in the same suit. Happier then, I reflect (and much in the spirit of the poems); happier almost any time than now.

5 April
,
Yorkshire
. I walk round the village at half past ten, the shadows from the barns sharp and clear under Larkin’s ‘strong, unhindered moon’. ‘This must wait’, is my foolish thought, ‘until I have written something that permits me to enjoy it.’

27 April
. Gavin Millar rehearses Julie Walters and me in our two main scenes from my television film
Intensive Care
. I play a shy schoolteacher, she a night nurse in the intensive-care unit where my father hovers between life and death. In the first scene, after a bit of palaver, I ask her to go to bed; in the second scene we do so, and in this brief absence from duty and the paternal bedside my father, of course, dies. The scene was suggested by an incident in the life of Gandhi, whose father died while he was actually screwing. I had had some thoughts while writing the play that I might act the schoolmaster, but coming to the bedroom scene I sighed with relief, knowing this was something I wouldn’t be prepared to tackle – an experience that occurs too frequently when I am writing for it to be just accidental; i.e. I deliberately write myself out of my own work. In this case, though, Gavin hasn’t been able to find anyone else to play the part, so here I am. It is a hard job because I have written myself very few lines, something I regularly do with the central character. Supporting parts I don’t find difficult, either to invent or to supply with dialogue; the central character is a
blank, a puzzle, and one which I hope the actor will solve for me. But now the actor is me and I don’t know what to do.

16 May, Yorkshire
. A racing pigeon comes down in the garden. It has been plucking its breast as pelicans were once thought to do and now just stands there, amber eyes unwinking, its beak full of fluff. It cannot fly, not even to help itself over the threshold of the hut, and, though we feed it on Ryvita and milk, A. finds it lying on its back this morning, fluttering and unable to right itself. I get the axe and, shutting my eyes, hit it on the head. Bright blood suddenly flows over the dust, though I seem to have made no wound, and its sharp-ringed eye is still. Gingerly I turn it over and it flutters again, so I give it another blow and as I lift it up there is a sound like a sigh as life leaves it. I put it in the bin. I cannot have killed more than three creatures in my life.

25 May
,
Airedale Hospital
,
Keighley
. Neil, the dresser, has been arguing with Simon, the AFM, and Miri, the make-up assistant, about the colour problem. Simon and Miri are both Jewish (Miri an Israeli) and Neil is ill-equipped to argue with them.

‘I just think,’ he says, telling me of the argument afterwards, ‘I just think there are too many coloured people in London now. And I don’t like it. But it’s only a preference. After all, some people don’t like Bette Davis.’

4 June
. We (we!) drop leaflets on the Argentine troops besieged in Port Stanley, urging them to lay down their arms. Were such leaflets dropped on our troops we would consider them contemptible and ludicrous; our leaflets are represented as a great humanitarian gesture.

15 June
. Mrs Thatcher announces the surrender of Port Stanley in well-modulated tones. Film follows of the funeral of the commandos killed at Goose Green, the simple service and the youth of the wounded unbearable. A pilot of one of the Harriers talks about the effectiveness of the Sidewinder missiles. ‘A bit of an eye-opener,’ is how he puts it. A bit of an eye-closer too. Not English I feel now. This is just where I happen to have been put down. No country. No party. No Church. No voice.

And now they are singing ‘Britannia Rules the Waves’ outside Downing Street. It’s the Last Night of the Proms erected into a policy.

Alan (Son of
Civilisation
) Clark MP wants the Argentinian prisoners paraded in front of the cameras with unlaced boots. I’m surprised he doesn’t want them displayed in front of the cameras with no braces, like the July plotters.

16 June
. A cease-fire with 250 of our forces dead, one for every twenty civilians of the Falkland Islands – the price, Madam says, of freedom. The ways the freedom of the Islanders seem to have been infringed before the outbreak of hostilities appear to be (i) they had to drive on the right, which, since their roads are mainly one-track, can scarcely have been a hardship; (ii) they were occasionally stood up against a wall, hands above their head, and searched, a humiliation suffered nightly by many citizens of this country – chiefly black – any protest about which is treated by the Conservative Party as humbug. The only actual atrocity seems to have been the death of a dairy cow. The man who would have had a field day with this war is Sydney Smith.

19 June
. Supper at AG’s with Evie Karloff, Boris Karloff ‘s widow.’ Tell me,’ I long to lean over and ask, ‘what was Bela Lugosi
really
like?’ She’s admirably plucky and lives in an
isolated cottage near Liphook, where she’s in the telephone book. On two occasions bricks have been thrown through her windows at night. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I suppose they think, “He frightened me, so now I’m jolly well going to frighten her.”’

20 June
. The papers continue fatuous. Peregrine Worsthorne suggests that, having won this war, our troops emerging with so much credit, Mrs Thatcher might consider using them at home to solve such problems as the forthcoming rail strike or indeed to break the power of the unions altogether, overlooking the fact that this is precisely what we are supposed to object to about the regime in Argentina.

Since the war (the last war should we now call it?) there has been a noticeable increase in the use of the military metaphor in public debate. Tebbitt, the Employment Secretary, yesterday talked of campaigns, charges and wars of attrition. And the flag figures. The danger of such talk, of course, is that it presupposes an enemy.

8 July
. A drunk comes round tonight shouting at Miss Shepherd and trying to get her out of the van. I go to the door and scare him off, saying, ‘What sort of a man is it who torments old ladies of seventy-five?’ This morning I am passing the van when her hand comes out. ‘Mr Bennett. I’m not seventy-five. I’m seventy-one.’

10 July
. Olivier is much given to excessive and almost laughably insincere flattery; he described
Enjoy
, I remember, as the best play he had ever seen – this from the balcony of Her Majesty’s to the assembled company at the dress rehearsal, when some of the younger members of the company actually believed him. I saw M. today, who told me of a better instance. Spotting Tom Courtenay at some awards dinner, Olivier congratulates him on
his role in
The Dresser
. Tom’s current girlfriend is the ASM, whose duties include prompting. Tom introduces her. ‘Oh, my dear,’ said the Brighton peer, ‘what wouldn’t I give to be in your shoes! To be able to follow the text of this play
every night
!’

3 August
. R. tells me that there has been a photo-call for Sefton, one of the horses injured by the IRA bomb in Hyde Park. However, Sefton has so far recovered that his wounds no longer register on camera. So make-up is applied.

6 September
,
Weston
-
super
-
Mare
. To Weston to see Mam. We have lunch in the Cosy Café. Mam’s teeth are loose, which blurs her speech, and she also talks quite loudly, as if she is deaf (and exactly the opposite of the hushed tones she and Dad would always use in cafés), so other diners are startled to hear ‘I do love you, chick’ shouted across the small room. I notice her watching what I do with my knife and fork at the end of the meal, then imitating me.

I drive her back. ‘Have you got one of these of your own?’ she asks as we are going along.

‘What?’

One of these things where you’re in it by yourself.’

‘A car?’

‘That’s it.’

7 September
. Douglas Bader dies. I used to imitate him in
Beyond
the Fringe
as part of the Aftermyth of War sketch, coming downstairs with a pipe in my mouth and exaggeratedly straight legs (though I never quite dared make them as stiff as they should have been). One night I was hissed and was very pleased with myself. He died after a dinner for Sir Arthur Harris, the destroyer of Dresden. ‘Probably legless,’ says R. Many other jokes possible, like the loss of his legs going to his head.
Certainly had he not lost them he would not have been heard so much of, which he was – and always on the right. Somehow his death is yet another feather in the cap of Mrs Thatcher, of whom he doubtless approved and who certainly approved of him. Describing his death, another veteran says, ‘It was completely clean.’

24 September
,
Yorkshire
. I blackberry up the lane that leads to Wharfe. A big heron in the beck takes wing and flies slowly away up to Crummock. My nightmare when blackberrying (or when I stop the car for a pee) is that I shall find the body of a child, that I will report it and be suspected of the crime. So I find myself running through in my mind the evidences of my legitimate occupation – where I started picking, who saw me park, and so on.

These days I even imagine Mozart as being arrayed against me – so safe, so consistent and now so universally esteemed, the centre of a great huddle (and a huddle of the great) at the Posterity Cocktail Party.

27 September
. Russell invents a good parlour game: whose underpants would you least like to be gagged by? I say there would be many people jostling for first position. ‘No,’ says R. ‘not jostling. Jockeying.’

8 October
. On the platform at the Conservative Party conference this week sits Mrs H. Jones, the widow of the commando colonel killed at Goose Green. No one remarks on the inappropriate-ness of this. Even were she, as I imagine she is, a fervent supporter of the Conservative Party, to parade her sacrifice in this fashion makes it partial, not national, and in every sense diminishes it.

13 October
. I am rehearsing
Merry Wives of Windsor
for TV, in which I play Justice Shallow. Today I go for a costume fitting to find I am dressed from head to foot in red brocade. I look like an animated tandoori restaurant.

22 November
,
New York
. Struck by the completeness of New York, much of it still as it was in 1930. Today is Thanksgiving Day and the streets are emptied of humanity, Prince Street swept clean of people, every detail of the fretted fronts of warehouses clear and sharp, buildings cut up like cheese, segmented against the sky. It was like this the Thanksgiving Day after J.F.K.’s assassination, when I walked down a totally empty Seventh Avenue with not a soul to be seen.

4 December
,
New York
. One change that has come over public manners was evident at the Falklands homecomings. Combatants (the only airman captured by the Argentinians, for instance), asked what is the first thing they are going to do when they get home, grin cheekily. One says, ‘Well, what do you think?’ and doubtless others actually do say, ‘I’m going to fuck someone silly’ Once upon a time they would have
said
, at any rate, ‘Have a nice cup of tea.’

6 December
,
New York
. Ever since 1977, when I first stayed in SoHo, there has been a boutique on the corner of Watts and West Broadway. It’s still there this year, and to the casual passer-by the stock looks much the same. But it isn’t. Despite the flimsy-looking furs and dresses on display, this is now a shop that specializes in ‘protective clothing’. The fur is bullet-proof.

Opposite, and a fixture there for many years longer, is a shop that sells live chickens (the hot smell of it always bringing back the hen coop at Wilsill where we were evacuated in 1939). The presence of the live-chicken shop and the boutique selling
protective clothing would enable J. to make one of his ‘waiting for the right circumstances’ jokes – i.e. not bullet-proof but pullet-proof.

8 February
,
Dundee
. A day off from filming
An Englishman
Abroad
and I go to Edinburgh with Alan Bates. We climb the tower near the castle to see the camera obscura. The texture of the revolving bowl and the softness of the reflection convert the view into an eighteenth-century aquatint in which motor cars seem as delicate and exotic as sedan chairs. The traffic is also rendered more sedate and unreal for being silent.

An element of voyeurism in it. The guide, a genteel Morningside lady, trains the mirror on some adjacent scaffolding where workmen are restoring a church. ‘I often wonder,’ she muses in the darkened room, ‘if one were to catch them… well, unawares. I mean,’ she adds hastily, ‘taking a little
rest
.’

3 March
,
Yorkshire
. I take a version of a script down to Settle to be photocopied. The man in charge of the machine watches the sheets come through. ‘Glancing at this,’ he says, ‘I see you dabble in play writing.’ While this about sums it up, I find myself resenting him for noticing what goes through his machine at all. Photocopying is a job in which one is required to see and not see, the delicacy demanded not different from that in medicine. It’s as if a nurse were to say, ‘I see, watching you undress, that your legs are nothing to write home about.’

20 March
,
Weston
-
super
-
Mare
. To see Mam at Weston. I sit in the dining-room of the home while they locate her coat. Two old ladies are waiting for their lunch, which won’t happen for at
least another hour. ‘It went through my mind it was pineapple,’ says one, ‘but I wouldn’t swear to it.’ ‘You have to watch her,’ says the other, pointing to an empty place. ‘She’ll have all the bread.’ Mam’s memory has almost gone, leaving her suffused with a general benevolence. ‘I’ve always liked you,’ she says to one of the other residents and plants a kiss on her slightly startled cheek.