Writing Home (20 page)

It is a beautiful day and we walk on the sands. ‘Has Gordon been to see you?’ I ask. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, happily. ‘Though I’m saying he has, I don’t know who he is.’ ‘Do you know who I am?’ She peers at me. ‘Oh yes, you’re… you’re my son, aren’t you?’ ‘And what’s my name?’ ‘Ah, now then.’ And she laughs, as if this is not information any reasonable person could expect her to have. But it doesn’t distress her, so it doesn’t distress me.

We have our sandwiches on a hill outside Weston with a vast view over Somerset. She wants to say, ‘What a grand view,’ but her words are going too. ‘Oh,’ she exclaims. ‘What a big lot of About.’ There are sheep in the field. ‘I know what they are,’ she says, ‘but I don’t know what they are called.’ Thus Wittgenstein is routed by my mother.

28 March
. A ‘vigorous but not bellicose’ war memorial is to be erected by the Falkland Islanders. It has been on view in High Wycombe. On the news, pictures of three ex-servicemen being taught to ski in Nevada. All have lost feet in the Falklands conflict. The instructor is American. He leads them off down the slopes with the words ‘All together now. Follow
moi
.’

17 April.
George Fenton, who got an Oscar nomination for his
Gandhi music
, has been to Hollywood for the ceremony. By far the most striking people attending were young couples, faultlessly dressed and very glamorous, who stood in the aisles throughout the evening. When anyone in the audience left to go
to the loo (the ceremony was interminable) their seat was immediately taken by one of these groomed and gorgeous creatures, who then gave it up without demur when the rightful seat-holder returned. Thinking they were hangers-on, George found himself slightly resenting them, as also their grooming and their glamour. Leaving for a break himself, George found a young man promptly sliding into his place and on his lapel a badge: ‘Seat-Filler’. They were all extras employed by the organizers to make sure nothing so shocking as an empty seat should ever appear on the television screen.

6 May
. A second session doing a voice-over for a commercial for Quartz washing-machines. I spend half an hour trying to invest the words ‘This frog’ with some singularity of tone that will distinguish this particular frog from the previous frog, with which it is otherwise identical. It defeats me, and the session is abandoned. Coming away, I feel just as badly as if I’d given a shoddy performance in a definitive recording of the Sonnets.

20 May
. In the evening I often bike round Regent’s Park. Tonight I am mooning along the Inner Circle past Bedford College when a distraught woman dashes out into the road and nearly fetches me off. She and her friend have found themselves locked in and have had to climb over the gate. Her friend, Marie, hasn’t made it. And there, laid along the top of one of the five-barred gates, is a plump sixty-year-old lady, one leg either side of the gate, bawling to her friend to hurry up. I climb over and try to assess the situation. ‘Good,’ says Marie, her cheek pressed against the gate. ‘I can see you’re of a scientific turn of mind.’ Her faith in science rapidly evaporates when I try moving her leg, and she yells with pain. It’s at this point that we become aware of an audience. Three Chinese in the regulation rig-out of embassy officials are watching the pantomime, smiling politely
and clearly not sure if this is a pastime or a predicament. Eventually they are persuaded to line up on the other side of the gate. I hoist Marie over and she rolls comfortably down into their outstretched arms. Much smiling and bowing.

Marie’s friend says, ‘All’s well that ends well.’ Marie says she’s laddered both her stockings and I cycle on my way.

30 May
,
Yorkshire
. A boy is paddling in the beck. He has rolled up his trousers but not taken his socks off, thus refuting the soldier’s argument against contraceptives.

I talk to Graham Mort, a young poet who has come to live in the village. He has a wife and three small children and to make ends meet teaches at a prison, the mental hospital in Lancaster and a local school. He says that, compared with the school-children, the murderers and psychotics are models of good behaviour.

9 June
,
Yorkshire
. On the day that Mrs Thatcher is elected for a second term I spit blood. Last night I was reading
Metamor
phosis
and wondered that Gregor Samsa, having woken and found himself a beetle, could yet drop off to sleep again, or at any rate daydream and pretend it wasn’t true. Yet somehow I manage to doze until around seven, when I come to and lie awake arranging my future, or lack of it.

At nine I go down to the Health Centre in Settle to see Dr. W., whom I first met twelve years or so ago when he was a student at Airedale Hospital. He examines me, finds some evidence of bronchitis, and sends me down to Skipton for an X-ray. By ten-thirty I am back at home, the whole process having taken less than two hours. The result (‘nothing sinister’) comes through later in the day. It’s a model of how the NHS should work, and does in small communities like this, where the patients know the receptionists, the GPs know the hospital, and bureaucracy and
waiting are reduced to a minimum. There can be very few private patients, I imagine, in our area because the NHS provides a better service.

12 June
,
Yorkshire
. The verges full of gypsies these last two weeks, on the road to and from the horse fair at Appleby. Someone must have gone into business reproducing their traditional hooped carts, as there are far more this year than previously. I pass some of them on the back road to Settle, two horse-and-carts coming down the steep hill above Swabeck. To brake the carts they trail an old car tyre behind with a child perched on it.

23 June
. As A. and I are walking in Regent’s Park this evening we stop to watch a baseball game. A police car comes smoothly along the path, keeping parallel with a young black guy who is walking over the grass. The police keep calling to him from the car, but he ignores them and eventually stops right in the middle of the game. A policeman gets out and begins questioning him, but warily and from a distance. The baseball players, unfortunately for the suspect, are all white and they mostly pretend it isn’t happening. Some laugh and look at their feet. Others break away and talk among themselves. Only a few unabashedly listen. Someone shouts, ‘What’s he done?’ ‘I want you to bear witness,’ the man shouts. ‘You all bear witness.’ For his part the policeman ignores the players, sensing that he is at a disadvantage and that the middle of a game is some kind of sanctuary and too public for the law’s liking. It’s the sort of refuge Cary Grant might choose in a Hitchcock movie. Meanwhile reinforcements are on the way, and, as a police van speeds over the grass, another policeman gets out of the car and the two of them tackle the suspect. Still one watched, nobody saying anything, those nearest the struggle moving away, their
embarrassment now acute. Eventually the police bundle the man into a van and he is driven off. The game is restarted, a little shamefacedly at first, then gathering momentum as we walk on. But the players must have lost heart, because five minutes later the pitcher passes us with his baseball mitt and a young man in a funny hat.

4 July
. Recording
The House at Pooh Corner
for Radio 4. One story ends, ‘“Tigger is all right,
really
,” said Piglet lazily. “Of course he is,” said Christopher Robin. “Everybody is
really
,” said Pooh.’ The true voice of England in the thirties.

8 July
. Two strips of pale-blue shirt fabric arrive in the post with a letter asking me to wear them as an armlet on 25 August, which is Leonard Bernstein’s sixty-fifth birthday. This will testify to my regard for Lenny and my desire for peace. Actually I don’t know Lenny and fear that wearing a sky-blue armband is an opaque if not an ambiguous gesture, so I send my Van Heusen sample to Patricia Routledge, who does know Lenny and is as much concerned about dying from radiation as I am, but less concerned about dying of embarrassment.

1 October
. I mend a puncture on my bike. I get pleasure out of being able to do simple, practical jobs – replacing a fuse, changing a wheel, jump-starting the car – because these are not accomplishments generally associated with a temperament like mine. I tend to put sexual intercourse in this category too. The contents of a puncture outfit are like a time capsule, unchanged from what they were when I was a boy, and probably long before that. Here are the rubber solution, the dusting-chalk, the grater on the side of the box, and the little yellow crayon I didn’t use then and I don’t use now. I ask the cycle shop if anyone has thought of making self-adhesive puncture patches. No one has.

15 October
,
Yorkshire
. If Mr Parkinson and Miss Keays would only get together they could call their baby Frances Parkinson Keays.

20 December
,
New York
. A sign on Seventh Avenue at Sheridan Square: ‘Ears pierced, with or without pain.’

I am reading a book on Kafka. It is a library book, and someone has marked a passage in the margin with a long, wavering line. I pay the passage special attention without finding it particularly rewarding. As I turn the page the line moves. It is a long, dark hair.

29 January
. Russell has been given some beta-blockers which help to suppress the symptoms of nerves and stage fright. He had put one of them in a tissue, meaning to take it just before his programme, but when he came to do so he found it had dissolved, leaving a patch on the tissue. In the hope that some effective trace of the drug remained, he sucked this patch and within a few minutes felt calmer and came through with flying colours. A second attack of nerves he dealt with in the same way. It was only on the way home after the programme that he felt in another pocket and found the original tissue with the pill intact. What he had been sucking was some snot.

16 February
,
London
.
Forty Years On
is to be produced at Chichester in May, sixteen years after it was first done. I am nervous about this. When I’ve written something, I’d quite like to have it adopted, put in someone else’s name, and thus have none of the responsibilities of parentage or run the risk that at
sixteen one’s offspring doesn’t turn out as well as one had hoped.

Apropos of which, a few years ago I adopted a Kenyan boy through Action Aid. Every three months or so I get an aerogramme covered with his drawings and a comment on his work from his teacher. The drawings have scarcely improved at all over the years: today’s are ‘house’, ‘pesil’, ‘bus’ and ‘boy’, with the teacher’s comment ‘He is doing nice in all fields.’ John Ryle, who has lived in Africa, says that these boys invariably end up in government service as petty officials.

23 February
. Local elections are in progress and I have two posters in the window on behalf of the Alliance candidate. Today is polling day and around eight I am woken by the doorbell. Thinking it’s the postman, I go down in my dressing-gown, open the door, and just catch Miss Shepherd scuttling back into the van. She has left a note on the mat:

Mr. Bennett. Urgent.

It has dawned on me I have not been given the Alliance Leaflet. If it should be the second one you have put in your window as my property I demand that it is
removed immediately
. Please put it through my window so that I can dispose of it as I think best.

Later I see she has stuck a Conservative poster in the back window of the van.

14 March
. Two nuns in Marks & Spencer’s studying
meringues
.

21 March. Malcolm Mowbray, Michael Palin, Mark Shivas and I go to Broxbourne, where we have three pigs being groomed for their role in the film
A Private Function
, due to be shot in May. The couple doing the grooming operate under the name ‘Intellectual Animals’, but our pigs are anything but intellectual, squealing to be let out and then trotting round on delicate little
feet like buxom landladies tripping naked to the bathroom in their high-heeled shoes. Their bums are much more striking than their faces, constantly on the move and shivering with delicate erotic tremors. They are supposed to have been house-trained and taught to come when called, but they aren’t and don’t. None of us mentions this.

31 March
,
Oxford
. In the morning to the Ashmolean, where I look at and dislike Leonardo’s
John the Baptist
, the body so smooth and rubbery it makes one doubt the attribution. The face, with its ambiguous smile, and the hand raised in what is almost an insulting gesture make it look more like a whore than a saint, the mysteriousness of the smile not a natural mystery – the enigma of beauty, say – but one of deliberate provocation. If he weren’t John the Baptist he’d be carrying a fan or peeping from under a parasol.

In the afternoon to Libby Vaisey’s confirmation in the cathedral. Though it’s not a large building, the bishop dons a mike in order to speak, but then, moving to the pulpit, forgets that he has done so and there is a terrible amplified slurring as he fouls the cable. However, the young, bearded priest who attends him (who is probably as much his sound man as his chaplain) disentangles his lordship so that he can get into the pulpit. Once there he unceremonially dons another mike, though presumably if this becomes a feature of the ordinary service it will end up being given ceremonial trappings and perhaps even a place in the liturgy.

The actual laying-on of hands has been personalized since that evening thirty-five years ago when H. H. Vully de Candole, the Bishop of Knaresborough, confirmed me in St Michael’s, Headingley. Nowadays each candidate carries a card with his or her name on it in block letters, some, I imagine, with an aid to
pronunciation in brackets. And there are Kims and Beckys and Mandys and Trevs, all blessed and admitted to communion by this miked-up bishop and with a casualness about it that nobody seems to find surprising and which I think myself a snob for even noticing. Few of the boys wear suits, and one of the older candidates goes up in almost doctrinaire Fabian undress in an anorak.