Writing Home (23 page)

‘Many there?’ Dad would always ask after church. About thirty today, well wrapped-up farmers’ wives, cheap fur coats and bobble hats and all the little niceties of devotion I had
forgotten, like the couple at the front, more fastidious worshippers than the rest, who wait until the queue has subsided before going up ‘to receive’.

Tell Mary-Kay about the service, who says that she knows of a church in France where the rite is sung as in the patristic church and people flock. It’s like Real Ale. And if the C of ? were differently organized that would be one way to revivify it, advertise the type of worship and the quality of the service provided. Real God.

29 March
,
Yorkshire
. It is Bank Holiday, and the cave rescue gets called out to find some students who have gone pot-holing and not come up. A young caver from our village, David Anderson, is one of the rescue team. The water is rising, and as he is going down he slips into a narrow gulley. Though he is roped up, the force of the torrent is too much for his companions: as they struggle to pull him out, his light still shining through the water, he drowns. The students are later found unharmed. What the feelings of the rescuers must be when, having lost one of their colleagues, they come upon the students is hard to imagine. Some harsh words spoken, or no words spoken at all more likely, pot-holers being a pretty laconic breed. The boy himself was very shy, blushing if his leg was pulled and cautious to a fault. Putting a TV aerial up on Graham Mort’s cottage roof, he got into a complete safety harness. He is the first cave rescuer ever to have died. Four hundred cavers turn up for his funeral and follow the coffin down the village to the graveyard. It is like a scene from Northern Ireland. The students who were rescued have gone down again today.

8 April
. A helicopter crashes near Banbury. The pilot, four children and a woman are killed. An eager reporter on
P.M
. interviews an eyewitness, who describes what happened. ‘But
what did it look like? ‘persists the reporter. What he means is, ‘What did it look like seeing six people burn to death?’

19 April
,
Bruges
. After seeing Uncle Clarence’s grave at Ypres
*
we drive to Bruges for the weekend. Drenching rain. Sea Scouts are putting up two wooden stakes near the Fish Market as once upon a time, in this city of cruelties, other more sinister stakes were often erected. Later we pass by; it is still raining and two figures in oilskins have been lashed to the stakes and a Sea Scout waits with a bucket of sponges for anyone wanting to pay for a shot.

The Groeninge is a good small museum with the rooms set on a circular plan so that the final room is next door to the first. They cover the whole span of Flemish painting. In the first room hang the Van Eycks and Van der Weydens. In the last room the chief exhibit is a large canvas which has been partially cut away to incorporate a bird-cage. The bird-cage contains a live bird, and the whole is reflected in a mirror opposite.

I May
. When Denholm Elliott is sent a script he opens it in the middle and reads a few pages. If he likes it, finds the characters interesting, he goes back to the beginning and reads it through. ‘You soon enough decide whether these are the kind of people you want to spend any time with. Reading a play, going into a pub – same thing, old boy’

11 May,
Yorkshire
. A day or two after the accident at Chernobyl Barry Brewster, our local doctor, rang the Department of Health and various other authorities wanting information about the likelihood of contamination. Getting none, and indeed no help whatsoever, he called all the local farmers and told them to keep
their cows indoors and alerted all the schools to stop them drinking the milk. On such people will survival depend.

14 May
. When stuck in hospital (I am thinking of Sam) it is irritating to find that, though on the one hand you are an object of pity and concern, on the other one is a social catalyst. Friends meet around the bed, discuss where they can ‘go on’ after the hospital, supper possibly, then a movie, all pleasures which one’s illness has made possible but from which the illness excludes you. The last glimpse of the world as one goes through the gates will be of friends making plans what to do afterwards.

25 May
,
Gloucestershire
. Walking in the bleak, deodorized fields round Blockley, we pass a large modern barn. Barns used commonly to be compared with cathedrals, and this, too, is not unlike a cathedral – but one of the terrible present-day ones at Bristol or Liverpool. The metaphor has kept pace. Of course, to say a barn is like a cathedral is different from saying a cathedral is like a barn.

26 May
,
Weston
-
super
-
Mare
. To Weston. Mam and I sit in the sun lounge and she holds my hand, hers now so thin and fine it is like an anatomical illustration, every vein visible. She has had her hair done, her face is plump and happy, and she talks gibberish.

Other residents pass through. ‘I hate it here,’ says one. ‘I hate it here, only my mother died.’ She is about sixty.

‘Can you remember your mother?’ I ask Mam. ‘No. I don’t think she had done then.’ Pause. ‘I am glad to see you. You are a love.’ She kisses my hand. ‘You’re beautiful.’

‘You’re beautiful too. Do you know how old you are?’

‘Was it?’

While we sit there a younger woman helps lay the tables. She
has straight white hair, a red rustic face, long socks pulled up almost to her knees, and trainers. ‘It’s 26 May,’ she says, not unhappily, ‘so I’ve been here one year, one month, and six days’.

‘I haven’t seen you,’ says a much older woman, ‘but then I’m upstairs most of the time. Just thought I’d come down for a trot round. I’m from Cirencester. Most people I know are from Westbury-on-Severn. Too far for them to come. I’ve only been here five weeks. My son’s off to Portugal tomorrow’

She is quite sensible, and when Mam responds in one of her garbled sentences I am apologetic, but the woman takes no notice. Occasionally Mam takes hold of her hand and kisses it.

It is time for lunch, so Mam is taken upstairs, though not on the chair lift. A few years ago, when she was still talking sensibly and getting about, I was with her as one of the other ladies sat on the chair and slowly ascended. Mam was not impressed. ‘I’ve been on that thing,’ she said. ‘It’s nowt.’ It might have been the Big Dipper.

I go and sit with her in the bedroom and help her with her lunch. She shares the room with two other old ladies, one the small Lancashire woman who always used to hang about the hall and keep trying the door. Now she is very frail, and with her little square face and beaked nose she looks like a finch. The third woman has rather a distinguished face and seems to be asleep, then suddenly without opening her eyes she shouts, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ Neither of the other two takes any notice. The handyman puts his head round the door, sees there is a responsible person present, grins, and goes away. ‘Who was that?’ Mam says, and laughs.

When I go she blows me a kiss.

27 May
. Roger Lloyd Pack is to play Kafka’s in
Kafka’s
Dick
. We also see Mark Rylance, an actor whom I don’t know and who is also very good. Totally self-absorbed, to the point of eccen¬
tricity, he’s the first actor we’ve read who makes sense of Kafka’s desire to be somebody and nobody at the same time. Roger L.– P. will be funnier and is physically more striking (and looks like Kafka), but Rylance has a lovely, appealing face and marvellous directness. He has played Peter Pan and many roles at the RSC (all, of course, unseen by me) and has had his own company presenting potted Shakespeare. Born in Kent, he was brought up in Milwaukee but talks like a northerner who has lost his accent.

I June
. Mary-Kay has been dining at All Souls and comes back with a nice Alan Tyson story. One of the Fellows is a vegetarian and was telling Tyson how he had to arrange himself special food at a dinner. He was to start off with Jerusalem artichoke soup which would be followed by a salad of Jerusalem artichokes. ‘Surely,’ said Tyson, Once in Royal David’s City is enough.’

3 June
. The harrying of the hippies continues. Turfed off a farm, they now camp on a disused airfield belonging to the Forestry Commission. The FC protest, saying the convoy will be injurious to wildlife, as if – with all those millions of acres of factory firs they’ve planted – they have ever given a toss about wildlife. The Chief Constable of Hampshire issues a statement: ‘If only they would return to a conventional way of living there would be no problem.’ It is the cry of the police the world over. I’m surprised there’s no such thing as an international police conference (perhaps there is). I can see the Hampshire Police and the KGB getting on like a house on fire. Later, on
The World at One
, the same Chief Constable, a drab accountant-like figure, describes the hippies as ‘rebels’. Nobody queries his use of the word. Meanwhile Mrs T. sets up a special committee of the Cabinet to deal with the
problem and the threat to property. No Cabinet committee to deal with the problem on the other flank, the daily attacks on Asians and the threat to property there. No monitoring of that by the police.

The Guards beat the retreat to the signature tune from
East
Enders
.

When Larkin says his childhood was a forgotten boredom, what he means is that he has nothing to write home about.

14 July
. First day of shooting a film based on the life of Joe Orton. We begin with the childhood scenes, Thornton Heath standing in for Leicester. The film is announced in
Variety
. The title,
Prick Up Your Ears
, presents a problem, as
Variety’s
cryptic style demands the film be known as
Prick
. But no: the headline reads, ‘
Ears
lenses Monday’.

Those best at saying what they mean aren’t always best at meaning what they say.

I am reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s
The Emperor
, the story of the last days of Haile Selassie. The accounts by the lowliest of the palace officials are the most interesting. Something of Oliver Sacks in the other ‘verbatim’ accounts. It’s not always easy to believe these articulate and over-literary witnesses, or to trust that words are not being put into their mouths. The most curious feature of the account are the names: Tenene Work, Asfa Wossen, Teferra Gebrewold. Are they Germanic or Scandinavian? Makonen, Zera Yakob: who would guess these were Africans?

A boy and a girl in Marks & Spencer’s, she punk, he gay. They take the lid off a prawn cocktail, shove their noses in it, sniff, then put it back on the shelf. Marks & Spencer’s now sell
freshly-squeezed ruby orange juice. Delicious, it is of course blood-orange juice, only the word ‘blood’ is thought to be unmarketable. It will doubtless not be long before the Church of England takes note of this and amends the already much-amended communion service, so that the priest, proffering the chalice, will say, not ‘This is my blood which is shed for thee,’ but, more palatably, ‘This is my ruby liquid.’ And while we’re at it, why not ‘This is the fibre-enriched bread of the New Testament’?

20 July
. What is written all over Gary Oldman’s muddy, slightly spotty face of Joe Orton at fifteen is a forgotten disease. It is that look of guilt and cunning you used to see thirty years ago on the faces of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old schoolboys, wankers doom. Look at old school photographs and it’s there in the faces of half my form because most of us were using every spare moment to wank ourselves silly and thinking nobody else knew. Nowadays everybody knows. Wanking is authorized, joked about on television. Not every boy is a wanker but everybody wanks and there is no doom.

27 July
,
Yorkshire
. The annual street market in the village and I take out piles of stuff for the junk stall. At home this clearing-out process was always known as ‘wuthering’ and Dad used to love it. ‘What’s happened to such and such?’ I would, ask Mam. ‘Ask your Dad. He’s probably wuthered it.’

And it does become a fever as I search each room for any object worthy of being wuthered. It’s like cutting a play, the zeal and pleasure of finding a cut far exceeding the joy of writing the stuff in the first place.

Among the junk I put out are piles of Mam’s old
Ideal Home
magazines and as I am about to hand them over a photograph
falls out. It’s a portrait of the four of us in
Beyond the Fringe
, taken and signed by Cecil Beaton.

31 July
. To St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, to speak to a summer school. My vanity is nicely exposed at the outset when I am introduced by the principal. A few nights ago, he tells the audience, he was playing a parlour game with some friends in which one pretended to be a famous person. He was a playwright beginning with ? and he was asked whether he was one of the most profound, influential (and here a modest-seeming smile begins to play shyly across my face) ascetic and un-self-regarding writers of our time. By now my smile is sickening in its humility.

‘And I said, “No”,’ says the principal, ‘“I am not Samuel Beckett.”’

5 August
. Neville Smith plays the police inspector in the Orton film. He was an undergraduate at Hull and is un-impressed by the current canonization of Larkin. He came across him twice. Once, waiting at a bus-stop in torrential rain, Neville edged closer and closer to Larkin, who had an umbrella. Finally the poet spoke: ‘Don’t think you’re going to share my umbrella, because you’re not.’ Another time Larkin in his role as librarian collared Neville as he was slipping in with an overdue book: ‘Don’t you know there’s a queue for this book?’ Neville swears the last time it had been taken out was in 1951.

1 September
. A group of drunks in the back doorway of the
Odeon
on Inverness Street. Another drunk, somewhat younger, sways across the street to join them. One of the drunks staggers to his feet. ‘Go away. We don’t want you jumping on our bandwagon.’

Play snooker with Sam. It is just before his bedtime and when I am not looking he keeps moving the white to a worse position so that the game can go on longer. One of the lines I have cut from
Kafka’s Dick
is about the games of cards he used to play with his parents. Eventually his father refuses to play with him because his son used to cheat. ‘But only’, says Kafka, ‘in order to lose.’