Writing Home (28 page)

Novy Mir
had printed bootleg extracts from Sue Townsend’s
Diary of Adrian Mole
. Now it is to be officially translated, and the translator is to take her out to supper. We go off to a restaurant, where eventually she joins us. The translator has stood her up. Next day he calls to say he had the day confused and thought Tuesday was Thursday. Paul Bailey remarks that this augurs ill for the translation, which will probably read, ‘Friday. Got up early and went to Sunday school.’

To Lvov by Aeroflot. It is a two-hour flight, and the only refreshment served is a cup of faintly scented mineral water. The stewardess waits while one drinks (not enough cups), this making it seem even more like medicine. Spirits rise as we see another stewardess coming through with a trolley and the passengers falling on the contents. They turn out to be dolls. A second pass through the plane brings little brown bears and plastic carrier bags, and a third the Russian equivalent of Knight’s Castile. I imagine if the flight went on long enough we’d be down to Brillo pads and plastic sink tidies.

The woman in front is nervous of flying. She is sweating a lot, and eventually removes her coat. Sitting by the emergency door and not finding anywhere to put her doubtless precious coat, she tries to hang it on the emergency door handle. In an unaccustomed moment of decision I clasp both arms round her and shout, ‘Stop!’ She doesn’t even look round, just meekly puts the coat across her lap and goes on sweating.

On the flight Paul Bailey reads Gibbon, I read Updike, Sue Townsend reads Paul Bailey, and Timothy Mo chats to Volodya, our senior representative. He is translating John le Carré and asks Tim for help with some idiomatic phrases. ‘What is “Down the hatch”? This is an invitation to drop the liquid, no?’ Some of Tim’s explanations are as inaccurate as Volodya’s guesses. ‘At Oxford, what is Port Meadow?’ Tim describes a rich green pasture where cows stand up to their bellies in the lush grass – a far cry from the patch of scrub bordered by factories and allotments that it really is.

Lvov turns out to be an enchanting place, a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century city that is largely intact, with architecture so cosmopolitan one could be anywhere in northern Europe or even Austria. The city was Polish until 1939, when it came to Russia in the carve-up after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and is now a
centre of Ukrainian nationalism. We are taken to meet the mayor, a large ironic man who gives us coffee in his parlour and tells us of the contacts the city maintains with expatriate Ukrainians, particularly in Canada, where he has just been visiting Winnipeg. I mention that most of the Russians in
An
Englishman Abroad
were played by members of the Ukrainian colony near Dundee. ‘What a pity,’ he says. ‘Next time maybe they’ll play Ukrainians.’

Lvov is full of churches – Catholic, Orthodox and Uniate – and all of them are packed this Thursday morning because it is Ascension Day. Sue and I go into the cathedral. Although the service is over, women are kneeling not only in the pews and before the altars but in the aisles, against pillars, anywhere where there is a spare patch of flagstone (which some of them kiss). We are younger than most of the congregation, and a kindly old granny, assuming that it is all mumbo-jumbo to us, starts to explain about the Ascension and Pentecost. She is stopped by a mean-looking old woman who tells me I should not be sitting with my legs crossed in a church. Sue is upset by this attack and starts crying, whereupon the nice granny shoos the old witch away and takes us off behind a pillar in order to continue the lesson.

Such fervour is disturbing. Lvov is still Polish in spirit, which explains part of it, but one realizes there is no easy equation between political liberty and religious freedom, and that faith as blind as this is no more democratic than the regime that would suppress it. It is incidentally very anti-Semitic. We ask our guide whether there is a synagogue in the city. There may have been, he says, but he thinks it has been destroyed. Further questions are met with a shrug. Later we discover that during the war Lvov had a large concentration camp on its outskirts.

An afternoon spent in discussions at the local Writers ‘Union. The most striking person here is a French-speaking Ukrainian woman. She is in her sixties, but chic and smartly dressed, almost a caricature of a Frenchwoman making t
h
e most of herself. Her job was to translate approved novels from the French. The approval had its limitations, however, and she was sentenced to ten years in a camp at Magadan. When the official interpreter translates this, she doesn’t actually say 4 a camp’, but ‘somewhere far away’. I am not sure if this is because of censorship, voluntary or otherwise, or because it wasn’t a camp, just a kind of exile. Or maybe it’s just that she’s naturally embarrassed in an atmosphere of cordial discussion to admit that there are such places.

There are plenty of cafés in Lvov, more food in the shops than in Moscow, and in the evening the place takes on an Italian atmosphere with the whole town out walking the streets round the main square. On park seats old men play chess, dominoes and a kind of stand-up whist in which the players hurl their cards down on to a low table.

Later we go to the opera to see an epic of Ukrainian nationalism, Gulak-Artemosky’s
The Ukrainian Cossack beyond
the Danube
. It is a simple tale, given once a month by the company and greatly appreciated by the audience, who applaud it way beyond its merits. The orchestra are plainly bored stiff with it, openly reading newspapers and chattering loudly during spoken passages. A pigeon now gets into the roof and gets trapped against the glass. The chorus discuss this while singing, and step out of line to look up at the source of the disturbance, as in their unoccupied moments do the leading singers. At the end, bouquets are brought on to the stage and there is the usual hail of tulips and ten minutes of rhythmic applause. Nice to see, though, that Melvyn has caught up with us again, this time
giving a somewhat overstated performance as a eunuch in the retinue of the Sultan.

Beer was unobtainable in Moscow except at the hard-currency shop, and before coming to Lvov I bought a dozen or more cans to see me through the trip. However, beer is plentiful in Lvov (though about as alcoholic as dandelion and burdock), so when I board the plane for Moscow I am still carrying a dozen cans of Heineken. It is, I suppose, the closest I shall ever come to being a football hooligan.

26 May
,
Leeds
. There is a sense in which the dying
shake off
the concerns of the living, play them like a salmon plays the rod – seeming to get a little better so that relief replaces concern, then worsening again so that anxiety returns. It needs only a short dose of this before the living are quite glad to see them go. Lady Bracknell’s ‘It is high time that Mr Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die’ is not altogether a joke.

11 June
,
Yorkshire
. The evening of Russell’s funeral A. and I go down to supper in Giggleswick, thinking we will also take a look at the flowers on the grave. But as long as the light lasts and well past eleven o’clock there are visitors threading their way by the church and through the opening in the wall to the huge mound of wreaths, and so we give it a miss.

At one point after supper I go up to the bathroom at W.’s, which overlooks the graveyard, just to see if it’s quietened down. There are myths in friendship, and one of ours was that I envied Russell his life and he envied me mine. He certainly had his much better sorted out – had a housekeeper, someone to cook and to clean, took lots of trips abroad, and always with a car to take him wherever he wanted to go. Whereas what he envied
about me was that I could point to the work I’d done and that I caught much less critical flak than he did (who caught more than most). The truth is, of course, that I wouldn’t have wanted his life or he mine.

My grave will, I imagine, be in the next village, a few miles north of Giggleswick. It’s a fairly anonymous spot, as our churchyard is full and burials are in the overflow cemetery on the road to the station. It’s where my father is buried, pleasant enough and surrounded by trees and fields, but without much character. Russell’s grave is in the churchyard itself, Giggles-wick church an ancient one, the setting picturesque, the graveyard grazed by sheep beneath the fell. He lies on the edge of the playing-fields, a stone’s throw from the village street and within sight and sound of the school where he was so happy. The church clock strikes ten as I look out of the bathroom window in the dusk. Not a bad place to be, I think. Then it comes to me that what I am doing is envying him his grave.

12 June
. Simon Callow calls suggesting
Single Spies
as a title for the double bill of Burgess and Blunt plays. While I’d hoped to get rid of spies altogether, it’s a much better title than any I’ve thought of and so
Single Spies
it is.

19 June
. Various quotes from today’s
Sunday Telegraph
:

That there will also be an unhealthy decline in the standard of the programmes televised does not of course concern him.

27 June
,
Paris
. To the Brasserie Bofinger near the Bastille. As we are finishing our supper a party rises from a distant table. It is Francis Bacon and his little entourage. A sharp narrow-trousered suit like the ones Peter Cook used to wear from Sportique in 1960, hair in a slick modified DA, and no sense at all that he is in his mid-seventies.

As Bacon and his party wait on the pavement outside, the waiters gather and look out of the window, paying their unashamed respects to a great man in a way I can’t imagine waiters doing in England. It recalls the dining-car attendant Harold Nicolson encountered who joined him and Vita Sackville-West in a toast to Sainte-Beuve as their train passed through Boulogne.

Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.

Someone writes asking advice about where to send a TV script. ‘We sent it to Kenneth Williams and he was extremely enthusiastic about our script but he committed suicide soon after.’

20 August
Watching Barry Humphries on TV the other night I
noticed the band was laughing. It reminded me how when I used to do comedy I never used to make the band laugh. Dudley [Moore] did and Peter [Cook], but not me. And somehow it was another version of not being good at games.

The Foreign Secretary says that with regard to the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds Britain is in ‘the forefront of anxiety’.

September
. Watch Tony Palmer’s film on Richard Burton, a morality tale about the perils of art. Less effective with me because I never went for the Welsh-wizardry and didn’t like the way he cultivated or acquired the Olivier mannerisms – the sudden fortissimos, the instant access to the emotions, and all the characteristics of the shouting school of acting. In 1968 the Burtons came to
Forty Years On
, coming round afterwards to see Gielgud together with a posse of black-suited hairdressers, make-up artists and, I suppose, bouncers. Then at a party at the Savoy a few months later Liz Taylor perched momentarily on my knee (and pretty uncomfortable it was too). In an earlier connection I knew Burton’s first wife, Sibyl, when we were in New York with
Beyond the Fringe
, and the night the divorce from Sibyl and the marriage to Liz was announced Sibyl asked me to accompany her to the film premiere of
The Criminal
with Stanley Baker (more Welsh-wizardry). Even at the time I realized I had been chosen because I was someone with whom no one could seriously imagine she had a romantic link. But what really impressed me about the evening was that, while I had Sibyl Burton on my right, on my left was Myrna Loy.

21 September
. I have started working on a play about George III, but I fear it may just have been brought on by being about to do another play [
Single Spies
] in which royalty figures and that it
will accordingly come to nothing. This often happens. When I was waiting for
Forty Years On
to be produced I was trying to write a farce which was also about a school.
Enjoy
was preceded by months of fruitless work on another play about old people,
Gerry Ward
; and, though it’s hard to say which came first, I suppose
The Insurance Man
and
Kafka’s Dick
are similarly related.

25 October
, Russell’s memorial service
*
belatedly attacked in the
Daily Telegraph
by Peter Simple. Its inaccuracy (‘A friend tells me…’) and the toadying omission from censure of Ned Sherrin suggests that the author is C. Booker. The
Telegraph’S
obituary of R. was equally vile.

The kind of memorial service the
Telegraph
likes is on the same page: the Prime Minister, flanked by her favourite bishop, Dr Leonard, looking caring at the service for T. E. Utley, for whom no one in the Tory world has a wrong word, though the presence at the service of the Chief Constable of the RUC plus the South African Ambassador suggests that a different view is possible.

11
November
. To Weston to see Mam. Two of the other old ladies in the home are having their hair done. One of them shouts above the noise of the dryer, ‘They keep telling me I ought to have been a Trappist nun. I didn’t want to be a Trappist nun. My father had Friar’s Balsam in the medicine chest, but that’s as far as it went.’