Writing Home (3 page)

This phrase had a literary history and was something of a family joke. As a child Dad had been taken to the Grand Theatre to see
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and in the scene in which Uncle Tom
was being flogged by the overseer, Simon Legree, a woman sitting next to Dad in the gallery shouted out, ‘You bad sod!’ The actor playing Simon Legree stopped, looked up at the gallery, leered, and then laid it on twice as hard.

Towards the end of his life I had so taken it for granted that our taste in reading coincided that I forgot how shy and fastidious my father was and how far his world still was from mine. Though there may have been a priggish element of ‘I think you are now ready for this’ about it, I did think that when I gave him Philip Roth’s
Portnoy’s Complaint
he would find it as funny as I did. Always anxious to talk about what he had read, on my next visit home he never mentioned it, and I later found it back on the shelf, the jacket marking the twenty pages or so that he had got through before deciding it was pornography and not something for him, and by implication not something for me, though nothing was ever said. It was a miscalculation that mortifies me to this day.

My mother was more broadminded and might have found
Portnoy’s Complaint
quite funny, but Dad’s literary renaissance never infected her, and for years her reading was largely confined to
Woman’s Own
and in particular to the column written by Beverley Nichols, of whom she was a great fan. But seeing the Brontës frequently referred to in the
Yorkshire
Evening Post
she began to persuade herself she had read them or perhaps would like to – maybe because (another escape story) if they hadn’t got away from their surroundings they had at any rate transcended them. So on a bleak February day in the late forties she and I took the Keighley bus to Haworth to see the famous parsonage. Not so famous then, Haworth was still happily unaware of its potential as a tourist trap, its situation on the frontiers of
Last of the Summer Wine
country far in the future. The place must have had some charm, but it looked to me like any other grim mill town and all I could think as we
toiled up that long hill was that it must be even more dismal on a Sunday.

We were the only visitors to the parsonage that day, and it was as dark and damp as it must have been when the famous trio lived there. Ramshackle and unrenovated, it was, even for 1948, a decidedly eccentric museum, looked after by a lady who, if not actually a contemporary of the Brontës, seemed their sister in suffering. Objects around the house were only haphazardly labelled: the sofa on which Emily died, for instance, just had pinned to it a yellowing piece of paper that said starkly, ‘Sofa Emily died on’. Mam was horrified. The fireplace wanted blackleading and the curtains were a disgrace. ‘Too busy writing their books to keep the place up to scratch,’ was her comment.

Though this was long before the tasteful pall of heritage was laid across the past, the parsonage can have survived in this Victorian state only a few years longer. Had it been kept as it was then, it would today be in a museum itself, a museum of museums perhaps. It would certainly be more interesting and characteristic than the branch of Laura Ashley the parsonage is nowadays, though there’s not much doubt which Mam would have preferred.

My parents always felt that had they been educated their lives and indeed their characters would have been different. They imagined books would make them less shy and (always an ambition) able to ‘mix’. Quiet and never particularly gregarious, they cherished a lifelong longing to ‘branch out’, with books somehow the key to it. This unsatisfied dream they have bequeathed to me, so that without any conscious intention I find I am often including in plays or films what is essentially the same scene: someone is standing at a bookcase; it may be a boy with no education, not daring to choose a book, or a wife anxious to share in the literary world of men; it can be Joe Orton looking at Kenneth Halliwell’s bookcase and despairing of ever catching
up, or even Coral Browne, idly turning over the pages of Guy Burgess’s books while being quizzed about Cyril Connolly, whom she does not know. One way or another they are all standing in for my parents and sharing their uncertainty about books. As for me, while I’m not baffled by books, I can’t see how anyone can love them (‘He loved books’). I can’t see how anyone can ‘love literature’. What does that mean? Of course, one advantage of being a gentleman farmer is that you seldom have to grapple with such questions.

There was a point during the Second World War when my father took up the double bass. To recall the trams of my boyhood is to be reminded particularly of that time.

It is around 1942 and we are living in the house my parents bought when they got married, 12 Halliday Place in Upper Armley. The Hallidays are handily situated for two tram routes, and if we are going into town, rather than to Grandma’s in Wortley, the quickest way is to take a number 14. This means a walk across Ridge Road, down past the back of Christ Church (and Miss Marsden’s the confectioner’s) to Stanningley Road. Stanningley Road is already a dual carriageway because the tram tracks running down the middle of the road are pebbled and enclosed by railings, so splitting what little traffic there is into lanes. The Stanningley trams are generally somewhat superior to those on other routes, more upholstered, and when the more modern streamlined variety comes in after the war, it is more likely to be found on this route than elsewhere. But the drawback with the Stanningley Road trams is that they come down from Bramley or even Rodley, and are always pretty crowded, so more often than not we go for the other route, the number 16, which means walking up Moorfield Road to Charleycake Park and Whingate Junction.

This being the terminus, the tram is empty and as likely as not waiting, or, if we’ve just missed one, the next will already be
in sight, swaying up Whingate. We wait as the driver swings outside and with a great twang hauls over the bogey ready for the journey back, while upstairs the conductor strolls down the aisle, reversing the seats before winding back the indicator on the front. The driver and conductor then get off and have their break sat on the form by the tram-stop, the driver generally older and more solid than the conductor (or, I suppose, the conductress, though I don’t recall conductresses coming in until after the war).

Dad is a smoker, so we troop upstairs rather than going ‘inside’, the word a reminder of the time when upstairs was also outside. On some trams in 1942 it still is, because in these early years of the war a few open-ended trams have been brought back into service. We wedge ourselves in the front corner to be exposed to the wind and weather, an unexpected treat, and also an antidote to the travel sickness from which both my brother and I suffer, though I realize now that this must have been due as much to all the smoking that went on as to the motion of the tram itself. Neither of us ever actually is sick, but it’s not uncommon and somewhere on the tram is a bin of sand just in case.

So the four of us – Mam, Dad, my brother and me – are ensconced on the tram sailing down Tong Road into town or, if we are going to see Grandma, who lives in the Gilpins, we will get off halfway at Fourteenth Avenue.

Around 1942, though, we come into the double-bass period, when some of our tram journeys become fraught with embarrassment. Dad is a good amateur violinist, largely self-taught, so taking up the double bass isn’t such a big step. He practises in the front room, which is never used for anything else, and, I suppose because the bass never has the tune, it sounds terrible; he sounds as if he’s sawing (which he also does, actually, as one of his other hobbies is fretwork). Though the
instrument is large the repertoire is small, except in one area: swing. Until now Dad has never had much time for swing, or popular music generally; his idea of a good time is to turn on the Home Service and play along with the hymns on
Sunday Half
Hour
, or (more tentatively) with the light classics that are the staple of Albert Sandler and his Palm Court Orchestra. But now, with Dad in the grip of this new craze, Mam, my brother and I are made to gather round the wireless, tuned these days to the Light Programme, so that we can listen to dance-band music.

‘Listen, Mam. Do you hear the beat? That’s the bass. That’ll be me.’

Dad has joined a part-time dance band. Even at eight years old I know that this is not a very good idea and just another of his crazes (the fretwork, the home-made beer) – schemes Dad has thought up to make a bit of money. So now we are walking up Moorfield Road to get the tram again, only this time to go and watch Dad play in his band somewhere in Wortley, and our carefree family of four has been joined by a fifth, a huge and threatening cuckoo, the double bass.

Knowing what is to happen, the family make no attempt to go upstairs, but scuttle inside while Dad begins to negotiate with the conductor. The conductor spends a lot of his time in the little cubby-hole under the winding metal stairs. There’s often a radiator here that he perches on, and it’s also where the bell-pull hangs, in those days untouchable by passengers, though it’s often no fancier than a knotted leather thong. In his cubby-hole the conductor keeps a tin box with his spare tickets and other impedimenta which at the end of the journey he will carry down to the other end of the tram. The niche that protects the conductor from the passengers is also just about big enough to protect the double bass, but when Dad suggests this there is invariably an argument, which he never wins, the clincher generally coming when the conductor points out that strictly
speaking ‘that thing’ isn’t allowed on the tram at all. So while we sit inside and pretend he isn’t with us, Dad stands on the platform grasping the bass by the neck as if he’s about to give a solo. He gets in the way of the conductor, he gets in the way of the people getting on and off, and, always a mild man, it must have been more embarrassing for him than it ever was for us.

Happily this dance-band phase, like the fretwork and the herb beer, doesn’t last long. He gets bored with the fretwork, the herb beer regularly explodes in the larder, and the double bass is eventually advertised in the Miscellaneous column of the
Evening Post
and we can go back to sitting on the top deck again.

After the war we move to Far Headingley, where Dad, having worked all his life for the Co-op, now has a shop of his own just below the tram-sheds opposite St Chad’s. We live over the shop, so I sleep and wake to the sound of trams: trams getting up speed for the hill before Weetwood Lane, trams spinning down from West Park, trams shunted around in the sheds in the middle of the night, the scraping of wheels, the clanging of the bell.

It is not just the passage of time that makes me invest the trams of those days with such pleasure. To be on a tram sailing down Headingley Lane on a fine evening lifted the heart at the time just as it does in memory. I went to school by tram, the fare a halfpenny from St Chad’s to the Ring Road. A group of us at the Modern School scorned school dinners and came home for lunch, catching the tram from another terminus at West Park. We were all keen on music and went every Saturday to hear the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra in the Town Hall, and it was on a tram at West Park that another sixth-former, ‘Fanny’ Fielder, sang to me the opening bars of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, which I’d never heard and which the YSO was playing that coming Saturday. Trams came into that too, because after the concert many of the musicians went home by
tram (though none with a double bass), sitting there, rather shabby and ordinary and often with tab ends in their mouths, worlds away from the Delius, Walton and Brahms which they had been playing. It was a first lesson to me that art doesn’t have much to do with appearances, and that ordinary middle-aged men in raincoats can be instruments of the sublime.

Odd details about trams come back to me now, like the slatted platforms, brown with dust, that were slung underneath either end, like some urban cowcatcher; or the little niche in the glass of the window on the seat facing the top of the stairs so that you could slide it open and hang out; and how convivial trams were, the seats reversible so that if you chose you could make up a four whenever you wanted.

How they work was always a mystery. As a child I had difficulty in understanding that the turning motion the driver made with the handle was what drove the tram, it seeming more like mixing than driving. And then there was the imposing demeanour of the ticket inspectors, invested with a spurious grandeur on a par with the one-armed man who showed you to your seat in Schofield’s Café, or the manager of the Cottage Road cinema in his dinner-jacket, or gents’ outfitters in general.

I don’t recall anyone ever collecting tram numbers, but the route numbers had a certain mystique, the even numbers slightly superior to the odd, which tended to belong to trams going to Gipton, Harehills, or Belle Isle, parts of Leeds where I’d never ventured. And Kirkstall will always be 4, just as Lawnswood is 1.

Buses have never inspired the same affection – too comfortable and cushioned to have a moral dimension. Trams were bare and bony, transport reduced to its basic elements, and they had a song to sing, which buses never did. I was away at university when they started to phase them out, Leeds as always in too much of a hurry to get to the future, and so doing the
wrong thing. I knew at the time that it was a mistake, just as Beeching was a mistake, and that life was starting to get nastier. If trams ever come back, though, they should come back not as curiosities, nor, God help us, as part of the heritage, but as a cheap and sensible way of getting from point A to point B, and with a bit of poetry thrown in.

When Brian Harrison invited me to take part in this seminar,
*
I warned him that I knew little about university theatre and that, a magisterial overview not being forthcoming, the most you were likely to get would be an exercise in licensed name-dropping. Even in that I find I was over-optimistic. I recall few names that became names – the broadcaster Russell Harty, the director Patrick Garland, and then I’m done. It hardly adds up to a generation. So if I confine myself to what is really a memoir of my somewhat atypical career outside university theatre it’s not because I believe that this was the most significant thing going on at the time, just that I so seldom ventured out of my college that I didn’t have much notion of what was happening outside at all.

The years after the war had seen a great flowering of talent in the theatre in Oxford. The backlog of ex-service undergraduates who came up then included some, like film director John Schlesinger, who were veterans of that ENSA concert party Peter Nichols has written about in
Privates on Parade
. There was sterner stuff in directors in the making like Lindsay Anderson and Ronald Eyre, and even management was represented in the infant impresario Michael Codron. Leading the rout and easily the most colourful figure, in clothes which
in those days started fights but now would scarcely lift an eyebrow, was Kenneth Tynan. By 1954 these were long gone, but most undergraduates still came up, as I did, after two years’ national service.

I imagine the point may have come up in earlier sessions of this seminar, but the abolition of national service later in the fifties must have made an incalculable difference to the university in all sorts of ways. I speak only for myself. Although when I came up I was two years older than most undergraduates are now, and was here in all for some eight years, it took me all that time to hit upon what I wanted to do. I found my niche eventually, but if I’d come here straight from school I should probably still be looking.

My college, Exeter, was in 1954 a fairly modest, not to say undistinguished establishment. Which was precisely why I’d chosen it, as I’d stand a better chance there, I reasoned, than at socially more exalted foundations such as Trinity, which I think was in the same group. My mother had actually suggested I try Balliol. (She mispronounced the name, of course, but I’m not sure I didn’t at that time.) My mother’s idea of a university owed less to Cardinal Newman than it did to Beverley Nichols, of whose weekly column in the
Woman’s Own
she was a great fan. Beverley had been to Balliol, my mother said, so why not me? There were plenty of reasons, the chief one being that it was so academically tip-top. It was also quite ugly. At seventeen I was a bit of an architectural snob. I was coming to Oxford hell-bent on going through a process I suppose I thought of as ‘blossoming’, and I saw as an essential ingredient in the blossoming process a nice period background. Exeter’s strong artistic suit was its connection with Morris and Burne-Jones, but the Pre-Raphaelites weren’t quite back in fashion by 1954 so even in this department I thought it no great shakes. Still it did have its picturesque corners, though not enough to attract the more
fastidious and discerning applicants, who would, I hoped, be winnowed out by the glories of Magdalen or St John’s, thus leaving the field open to dowdy and devious creatures like myself.

One jokes about these options now but they were no joke then, and it all had to be decided at home – the wireless off, the kitchen table cleared and wiped (no more certain way of being rejected, I thought, than jam on the entrance form). In the mystifying permutations of choice my parents stood by helpless; they scarcely knew what a university was, let alone the status of its component parts. The irony, of course, was that when I finally landed up at Exeter I found that in my callow assessment of college form I had not been unique. Others had reasoned in the same way, with the result that Exeter was far harder to get into than anywhere else.

In 1954 Exeter was an inward-looking college. Few of its members figured in the wider life of the university, and it had a close-knit family atmosphere. This should have meant that in-college societies were that much more vigorous, but this certainly wasn’t true of drama. So far as I recall, Exeter’s dramatic society was in abeyance the whole of my time as an undergraduate. This was no doubt a relief to the college. Dons have always been dubious about drama. Though rowing, and indeed running, can scarcely be said to hone the mind, they have always been looked on more favourably than the stage. Acting is somehow thought to rot both mind and character. Whereas it would be inconceivable to stop someone rowing or running in their final year, it was (and perhaps still is) quite common to forbid him or her to act.

None of which – acting, rowing, or running – bothered me much, as I wasn’t inclined to do any of them. I had carried over from national service (and in this I’m sure I wasn’t alone) a suspicion of volunteering, of joining, indeed of conspicuous
activity of any sort. So I became a member of no clubs; no cards decorated my mantelpiece; no societies met in my rooms. It was all very dull and, apart from the fact that I had to share a set with someone who had been in the same barrack room for much of my national service and whom I loathed and who loathed me, I was quite happy.

In the army one of my friends was Michael Frayn, subsequently the novelist and playwright. He was now at Cambridge, and his attitude was the opposite of mine. In the first week of his first term he was writing for
Varsity
, had enrolled with the Footlights, and had taken to university life with a large, unselfconscious splash. In those days we used to correspond, and whereas my letters accuse him of ‘selling out’, his letters to me, slightly more sensibly, urge me to pull my socks up. On one point in particular we differed absolutely and this was college life. Whereas I was happy to settle down in the cosy, undemanding atmosphere of the Exeter Junior Common Room, Frayn regarded his college, Emmanuel, as little more than an address – and not a very smart one at that. And since Exeter was to me all that I wanted in the way of a club, this was another reason for not joining any others. There was certainly no thought of joining either OUDS or the Experimental Theatre Club, both somehow sounding wrong: OUDS the plump, self-assured, good-mannered theatre of the Establishment; ETC the opposite – seedy, plaintive, out at the elbows. What there was not, of course, was anything like the Cambridge Footlights, with a tradition of revue and comedy-writing. I’m sure if there had been I would have failed to join that too.

So it was with a certain sense of already having thrown in the towel that I settled down to college life. The JCR in Exeter at that time was more central to the life of the college than in other colleges I visited. At the heart of it was the institution of the Suggestions Book. As a repository of actual suggestions, the
Suggestions Book was useless, but it served besides as a college newspaper, a diary, a forum for discussion, and a space in which those who were so inclined could attempt to amuse and even paddle in the direction of literature. The result was a volume (in time a succession of volumes) that was parochial, silly and obscene, but to me, and possibly to others, of a particular value. A family atmosphere, a captive audience and a set of shared references are good conditions in which to learn to write, and I think it was through my contributions to the JCR Suggestions Book that I first realized I could make people laugh and liked doing it.

At the end of each term the JCR held a smoking-concert. These smokers were really just a dramatized version of the Suggestions Book: vulgar, private, silly – all the things my literary friends abhorred. They were uproarious drunken affairs, confined to members of the college and in the direct line of those camp concerts POWs spent their time acting in when they weren’t busy tunnelling under the foundations. One regular feature was a Queen’s Christmas Broadcast; very tame it would seem now, but in those pre-satirical days, when HMQ’s annual pronouncement was treated with hushed reverence, the very idea of it seemed sacrilegiously funny. And it was for one of these smoking-concerts that I wrote a cod Anglican sermon, something I found no problem doing as I’d sat through so many in my youth. It took me half an hour to put together, and, since it later figured in (indeed earned me my place in)
Beyond the
Fringe
, it was undoubtedly the most profitable half-hour I’ve ever spent. At the same time, having written it I had no sense that a corner had been turned.

I had always been a late starter, so, friendly though the atmosphere was, I didn’t pluck up courage to take part even in these JCR smokers until my third year, by which time my days at the university seemed numbered. However, after I’d taken my
degree I found myself able to stay on as a postgraduate, doing research on Richard II. I also began to teach a little, first for Magdalen and then for Exeter. I had some sense, I think, that making people laugh was not a proper activity for a postgraduate and that I ought somehow to be acquiring more dignity; except that by now I was being asked to perform in other colleges and do cabaret for dances and Commem Balls, and was sometimes even paid. The situation was more delicate because I was supervised in my research by the medieval historian Bruce McFarlane. McFarlane was a man of great austerity and singleness of mind. He was shy, very kind, and the most impressive teacher, and in some ways the most impressive man, I have ever come across. One could go and chat to him without seemingly ever touching on the subject of one’s research and come away convinced that studying one’s tiny slip of a subject (mine was Richard II’s retinue from 1388 to 1399) was the only thing in the world worth doing. He knew a little of my cabaret performances, but they were never referred to. Around this time I recorded some sketches for BBC radio, and told him when they were due to be broadcast; ‘I listened,’ was all he ever said.

By this time I had been at Oxford some five years, and it was plain to me, if I did not quite admit it to myself, that I was not going to make a don. To begin with I had no memory to speak of, and the notes of my research proliferated without ever congealing into anything approaching a thesis. As for teaching, I could never find sufficient comments to fill the necessary hour, and nor could my pupils. If I ventured on argument I was soon floored, and the tutorials ended in awkward silence. Eventually I took to putting the clock on before my pupils arrived, so there was less time to fill.

Deliverance came in the summer of 1959. In that year the Oxford Theatre Group first put on a revue on the fringe at the
Edinburgh Festival. Feeling immensely old and foolish at twenty-five, I nervously auditioned for the writer and director Stanley Daniels. He was an American, also a postgraduate, who appeared (so much for my qualms) at least forty, with no dignity at all nor seeming to want any. I see his name nowadays in the credits as one of the producers of the excellent American TV series
Taxi
. We performed at the Cranston Street Hall in Edinburgh, where in the same hall the previous year the Oxford Theatre Group had premièred Willis Hall’s
The Long, the Short
and the Tall
and where another première a few years later was Tom Stoppard’s
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
. In any account of university theatre the OTG should figure largely. Our contribution in 1959 was called
Better Late
. It was a great success, to the extent that the official Festival took note and the following year decided to put on a revue of its own, inviting Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller from Cambridge and Dudley Moore and myself from Oxford to write and perform it. This we did firstly in Edinburgh in 1960 and subsequently in the West End. Though Dudley had been an organ scholar at Magdalen and we had even appeared on the same bill, I don’t think we had ever met until the first script conference for
Beyond the Fringe
.

While I was writing this I was puzzled why, when I’d performed so little at university and not been an avid playgoer, I yet remembered Oxford as a place of theatrical excitement. I think it was that I somehow regarded the nightly experience of dining in hall as a kind of theatre, a theatre in which the undergraduates were the audience and the actors were the dons. At Exeter they entered –
climbed
almost – on to the stage from the mysterious backstage of the Senior Common Room, a room dimly remembered from one’s scholarship interview and not seen again until three years later, when one entered it before one’s Schools Dinner. Fanciful perhaps to compare the bang of the block for grace with the knocks that signal the rise of the
curtain at the Comédie-Française, but there was, as there is in every college, a regular repertory company enlivened at weekends and on guest nights by visitors and the occasional star. Auden I remember seeing once, hearing that quacking voice without recognizing the face, which in the mid-fifties had just begun to go under the harrow. Richard Burton was there one night, Dennis Healey, Harold Wilson – hardly fabled names but still names one had read in the papers, creatures from a world elsewhere. Nowadays dining arrangements at Exeter are different. The undergraduates are halfway through their meal when High Table comes in, so they don’t have this sense of a nightly performance that I had – and feel it faintly ridiculous to have had.

When I moved to Magdalen, as the most junior of junior lecturers, it was rather different. Whereas Exeter was still in the era of the proscenium arch with the dons entering stage left in single file, at Magdalen it was altogether more dramatic and the choreography more fluid. There the fellows made a swift dash around the cloisters before entering in a crowd through the body of the hall, streaming through the standing assembly and up to High Table as if directed by Ariane Mnouchkine or some fashionable young man from the RSC. At Magdalen too the visitors were grander and the regular repertory company more distinguished: C. S. Lewis, Gilbert Ryle, A. J. P. Taylor, daunting neighbours at dinner, my memories of those meals as vivid and painful as any embarrassment that happened to me subsequently on the stage. The first or second time I dined there I sat down and, as I pushed in my chair, caught the sleeves of my BA gown under the legs. Despite the fact that my movements were thus severely restricted I was too shy to get up and free them. It was a particularly delicious dinner that night, but I saw little of it. The scouts kept lowering dishes towards me but hovered tantalizingly out of reach of my pinioned arms. As I
thus appeared to wave away dish after dish my neighbour leaned over solicitously and said, ‘You know, if you’re a vegetarian, they’ll do you something special.’