Writing Home (31 page)

We are videoing the performance for the benefit of the actors who will play the string quartet in the film, and it transpires that the Delmé Quartet have been videoed once before, by the BMA. The readiness of players in a string quartet to absorb criticism from their colleagues had been noted by doctors, and the BMA video was made to be shown to businessmen as a model for them to emulate. Perhaps it should be shown to Mrs Thatcher.

17 July
. Supper with Don Sniegowski and his wife, Barbara, and with David and Maureen Vaisey. They have all recently visited Poland, where they were taken to see the church of the murdered priest Father Popieluszko, which is in the process of being turned into a shrine. Here in the church is the car in which the young priest was driven to his death; here are the clothes he was wearing when he was murdered; and around the walls, as it were the stations of his particular cross, are scenes leading up to the murder. At Christmas the crib is placed in the boot of the car, the Christ-child curled up in the same position as Father Popieluszko was curled up as he was driven to the
reservoir to be murdered. Day by day the devout bring in further relics. David, who began life as a medieval historian, is excited by all this, as it shows exactly how medieval cults must have started: the accumulation of relics, the elevation of the martyr’s life to the status of myth, until finally comes the sanctification, as in due course it will come for Father Popieluszko.

Don, who is American and the son of second-generation Polish immigrants, takes a less detached view, believing that it’s still in the interest of the Church in Poland to foster ignorance and idolatry, and that bigotry will now flourish.

10
August
. An invitation from the Vice-Chancellor at Oxford to a fund-raising dinner at Merton. ‘It will be an opportunity’, he writes, ‘to tell you something about the university’s current achievements.’ Since one of the university’s current achievements is the establishment of the Rupert Murdoch Chair in Communications, I feel disinclined to attend, and write back that if the university thinks it’s appropriate to take Rupert Murdoch’s money perhaps they ought to approach Saddam Hussein to found a chair in Peace Studies. [A pained letter eventually came back saying the university had been most careful to ensure the money came from
The Times
and not from the less reputable sections of the Murdoch empire. A visit to the university Department of Economics would seem to be in order.]

15 August
. To Weston-super-Mare. A young couple get on at Reading, returning from a holiday (and possibly their honeymoon) on the Isle of Wight.

23 August
. Saddam Hussein poses with the children of the hostages on TV, thereby producing outrage in the Foreign Office and Downing Street. ‘Nauseating,’ says Douglas Hurd, and Mrs Thatcher is said to have thrown up her hands in horror. There’s some hypocrisy here. The programme was foolish, the propaganda crude, and Saddam H. an obvious villain, but politicians have always made a beeline for babies. This ‘nauseating obscene exhibition’ (Gerald Kaufman) is only an extension of the ‘caring’ image they all like to project, and with about as much truth in it.

5 October
. An article in the
Independent
entitled ‘The Gatecrasher’s Guide to Berlin’: ‘Now is the time to visit Berlin while the shock of the Wall is still evident, consumerism’ – of which the
Independent
is wholly innocent – ‘has yet to take over and freedom means more than a new microwave oven. Berlin in 1990 is extraordinary; go there before it becomes plain ordinary’ – i.e. before the readers of the
Mail
get round to it.

8 October
. Rehearsals for
The Wind in the Willows
begin this week. The cast are having movement classes to teach them how to move like the animals they are representing – rabbits, weasels and so on – and as a first step have been watching videos and nature films. Michael Bryant, who plays Badger, is sceptical about this, as older actors tend to be. However, Jane Gibson, who is teaching them movement, thinks she has made a breakthrough when Michael asks if he can take away the videos
and study them at home. He comes back next day and takes her on one side. ‘I’ve been watching these films of badgers and the way they move… and the thing is they all move exactly like Michael Bryant.’

7 November
. I film at a TV studio in Harlesden where Gary Lineker had been filming the previous day. The girls in the crew have still not recovered from the beauty of his thighs. ‘They were so big. And so
smooth
. You could land a helicopter on them.’

11
November
. A young man sets himself on fire during the Two Minutes ‘Silence and, as he lies on the ground burning, shouts, ‘Think about the people today’ Closer in feeling and in genuine agony to what is being commemorated than anyone else on the parade, he is bundled away to be treated for 60 per cent burns at Roehampton, and nothing more will be heard of him. If Jan Palach had put a match to himself in Whitehall and not Wenceslas Square, the same would have happened. It’s not called ‘martyrdom’ in England, just ‘going too far’. Still, ‘it is thought that the Royal Party were unaware of the incident,’ and that’s the important thing.

22 November
. Phoned by the
Guardian
in a round-up of what people think of the departure of Mrs T, I say that I’m hopeless at this kind of thing and am simply relieved I shan’t have to think about politics quite so much. They print this fairly uninspired comment but preface it with ‘Oo ’eck’ and systematically drop all my aitches. I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t report me as saying: ‘Ee ba gum, I’m reet glad t’Prime Minister’s tekken her ‘ook.’ Actually, now that she has gone, what it does feel like is the week after Christmas.

24 November
. In all the welter of comment on the Tory leadership crisis, no one seems to have noted how eighteenth-century it all is. Namier would have found Michael Heseltine a familiar figure: the leader of a group of ‘outs’ numerous enough to have to be taken into the government but who cannot be taken in without the administration being reconstructed. Hence the departure of Mrs T.

Of course the difference between politics then and politics now is that in the eighteenth century there were few issues that really divided the House, leaving members time and energy to squabble over patronage and place. Not yet quite the same, but ‘the structure of politics in the age of Charles III’ may be getting on that way.

28 November
. Two young men come down the Bristol train, unshaven and in track suits. Looking up from my book, I wonder vaguely if they’re football hooligans. They knock on the conductor’s door and have a word with him, and when they go back up the train I notice one of them is carrying a policeman’s helmet. All is explained when the conductor announces over the Tannoy that there are two policemen on the train, doing a twenty-four-hour rail marathon in aid of the Bristol Children’s Hospital, and would we all give generously. There is a general reaching into pockets, but as the carriage awaits their return, certain questions occur. What if the collectors had not been policemen but students collecting for Amnesty, say, or Action Aid, or the Terrence Higgins Trust? Would the conductor have acquiesced so readily in a collection for them? Besides which there’s the other nagging thought that hospitals ought not to have to depend on charity, and that by forking out for a hospital fund one is just playing the government’s game and getting it out of the hole it has dug for itself. But now the policemen have returned and the
helmet is under my nose. A pound seems the average gift, so I put one in meekly and say nothing.

8 December
. Richard Briers tells me how he was going up the steps from the National on to Waterloo Bridge when he was accosted, as one invariably is, by someone sitting on the landing, begging. ‘No, I thought,’ said Richard – ‘not
again
, and walked on. Only then I heard this lugubrious voice say, “Oh. My favourite actor.” So I turned back and gave him a pound.’

That particular pitch is known to be very profitable, partly because of actors and playgoers being more soft-hearted than the general run. The beggars have got themselves so well-organized as to ration the pitch to half an hour apiece on pain of being beaten up. I find it easiest to think of Waterloo Bridge as a toll bridge, and resign myself to paying at least 50p to get across, thus sidestepping any tiresome questions about need or being taken advantage of.

II December
. I am taking A.’s three children to
The Wind in the
Willows
.

4 January
. On BBC’s
Catchword
this afternoon, one of the questions is on anagrams of playwrights. Mine is Annabel Tent. Nobody guesses it.

A joke about the Queen Mother, who in an old people’s home finds herself not treated with the proper respect. She approaches a nurse:

14 January
. Most of the headlines this morning quote Bush’s remark that they have given Saddam Hussein ‘a spanking’ – a homely term which nicely obscures the fact, nowhere mentioned, that people were killed, spanked, in fact, to death. A couple of days ago one of our peace-keeping troops was shot in Bosnia, and he is pictured everywhere. Maybe the Serbs or the Croats, or whoever it was shot him, think this was just a bit of a spanking too.

16 January
. Now the papers are full of the latest scandal, the bugged phone call between the Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker-Bowles. I read none of it, as I didn’t read the earlier Diana tapes, not out of disapproval or moral superiority, just genuine lack of interest. I wish it would all go away.

I am sickened by the self-righteousness of the newspapers, which, though it takes a different form, is as nauseating in the
Independent
as it is in the
Sun
. Depressed too by the continuing corruption of public life, ex-members of the Government moving straight on to the boards of the ex-public utilities they have helped to privatize and reckoning to see nothing wrong in it. Meanwhile the Government keeps at it, relentlessly paring
and picking away at the proper functions of the State; ‘lean’ is how they like to describe it, but it’s gone beyond lean – now it’s more like the four-day-old carcass of the Christmas turkey. Then an item today about babies born without eyes in Lincolnshire makes me want never to read a paper again and go and live in the middle of a field.

20 January
. Collected by
The New Yorker
and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of seventy-two who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from time to time where the edge of the frame is. He explains he wants me to seem to sit on the branch but actually to lean forward into the camera at the same time. I try.

‘You’re game,’ says Julie Kavanagh of
The New Yorker
. Actually I’m not game at all, just timid, and – short of taking my clothes off – ready to do anything, even climb trees, rather than be thought ‘difficult’.

A propos of which is Whitman’s description of himself to Edward Carpenter: ‘An old hen… with something in my nature
furtive
.’

2 February
. Late for a final rehearsal for the tour of
Talking
Heads
, I rush out of the house on this bright spring-like morning to be confronted by a large pile of excrement on the path. Thinking it’s a dog, I swear and am about to go in and get a bucket to swill the path when I see that shit has been smeared on the car, and the paper whoever it is has used to wipe his or her bum has been carefully stuffed into the door-handle. I swill the
flags, wash the car, and, returning home this evening, wash it again with Dettol, reflecting that if my mother were in a state to know of this she would never get into the car again, would want it sold or at the very least a new door fitted. Wonder if the person who did the shitting is the same person who stove in the car window on Saturday night, but decide this is paranoia.

8 February
,
Newcastle
. Coming back to the hotel from the dress rehearsal, I call in at the cathedral – the parish church as it must have been until about 1900. A grand medley of Church and State, the army and the professions, it’s an old-fashioned place too in that you’re not blitzed with information, exhibitions and outreach as soon as you set foot in the door. Here are Collingwood, Nelson’s admiral, and an eighteenth-century general in the Deccan Rifles, dead on the voyage out; surgeons and solicitors of the town; neat, kneeling Tudors; plump Augustan divines; and an atmosphere of piety, property and Pledge never quite caught by anyone – even Larkin, whose life I must get on and review. I wanted
Forty Years On
to be like this cathedral, studded with relics and effigies, reminders and memorials, half-forgotten verses and half-remembered hymns. Everything fits: the crypt chapel nicely restored in the thirties, the memorial to Danish seamen dead in the war, the brasses rubbed to extinction before a lavish twenties altar rail – time and what it has deposited.