Writing Home (32 page)

11
February
,
Yorkshire
. Am periodically sent statements of profits (
sic
) by Hand Made Films, which produced
A Private
Function
. Each year the loss escalates, and it now runs at some
£
2 million for a film that cost two-thirds of that. Write back suggesting they submit the statement as an entry for this year’s Booker Prize for fiction and saying that if it won they’d probably be able to convert the prize money into a loss too.

Remember at supper in Giggleswick that, when I was a boy in Armley, the clothes-horse was called the ‘winter edge’ – actually the ‘winter hedge’. W. suggests, poetically, that it was because, laden with clothes, it would look like a hedge covered with snow. More plausibly, it was because in summer clothes could be spread on the hedge (though not in sooty Armley) and in winter on the horse. The other name for it, remembered by W.’s eighty-five-year-old mother, is ‘clothes maiden’.

16 February
. A child lured away by two boys in Bootle and found battered to death and run over by a train. A boy is taken in for questioning, and crowds gather outside his house, jeering and hurling stones, so that the family have to be taken away to a place of safety; the boy is later released. The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard – probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.

22 February
. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the police cordon and manages to bang on the side of the van, and six others are arrested. Yesterday Mr Major appealed for ‘less understanding’, as indeed the
Sun
does every day of the week.

Come across this, said (I think) by Resencrantz. As so often with Shakespeare, you wonder what sort of life he led, how he came to know this. It takes in most of Larkin’s life.

A regular from Arlington House walks down the crescent, stiff
as a ramrod, upright, respectable. By his side and pressed as firmly into the seam of his trousers as the thumb of a Guards sergeant-major is a can of McEwen’s lager.

10 March
. The
Independent
pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.

13 March
. To Weston to see Mam, who is dull-eyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the blinds, and the radio full on. ‘My,’ says a nurse (who’s not really a nurse), bending over the wreck of some ex-Somerset housewife, ‘it’s 12.30. Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun!’ Downstairs comes an uninterrupted lamentation from some caged creature. ‘Well,’ says the nurse, spooning another dollop of rice pudding into a gaping mouth, ‘what I say is, If you’ve got lungs, why not use them?’

20 March
,
Yorkshire
. Late on Saturday afternoon I drive over to the Georgian Theatre at Richmond and do my piece. Half the audience are in dinner-jackets, part of a group paying extra to dine afterwards with the Marquis of Zetland, thus raising more money for the Dales Museum. Nobody comes round, and since I’ve cried off the dinner I come away feeling unthanked but also obscurely pleased, as it shows I’m just the entertainment, below stairs the proper place for the actor, and which I’m in favour of if only because the opposite can be so dire. So, while half the audience are dining at Aske with the Zetlands, I am sitting in the Little Chef at Leeming Bar having baked beans on toast. Which is what I prefer, so it isn’t a grumble. But I catch myself here doing a Larkin (or being a man) – i.e. claiming I don’t want something, then chuntering about not getting it.

9 April
,
Good Friday
. ‘It’s Good Friday!’ shouts the ginger-haired young man who presents
The Big Breakfast
, as if the goodness of the day were to do with having a good time.

What nobody seems to say (and what I didn’t say) about Larkin’s idea of the artist – lonely, unpossessed and unposses-sioned – is that it’s both romantic and conventional. Pearson Park was a garret.

15 April
. Lady Thatcher back on the scene, lecturing the world about Bosnia, with ‘Bomb the Serbs’ her solution. She doesn’t begin by saying, as any fair-minded person would, ‘I admit I supported the Serbs to start with,’ just hoping no one will remember that (and having some glib answer if they do).
*
Most people would also say that the fewer arms there are on the market the easier these conflicts would be to settle, and that anyone whose family is involved in arms-dealing would do better to pipe down about the moral issues. Nobody points this out – least of all to her.

18 April
. A seventieth-birthday party for Lindsay Anderson in St Mary’s Church Hall, Paddington. Lindsay in one of his presents, a silk dressing gown (‘I’m wearing it to show that I am quite happy to direct Noël Coward if asked’). A wheelchair has been provided for a ninety-year-old guest who hasn’t turned up, so Lindsay commandeers it and is wheeled around the room getting older by the minute. The room is full of all sorts of people, with show business probably in a minority, and offhand I can’t think of any other director who’d be given a birthday party like this, and with such lovely parish-hall food. ‘A very English occasion’ is how it would be described. The church hall was
built after the parish had discovered that it owned the land on which the A40 flyover had been built and so was compensated with several millions – a real-life Ealing Studios plot.

11
May
. To Weston. Besides the women, Mam’s room now has two men: Cyril and Les. Cyril is small and plump with a little secret smile, as if he’s sitting on an egg; Les has a bad chest and does what Mam would once have called ‘ruttles’, i.e. gargles with phlegm. He can’t speak except as part of a routine he does with the cleaner. She says, ‘Les, Les,’ and, having got his attention, ‘Boom tee bum bum.’ And Les (sometimes) says, ‘Bum Bum.’ This is as much laughed at and applauded as if he were an elephant that had got on its hind legs.

15 May
,
Yorkshire
. Sitting in the car at Richmond, waiting while R. has a look round, I see out of the corner of my eye a middle-aged woman crossing over towards the car with a broad smile on her face. I assume I have been recognized and am about to be accosted, and compose my features in a look of kindly accommodation. Even so I am a little taken aback when the woman, without even knocking on the window, actually opens the car door. Still, I don’t show any surprise – this is a fan, after all. But not merely does she open the door, she gets in, sits down beside me, and closes the door. Still I make no protest. She settles herself, then finally turns to me, still smiling. Only in Yorkshire… Bloody Hell! I’m in the wrong car!’ and bolts, running back along the pavement to her by now wildly gesticulating husband. The person who is really shown up by the story is, of course, me.

Tony Cash tells me that he saw
A Lady of Letters
done on French TV. When Miss Ruddock is watching the young couple who live opposite her, she remarks, ‘The couple opposite just
having their tea. No cloth on. Milk bottle stuck there, waiting. ‘This has been translated as ‘The couple opposite just having their tea. No clothes on. Milk bottle stuck there waiting.’ It’s the milk bottle that intrigues.

8 June
. Man overheard in Oxford Street: ‘Can that cow shop! Jesus!’

18 June
. Alan Clark’s
Diaries
mention being smiled on in the lobby by the Prime Minister. Idly opening Chips Channon’s
Diaries
I find a similar note, re Chamberlain. Courts do not change whether the court is at Westminster, Versailles or even British Airways – Lord King’s rare smiles presumably a high favour. But that grown men should garner a little hoard of smiles from Mrs Thatcher and find something to comfort them there makes me thankful this dull morning to be sitting at my desk, watching the rag–and–bone man push his cart past the window, his Jack Russell stood eagerly in the prow as if waiting to strike land.

On
Any Questions
on Radio 4 tonight are Roy Hattersley and Edward Heath, Janet Cohen and Jonathon Porritt. Neither Heath nor Hattersley is a particular favourite of mine but, because no one on the panel is extreme in their views, discussion is sensible and without point-scoring and one has the feeling by the end of the programme that the topics have been properly aired and some understanding achieved. Contrast this with
Question Time
on BBC1 last night with Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams and some unidentified industrialist. Tebbit played his usual role of a sneer on legs, snarling and heaping contempt on any vaguely liberal view, and the discussion – which was no discussion at all – was rancorous and rowdy and left all concerned as far from enlightenment and understanding as
they had been at the start. It is
Any Questions
of course that is the exception,
Question Time
with its shouting and ill-temper very much the norm. And for this we have to thank the ex-Mrs Thatcher and her cronies: they have un-civilized debate and denatured the nation.

25 June
. Walking in the park, we pass some young black boys playing football. One gets a shot at goal which the goalie, in the way of goalies, does not think the so–called defenders should have allowed him. However, he manages to save the ball and throws it back into play, shaking his head and saying, as a reproof to his own team, ‘ ’Ave a word,’ave a
word
.’ I take this to mean ‘Pull your socks up’ or, as they would say in Yorkshire, ‘Frame yourselves.’

Having espoused the attitudes of the thirties, the
Spectator
now seems to be aping their style: ‘Her mind was as sharp as any I have known.’ Thus Charles Moore on Shirley Letwin. Buchan is alive and editing the
Sunday Telegraph
.

11 July
. An ex-prisoner turns up at the Drop-In Centre in Parkway. He is violent, and the Centre telephones for help to Social Services, who tell it to send him round. The Centre does so, phoning to say that he’s on his way and that he’s armed, though not saying with what. It’s actually a syringe filled with blood, which he claims is Aids-infected, and he makes his way through Camden Town brandishing this at horrified passers-by. At Social Services he says it’s not his own blood but that he bought it at Camden tube station for
£
1, and when a social worker bravely tries to persuade him to give it up he takes the cap off as if he’s cocking a gun. Eventually he is coaxed into a taxi, the social worker goes with him and
en route
for the Royal Free persuades him to give up
the syringe, which is then flung out of the window.

Had Harriet G. not told me the story I would put it down as an urban myth. But it isn’t, the most chilling part of the saga the syringe changing hands for
£
1 as a profitable investment. The social worker who took him to hospital deserves the George Medal, but he’s more likely to be dismissed by Mrs Bottomley as just another ancillary worker bleeding (
sic
) the Health Service dry.

18 July
. Lord (ex-Chief Rabbi) Jakobovits is in favour of genetic engineering to rid the world of homosexuality. I wonder whether he’s always been in favour of medical experiments.

11
August
. Neville Smith sends me a menu from Virginia Woolf’s, a restaurant and bar in the Russell Hotel, which tells prospective diners that Virginia Woolf was ‘a modernist writer’, a member of the Bloomsbury Group ‘which used to meet at 46 Gordon Square where topics for discussion were Philosophy, Religion and the Arts’. Dishes include Jacob’s Burger (a burger in a creamy mushroom sauce), Mrs Dalloway’s (sauce poivre, pink and green peppercorns, cream and brandy) and Orlando’s (hot chilli sauce). As a dessert you can have ‘Virginia’s favourite: deep-fried banana with vanilla ice-cream, real maple syrup and cream. Irresistible.’ Carol Smith says, ‘Well, if that was her favourite I’m not surprised she sank like a stone.’

25 August
. Asked to write the entry on Russell Harty for
The
Dictionary of National Biography
, I duly send it off. A card from Ned Sherrin says he has been landed with Hermione Baddeley on the same principle – i.e. if he didn’t do it nobody else would. His contribution had been returned to him because it lacked the full name of her second husband – something she didn’t know herself, as she always referred to him by his initials.

Shot of a dead whale being slowly winched up a ramp. Men with satchels of knives move in and slit it open. Titles come up: ‘The Art of Biography’.

6 September
. Work in the morning, get my lunch – cold chicken and beetroot – then bike down to Bond Street. I look in Agnew’s, buy some soap in Fortnum’s, and end up in the Fine Arts Society, where there is an exhibition of American prints. I chat to two of the partners about F. Matania, an illustrator I have remembered from my childhood and whom I’d like to know more about. Then I get on my bike, having spent a civilized afternoon – the kind that leisured playwrights are supposed to spend. Except that when I get home T. says, ‘What are those red stains on your chin?’ And all the time I have been dallying in Fortnum’s and idling in Agnew’s and chatting in the Fine Arts Society my chin was covered in beetroot juice so that I must have looked as if I’d been sucking an iced lolly.

15 September
. There are three reporters. The woman is smartly dressed, hair drawn back, hard-faced and ringing the bell at this moment (and now rattling the letter-box). They have been outside the house for two hours, since eight o’clock this morning, and, though there has been no sign of life or anything to indicate I am at home, madam periodically strides briskly up to the door and rings the bell as if it were the first time she has done it. She is at it again now, and clip clip go her little heels as she trips back down the path. Across the road her companion waits – a solid middle-aged man with bright white hair and glasses: a sports outfitter perhaps, the secretary of a golf club, even chairman of the parish council, though there is something slightly seedy or lavatorial about him, but nothing to suggest he is a reporter or a photographer on the
Daily Mirror
. I’m mildly surprised that both of them
read
the
Mirror
: they sit in their car
drinking coffee and looking at their own paper, pigs wallowing in their own shit. The third, slightly forlorn, figure is a balding young man in a Barbour who rang the doorbell last night to say he was from the
Daily Mail
– the first time I was aware I had done anything to attract any attention. I closed the door in his face then and now he is back, but with no car to sit in he stands disconsolately on the pavement, picking his nails. Meanwhile the phone rings constantly.