Writing Home (49 page)

28
February, Hartlepool
(
Afternoon Off
). Stephen Frears shows me Seaton Carew, the seedy holiday resort near Hartlepool he thinks he may use for
Afternoon Off
. A green art-deco marina, a stretch of prom, then cranes, cooling towers and a skyline filled with factories and derricks. On the shore thin Lowry figures fill sacks with sea-coal and wheel
them dripping across the prom to the gates of the power station where they sell for a few shillings. Hartlepool itself has been largely flattened and a new centre built. A few of the larger buildings survive, including Baltic Chambers, a huge redbrick building with a steep pitched roof looking in the middle of the acres of rubble like the town hall at Ypres after the First World War. We wander past miles of palings and upended sleepers lining recreation grounds and allotments. The word ‘television’ opening all doors, we are taken round the Athenaeum, a men’s club. The ceiling of the pool room, where tiny old men play snooker, is cone-shaped, like the inside of a hive. The walls are lined with cues in locked tin boxes, a name painted on each. Stephen is excited, thinks I should write a new scene for the room. The young man who shows us round apologizes for it. ‘Although’, he says happily, ‘it’s all going to be altered soon.’

6
March, London
(
All Day on the Sands
). What nobody ever says about writing is that one can spend a whole morning, like this one, just trying to think of a name … the name of a character, the name of a place, or, as in this case, the name of a boarding house. The boarding house has been jazzed up, made into a ‘private hotel’, rooms give the names of Mediterranean resorts: the Portofino Room, the Marbella Lounge. What should the establishment as a whole be called?

Somerset Maugham set himself to write 2,000 words a day.

Did you ever have this problem, Somerset?

I eventually settle on the Miramar.

14
March, Leeds
(
Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf
). A night shoot near Malvern Ground, a vast demolition site at Beeston overlooking the lights of Leeds. This is the frontier of devastation where demolition laps at the neat front doors and
scoured doorsteps of solid redbrick back-to-backs. Neville Smith as Hopkins, the polytechnic lecturer, stands at a bus stop by a street lamp, the arc-lights trained on him, to say his one line at this location. It is ‘O my pale life!’

In Barton Grove people come to their doors, oldish mostly, couples who have lived here all their lives, lives now narrowed and attenuated by this approaching tide of destruction. I suspect that Hopkins’s ‘O my pale life’ is me presenting an edited version of my own. Located in this desperate place, observed by these bewildered people, the line insults them. I insult them.

The shot is soon done and we pack up. I imagine a similar scene, technicians coming to the bottom of a street, setting up lights as other groups arrive and stand about. A girl with a clipboard, a man with a loud hailer, waiting. Then the chief actor arrives and he is positioned under the lights, stood against a lamp standard. And shot. And not on film either. Or also on film. The technicians pack up, the cars drive away, leaving the body slumped under the lamp as the doors begin to edge open down the street.

15
March, Leeds
(
Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woo If
). Thora Hird arrives to film the main scene of the play, in which she meets her son, Trevor, and questions him about his private life (or lack of it). We are due to film in the Civic Restaurant below the Town Hall, but shooting cannot start until it closes, so we sit in the Wharfedale Room at the Queen’s Hotel having a long lunch. Thora was brought up in Morecambe, the daughter of the manager of the Winter Gardens, and she keeps up an unending flow of reminiscence; her early days in rep, her screen test at Ealing, her time with the Crazy Gang. While we chat Don Revie comes in and hangs about the entrance to the kitchen. A waiter appears and gives him a parcel. He uses the Queen’s Hotel as a takeaway.

The Civic Restaurant is in the basement of the Town Hall, which also houses the Crown Court. All through the long evening’s filming the corridors upstairs are thronged with lawyers and policemen, awaiting the verdict in a murder trial. A twenty-year-old man is accused of battering a baby to death; there are also cigarette burns on its body. To the police and the lawyers it seems an open and shut case, but the jury has surprised everyone (and ruined all social arrangements) by staying out for seven hours. The police attribute this to the fact that the foreman of the jury is a member of the Howard League of Penal Reform and herself an unmarried mother. The judge had been hoping to go out to dinner and his Bentley waits in Victoria Street. The court caterers have gone home and eventually the judge’s chamberlain lines up at Kennedy’s, the film’s caterers, and gets some dinner there for the judge and the high sheriff. Meanwhile the lawyers and bored policemen drift down into the basement to watch the filming and we chat.

One of the good things about being in a group, engaged in what to other people seems a glamorous activity is that I can chat to these lawyers about their job and to the policemen about theirs, behave in fact in the way writers are generally supposed to behave, but which I seldom do. I’d normally sidestep policemen and would want to keep out of the way of their prejudices lest they expect one to corroborate them, but established as part of another scene, with a setting and frame of my own, I find I am set free, enfranchised in the way people of a more outgoing temperament are all the time.

Suddenly there is a flurry of activity: the jury is being called back and the lawyers and policemen scurry back upstairs into the court. The judge’s chamberlain takes me and some of the crew and puts us in the well of the court. It is like a theatrical matinée, the cast of one show going to see another. Indeed, when he follows the judge on to the bench the chamberlain gives us a
little showbiz wave. The jury now file in, surprisingly informal and at ease, the men in shirtsleeves, one woman with her knitting. The judge is kind and courteous, emphasizing they must feel under no pressure to bring in a verdict. What he wants to know is whether there is any likelihood of them coming to an agreement. The foreman must answer yes or no. She asks when. ‘Ah,’ says the judge, ‘I mustn’t answer that. That would be to put pressure on you. Obviously there will come a time when you are too tired to go on, but the very fact that you have asked that question seems to indicate to me that point has not yet been reached.’ It is like Oxford philosophy. The jury files out to deliberate further and out we file to do reverses on shots already filmed. I am in the corridor two hours later when the verdict comes through. A man walks through the policemen shaking his head in disgust, saying, ‘Manslaughter. Seven years.’ The prisoner was a good-looking boy. Naively I expected to see some depravity in his face.

We finish at 11.30 with the customary call, ‘Right, that’s a wrap.’ The judge could have said the same. ‘Manslaughter. Seven years. And that’s a wrap.’

16
March, Leeds
(
Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf
). More filming in the Town Hall, this time in a corridor which leads from the cells. Two men are led by in handcuffs, the father and uncle of a family, both deaf and dumb. The father had been sleeping with his children and allowed the uncle to do the same. Mother, father, uncle, all were deaf and dumb, but the children could speak and speech was the father’s downfall. ‘Would this be any more Life,’ says Hopkins in the play, ‘would this be any more Life than a middle-aged lady sitting reading in a garden?’ Yes, I’m afraid it would.

18
March, London
. When I come back from filming – emerge, as
Goffman would say, from an intense and prolonged period of social interaction – I feel raw, as if I have in some unspecified way made a fool of myself.

11
April, Morecambe
(
All Day on the Sands
). A bright, bitter cold morning. Over the sand the low tumbled hills of the Lake District and one white mountain. Blue council buses ferry schoolchildren along the empty promenade. Old couples take the air. Why do people find the seaside out of season sad? I never do. It’s much sadder when the streets are filled with tired families, cross because they’re not happy. Which is what the film is about.

Two women pass. ‘I said to him, “If you’ve brought me here to mix with a lot of old people, you’re mistaken. You’ve got the bowling green to go to. Well, I’m not spending the rest of my life on bowling greens.”’

An old gentleman watches the filming on the front. Apparently he made boots for Field Marshal Earl Haig. Another front. This information he volunteers readily to anyone who comes near him, so I keep out of his way, suspecting he is a bore. This is foolish, since to be a bore about making boots for Earl Haig constitutes interest. A life flying this small flag. Had he met the Field Marshal?

‘Oh, yes.’

‘What was he like?’

A long pause. ‘Very smart.’

14
April, Morecambe
(
All Day on the Sands
). Alun Armstrong, who plays the father in the film, is full of jokes and stories and on the go the whole day. This morning he sits apart, silent and withdrawn. I ask him what’s the matter.

‘I woke up in the night and I’d nothing to read, so picked up my Gideon’s, opened it at a page, the way you do, thinking there
might be some sort of revelation, change my way of life and so on. And it’s Ecclesiastes, “the joker is a foolish man”, “empty pots make most noise”; all that stuff. I mean
my story
. So I’m piping down a bit this morning.’

On a wall on one of the roads off the promenade in clear large letters written without haste and correctly spelled: ‘Mark Lambert is a Paedophiliac (Ask Tracy)’.

30
April, Hartlepool
(
Afternoon Off
). In my mind’s eye I had seen this play taking place in Scarborough or Harrogate. It is the story of a Chinese waiter on his afternoon off, searching the town for a girl called Iris, whom he has been told fancies him. I’d got the idea from a Chinese waiter I glimpsed from a car, wandering about a small town on early closing day. That had been in Lewes in 1972. Now it is six years later and it’s not Lewes, it’s not Harrogate but somewhere that couldn’t be more different, Hartlepool.

It was this main street that gave Stephen the idea of setting the film here. The buildings all date from the same period, around when the town was founded in the 1880s. The date gives it the look of a town in a western, the main street lined with saloons, shipping offices, tackle shops and behind it, like in a western, the desert. Only it’s a desert of rubble where all the symmetrical side streets have been demolished, leaving only occasional outcrops of bright, boiled brick, where the grander buildings await a more elaborate and accomplished destruction. A sense too of the proximity of Germany and the Baltic coast. The dullness and loutishness of a rundown port; pubs, prostitutes. Sailors returning.

Sunday morning and the street is closed off, emptied of cars as rails are laid down for the camera. It’s Meccano time, a big tracking shot, ‘real filming’. Along the pavement a wavering trail of blood leads the length of the street. Last night a man was
stabbed and wandered along, holding his arms, looking for a taxi. Blood is sticky. It smears the pavement and members of the unit examine it curiously. It does seem indelible, more so than paint. Seagulls yelp over the empty street and mount each other on chimneystacks this grey Sunday while boys in baggy trousers phone possible girls from shattered phone boxes.

1
May,
Ηartlepool
(
Afternoon Off
). We film in the sluice room of the cottage hospital. Racks of stainless-steel bottles and bedpans, a sink that flushes and a hideously stained drum on which the bedpans are sluiced out. This room would be my mother’s nightmare. Conditions are cramped and I crouch behind the camera tripod in order to see the action. I am kneeling on the floor under the bedpan sluice. If my Mam saw this she would want to throw away trousers, raincoat, every particle of clothing that might have been touched and polluted. This has got into the film. Thora Hird plays a patient in the hospital being visited by her husband. ‘I bet the house is upside down,’ she says to him.

‘It never is,’ says her husband. ‘I did the kitchen floor this morning.’

‘Which bucket did you use?’

‘The red one.’

She is outraged. ‘That’s the outside bucket. I shall have it all to do again.’

I am assuming this is common ground and that the tortuous boundary between the clean and the dirty is a frontier most households share. It was very marked in ours. My mother maintained an intricate hierarchy of cloths, buckets and dusters, to the Byzantine differentiations of which she alone was privy. Some cloths were dish cloths but not sink cloths; some were for the sink but not for the floor. There were dirty buckets and clean buckets, brushes for indoors, brushes for the flags. One mop
had a universal application while another had a unique and terrible purpose and had to be kept outside, hung on the wall. And however rinsed and clean these utensils were they remained tainted by their awful function. Left to himself my Dad would violate these taboos, using the first thing that came to hand to clean the hearth or wash the floor. ‘It’s all nowt,’ he’d mutter, but if Mam was around he knew it saved time and temper to observe her order of things. Latterly, disposable cloths and kitchen rolls tended to blur these ancient distinctions but the basic structure remained, perhaps the firmest part of the framework of her world. When she was ill with depression the order broke down: the house became dirty. Spotless though Dad kept it, she saw it as ‘upside down’, dust an unstemmable tide and the house’s (imagined) squalor a talking point for the neighbours. So that when she came home from the hospital, bright and better, her first comment was always how clean the house looked. And not merely the house. It was as if the whole world and her existence in it had been rinsed clean.

Grand Hotel, Hartlepool. Breakfast. The waitresses are two local girls who are marshalled, instructed and generally ordered about by an elderly waitress with jet-black hair and glasses. This morning she is off. A man behind me raises his voice to ask whether anyone is serving his table. The two young waitresses whisper briefly, then one goes across. The man studies the menu.