Writing Home (50 page)

‘I would like fresh grapefruit.’

‘Are you suffering from diabetes?’

A hush has fallen on the room.

‘I beg your pardon?’

The waitress smiles helpfully. ‘Fresh grapefruit. Are you diabetic?’

The man is now in a towering rage. ‘No, I am not diabetic.
Furthermore I am not suffering from Bell’s palsy, tuberculosis, cancer or Parkinson’s disease.’

Everyone buries themselves in their cornflakes as the waitress, scarlet, rushes from the room to tell the kitchen of this madman.

2
May, Hartlepool
(
Afternoon Off
). I take photographs in the old cemetery by the sea on the north side of the headland. The graveyard is flanked by two huge factories, where the pier of Steetley Magnesite runs out into the sea. The graves are of dead mariners, a Norwegian from a shipwreck, a man killed by a shell in the bombardment of Hartlepool in 1914 and many men and children killed ‘in the course of their employment’.

Filming gives one an oblique perspective on English life, taking one into places one would not otherwise go, bringing one up against people one would never normally meet. This morning busmen in the depot on Church Street, yesterday the chef and waiters in the hotel kitchens. I have very little knowledge of ‘ordinary life’. I imagine it in a script and come up against the reality only when the script gets filmed. So the process can be a bit of an eye-opener, a kind of education. Cameramen in particular are educated like this, men of the world who have odd pockets of understanding and experience gleaned from the films they have worked on. I imagine someone could be educated in the same way by promiscuity.

Sunderland. An old-fashioned shoe shop. High ladders and shelves piled with shoeboxes. Feeling this is what a genuine writer would do I make a note of the labels:

3
May, Hartlepool
(
Afternoon Off
). We are filming an OAP concert at St Hilda’s Church Hall. The Chinese waiter wanders on to the stage while two entertainers are giving a rendition of ‘Pedro the Fisherman’ to the whistled accompaniment of an audience of old ladies. They arrive in a coach, smart and warm in fur hats, check coats and little bootees with one solitary man. I see my father in him, going with my Mam on the WI trip from the village. ‘Well, your Mam and me always do things together. We don’t want splitting up to go with lots of different folks.’ And he was not embarrassed by it.

My mother’s description of her clothes:

Like the inventory of a medieval will.

Casual onlookers find it difficult to detect the hierarchy of a film unit. Who is in charge? It seems to be the cameraman. He is making them move all the lights anyway. Or is it one of those two young men who keep changing their minds about where everybody in the audience is meant to sit? Perhaps it’s the man with the long microphone. Certainly, now that he’s shaken his head they’re changing it all again. The proper actors haven’t even appeared yet, you’d think they’d have some say. Suddenly
everything settles down and somebody shouts out (quite rudely), ‘Settle, everybody, settle’, and the boss turns out to be the scruffy young man who has been sat on the window-sill doing the crossword. He scarcely looks old enough.

And so it was in the days when Mam and Dad used to come and watch the filming. Dad would think he was talking to a key figure on the film, when in fact he was talking to one of the props boys or the animal handler, members of the unit I’d scarcely come across and whose names I didn’t know. Once when they visited me at Oxford they took my scout for a don, and in the theatre my dresser for John Gielgud. And it’s happened to me. When we were on Broadway with
Beyond the Fringe
the Kennedys came backstage after the show. Having been introduced I spent most of my time talking to a distinguished but rather abstracted young man who, though (and perhaps because) he kept looking over my shoulder, I took to be an important section of the New Frontier. He was a secret serviceman.

13 May, Hartlepool
(
Afternoon Off
). The final sequences with Peter Postlethwaite and Stan Richards, in the Municipal Art Gallery and Museum, which combines art, archaeology, natural and local history. Downstairs is an exhibition of flower arrangements, ‘Britain in Bloom’, with the comments of the adjudicators affixed: ‘It speaks to me’; ‘Lovely arrangement, but a bit delicate flowerwise’. Upstairs a case of stuffed birds and in another case, ‘Hartlepool in Palaeolithic Times’. There is an old bicycle, a Japanese suit of armour and a dismal collection of pictures, scarcely above the highland-cattle level. Kids wander through, bored out of their heads, mystified by a culture that can comprehend a Japanese suit of armour, a stuffed otter and a calcified Roman waterpipe.

The filming finishes as filming usually does, with a wild track.
In the midst of clearing up everybody suddenly freezes into silence and immobility as on sound only the actors record their lines.

The Insurance Man
is set in Prague. It begins in 1945 with the city on the eve of liberation by the Russians, though the main events of the story, told in flashback, take place before the First World War. The film was shot in Bradford, where every other script I’ve written seems to have been shot, and also in Liverpool, a city I didn’t know and had never worked in. Bradford was chosen because among the few buildings the city has elected to preserve are some nineteenth-century warehouses behind the Cathedral. From the nationality of the merchants originally trading there, this neighbourhood is known locally as Little Germany. The trade has gone but the buildings remain, the exteriors now washed and sandblasted but the interiors much as they were when the last bolt of cloth was dispatched in the 1960s. Liverpool likewise has many empty buildings, and for the same reason, and there we had an even wider choice. I found both places depressing – Liverpool in particular. Work though it is, a play, however serious, is play, and play seems tactless where there is no work.

9 July 1985, Connaught Rooms, Bradford
. These masonic chambers on what’s left of Manningham Lane serve as part of the Workers Accident Insurance Institute, the office in Prague where Kafka was a conscientious and well-thought-of executive. It is only the first day of shooting, and already I feel somewhat
spare. We are filming scenes in the lift, which is just large enough to contain the actors and the camera crew. There’s no hope of hearing the dialogue, so I sit on a window-sill and read, wishing, after writing nearly a score of films, that I didn’t still feel it necessary to be in attendance at the birth. Just below where we are filming is Valley Parade, Bradford City’s football ground, where two months ago dozens of fans perished in a fire. Glance down a back street and there is the blackened gateway.

10 July, Holcroft Castings and Forgings
,
Thornbury
. Periodically between 1911 and 1917 Kafka helped to manage an asbestos factory set up by his brother-in-law. The hero of
The Insurance
Man
is Franz, a young man who contracts a mysterious skin disease, seemingly from his job in a dyeworks. As a result he is sacked and comes to the Workers Accident Insurance Institute to claim compensation. He fails, but Kafka, anxious to do him a good turn, offers him a job in his brother-in-law’s asbestos factory. The story is told in flashback thirty years later when Franz, now an old man, comes to his doctor to be told that Kafka’s good turn has sealed his death warrant. Kafka describes in his diary the dust in the original asbestos factory and how, when they came off shift, the girls would dash it from their overalls in clouds. Even so I feel the design department has overdone it: dust coats every surface and lies in drifts against the machinery. I mention this to Richard Eyre, wondering if it’s a little too much. It turns out we have had nothing to do with it: the forge, shut down six months ago, is just as it was.

The offices too have not been touched, a ledger open on a desk, records and files still on the shelves. In a locker are a cardigan and three polystyrene plates, remnants of a last takeaway, and taped to the door a yellowing cyclostyled letter dated 12 June 1977. It is from a Mr Goff, evidently an executive of the firm, living at The Langdales, Kings Grove, Bingley. Mr
Goff has been awarded the OBE in the Jubilee Honours, and in the letter he expresses the hope ‘that the People, who are the Main Prop in any endeavour, many with great skill and ability, will take Justification and Pride in it and will’, he earnestly hopes, ‘feel that they will be sharing in the Honour conferred on me.’

11 July, Downs, Coulter & Co., Currer Street, Bradford
. Another empty factory, which we fit out as the office and medical room of a dyeworks. The firm has moved to new premises in Thornton but still on the wall is a list of internal telephone numbers: Mr Jack, Mr Ben, Mr Jim, Mr Luke. It is evidently a family firm, and sounds straight out of
The Crowthers of Bankdam
. Also on the wall is an advertising calendar sent out by Chas Walker & Sons, Beta Works, Leeds, and headed
Textile Town Holidays
1974
. From big cities like Leeds and Manchester down to the smallest woollen and cotton towns like Tottingham and Clayton-le-Moors, the calendar lists the different fortnights in the summer the mills would close down. If they hadn’t closed down for good already, that is. The artwork is a fanciful drawing of a toreador watched by elegant couples under Martini umbrellas but the obstinate echoes are of men in braces sat in deck-chairs, fat ladies paddling at Bridlington and Flambor-ough and Whitley Bay. For most of them now one long holiday.

16 July, Bradford
. A boy of sixteen, hair streaked and dressed in the fashion, leads an old lady down Bridge Street. In this town of the unemployed he is probably her home help or on some community-care scheme so it’s not just the spectacle of youthful goodness that makes it touching. But, not yet of an age to go arm in arm, he is leading her by the hand. He little more than a child, she a little less, they go hand in hand along Hall Ings in the morning sunshine.

Night Shoot, Little Germany
. In the original script the first scene was set in the doctor’s surgery in Prague at the end of the war. Old Franz is let in and mentions there is a body hanging from the lamp-post outside. Richard Eyre thought that a more arresting opening would be of Franz picking his way down the bombed street and the man’s body hanging in the foreground.

The corpse is played by an extra, who is perhaps sixty. It is a complicated shot, done at night, and involves water flooding down the street, the camera on a crane, and high above it another much taller crane, a ‘cherry-picker’, from which (since the lamp-post is false) the ‘corpse’ has to be suspended. There is no dialogue and nothing for me to do. It’s too dark to read and too cold to be standing about. We have done the first shot when I notice that a placard has been hung round the corpse’s neck saying
TRAITOR
. I think this is too specific and ask Richard if we can do a shot without it. There are other technical problems to be sorted out before we do a second take, and those not involved hang around chatting and drinking coffee. As so often on a film, the atmosphere is one of boredom and resignation, troops waiting for the action. Or the ‘Action’.

Suddenly there is a commotion at the lamp-post. The hanging man has been sick, is unconscious. There is a rush to get him down, many hands reaching up, the scene, in our carefully contrived light and shade, like a Descent from the Cross. Thankful at last to have something to do, the duty policeman briskly calls up an ambulance while the make-up girls (odd that this is part of their function) chafe the man’s feet. At first it is feared that he has had a heart attack, but soon he is sitting up. We abandon the shot, and Mervyn, the production manager, calls a wrap. The water is turned off, props begin to clear the rubble from the street as an ambulance arrives and the patient gets in under his own steam. There is some discussion whether anyone from the unit should go with him, as someone
undoubtedly should. But it is 3.30 a.m. and he goes off in the ambulance alone. I note my own reluctance to assume this responsibility. I could have gone, though there is no reason why I should. Except that it’s my play. I’m to blame for him hanging there in the first place.

(Though it seems fairly obvious to me, in the finished film the meaning of this hanged man puzzles some people. The doctor had heard the man running down the street the previous night, trying to find a refuge from his pursuers. He bangs on a door and it is opened – by his pursuers. His refuge turns out to be his doom. This kind of paradox is one associated with Kafka, and it’s also the paradox at the heart of the play: Kafka does Franz a favour by giving him a job in his factory, but since the factory turns out to make asbestos this good turn leads in the end to Franz’s death.)

17 July, Peckover Street, Little Germany
. Dan Day-Lewis, who plays Kafka, has a stooping, stiff-necked walk which I take to be part of his characterization. It’s certainly suited to the role, and may be derived from the exact physical description of Kafka given by Gustav Janouch. Even so, I’m not sure if the walk is Kafka or Dan, since he’s so conscientious he seldom comes out of character between takes and I never see him walking otherwise.

We film the scenes between Kafka and his father (Dave King), the Kafka family home set up on another floor of the same empty warehouse. When I first worked on the script with Richard Eyre he wondered whether these scenes of the Kafka household were necessary, feeling that the film is really the story of Franz, to which Kafka is only incidental. I pressed for them then, the producer Innes Lloyd agreed, so here we are in the Kafka apartment. Any doubts are resolved by a scene in which Hermann Kafka gets into his son’s bed, then stands on it (an
image taken from one of Kafka’s stories) and begins to bounce up and down, the sound that of the sexual intercourse Kafka could often hear from his parents’ bedroom when he was struggling to write.

(Richard’s instinct proves right, nevertheless: in the editing the scene is cut, as it seems to hold up the story.)

The Bradford sequences over, we now have three days off before moving to Liverpool.

23 July, Fruit Exchange, Victoria Street
,
Liverpool
. This is a great rarity: a location that exactly matches the scene as I imagined it. A small, steeply raked auditorium with a gallery done in light oak and lit by five leaded windows. It was built in 1900 and is as pleasing and nicely proportioned as a Renaissance theatre. Each seat is numbered, the numbers carved in a wood that matches the pews, and facing them a podium on which is the hydraulic lift that brought up the produce to be auctioned. Ben Whitrow stands on the podium now as we wait to rehearse a scene in which, as a professor of medicine, he uses Franz in a clinical demonstration for his students. The students are played by fifty Liverpool boys, some of whom are given lines to speak. (‘What is this word?’ asks one. ‘Origin.’ ‘What does that mean?’)

One is tempted to think that this auditorium and another that adjoins it should be rehabilitated and used as theatres. For revues possibly. Seeing it for the first time Vivian Pickles remarks, ‘Look out! I feel a song coming on.’ Yet if it was a theatre it would straightaway lose its charm, part of which lies in its being unwanted, a find. We do our little bit to hasten its decline by cutting out one section of the pews to accommodate a gallery. Pledged to restore it to its original state, our carpenters will patch it up but it will never be quite the same.

In the scene, Robert Hines, who plays Franz, has to stand naked on the podium under the bored eyes of fifty medical
students. As the day wears on the extras have no problem simulating boredom, often having to be woken for the take. I never fail to be impressed by the bravery of actors. Robert is a striking and elegant figure, seemingly unselfconscious about his nakedness. Did I have to display myself in front of a total stranger, let alone fifty of them, my part would shrink to the size of an acorn. Robert’s remains unaffected. I mention this to John Pritchard, the sound supervisor. ‘I see,’ he says drily. ‘You subscribe to the theory of the penis as seaweed.’ It later transpires that Robert’s seeming equanimity has been achieved only after drinking a whole bottle of wine.

24
July, St George’s Hall, Liverpool
. We film a long and complicated shot that introduces the Workers Accident Insurance Institute, the office where Kafka worked for most of his life. I had written this shot in several scenes, but Richard Eyre combines them into one five-minute tracking shot. An office girl is making her rounds, collecting on behalf of the retiring head of department. The camera goes with her as she moves from office to office, calling in turn on the three clerks who figure in the story, finally ending up in Kafka’s office, where he is dictating to his secretary.

The WAII office has been built in the St George’s Hall, the massive municipal temple on the Plateau at the heart of Liverpool. Ranged round the vast hall are statues of worthies from the great days of the city, and on the floor a rich and elaborate mosaic, set with biblical homilies. ‘By thee kings reign and princes decree justice,’ say the roundels on the floor. ‘Save the NHS. Keep Contractors Out,’ say other roundels, badges stuck there at a recent People’s Festival. ‘He hath given me skill that He might be honoured,’ says the floor. ‘Save the pits,’ say the stickers. It is a palimpsest of our industrial history. Peel and George Stephenson look down.

Most of the unit are staying in the Adelphi, a once grand hotel and the setting of the thirties comedy
Grand National
Night
. More recently the vast lounge figured in the television version of
Brideshead Revisited
as the interior of a transatlantic liner. One gets a hint of its former grandeur in the size of the towels, but the service is not what it was. At breakfast I ask for some brown toast. The waiter, a boy of about sixteen and thin as a Cruikshank cartoon, hesitates for a moment then slopes over to the breakfast bar and riffles through a basket of toast. Eventually he returns with two darkish pieces of white toast. ‘Are these brown enough?’ It is not a joke.

26
July, St George’s Hall
. At the centre of the gilded grilles on the huge doors of the St George’s Hall is the motto SPQL – the senate and people of Liverpool. There isn’t a senate now and the building serves no civic function, the courts, which once it housed, transferred to less noble concrete premises down the hill. As for the people, they occasionally figure at rallies and suchlike, and marches seem to begin here, but the portico stinks of urine and grass grows on the steps.

In front of the St George’s Hall is a war memorial, a stone of remembrance inlaid with bronze reliefs. The inscription read:
OUT THE NORTH PARTS A GREAT COMPANY AND A MIGHTY
ARMY
. The panels, soldiers on one side, civilians on the other, are vaguely Vorticist in inspiration, the figures formal and angular and all inclined at the same slant. It was designed by Professor Lionel Budden of Liverpool University, and the bronze reliefs done by H. Tyson Smith. These aren’t notable names but it is a noble thing, far more so than Lutyens’s Whitehall Cenotaph.