Writing Home (7 page)

The end of a Leisure Break for one couple, but for some it was once all leisure.

When we were at home we always had our dinner at lunch-time. For my parents, anything that came after that was never more than a snack. But when I was at university and they came to see me, we’d go into the hotel dining-room at night and the waiter would present the menu, and my Mam would say the dread words, ‘Do you do a poached egg on toast?’ and we’d slink from the dining-room, the only family in England not to have its dinner at night.

‘Would you like the wine list?’ the waiter would ask. ‘Not really,’ Dad would say, and one had to be quick in order to stop Mam explaining about his duodenal ulcer. Mind you, what
wine was there that would go with spaghetti on toast? ‘Which is really all we want at this time in the evening. Mr Bennett has to watch his tummy.’

As I grew older and came to delight in these eccentricities and ceased to be embarrassed by them, my parents still struggled to fulfil what they imagined were my aspirations for them. ‘We’ve found an alcoholic drink that we like,’ my mother said. ‘It’s called Bitter Lemon.’ Of course by this time my aspirations for them had changed anyway. Now I wanted them to stay the same as they’d been when I was a child. It didn’t matter any more.

Once, when I had a play on in the West End, they came to a matinée and I took them afterwards to the Savoy Grill, where there was no set menu and it was all à la carte. They appreciated this. ‘Oh it’s a grand place,’ my mother told my brother. ‘You can have anything you want. Well, you can have poached egg on toast, which is what we want.’

These are TV-rental reps, and, reluctant though I am to admit it, I can see that with their conferences and camaraderie and their leisurewear it’s business people like this who are banishing class from hotels and elsewhere.

The snobbish bit of me regrets this, but it’s a small regret. If you want a poached egg, you can have a poached egg, and there’s no nonsense about ties or even jeans. This is what they put on after a day at the office, so this is what they put on here.
They’re at home in hotels; they’re at home everywhere. I envy them.

I suppose one of the purposes of coming to this hotel in Harrogate was an evangelical one: I wanted to find people who were as awkward as I used to be in these surroundings and show them it didn’t matter. Only I didn’t find them, and besides, quite sensibly, everybody seems to know it doesn’t matter. I wanted to revive or relocate some of the embarrassments or awkwardnesses I felt when I was younger. I didn’t. I’m older, the world has changed, and maybe it’s the businessmen who’ve changed it. Class isn’t what it was; or nowadays perhaps people’s embarrassments are differently located.

That was going to be it. I came back to London after the filming had finished by train, and as it was the weekend I paid the
£
3 supplement and went First Class. I was sitting there when the ticket collector came round. He looked at my ticket.

‘Oh, you don’t belong in here,’ he said. ‘These are proper First Class people – the
£
3 supplement are further down. Come on – out.’

‘I don’t seem to be able to get started,’ Russell wrote to me in 1966. He was a lecturer at a training college in Derby and at the age of thirty-two had just made his first foray into television, a catastrophic appearance as a contestant on Granada’s
Criss Cross
Quiz
. The only question he got right was about Catherine of Braganza. It was such a public humiliation that Myrtle, his mother, refused to speak to him, treating him, as he said in the same letter, ‘like Ena Sharples treated the now late Vera Lomax’.

When he did get started, of course, there was no stopping him, and it was soon hard to recall a time when he had not been on television, though it was the capacity for provocative half-truths and outrageous overstatement that stood him in such good stead as a schoolmaster which now fitted him for a career on the small screen.

To me and his other close friends his career in radio and television was almost incidental. It furnished him with more stories, the cast of them more glamorous and distinguished and the attendant disasters and humiliations more public, but he never really altered from the undergraduate who had rooms on the same staircase as I did thirty-four years ago at Exeter College, Oxford.

He had learned then, by the age of twenty, a lesson it took me half a lifetime to learn, namely that there was nothing that could not be said and no one to whom one could not say it. He
knew instinctively that everybody was the same (which is not to say they are not different), and he assumed instinctively that if a thought had occurred to him then it must have occurred to someone else. So by the time he got to Oxford he had long since shed youth’s stiff, necessary armour, and the television personality who, in the last year of his life, introduced himself to a slightly mystified Pope wasn’t very different from the undergraduate who invited Vivien Leigh round for drinks. ‘You can’t do that,’ I would protest. ‘Why not?’ said this youth off Blackburn market. ‘They can only say no.’ And if one had to point to the quality that distinguished Russell throughout his life it would be
cheek
.

While cheek is not quite a virtue, still it belongs in the other ranks of courage, so that even when he embarrassed you, you had to admire him for it – and, of course, laugh. It came out in the silliest things. He was one of the first people I knew who drove. It was the family car – opulent, vulgar, the emblem of successful greengrocery – and driving through Leeds or Manchester and seeing an old lady waiting at a bus-stop he would pip his horn and wave. She would instinctively wave back and, as we drove on, one would see her gazing after us, wondering who among her scant acquaintance had a large cream-coloured Jaguar. ‘Brought a bit of interest into her life,’ he would say, and that was as far as he got towards a philosophy: he understood that most people are prisoners in their lives and want releasing, even if it’s only for a wave at a bus-stop.

He spent his life fleeing boredom, and he had no real goal beyond that. He had various romantic notions of himself, it’s true – the country squire, for instance, though he was never particularly rustic; the solitary writer, though he hated being alone. Half an hour at his desk and he’d be on the phone saying ‘Is the patch of wall you’re staring at any more interesting than the one I’m staring at?’

‘Private faces in public places’, says Auden, ‘Are wiser and nicer/Than public faces in private places.’ For his friends he was naturally a private face, but for the public he seemed a private face too, and one that had strayed on to the screen seemingly untouched by expertise. That was why, though it infuriated his critics, the public liked him and took him to their hearts as they never did more polished performers. And yes he fumbled, and yes one wished he would reach for the right word rather than the next but two, and yes his delivery could be as tortured as his mother’s was answering the telephone, but it didn’t matter. That was part of his ordinariness and part of his style.

Still, television magnifies some personalities, but Russell it diminished, and people watching him saw only a fraction of the man. He once had to do a promotion for British goods in Bahrein. Flown there on Concorde with a party that included a beauty queen and a town crier, they sat down to a lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in a temperature of no in the shade. They all got on very well, except that after Russell had stood up and done his bit and sat down the town crier leaned over and said, ‘I’ll tell you something. You’re better off than on.’ And of course he was.

One laughed more helplessly with him than with anyone else I know, but so much of his humour – immediate and throwaway and born out of disaster and humiliation – is hard to recapture. The worst meal I ever had in my life was with him, and, ironically, in France. After the soup he pushed his plate back. ‘Well, that soup might be a big event in a day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch but it didn’t do much for me.’ International figures had a habit of intruding on the domestic scene. ‘I think’, he’d say, popping in another violet cream, ‘the only person who must be more depressed than I am at this moment is Benazir Bhutto.’ He took no interest in current affairs except insofar as they
intruded on his immediate concerns. ‘I think the pace of glasnost is too hectic. The next thing you know we shall have Mr Gorbachev on
Blankety Blank
.’

‘I’m fed up with Agewatch and Childwatch. I’m thinking of founding a society against potential suicide called Wristwatch.’

Some random thoughts:

He loved Italy, hated Greece.

He liked families and was an
ami de maison
in half a dozen households.

He was uncensorious of himself and of other people.

He knew that there are no rules.

He never kept people in compartments, introducing and mixing one layer of his friends with another. If somebody new came into his life he expected his old friends to budge up and make room for them. Which, Russell being Russell, they generally did. And he would do the same for them.

He was unashamedly self-interested. He switched on Dennis Potter’s
The Singing Detective
at the point where the naked Michael Gambon is having his psoriasis anointed by a nurse. In order to stop himself getting excited, Gambon recites a list of the most boring television programmes he can think of. Russell waited with bated breath long enough to make sure he wasn’t on the list, and then switched off.

He would telephone in the morning to find out whether you were free for supper that evening, promising to call back later to confirm. When he didn’t, you knew he’d had a Better Offer. This principle of the Better Offer was respected, though complained of, by all his friends.

If you did manage a meal, a couple of hours would do it. ‘I’m bored now,’ he would say.

‘But he’s so silly,’ pompous people would tell you, not understanding that that was why one loved him, that to be silly is not to be foolish.

The fourteen-year-old boy who had thought it worthwhile confiding in his diary that Princess Margaret had a slight cold remained all his life a sucker for royalty, and unashamed of it. A couple of years ago he arranged for the Princess of Wales to visit Settle and Giggleswick. At the end of the visit the Princess offered him a lift back to London in the royal plane. Notwithstanding he had to get into the plane with a plastic bag over his head to evade the attentions of the press, he accepted with alacrity. They had both of them got on very well and made each other laugh, and now spent a happy hour chatting as they flew south. Arrived at Northolt they said goodbye, the Princess sped off to Windsor while Russell flung himself into a taxi and rushed to Heathrow and a plane back. He hadn’t wanted a lift at all, but just couldn’t resist the offer. It was sheer cheek.

The spell of royalty persisted to the end. The last time I saw him I had gone up to Leeds for some function and met there Professor Losowsky, the head of the team that fought so long for his life at St James’s Hospital. At that time prospects were quite hopeful, and the professor told me how patient Russell had been under weeks of wearisome treatment, unable to speak, fed intravenously, rest impossible. ‘I have’, said the professor, ‘great admiration for his qualities of character’. Now this set me back, because it was taken for granted by all his friends that Russell had no qualities of character at all. How else could he have been such good company? But I went up to the hospital prepared for a change, expecting, in Larkin’s phrase, to see a new man when I’d quite liked the old.

I need not have worried. I found him festooned with wires and equipment, a tracheotomy tube in his throat, monitored, ventilated. But underneath all this he had a message he wanted to convey. The nurse, who had got used to lip-reading him, thought it was something about sherry. Russell shook his head and closed his eyes in that familiar gesture of impatience,
learned from Annie Walker in
Coronation Street
. We tried again, and he began to get agitated. Fearful of a relapse, the nurse thought we’d better find out what this vital message was, so she laboriously disconnected Russell from his machine, took out the tracheotomy tube, and pressed a pad over his throat so we could hear his faint voice and the essential words. They were: ‘Ned Sherrin had supper with Princess Margaret last week and she asked how I was. Twice.’ It was a triumph for the strength of weak character.

Russell never made any secret of his homosexuality even in those unliberated days when he was an undergraduate. He didn’t look on it as an affliction, but he was never one for a crusade either. He just got on with it. He had never read Proust, but he had somehow taken a short cut across the allotments and arrived at the same conclusions. His funniest stories were always of the absurdities of sex and the ludicrous situations it had led him into, and if he was never short of friends it was because his partners knew that there would always be laughs, sharing a joke something rarer than sharing a bed.

In the succession of his friends he was happier than most people, certainly during the last five or six years of his life in his friendship with Jamie O’Neill, but with the gutter press systematically trawling public life for sexual indiscretion he knew he was in a delicate position. So when in March last year the
News of the World
set him up, then broke to an unstartled public the shocking news, Russell thought his career was over. One longed for him to say ‘So what?’, but here, not surprisingly, with his livelihood at stake, his cheek failed him. He expected the BBC not to renew his contract and that offers of work elsewhere would be bound to dwindle.

In fact this did not happen, and he began to work harder than he had ever worked before. So convinced was he that there would soon be no more, he accepted every offer that came his
way. Thus at the same time he was making his television series
The Grand Tour
for the BBC, he was doing a weekly TV programme for BBC North West and presenting
Start the Week
on radio, besides doing a weekly column for the
Sunday Times
. In addition to all this he had to write the book of his television series. On the surface it seemed things had never been better. But his first instinct had been right. The gutter press had finished him because they had panicked him into working so hard that by the time he was stricken with hepatitis he was an exhausted man.

And it went on. Reporters intermittently infested his home village for more than a year, bribing local children for information about his life, even (there is terrible comedy in it) trying to bribe the local vicar. Now as he fought for his life in St James’s Hospital one newspaper took a flat opposite and had a camera with a long lens trained on the window of his ward – the nurses would point it out to you when you visited him. A reporter posing as a junior doctor smuggled himself into the ward and demanded to see his notes, and every lunch-time journalists took the hospital porters over the road to the pub to try to bribe them into taking a photo of him. One saw at that time in the tireless and unremitting efforts of the team at St James’s the best of which we are capable, and in the equally tireless, though rather better rewarded, efforts of the journalists the worst.

As the days went on their fury mounted, and one had to sympathize. Russell, with his usual lack of consideration, was dying of the wrong disease. Even worse, for a time it seemed he wasn’t dying at all and looked boringly likely to recover. The final touch, however, came on television, when Russell was actually on his deathbed, and the woman who had written the original story in the
News of the World
could not be restrained from retelling the tale of her journalistic triumph. Some of you
may think that these kind of recriminations are out of place at a memorial service, and certain it is that Russell would not have approved of them. Had he recovered he would have gone on going to Mr Murdoch and Mr Maxwell’s parties and doing his column for a Murdoch newspaper. The world was like that. Or at least England is like that.

There was one more joke before he died. Many of you will know Russell’s secretary and personal assistant of many years, Pat Heald. Pat maintained some order in his frenzied life; no one understood him better, and the efficiency – clairvoyance almost – with which she anticipated his requirements and outflanked his changes of mind never ceased to gratify and also to infuriate him. He did not like to think he was known so well. On the day before he died I rang his oldest friends, Hugh and Joan Stalker, to find out what the situation was, but they were already at his bedside. The person who answered the phone told me that in a last desperate gamble the team at St James’s were going to try a liver transplant. ‘But’, she went on, ‘there’s some confusion. The hospital hasn’t been able to find a liver, but apparently Pat Heald has managed to put her hands on one.’ It wasn’t true, quite, but for both of them it would have been a wonderful apotheosis.

But it was the last joke, and the first that he was never going to be able to share.

God bless him.