I knew I stood a good chance of being rescued, since several people were still dittling about, pretending to be working. Nevertheless I was quite frightened, especially as they didn’t seem able to hear my knocking and calling … or my BANGING and SHOUTING … or even my POUNDING and SCREAMING. There was a glass panel in the door, and I could see people wandering soundlessly between rooms, totally oblivious to my plight. Had premature burial come to the Old Marylebone Road?
Even when at last I managed to attract someone’s attention, the relief was short-lived, since it was soon discovered that the door wouldn’t open from the outside either. Besides, it turned out that my so-called rescuer had watched Billy Wilder’s film Ace in the Hole on television the night before, and was immediately struck by the parallel. Shouting through six inches of metal, she assured me that I would be perfectly all right, of course, but that they might need to drill down from the top. ‘We’ll have you out of there in no time,’ she said. ‘Three weeks at the outside.’
Gradually the alarm went out, and people gathered around the lift to see me in my vertical coffin. Having endured many a Roger Corman movie in my youth, I knew the proper Ligeia drill, but I decided against breaking my fingernails tearing at the glass for their benefit. Instead I behaved impeccably, shrugging and smiling, and waving cheery hellos to the succession of familiar faces who took it in turns to peer solemnly in at me. It was like one of those reconstructions of a baby’s-eye view of childbirth: big faces with impersonal expressions looking in and mouthing stuff like, ‘She’s in there, sure enough. But how are we going to get her out?’
In the end, our fast-thinking Chief Sub ran and located some sort of lift-key which, when properly applied to the door, alarmed him by sending me plummeting down (inside the lift) to freedom.
There is only one interesting aspect to this no-doubt commonplace experience. It is that throughout the whole terrifying ordeal, I seemed to hear the voice of the Lord. And he said to me, ‘Here you are then, Lynne. Here’s your Margins for next week. Don’t say I never give you anything.’
To celebrate the 3,000th Listener crossword, I thought I might share a little secret with you. Shout it aloud in Gath and Hebron: nobody on the Listener staff has the first idea of how to do the Listener crossword. For years, we have been convinced that the clues are actually coded messages from MI5.
Speaking personally, it’s not only crosswords that I can’t do. All sorts of brain teasers leave my brain completely unexcited. The ones I particularly dislike are those that are designed to develop your verbal reasoning skills, where you are supposed to infer a whole system of relationships from a few key bits of information. For example: a) ‘Julie has a dog but it does not have blue eyes’; b) ‘John knows all the words to Melancholy Baby but can’t quite get the tune’; c) ‘Sylvester only recognizes words with fewer than four letters’; d) ‘The dog will sing, but only for Maltesers’.
Perhaps my dislike for these exercises explains why I found it so hard to get started on Iris Murdoch’s novel, The Book and the Brotherhood. She launches straight into this kind of information about a vast number of characters (Conrad is taller than Gulliver, though Gulliver is considered tall; Gerard is Tamar’s uncle but Violet’s cousin; Gerard, Jenkin and Duncan all wear dinner-jackets), with nary a thought for those of us hastily sketching diagrams on the fly-leaf.
So which puzzles can I do? Well, I will confess that I have a certain aptitude – given the right airport-lounge – for the ones that present you with a block of letters, and ask you to find the hidden words.
Now, to the untrained eye, this looks like a mere mess of jumbled letters. But I think I can demonstrate something pretty startling.
Reflections on Culture
Since the book is now out, it is too late to ask Susan Hill to be gentle with me. As from yesterday, a surging modern sequel to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca has crashed and boiled by moonlight into the bookshops, and my name – Mrs de Winter – is once again in common parlance, along with Rebecca and Mrs Danvers, and Mad Ben the beachcomber. (‘No shell here,’ nods gap-toothed Ben mysteriously in my dreams at night. ‘Been diggin’ since forenoon. No shell here.’)
Ho hum. Crash. Boil. That’s the trouble with being shy and mousy. When you are the sort of nervous person who pushes the shards of a broken ornament to the back of a drawer so that the servants don’t find out (‘Oh lord, that’s one of our treasures, isn’t it?’ quips your husband, helpfully), it is natural that people should go right ahead and publish sequels about you, without bothering to ask you first. In my worst moments I think Mrs Danvers was right, I should have chucked myself out of an upstairs window and done everyone a favour. But the trouble with being Rebecca’s nameless heroine is this: supposing Susan Hill had taken me out for a coastal drive and then explained, ‘I’m asking you to be in my new novel, you little fool!’ – well, I would have had no option but to swoon my acceptance, wouldn’t I?
But I have changed a lot since Rebecca, since those ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea. And I just hope Susan Hill is aware of it. The fact is, I experienced a quite surprising character change just at the point when Daphne du Maurier’s narrative left us – Maxim and me – on that mad, desperate nocturnal drive westwards towards the blazing Manderley. You may remember the scene. I spotted the giveaway glow on the horizon, and suggested, feebly, that it was the northern lights. ‘That’s not the northern lights,’ said hubby, all grim and lantern-jawed (as usual). ‘That’s Manderley.’ And he put his foot down. ‘Maxim,’ I whined. ‘Maxim, what is it?’ But he didn’t answer, just drove faster, much faster. I felt cold, very cold. It was dark, horribly dark. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. ‘It’s the bloody house!’ I yelled, suddenly. ‘That snotty cow in the black frock has set fire to the bloody house!’
Well, you can imagine the consternation. We came off the road. The car juddered to a halt. There was a hiss of steam. The ash still blew towards us with the salt winds of the sea, but I beat it off my jacket saying, ‘Ugh! Ash! Yucky! Look!’ Maxim could not believe his ears. ‘Stop it, you idiot!’ he said, but it was the wrong thing to say. ‘And you can stop calling me an idiot as well!’ I said, and socked him on the jaw. It was terribly peculiar; not like me at all. The author watched in stunned amazement, and then asked very quietly whether she could have a word.
The whole point of Rebecca, she explained patiently, was that I – as the modest, hapless, mooncalf heroine – should serve as a role-model for readers yet unborn, as the acceptable face of womanhood. Surely I could see that? ‘First we have Rebecca,’ she said; ‘she’s sexy and manipulative and selfish. You see? Then we’ve got Mrs Danvers, who is dark and jealous and self-sacrificing and is obviously everybody’s mother because she knows their faults and judges by impossible standards and rests her chin on their shoulder. And then there’s you, the victim. And you haven’t got a clue, basically. But because you are well intentioned, not very bright, motivated by gratitude and love, and terrorized by a fear of failure, you’re the heroine. Everyone loves you! Trust me! You are a great modern archetype! One day your followers will include the Princess of Wales!’
But I couldn’t help thinking, ‘Where’s the fun in that?’ So I divorced Maxim, took half the insurance money on Manderley, learnt to sail, wrote a book on sexual politics, broke a lot of ornaments and felt much better. That’s all there is, I think. Except that I decided to call myself Jackie. It comes as a surprise to some people, but as I always say, it’s a great deal better than nothing.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I wake up in my little flat, turn on the light, and burst into tears with relief. ‘Oh kitties,’ I gasp. ‘What a terrible dream! I dreamed I was in the Algarve on holiday on my own again!’ The awoken cats (God bless them) at first assume an air of polite concern. But at the word ‘Algarve’, they exchange weary glances (the feline equivalent of ‘Tsk’) and settl
e their heads back down on their paws. My buried-alive-in-Portugal saga seems to have lost its news value.
Meanwhile, I witter on. ‘I am in this café, you see, and I am reading the phrase-book. And all I can say in Portuguese is that I want two coffees, and four teas with milk, and lots of cakes! But I don’t really want all these drinks because I’m on my own! And they keep bringing cakes and teas and coffees, and I don’t know how to say Stop! and the teas keep coming and it’s like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and …’ I look around and see that nobody is listening.
The good thing about this Algarve nightmare is that at least it covers everything you might want to have a nightmare about – from waking up in a box, to doing Finals in Sanskrit, to being drowned in a flash flood of Twinings. It’s all there. A friend of mine, who frequently suffers from the Finals dream, says he sometimes manages to double the anxiety by imagining that if he doesn’t pass this impossible exam, he won’t be allowed to reach the age of thirty-five; he will be obliged to go back to eleven and start again. Yike. In a similar exercise, I sometimes ring the changes on my Algarve nightmare by imagining that while I order the usual never-ending buckets of tea and coffee, I am unaware the laws of the country have been changed, so I am slung into jail for some sort of beverage transgression.
Why am I going on about it? Because I have been studying a little phrase-book I picked up in Italy on my last holiday, and have been rather alarmed by it. L’Inglese come si parla has worried me, I admit, ever since I first discovered I had goofed in the shop and bought the wrong sort of phrase-book – intended for Italian visitors to England, rather than the other way around. ‘What would you charge to drive me to Richmond?’ was the first phrase I saw in it, helpfully spelled out in pretend-phonetics: Huot uud iu ciaadg tu draiv mi tu Ritc’mond? And I thought, hang on, this can’t be right. Richmond is miles away.
But what I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was what a nightmare experience the Italian visitor would have if he allowed this little phrase-book to govern his expectations of England. Because close attention reveals this newly printed publication to have been written either: a) by someone trying to push back the boundaries of existential terror; b) by someone who got all his information from watching Ealing comedies; or c) in 1948.
It’s the telltale references to trams that first set you thinking. Then you notice that the pubs close at 10 o’clock, the planes stop at Renfrew, and there are jam omelettes on the bill of fare. The world is suddenly all Sidney Tafler and black and white. In a tobacconist’s shop, the choice of cigarettes is Gold Flake, Players and Capstan; and the lonely Italian visitor in search of a girlfriend proceeds at once to a dance hall. ‘Dhis tiun is veri na(i)s, isn’t it?’ he says to his partner, peering over her shoulder at the phrase-book, and speaking like a computer. He riffles a few pages. ‘Iu aa(r) e wanderful daanser! Mei ai sii iu ho(u)um? Huot is iu(r) adres?’ Encouraged to dabble in less formal English, he tells his new lady-friend she is ‘(e) nai(i)s litl bit ov guuz’ (a nice little bit of goods). Something about all this makes me intensely worried on his behalf.
I mean, what would happen if he arrived at Victoria Station, and shouted (as he is advised here), ‘Poorter! Te(i)k dhis laghidg tu dhe Braiten trein!’ (‘Porter! Take this luggage to the Brighton train’). There would be some sort of riot. Alas, the British public would never guess he was living in some parallel phrase-book universe, would they? They would just assume he was asking for a punch in the eye. ‘Wash the car, and give it a good greasing,’ he commands at a petrol station. But what’s this? Biff! Boff! Ooof! Crawling back to the car, clutching his abdomen in one hand and his phrase-book in the other, he mutters, ‘Dhets dhe ghidi limit!’ (That’s the giddy limit).
I do wonder whether the book was published in a spirit of mischief by someone obsessed with Ealing films, because actually the story that emerges from its pages is rather like an Ealing plot. Poor guileless foreigner (played by Alec Guinness, perhaps) works hard to overcome loneliness by using authentic popular slang such as ‘nose-rag’, ‘old horse’ and ‘cheese it!’ and nobody knows what the hell he is talking about. ‘Dhets ool mai ai end Beti Maarten!’ he exclaims jocularly (‘That’s all my eye and Betty Martin’), amid general shrugs.
To make matters worse, the phrase ‘To pull the plonker’ is mysteriously omitted from L’Inglese come si parla. So the poor bloke keeps hitting the deck without ever understanding the insistent question on all English people’s lips.
Occasionally, we television critics like to reflect on our lives and pull a few strands together. In particular, we like to emphasize that, far from wasting our childhoods (not to mention adult-hoods) mindlessly gorming at The Virginian and The Avengers, we spent those couch-potato years in rigorous preparation for our chosen career. ‘It’s been tough,’ we reflect thoughtfully (as our eyes dart unbeckoned to the nearest flickering screen). ‘I mean, er, gosh, Streets of San Francisco, I love this. Oh yes, of course there were a few dodgy moments during the second run of Blankety Blank when I feared I might not make it, that the pace was simply too hard. But I pulled through. And leaving aside the damage to the optic nerve, I can honestly say that watching wall-to-wall drivel was the best – ahem – mental investment I ever made.’
I know, I know. Such pious fraud fools nobody. But in the week that saw the thirty-fifth anniversary of BBC1’s Blue Peter, and in which I calculated that I watched this enjoyable, educative programme, girl and woman, for a total of fifteen years, I simply felt obliged to trawl for a valid extenuation. In reality, of course, I watched it because I loved it, because it was live and dangerous, and because the invited animals acted up, refused to eat, and sometimes dragged presenters clear off the set. Most of all, however, I watched for its suggestion of that strange made-it-myself domestic world (reached, perhaps, through the airing-cupboard) in which Mummy’s work-basket was filled with Fablon off-cuts, while Daddy was a kindly twinkler in carpet slippers who would happily drill a hole in a piece of wood (‘Hand it here, youngster!’); you only had to ask.
Some people disliked Blue Peter for this cosy middle-class idyll; they got chips on their shoulders. But I thrived on these glimpses of a parallel universe. I adored the fanciful idea of aunties who exclaimed, ‘What a lovely present! How ingenious to think of painting an egg-box and making it into a fabulous jewellery case!’ Wisely, however, I stayed on the right side of the airing-cupboard, not dabbling in glitter and squeezy bottles; also, I recognized cheap tacky home-made stuff when I saw it, and refused to get involved. Only once in thirty-five glorious Blue Peter years did I let slip my guard (oh, woe) and attempt to make ‘jelly eggs’ as a nice surprise for a family Easter. I regretted it instantly. It was a terrible mistake. One day, they will find ‘Jelly Eggs’ engraved on my heart, just next to the inexpressibly mournful ‘Copy fits, no queries’.
The jelly eggs instructions looked simple enough, but that’s no excuse.
1) Take an egg, make a tiny hole in each end, and then just blow the contents through the tiny weeny hole, leaving the shell empty.
2) Boil up some jelly.
3) Cover one of the tiny holes with a small piece of sticky tape.
4) Pour the jelly into the shell, then pop it into the fridge, where it will set. Now, just picture the surprise of the adults on Easter morning when they take the top off your egg and find the jelly inside!
Whatever possessed me to try this at home? Could I blow an egg? No, not without blowing my brains out. Would a piece of sticky tape keep the jelly inside (assuming I could pour it into a tiny hole without a funnel)? No, the only thing that worked, finally, was an Elastoplast – the big brick-red fabric sort, generally used for heels. Would the egg-shell mould the jelly into the shape of a perfect egg? No, because the jelly seeped into the Elastoplast overnight, and sank to half-way. Were the adults dumb-struck with surprise when they ate their Easter breakfast? No, because they had all been involved in this disastrous enterprise at some stage or another, urging me in my own interests to
see sense and give the whole thing up.
But I never lost my love for Blue Peter. I now hear that under pressure from the real world they have sealed up the old airing-cupboard door, which is a shame. Blue Peter taught me that when my own turn as auntie came around, I should exclaim, ‘That’s lovely, how clever, is it a tissue box with my name on it in glitter?’ – thus making a little girl quite happy. So it just goes to show. Watching fifteen years’ worth of television does teach you something, sometimes.
Alas, I am perplexed again. A few weeks ago, a writer chum phoned me to ask for some help with a difficult ethical question, so naturally I pulled a straight face immediately, rested my fingertips lightly together (tricky when holding a receiver) and suggested she proceed. A friend had left an expensive winter coat in her flat, by mistake, she explained, then flown abroad for six weeks. ‘I see,’ I said, nodding thoughtfully; ‘And so? What?’
My chum’s question was this: if I were in her position, would I wear the coat?
I was so shocked by the very idea that I instantly abandoned my rational, objective Michael Ignatieff impersonation. ‘No,’ I said flatly. ‘No, I would not.’ ‘Why?’ she asked.
Well, I said, first I would be worried about the safety of the coat, you know, down the shops, bloke on a ladder, tin of paint, Norman Wisdom, ha ha ha. Second, I would be almost suicidally flummoxed in company if anyone remarked: ‘Nice coat, where’s it from?’ But really and honestly, I wouldn’t wear it because it wasn’t mine.