I sit next to Neil MacGregor who delivers an outstanding address – reads it, which is unusual for him, but so well and naturally with most of what he has to say about Simon – his multifarious and countrywide philanthropies for instance – entirely unknown to me.
I go part of the way back in a cab with Neil and I ask him about his job, which he revels in and which is not simply confined to the British Museum. He’s practically a cultural ambassador or an UNESCO representative, just back from the Sudan where he’s one of a group surveying the antiquities likely to be submerged by a new dam, currently being constructed on the Nile. The problems though are not simply to do with cultural artefacts and he talks of the villagers the dam will displace, who, although they have been told what is to happen and for whom alternative accommodation has been provided, have nevertheless no idea of what this being uprooted will mean. The human and the antiquarian problems in Sudan are mirrored in Iraq where the Director of Antiquities, a Syrian Christian, single-handedly defended his museums against the depredations consequent on the invasion and the war. Now in the aftermath he has had to ransom his two sons who have been kidnapped and despairing of carrying on in such circumstances has left Iraq for Damascus, ultimately hoping to get to America. As Neil pours this out, the words tumbling out of him as they do I feel both inadequate and ill-informed and it’s perhaps as well he doesn’t travel all the way but gets out at St Pancras to go to the Museum – looking, as he always looks, absurdly young but, I would have thought, one of the most remarkable men of his generation.
2007
2 January. Catching up on the literary round-ups at the year’s end I’m struck as so often by how cantankerous the world of literature is, and how smarmy, both backbiting and back-scratching much more so than the theatre or show business generally. I’m sure this is because actors don’t moonlight as critics in the way novelists or writers do. Few writers are reviewers tout court, most having other jobs as novelists, historians, biographers or whatever, and writing reviews simply because they need or want the money. It’s harmless enough but it makes literature a nastier world.
8 January. Reading Zachary Leader’s biography of Kingsley Amis, though not with much relish. She was ‘a good drinker’, Leader says of the Swansea original of Mrs Gruffydd-Williams, and while one feels this is very much an Amis-type judgement, it’s not one Leader dissents from – or dissents from sufficiently, drink and good fellowship equated throughout. Never having been able to drink much, partly through not having been brought up to it but also having had a duodenal ulcer as a young man, I suppose I feel disqualified, or somehow got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite.
It’s stated in the book that Denis Brogan, fellow of Peterhouse, broadcaster and expert on the USA, used to boast that he had fucked in forty-six of the fifty states. I wish I’d known this in 1952, when in my first weeks of National Service Basic Training I was in the next bed to a boy called Huggins, a steelworker from Sheffield whose frequent boast was that he had ‘had his hole’ in six or seven towns and cities, which he would then list. At the time I was less than impressed and probably rather prissy about this conflation of lust and topography – had I known about Brogan (a regular with Alistair Cooke on Transatlantic Quiz), I might have treated Huggins with more respect.
11 January. Picture in the Guardian of an American soldier manning a gun in Baghdad, stencilled on the front of the gun a death’s head. That’s why the war is lost.
14 January. I’d written in my diary in this month’s LRB about the puns John Bird and John Fortune are addicted to in their TV show, instancing the employee of the Brighton Dolphinarium who was sacked as ‘not fit for porpoise’. John Bird rings this morning to say the audience narrowly missed getting an even worse one: the woman who went off to start a crèche on an Indian reservation in Canada but was sacked as ‘not fit for papoose’.
25 January. I’ve taken to eating the occasional date, though it’s not a fruit I wholly like. Mam used to eat them when we were little, bought in small compressed bricks, one of their attractions being that they were not on the ration or even on points. It’s the texture I’ve never altogether cared for, too mushy and spreadable. Also the sheen on some of them. Very good for one, of course, which is why I eat them now, and it reminds me how ahead of her time my mother was in the food she ate herself and tried to pass off on us – the Allinson wholemeal bread she got from a confectioner’s on Armley Moor, the prunes that were often in soak on the draining board, fads as I thought even as a boy of ten, picked up from Miss Thompson, a herbalistic lady living in the Hallidays who used to give Dad burdock and suchlike ‘for his blood’.
1 February. To Westminster Abbey for Michael Mayne’s memorial service. Though I’m not reading I still get in a fluster lest I’m late and whether I shall want to pee, so in the finish I’m glad I’m not contributing as that would have made it worse. Happy to see the nave is cleared of its new and dreadful chairs, though whether it’s simply for this occasion not plain. Seated in the front row in the choir next to P. Routledge (who is reading) and James Roose-Evans. Patrick Garland arrives and lastly Rupert.
The choir is superb, particularly in the opening, Walton’s ‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart’ which I don’t ever remember hearing. The hymns are to me as unknown as the ones at Michael’s funeral with the possible exception of ‘Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord’, the tune I see written by Walter Greatorex (1877–1949), presumably the same Walter Greatorex whom I was this very morning reading about in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Benjamin Britten. Greatorex a master at Gresham’s School, Holt and who was a comfort and an ally of S. Spender when he was a pupil, was at first anyway no fan of Britten’s though he ended up being influenced by him. Routledge reads and Timothy West and Pru S. and there’s a good address, an encomium really by Canon Sagovsky whom I don’t know. Alison M. gives me a little smile as she comes down the aisle by which I’m absurdly pleased (and I’m sure it shows on my face) – it’s like being thrown the bride’s bouquet – but in all R. is far more impressed by the service than I am who feels shut out – but R. always feels shut out by religion anyway.
Good eirenic verse by Frederick William Faber in one of the hymns and an implied rebuke to the evangelicals.
For the love of God is broader
than the measure of man’s mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
But we make his love too narrow
by false limits of our own;
and we magnify his strictness
with a zeal he will not own.
I owe it to Michael M. that I know – or knew – so much about the Abbey but queuing at the end to say hello to Alison and the family, I am looking at the monuments in the nave and find I don’t know where anything is any more and that it’s all gone from my mind like a script from a play one was in once and has now forgotten.
7 February. Reading Humphrey Carpenter’s life of Benjamin Britten, I imagine you could write a pretty scandalous play about Aldeburgh – which at times doubles as Moscow under Stalin. One of the many to fall out of favour was Eric Crozier, one of the founders of the Festival. When its history came to be written by Imogen Holst (who was always besotted with Britten) any mention of Crozier’s part in the enterprise was omitted – as were the other ‘corpses’.
The Amis and the Britten biographies are in different ways demonstrations of the allowances that are made for talent; or in Britten’s case, genius. Neither is particularly edifying and with Britten especially one wishes the many decent people with which he was surrounded had stood up to him more than they did. As it was they bade sad farewells to the ones who fell out of favour and huddled together to await their own turn.
20 February. There have been good reviews in the Guardian and the Telegraph for Enjoy, Chris Luscombe’s
production at Watford which I talked to him and his designer about before they started work but know no more about than that. He sounds to have made it work, which we didn’t manage to do back in 1980 though M. Billington singles out ‘Ms Craig’ as the weakest link in the plot: ‘there is no real tension between his dual role as scientific observer and family outcast’.
This is fair, though there is more to be said for the set-up than I made plain. I’ve always wanted to write Oedipus as a comedy and that was in my mind when I was putting together Enjoy. The father accuses the son of trying to kill him at Four Lane Ends – the name of an actual place in Leeds but also the setting for Laius’ encounter with his son Oedipus. Oedipus is unrecognised by his real parents and this, as much as any advertisement for his sexual orientation accounts for Ms Craig’s drag. He/she needs to be unrecognised when he/she returns home – though as in a dream, the mother knows this is her son besides his being someone else.
It’s not well worked out – it was the first play I’d written when I didn’t always quite know what I was doing – and I knew it was going wrong back in 1980 when the cast had long discussions about transvestites and transsexuals. ‘He’s just in drag, that’s all’ was my contribution but this wasn’t thought to be helpful.
The notion of observing ordinary behaviour at close quarters which was thought to be far-fetched in 1980 is now, thanks to reality TV, a much more general concern and it’s in this sense that the play has come into its own. Why it’s called Enjoy I can’t think – it was an exclusively American or a New York phrase in 1980. I think I just wanted the play to seem happier than I perhaps made it. ‘Cheer Up’ would have been just as good. It’s on the same principle that Lady of Letters ends with Miss R. in prison saying ‘I’m so … happy.’
21 February. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as poet of Cumbria. Auden couldn’t have inhabited his ideal landscape, however nurturing he found the idea of it. Everything about him was urban. He wanted opera, libraries, restaurants, rent boys – all the appurtenances of civilisation. You don’t find them in Penrith.
Never underestimate the role of the will in the artist’s life. Talent you can dispense with but not will. Some artists are all will.
1 March. To a fund-raising do for the National held at the Roundhouse. I’m next to a nice man, Ayub Khan-Din, the author of East is East who’s a bit of a fan but for whom I think I may be a disappointment as I can’t quite be the expatriate Northern boy he wants me to be. Also at our table is Helen Mirren whose entrance is greeted with a standing ovation, which she takes gracefully and does it well not overdoing the humility (as I would have done) or being over-grand, and in the course of the evening I very much come round to her – particularly a speech she makes about the kind of theatre matinées in the provinces (in her case Scotland); if there is one child in the audience entranced by the stage (as I was in Leeds and she in Scotland), that is what the funds they are raising are about.
And they do raise funds – bidding orchestrated by Harry Dalmeny, few items going for less than £20,000 – including the original script for Cream Cracker Under the Settee I’d sent, which fetches £30,000.
5 March, Lacock, Wiltshire. In cold bright sunshine this Sunday morning tourists are already arriving and as the church bells ring a family, father mother boy and girl, each with a prayer book, thread their way through the visitors on their way to morning service.
A heartening sight, a way of life still going on. Or are they, like the houses, dependents of the National Trust, conspicuous attendance at church a condition of their tenancy? [This and the related entry for 4 March 2005 led eventually to the play People (2012).]
Across the deer-grazed fields the honey-coloured Gothick front of Lacock Abbey home to the pioneers of photography, the first to catch life on the wing, their house, their family, this village – to which now people flock, the car park nearly full and it’s not even half past ten.
A craft fair in the parish hall and in the wide high doorway of the tithe barn a trestle table with plants for sale. (Put your money in the box.)
Oh England.
The village shop, handily named The Village Shop. Subsisting on what you forgot to get/slipped your mind at Tesco; a half-timbered hotel, serving hearty meals with some of the authentic Tudor rollick; hearts of (limed) oak.
A red kite swoops cosmetically above the abbey ruins and seeing the car park emptying prepares perhaps to shut up shop when the visitors have departed.
Unusual among the employees of the National Trust in that he has a tattoo.
Nature red in tooth and claw, the red one of several subtle/discreet shades gloss or matt on offer by Farrow and Ball.
Gifted (as we say nowadays) to the Trust in 1944, the house/village and its appurtenances an emblem of that way of life (as pictured particularly on the railway posters of the time) that we were then fighting our way across Europe to defend – the big house, the tenant farms, the village with its tithe barn – England as it had always been, and which now the people – I’m sorry, the community – comes to savour.
In the park (but well out of sight of the house) is a village – or what seems to be a village, the street, the pub, the well-tended gardens, the village shop. Children wait for the school bus. A woman walks her dog as a man putting on some clothes bursts out of a house pursued by a woman who abuses him. The children at the bus stop are incurious as the man gets into a car and drives violently away, followed to begin with by the woman still hurling abuse. As the car accelerates out of sight she walks back, passing the children at the bus stop and saying, ‘And what are you staring at? Have you never seen marriage before?’ She goes inside the house, slamming the door.
9 March. Papers full of a row over casualties from Iraq dumped in NHS hospitals where they have been overlooked and neglected, the consequence, it’s suggested, of there nowadays being no longer any military hospitals. I’m not sure when there were, that military establishments were that much better. I remember Stan, Aunty Myra’s husband who was in the regular RAF. Diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer at the first-rate Midhurst Chest Hospital he was then transferred to an RAF hospital at Uxbridge where he lengthily died in far more pain than he need have done – the philosophy of such places presumably being that part of taking the Queen’s shilling was the suffering of more pain than pampered civilians could stand. Now Midhurst is a plush private hospital and Uxbridge, I hope, no longer exists though the indifference to military patients’ welfare seems to live on.
16 March, Yorkshire. As age weakens the bladder I find myself having to pee more often, which, when I’m out in the country in a car, is no problem, though like a dog or a creature marking its territory, I do find myself often choosing the same spot. One regular place of worship is a lane on the outskirts of Leeds between Arthington and Harewood. It’s a nice location and of some historic interest, as in the sixteenth century the land belonged to an ex-Cluniac monastery that was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by Henry VIII on his deathbed. Not far away is Harewood House (where I do not pee). It’s the home of the Lascelles family, an ancestor of which, John Lascelles, blew the gaff on Catherine Howard, the king’s fifth wife, but was later culled himself in the purge of evangelicals during that dreadful monarch’s last years. I watch two of the now well-established red kites tumbling about the sky above the Harewood estate, home these days to Emmerdale, that hotbed of the lust, murder and arson so typical of rural North Yorkshire.
22 March. Then via the M62 (a constant stream of traffic but moving at least) thirty miles to the Saddleworth turn-off where I’m met by David Makin, for whom I’ve agreed to do an evening to raise money to fund a public enquiry against a wind farm to be sited on the unspoilt moors above Denshaw. They’re unspoilt certainly but so bleak a
nd without cover or shelter I get perishingly cold talking to a journalist from the Manchester Evening News and having endless photographs taken, fatuously pointing at the threatened moorland. Saddleworth is less of a place than a federation of villages – Denshaw, Delph, Dobcross, Uppermill – the hall where I speak a largish place packed out. I read for three quarters of an hour then answer questions, sign books etc. and set off back at 10 p.m. David Makin’s daughter and a cheerful Cézanne-like boy called Dante have agreed to lead me over the moors on a short cut to Oxenhope and Keighley. It’s an extraordinary journey – the moors so high and bleak and deserted, the road along I suppose Blackstone Edge and far below the sprinkling of lights in the various houses and villages that cling to the folds and valleys of these mountains. It’s Ted Hughes country and indeed we go through Mytholmroyd en route for Hebden Bridge – in a landscape that’s but for the hills out of (the much derided by me) Sebald, i.e. not a soul about, the towns and villages deserted, no one to be seen and only the occasional car.
Tabitha leaves me at a point where there is supposedly a straight run over to Oxenhope – but, of course, I miss a turning and instead of heading across the moors find myself plunging down into the valley again – through Midgley and Ripponden on the road to Halifax. Knowing it’s at least an hour and a half before I get home – and with no food in prospect and frightened of falling asleep – had I passed an hotel I’d have stopped there. But this part of the West Riding doesn’t do hotels. Eventually I’m on the home stretch and phone R. from Coniston Cold – but don’t actually get home till half past midnight.