Architecture – the bulldozer’s friend.
5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups being told stories and at every table children reading on their own. This library is one of those institutions that Mark Littlewood, the head of the right-wing think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, said would make ‘a useful retail outlet’, a facility and a building for which there was no longer a social purpose. Most of the children reading here are black or Asian, with Somali children in the majority. As a so-called economist Littlewood presumably thinks the place would be better used as a Pizza Hut.
26 March. Wake this morning thinking affectionately of the spring in the grounds of Jervaulx Abbey which bubbles up below a stone sill installed by the monks before scampering away underground somewhere as it has done for I suppose a thousand years. I’m cheered by this as I am, even if only in recollection, by the spring at the top of the Raikes near Wilsill in Nidderdale which I first saw aged six in 1940.
27 March. On Tuesday Mary-Kay rings to ask me to be interviewed by the Shanghai Review of Books and mentions a good piece on Auden by Edward Mendelson in the NYRB. I buy a copy and it is a revelation detailing some of Auden’s almost obsessively secretive charities – two orphans to be supported all his life, the support transferred to a further two once a pair had grown up; kicking up a fuss over the prompt payment of a cheque from a publisher, the reason only becoming clear when the cheque was endorsed after payment showing it had gone towards keeping open a shelter for the homeless that would otherwise have closed. It’s the kind of goodness one might meet in a Victorian novel and not, I think, figuring in any of Auden’s various biographies and memoirs. Scrupulously secretive I suppose he was lest the motives for his charities were sullied by any hint of self-advertisement.
11 April. Sue Townsend dies, whom I count as a friend both on the strength of what she has written and because we were together part of a group of writers on a courtesy visit to the USSR, as it then was, in 1988, a party which included Craig Raine, Paul Bailey and Timothy Mo. I don’t remember laughing more on any trip before or since; we were a very silly group, so much so that we often mystified our hosts and sometimes behaved disgracefully. Sue – and I even noticed this in the photo the Guardian used for her obituary – had something of Elsie Tanner about her. She looked battered by life, and presumably by love, to the extent that the men in the various literary groups entertaining us on our Soviet peregrinations invariably took her for an easy lay. On one occasion we were treated to a picnic, with one of our hosts bringing with him his teenage son plus a bottle of wine, hoping that Sue would take the young man into the woods and initiate him into the arts of love. None of them had any doubt that this was a woman of the world whereas Sue was actually quite shy and couldn’t see that she had given them any cause to think otherwise. She hadn’t; she just looked like a Scarlet Woman.
15 April. Watch five minutes of Have I Got News for You with Nigel Farage the guest and Ian Hislop and Paul Merton their usual genial selves. I never quite understand why they are happy to sit on a panel with Farage, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Clarkson et al. Their reasoning would, I imagine, be that this gives them the opportunity to have fun at the expense of Farage and co. And so they do. But the impression an audience comes away with is that actually nothing much matters and that these seemingly jokey demagogues are human and harmless and that their opinions are not really as pernicious as their opponents pretend. And even if they are what does it matter as politics is just a con anyway. Whereas Johnson, the bike apart, doesn’t seem to have a moral bone in his body and the batrachoidal Farage likewise. ‘So where’s your sense of humour? It’s only a joke.’
23 April. Remember Dad’s homemade herb beer, which regularly used to explode. We’d be crouched round the wireless at 12 Halliday Place listening to ITMA when there would be a dull thud from the scullery as yet another bottle went up.
24 April. Coming back from Profile where I’ve been signing books and the cab takes me up Gray’s Inn Road where sitting outside a café I see Lindsay Anderson or someone vaguely like him. I imagine the conversation.
‘What’s it like, Lindsay? Death?’
A heavy sigh. ‘Death – well, it’s like England. You’ll love it.’
I nearly wrote ‘You’ll probably love it’ but Lindsay would have struck out that ‘probably’, his mission with me (in which he never succeeded) to make my utterance less conditional, less moderated – all my ‘quites’ and ‘possiblys’ struck through in his futile crusade to make me epic.
7 May. On the TV news footage of Stuart Hall arriving for the first day of his trial at Preston Crown Court; he is seemingly handcuffed with his hands held in front of him, but thus shackled has to negotiate the quite steep steps from the police van. At eighty-four, he manages this without much help, which is more than I would be able to do even with free hands and four years younger. But why is he handcuffed in the first place? He’s no danger to anyone; he is not going to cut and run; it’s simply part of his humiliation. Nothing is too bad for him is the message.
A seven o’clock platform with Nick at the NT, the Olivier nearly full with a row or two empty upstairs at the back. We do it better than the BBC programme with both of us more relaxed though what particularly strikes me is how unself-serving Nick is, sometimes almost painting himself out of the picture. No other director I know would defer to this degree even out of consideration for my birthday. And it’s actually Nick’s birthday too (fifty-eight) but we don’t mention that. I’m clearer on the subject of the Cambridge spies than on TV and how treason these days is too narrowly defined. I say that in my view Tony Blair was guilty of treason in 2002 (smattering of applause) and that the present administration’s policy of selling off all our national assets without any mandate is also treason (much louder applause).
8 May. Cheered this morning when Daniel, the young man from Detroit who lives opposite, wishes me a happy eightieth birthday for Friday, saying he’d read the stuff in the papers about the BBC interview I did with Nicholas Hytner, the ‘shocking’ revelation that I don’t read much contemporary English fiction and all the tired old stuff about treason that I’ve been saying since 1988 and A Question of Attribution. ‘It’s great’, says Daniel (who’s off to Cuba next week), ‘that you can still piss people off however old you are.’
18 May. Once upon a time when one saw an old couple walking along holding hands the thought was of Darby and Joan. Nowadays one just wonders which of them it is who has Alzheimer’s.
21 May. Chairs in places now are crucial:
The chair in the chemist’s
The chair by the post office counter
And no chair in the dry cleaner’s.
1 June, Cambridge. On parade (on King’s Parade in fact) just after ten, where the calming presence of Richard Lloyd Morgan, the chaplain of King’s, waits to shepherd me to the Senior Common Room. It’s already crowded with dons, some, since it’s the university sermon, presumably heads of houses. I manage to avoid the chat by settling into a corner to con my already much conned text, though I’m still not sure that what I’ve written is what’s expected or whether it’s too long or even if I can make myself heard. (‘You’ll be in trouble,’ the chaplain said, ‘if you have a voice like a moth.’) It’s a hot morning and various dignitaries now await us outside the Gibbs Building, where there’s a good deal of hat-doffing before we process along to the west door of the chapel – a nice sight, I imagine, if one is lucky enough not to have a part to play. Various tourists take pictures.
There’s not a soul in the ante-chapel as Richard L. M. had warned would be the case, though the chapel itself is full. Rupert is in the next stall and Rowan Williams slips in beyond him in his capacity as Master of Magdalene. Comforting presence though he is, this means I will be preaching (sic) a few feet along from the ex-
Archbishop of Canterbury. Still, at least he’s not the dreadful Geoffrey Fisher who when I was young was for years synonymous with the office. R. has insisted that I keep sitting down for most of the service, which I do, the proceedings quite slow and choral and upstanding, the only time I feel I have to get to my feet, out of deference to my Anglican upbringing, during the Creed. Now after lengthy prayers from the dean I begin, thankful at least that the sun is pouring through the windows, making it easier to read my text than it was at the rehearsal last night.
The subject of the sermon is the unfairness of private education, hardly a tactful topic, particularly in King’s with its historical connection with Eton. Whether it goes well I’m not sure. Used as I am to audiences that make their feelings felt, I’m slightly unnerved at being heard in such reverent silence. True there is the occasional guffaw and sometimes the congregation mews where in more secular circumstances people might have laughed. But when after twenty minutes or so I finish it still seems strange to sit down without applause. In the past I’ve managed to wheedle a clap out of a congregation in Westminster Abbey and various lesser places of worship, though nowhere, I suppose, as august as this. Still, as we process through the west door to the stirring strains of Walton’s Orb and Sceptre, I’m just thankful it’s over.
11 June. For years now I’ve been periodically sent press cuttings by someone unknown to me, his name and the note that accompanies them almost illegible. I take it I’m not the only beneficiary of this bounty, which must be quite costly in time and postage and indeed papers. Not that the cuttings are those one particularly wants to see; they’re seldom from the ‘posh papers’ though frequently from the Mail and the Radio Times. So it is this morning, the bundle including various letters from the correspondence columns, so called, of the Mail, occasioned by my remarks in the television interview I did with Nicholas Hytner exculpating the Cambridge spies. All the sometimes almost incoherent correspondents take this to include Philby, which was not my intention and whom I have in the past both in print and in interviews taken care to distinguish from Burgess, Blunt and their associates. Cold-hearted, devious and supposedly a good chap, Philby has never appealed to me any more than Graham Greene does, who was his friend and admirer. It’s ironical that even after his departure for Moscow Philby was always more sympathetically treated by journalists because he was a journalist himself, supposedly a good sort and of course he wasn’t homosexual. Unsurprisingly, none of this has registered with the Mail or its readers, one of them so incensed that he suggests that had I been older and at Cambridge not Oxford I might have been a spy myself. Not so, though it wasn’t age or university or sexual inclination that would have ruled me out. It was class.
23 June, Yorkshire. Sky slowly clearing of clouds, bars of cloud like the sand left by the tide, these correspondences in nature something I’ve never fathomed, the garden glittering and too hot to sit in. Up early because John, Bruce Mills’s assistant, is here mending the radiator. Bees burrow in the borage by my rocking chair as I sit in the shade at the top of the garden. Half a dozen swallows – or martins maybe – twist and turn above the houses, our bedroom window open with Grandma’s jug full of R.’s flowers. Everywhere so full – and busy.
5–6 July, Yorkshire. Watch various stages of the Tour de France on TV more out of an interest in the topography than the cycling itself, which is hardly a spectator sport and tedious to a degree. The route is thronged with spectators who seem highly excited and anxious to be part of the spectacle, leaning out in front of the bikers, flourishing flags in their faces and generally making the riding more hazardous than it has any need to be, so that when a rider comes off, as happens disastrously at the first day’s finish, it’s hard not to wonder how often the spectators are to blame. The countryside, particularly in Swaledale, is bathed in sunshine and looks spectacular, especially from a helicopter, though since part of the object of the exercise is to fetch more tourists in, I have mixed feelings about its attractions. Most memorable is the scene on Blubberhouses Moor when the cyclists stream over into Wharfedale watched by onlookers capping the most inaccessible crags.
15 July. Asked by Yorkshire Tea if I would like ‘a quick jaunt to King’s Cross Station’ to have my face modelled in cake and put on a plinth in the forecourt. It’s not a distinction that is to be conferred on me alone, though Yorkshire Tea does not specify who my fellow modèles en gâteaux might be – the late Freddie Trueman I would guess, Michael Parkinson possibly and Alan Titchmarsh (who’s so amiable he might even do it). A candidate for patisserie posterity would once have been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile, who seemed made for marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.
29 July. Hot and because Dr Posner has decreed I must take more exercise, bike included, I cycle round to Camden Town where for the purposes of the film, I have to have my identity authenticated at NatWest before I can receive any payment. What with the heat and feeling dishevelled I am put in mind of the European banks one used to have to go into when young and on holiday – in Italy or a French provincial town, a superior bank in Padua once and Cassa di Risparmio in Olbia. And always it was cool and elegant and the native customers who came in every day were treated deferentially by the clerks – who were generally male and never quite good-looking and, with us, offhand and condescending – students who carried all their belongings with them – in our boots and shorts, sandy and burnt, just wanted their measly traveller’s cheques changing – the cheques themselves always treated with the utmost suspicion. Whereas what went on in the bank elsewhere was so cool and unquestioning, the notes so crisp and ungrubby it was hardly to do with money at all. An oasis of civilisation where we did not belong; we were interlopers.
As it is the Tories are behaving in their last term just as they did under John Major when he privatised everything in sight, particularly the railways. Today it’s handing out wholesale fracking licences trusting that whatever happens they won’t be rescindable without prohibitive compensation.
7 August. To Oxford and the Holywell Music Room where Bodley’s librarian emeritus David Vaisey and I have a conversation about our time at Oxford in the 1950s. David and I were first aware of each other at the scholarship examination in Exeter College hall in January 1954. The hall was bitterly cold but both of us managed to bag places near the open fire where, sitting next to him, I envied his handwriting which unlike mine was already adult and fully formed; he just remembers how much I wrote. I was halfway through my National Service on the Russian course, David was a couple of years younger and having won an exhibition went off to Kenya as a second lieutenant in the King’s African Rifles. As undergraduates neither of us was entirely happy, both remembering how inadequately we were taught and how long it took us to learn how to teach ourselves. I briefly became a fairly hopeless tutor myself, eking out my research grant with pupils from Exeter and Magdalen, where I was appointed a lowly junior lecturer and thus a member of Magdalen Senior Common Room. It was a daunting community, with A. J. P. Taylor, Gilbert Ryle and C. S. Lewis regularly met with on High Table. I didn’t have much small talk but what was the point as one seldom got a word in with Taylor and had I had anything to chat to Ryle about it would have been like chatting to a figure on Easter Island.
The food was delicious but meals could be a nightmare. I remember once we had mince pie but not, of course, the common individual variety but a great dish of a pie from which, having been handed a silver trowel by the scout, one had to cut oneself a tranche and manoeuvre it onto one’s plate. Next came another scout bearing a silver Bunsen burner and a ladle which a third scout filled with brandy which one then had to heat over the burner until it produced a wavering blue flame whereupon one poured it over the pie. A fourth scout then appeared carrying a pitcher of cream with which one doused the conflagration. It was a lengthy process and one which deprived me of all appetite for the end product, particularly since as the lowliest member of Common Room I was served last while Taylor, Ryle, Lewis et al. having long since finished
looked on in unconcealed impatience. If anything cured me of wanting to be a don it was this.
9 August, Oxfordshire. We turn off the Burford road to look again at William Wilcote’s tomb at North Leigh, knowing, though, from our last visit that some well-meaning vicar has desecrated the little masterpiece of a chapel by kitting it out with serpentine blue-upholstered chairs and a garish triptych on the altar – the clergy so often no better custodians of their churches than farmers are of their fields. My supervisor Bruce McFarlane came out from Oxford to look at the church with A. L. Rowse in June 1944 and described the visit in a letter to his pupil Karl Leyser, then awaiting posting to Normandy just before D-Day. McFarlane knew a good deal about William Wilcote, describing his chapel as ‘one of the most beautiful tombs of the fifteenth century and made by the most expensive master mason of the day’ (who also built the Oxford Divinity School). Feeling himself on familiar terms with Wilcote, McFarlane ‘startled even Rowse by giving his alabaster cheek a great smacking kiss’. I don’t quite do this but touch his marble lips, an endearment meant as much for Bruce (who died in 1966) as for Richard II’s chamber knight.
2 September. Because Dr Posner has told me I must take more exercise and with walking nowadays not easy I have taken to going for a daily therapeutic bike ride through the park down the Broad Walk as far as the inner circle where I turn round and cycle back. It’s slightly tricky as there are always throngs of people and lots of children and the rules of the road not always seemingly applicable one weaves from side to side around both cyclists and pedestrians. It’s interesting, though, and less tedious than I find walking and I’m not put off by the hazard that deters R.: there are always ball games being played alongside the Walk, soccer, baseball and what I would call rounders, so there’s always the risk that a stray ball may come one’s way, which one is expected to kick (or throw) back. Regardless of being thought a wimp (or a wuss) R. strides determinedly past, leaving whomever to fetch their own ball.