Staying on at Oxford after I’d taken my degree I did research in medieval history, the subject of my research Richard II’s retinue in the last ten years of his reign. This took me twice a week to the Public Record Office then still in Chancery Lane and in particular to the Round Room, galleried, lined with books, a humbler version of the much grander Round Room in the British Museum. Presiding over the BM Round Room in his early days was Angus Wilson whereas at the PRO it was Noel Blakiston, friend of Cyril Connolly, hair as white as Wilson’s and possibly the most distinguished-looking man I’ve ever seen.
Though I made copious notes on the manuscripts I studied (which were chiefly records of the medieval exchequer) I would have found it hard to say what it was I was looking for – imagining, I think, that having amassed sufficient material it would all suddenly fall into place and become clear. Failing that, I hoped to come upon some startling and unexpected fact, a very silly notion. Had it been Richard III I was researching rather than Richard II, it might have been something as relatively unambiguous as a note in the monarch’s own hand saying: ‘It was me that killed ye Princes in ye Tower, hee hee.’ Historical research nowadays is a dull business: had I any sense I would have been collating the tax returns of the knights I was studying or the amount they borrowed or were owed, or sifting through material other historians had ignored or discarded; it is seldom at the frontier that discoveries are made but more often in the dustbin.
The Memoranda Rolls on which I spent much of my time were long thin swatches of parchment about five feet long and one foot wide and written on both sides. Thus to turn the page required the co-operation and forbearance of most of the other readers at the table, and what would sometimes look like the cast of the Mad Hatter’s tea party struggling to put wallpaper up was just me trying to turn over. A side effect of reading these unwieldy documents was that one was straight away propelled into quite an intimate relationship with readers alongside and among those I got to know in this way was the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith.
The author of The Great Hunger, an account of the Irish Famine, and The Reason Why, about the events leading up to the Charge of the Light Brigade, Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny bird-like skull, looking more like Elizabeth I (in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet-metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of phrase. ‘Do you know the Atlantic at all?’ she once asked me and I put the line into Habeas Corpus (1973) and got a big laugh on it. From a grand Irish family she was quite snobbish; talking of someone she said: ‘Then he married a Mitford … but that’s a stage everybody goes through.’ Even the most ordinary remark would be given her own particular twist and she could be quite camp. Conversation had once turned, as conversations will, to forklift trucks. Feeling that industrial machinery might be remote from Cecil’s sphere of interest I said: ‘Do you know what a forklift truck is?’ She looked at me in her best Annie Walker manner. ‘I do. To my cost.’
Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I’ve written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking in character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture. A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
That someone’s working library has a particular tone, with some shelves more heterogeneous than others, for example, or (in the case of an art historian) filled with offprints and monographs or (with an old-fashioned literary figure for instance) lined with the faded covers and jackets of distinctive Faber or Cape editions, does not seem to occur to a designer. On several occasions I’ve had to bring my own books down to the theatre to give the right worn tone to the shelves.
In The Old Country the books (Auden, Spender, MacNeice) are of central importance to the plot. I wanted their faded buffs and blues and yellows bleached into a unity of tone that suggested long sunlit Cambridge afternoons, the kind of books you might find lining Dadie Rylands’s rooms, for instance. Anthony Blunt’s bookshelves were crucial in Single Spies (1988), the look of an art historian’s bookshelves, as I’ve said, significantly different from those of a literary critic. All this tends to pass the designer by. One knows that designers seldom read, but they don’t have much knowledge of Inca civilisation either or the Puritan settlement of New England and yet they seem to cope perfectly well reproducing them. An agglomeration of books as illustrating the character of their owner seems to defeat them.
When I first bought books for myself in the late 1940s they were still thought to be quite precious and in poor homes books might often be backed in brown paper. Paper itself was in short supply and such new books as there were often bore the imprint ‘Produced in conformity with the Authorised Economy Standard’. The paper was mealy, slightly freckled and looked not unlike the texture of the ice cream of the period. It was, though, a notable period in book design and perhaps because they were among the first books I ever bought (one was C. V. Wedgwood’s William the Silent) the books of that time have always seemed to me all that was necessary or desirable – simple, unfussy, wholesome and well designed.
They were not, though, to be left about at home. ‘Books Do Furnish a Room’, wrote Anthony Powell, but my mother never thought so and she’d always put them out of the way in the sideboard when you weren’t looking. Books untidy, books upset, more her view. Though once a keen reader herself, particularly when she was younger, she always thought of library books as grubby and with a potential for infection – not intellectual infection either. Lurking among the municipally owned pages might be the germs of TB or scarlet fever, so one must never be seen to peer at a library book too closely or lick your finger before turning over still less read such a book in bed.
There were other perils to reading, but it was only when I hit middle age that I became aware of them. Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a television play written in 1978 and though it doesn’t contain my usual scene of someone baffled at a bookcase the sense of being outfaced by books is a good description of what the play is about. ‘Hopkins,’ I wrote of the middle-aged lecturer who is the hero, ‘Hopkins was never without a book. It wasn’t that he was particularly fond of reading; he just liked to have somewhere to look. A book makes you safe. Shows you’re not out to pick anybody up. Try it on. With a book you’re harmless. Though Hopkins was harmless without a book.’ Books as badges, books as shields; one doesn’t think of libraries as perilous places where you can come to harm. Still, they do carry their own risks.
I have been discussing libraries as places and in the current struggle to preserve public libraries not enough stress has been laid on the library as a place not just a facility. To a child living in high flats, say, where space is at a premium and peace and quiet not always easy to find, a library is a haven. But, saying that, a library needs to be handy and local; it shouldn’t require an expedition. Municipal authorities of all parties point to splendid new and scheduled central libraries as if this discharges them of their obligations. It doesn’t. For a child a library needs to be round the corner. And if we lose local libraries it is children who will suffer. Of the libraries I have mentioned the most important for me was that first one, the dark and unprepossessing Armley Junior Library. I had just learned to read. I needed books. Add computers to that requirement maybe but a child from a poor family is today in exactly the same boat.
The business of closing libraries isn’t a straightforward political fight. The local authorities shelter behind the demands of central government which in its turn pretends that local councils have a c
hoice. It’s shaming that, regardless of the party’s proud tradition of popular education, Labour municipalities are not making more of a stand. For the Tories privatising the libraries has been on the agenda for far longer than they would currently like to admit. This is an extract from my diary:
22 February. Switch on Newsnight to find some bright spark from, guess where, the Adam Smith Institute, proposing the privatisation of the public libraries. His name is Eamonn Butler and it’s to be hoped he’s no relation of the 1944 Education Act Butler. Smirking and pleased with himself as they generally are from that stable, he’s pitted against a well-meaning but flustered woman who’s an authority on children’s books. Paxman looks on undissenting as this odious figure dismisses any defence of the tradition of free public libraries as ‘the usual bleating of the middle classes’. I go to bed depressed only to wake and find Madsen Pirie, also from the Adam Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatisation of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable.
That was written in 1996. It’s hard not to think that like other Tory policies privatising the libraries has been lying dormant for fifteen years, just waiting for a convenient crisis to smuggle it through. Libraries are, after all, as another think-tank clown opined a few weeks ago, ‘a valuable retail outlet’.
Speech delivered 15 June 2011 at St Mary’s Church, Primrose Hill, London. First published in the London Review of Books, 28 July 2011.
Fair Play
Sermon before the University, King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, 1 June 2014
I am grateful to the Chaplain of King’s, Richard Lloyd Morgan, who persuaded me to do this sermon. It may not have been quite what he was expecting but to his great credit he never let me think so.
Preaching is a hazard when writing plays. One isn’t supposed to preach and gets told off if one does. Poets are allowed to, but not playwrights, who if they have naked opinions, do better to clothe them in the decent ambiguities of their characters or conceal them in the sometimes all too thin thicket of the plot. Just don’t speak to the audience.
I have always found this prohibition difficult. John Gielgud, who was in my first play, thought talking to the audience was vulgar. Then he was prevailed upon to try it and thereafter would seldom talk to anybody else. I understand this and even in my most naturalistic plays have contrived and relished the moments when a character unexpectedly turns and addresses the house and, in a word, preaches.
This may be because as a boy and a regular worshipper at St Michael’s, Headingley I heard a lot of sermons. I also used to go to Saturday matinees at the Grand Theatre in Leeds, though on occasion the sermons were more dramatic than the plays. This was particularly so when they were preached, as they quite often were, by visiting fathers from the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield who were almost revivalist in their fervour and the spell they cast over the congregation.
So when as a young man I first had thoughts about what nowadays is called stand-up it’s not surprising it took the form of a sermon. Like all parodies it was born out of affection and familiarity and the Anglican services that were in my bones, and there is symmetry here as the first sermon I preached on a professional stage was in Cambridge fifty-odd years ago across the road at the Arts Theatre in the revue Beyond the Fringe. It was on the text, ‘My brother Esau is an hairy man but I am a smooth man.’ That sermon apart I have never formally preached since until this morning and here I am again in Cambridge.
This is where I came in.
I had first seen Cambridge ten years before when, as a boy of seventeen, I had come down from Leeds in December 1951 to sit the scholarship examination in history, staying the weekend, as one did in those days, in the college of my first choice, Sidney Sussex. The place and the university bowled me over. Leeds, where I had been born and brought up, was like the other great Northern cities still intact in 1951, but though I was not blind to its architectural splendours, unfashionable though at that time they were, it was a soot-blackened, wholly nineteenth-century city and as a boy, like Hector in The History Boys, I was famished for antiquity. I had never been in a place of such continuous and unfolding beauty as Cambridge and, December 1951 being exceptionally cold, the Cam was frozen over and a thick hoarfrost covered every court and quadrangle giving the whole city an unreal and celestial beauty. And it was empty, as provincial places in those days were.
I see my seventeen-year-old self roaming unrestricted through the colleges as one could in those unfranchised days, standing in Trinity Great Court in the moonlight thinking it inconceivable I could ever come to study in such blessed surroundings. And nor could I so far as Trinity was concerned. Sidney Sussex wasn’t quite my taste in buildings, but you had to be cleverer than I was or higher up the social scale to have the real pick of the architecture. Still, we were examined in the Senate House, the interior of which, had it been in Leeds would have been sequestered behind red ropes, and I went to Evensong in King’s, astonished that one could just walk in and be seated in the choir stalls. It was Advent, or what nowadays is called the countdown to Christmas, and one of the hymns was ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’, which is rather dirge-like but has stayed with me all my life since. Interviewed by the kindly dons at Sidney I was for the first time conscious of having a Northern accent.
If the dons were genial some of my fellow candidates were less so. That weekend was the first time I had come across public schoolboys in the mass and I was appalled. They were loud, self-confident and all seemed to know one another, shouting down the table to prove it while also being shockingly greedy. Public-school they might be but they were louts. Seated at long refectory tables beneath the mellow portraits of Tudor and Stuart grandees, neat, timorous and genteel we grammar-school boys were the interlopers; these slobs, as they seemed to me, the party in possession.
But it was a party, seemingly, that I was going to be allowed to join as, though I was a long way from getting a scholarship, Sidney Sussex offered me a place to read history, to come up after my National Service.
This, too, takes in Cambridge and if you’re beginning to wonder whether, far from being a sermon, this is just a stroll down memory lane, take heart, because here is where a tentative homily begins to shove its nose above the horizon.
Having done basic training in the infantry I was then sent on a course to learn Russian, a year of which was spent out of uniform and in very relaxed circumstances in Cambridge. It was a heady atmosphere, more so in some ways than university proper, where many of my colleagues were headed after National Service. Some of them were disconcertingly clever, boys from public schools who, when they talked of their schooldays often had in the background a master whose teaching had been memorable and about whom they told anecdotes and whose sayings they remembered – teachers, I remember thinking bitterly, who had presumably played a part in getting them the scholarships most of them had at Oxford and Cambridge. For them the scholarship examination, from which I’d just managed to scrape a place, had almost been a formality. They had been schooled for it and groomed for the interviews that followed, with the scholarships and exhibitions that ensued almost to be taken for granted. This was Oxford and Cambridge after all; they were entitled.
If I felt this was wrong, which I did, it was not at that time an altruistic feeling. I was thinking of myself and how the odds were stacked against me and boys like me. And here I should apologise that this narrative is couched so continuously in single-sex terms, but then, so had my education been, my school, the army, my eventual college – all of them at that time male institutions.
As I say, I saw the odds as stacked against me but took some comfort, as I think educators did generally, in assuming that this situation must inevitably alter and that the proportion of undergraduates from state schools at Oxford and Cambridge would gradually overtake that from public schools until they were both properly and proportionately represented. It was only
when as time passed this didn’t happen that what in my case had begun as a selfish and even plaintive grievance hardened to take in not just entrance to Oxford and Cambridge but access to higher education in general, with the scramble for university places more desperate year by year. And this is to say nothing of the cost.
Better minds than mine have tackled this problem and continue to do so and I would be foolish if I claimed to have a solution. But I know what is part of the problem and that is private education. My objection to private education is simply put. It is not fair. And to say that nothing is fair is not an answer. Governments, even this one, exist to make the nation’s circumstances more fair, but no government, whatever its complexion, has dared to tackle private education.
It might have been feasible at the time of the Butler reforms in 1944 but there were other things going on. The Labour government in 1945 could have tried but it had a great deal to do besides. There was not another chance until 1997 when Labour’s huge majority would have at least allowed a start, except that the prime minister had been a public schoolboy himself and seemingly a happy one so that opportunity too went begging.