Writing Home

  8 June. Man overheard in Oxford Street: ‘Can that cow shop! Jesus!’

  18 June. Alan Clark’s Diaries mention being smiled on in the lobby by the Prime Minister. Idly opening Chips Channon’s Diaries I find a similar note, re Chamberlain. Courts do not change whether the court is at Westminster, Versailles or even British Airways – Lord King’s rare smiles presumably a high favour. But that grown men should garner a little hoard of smiles from Mrs Thatcher and find something to comfort them there makes me thankful this dull morning to be sitting at my desk, watching the rag–and–bone man push his cart past the window, his Jack Russell stood eagerly in the prow as if waiting to strike land.

  On Any Questions on Radio 4 tonight are Roy Hattersley and Edward Heath, Janet Cohen and Jonathon Porritt. Neither Heath nor Hattersley is a particular favourite of mine but, because no one on the panel is extreme in their views, discussion is sensible and without point-scoring and one has the feeling by the end of the programme that the topics have been properly aired and some understanding achieved. Contrast this with Question Time on BBC1 last night with Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams and some unidentified industrialist. Tebbit played his usual role of a sneer on legs, snarling and heaping contempt on any vaguely liberal view, and the discussion – which was no discussion at all – was rancorous and rowdy and left all concerned as far from enlightenment and understanding as they had been at the start. It is Any Questions of course that is the exception, Question Time with its shouting and ill-temper very much the norm. And for this we have to thank the ex-Mrs Thatcher and her cronies: they have un-civilized debate and denatured the nation.

  25 June. Walking in the park, we pass some young black boys playing football. One gets a shot at goal which the goalie, in the way of goalies, does not think the so–called defenders should have allowed him. However, he manages to save the ball and throws it back into play, shaking his head and saying, as a reproof to his own team, ‘ ’Ave a word,’ave a word.’ I take this to mean ‘Pull your socks up’ or, as they would say in Yorkshire, ‘Frame yourselves.’

  Having espoused the attitudes of the thirties, the Spectator now seems to be aping their style: ‘Her mind was as sharp as any I have known.’ Thus Charles Moore on Shirley Letwin. Buchan is alive and editing the Sunday Telegraph.

  11 July. An ex-prisoner turns up at the Drop-In Centre in Parkway. He is violent, and the Centre telephones for help to Social Services, who tell it to send him round. The Centre does so, phoning to say that he’s on his way and that he’s armed, though not saying with what. It’s actually a syringe filled with blood, which he claims is Aids-infected, and he makes his way through Camden Town brandishing this at horrified passers-by. At Social Services he says it’s not his own blood but that he bought it at Camden tube station for £1, and when a social worker bravely tries to persuade him to give it up he takes the cap off as if he’s cocking a gun. Eventually he is coaxed into a taxi, the social worker goes with him and en route for the Royal Free persuades him to give up the syringe, which is then flung out of the window.

  Had Harriet G. not told me the story I would put it down as an urban myth. But it isn’t, the most chilling part of the saga the syringe changing hands for £1 as a profitable investment. The social worker who took him to hospital deserves the George Medal, but he’s more likely to be dismissed by Mrs Bottomley as just another ancillary worker bleeding (sic) the Health Service dry.

  18 July. Lord (ex-Chief Rabbi) Jakobovits is in favour of genetic engineering to rid the world of homosexuality. I wonder whether he’s always been in favour of medical experiments.

  11 August. Neville Smith sends me a menu from Virginia Woolf’s, a restaurant and bar in the Russell Hotel, which tells prospective diners that Virginia Woolf was ‘a modernist writer’, a member of the Bloomsbury Group ‘which used to meet at 46 Gordon Square where topics for discussion were Philosophy, Religion and the Arts’. Dishes include Jacob’s Burger (a burger in a creamy mushroom sauce), Mrs Dalloway’s (sauce poivre, pink and green peppercorns, cream and brandy) and Orlando’s (hot chilli sauce). As a dessert you can have ‘Virginia’s favourite: deep-fried banana with vanilla ice-cream, real maple syrup and cream. Irresistible.’ Carol Smith says, ‘Well, if that was her favourite I’m not surprised she sank like a stone.’

  25 August. Asked to write the entry on Russell Harty for The Dictionary of National Biography, I duly send it off. A card from Ned Sherrin says he has been landed with Hermione Baddeley on the same principle – i.e. if he didn’t do it nobody else would. His contribution had been returned to him because it lacked the full name of her second husband – something she didn’t know herself, as she always referred to him by his initials.

  Shot of a dead whale being slowly winched up a ramp. Men with satchels of knives move in and slit it open. Titles come up: ‘The Art of Biography’.

  6 September. Work in the morning, get my lunch – cold chicken and beetroot – then bike down to Bond Street. I look in Agnew’s, buy some soap in Fortnum’s, and end up in the Fine Arts Society, where there is an exhibition of American prints. I chat to two of the partners about F. Matania, an illustrator I have remembered from my childhood and whom I’d like to know more about. Then I get on my bike, having spent a civilized afternoon – the kind that leisured playwrights are supposed to spend. Except that when I get home T. says, ‘What are those red stains on your chin?’ And all the time I have been dallying in Fortnum’s and idling in Agnew’s and chatting in the Fine Arts Society my chin was covered in beetroot juice so that I must have looked as if I’d been sucking an iced lolly.

  15 September. There are three reporters. The woman is smartly dressed, hair drawn back, hard-faced and ringing the bell at this moment (and now rattling the letter-box). They have been outside the house for two hours, since eight o’clock this morning, and, though there has been no sign of life or anything to indicate I am at home, madam periodically strides briskly up to the door and rings the bell as if it were the first time she has done it. She is at it again now, and clip clip go her little heels as she trips back down the path. Across the road her companion waits – a solid middle-aged man with bright white hair and glasses: a sports outfitter perhaps, the secretary of a golf club, even chairman of the parish council, though there is something slightly seedy or lavatorial about him, but nothing to suggest he is a reporter or a photographer on the Daily Mirror. I’m mildly surprised that both of them read the Mirror: they sit in their car drinking coffee and looking at their own paper, pigs wallowing in their own shit. The third, slightly forlorn, figure is a balding young man in a Barbour who rang the doorbell last night to say he was from the Daily Mail – the first time I was aware I had done anything to attract any attention. I closed the door in his face then and now he is back, but with no car to sit in he stands disconsolately on the pavement, picking his nails. Meanwhile the phone rings constantly.

  All this is because in a profile in The New Yorker a week or so ago I made a few unguarded remarks about my personal life. These are apparently reprinted and amplified in this morning’s Mail, as if I had approached the paper anxious to come clean.

  ‘Hello?’ The balding young man is calling through the letter-box. ‘Hello, Mr Bennett. Can I have a chat? I just want to clear up one or two misconceptions.’

  Periodically the chairman of the parish council pokes his little lens through the car window and takes yet another photograph of the mute house.

  Around four the shifts change and Ms Hardface and the chairman of the PCC go off, leaving a bearded young man to do duty for them both.

  ‘I don’t want to make your life a misery,’ says one of the notes put through the door.

  I think of George Steiner, who asked Lukacs how he got through so much work. ‘House arrest, Steiner. House arrest.’

  16 September. A. N. Wilson thoughtfully weighs in, this time in the Evening Standard, comparing me with Liberace and Cliff Richard and saying I have been boasting about my sex life. ‘You silly prat’ is what I feel
, wondering how anyone who writes for such a rag as the Standard feels in a position to say anything about anybody. The littleness of England is another thought. All you need to do if you want the nation’s press camped on your doorstep is say you once had a wank in 1947.

  26 September. Six days in France, much of it in drenching rain, driving round Provence. Most towns and villages now meticulously restored – Lacoste, Les Baux, Aries, Uzés, the cobbles relaid, the stone cleaned and patched, everywhere scrubbed and made ready – for what? Well, for art mainly. For little shops selling cheap jewellery or baskets, for galleries with Provençal pottery and fabrics, bowls and beads and ‘throws’. Better, having done the clean-up, to put a machine-shop in one of these caves, a butcher’s where a butcher’s was, a dry-cleaner’s even. But no, it’s always art, dolls, kitchenware, tea-towels. And people throng (myself included), Les Baux like Blackpool.

  Aries is better because a working place still, and with a good museum of monumental masonry – early Christian altarpieces, Roman gravestones – and beneath it a labyrinth of arcaded passages that ran under the old Roman forum. The Musée Arlaten, on the other hand, is rather creepy, the walls crowded with primitive paintings of grim females – Arlésiennes presumably – and roomfuls of nineteenth-century folkish artefacts, collected under the aegis of the trilby-hatted poet Frédéric Mistral, whose heavily moustached image is everywhere. Many of the rooms contain costumed dummies which are only fractionally less lively than the identically costumed attendants, some of them startlingly like Anthony Perkins’s mother in Psycho.

  Then to an antique fair in the middle of some zone industrielle, every stall stocked with the appurtenances of French bourgeois life: great bullying wardrobes, huge ponderous mirrors and cabinets of flowery china. For the first time in my life I find myself longing for a breath of stripped pine.

  12 October, Baltimore. Edward Kemp, the National Theatre’s staff director, goes into a diner. ‘How do you like coffee?’ asks the waitress, who is black.

  ‘White, please,’ said Edward.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘White… with milk.’ The explanation notwithstanding the waitress marches away into the kitchen, refusing to serve him.

  Another waitress comes out, also black.

  ‘All I want,’ says the hapless Edward, who has not twigged, ‘is a white coffee.’

  ‘No,’ says the waitress. ‘You want a brain.’

  26 October. The queue outside the post office this morning trails right up past the (now closed) Parkway Cinema, where half a dozen people are sleeping in the doorway. Sunley, who demolished the St James’s Theatre back in the early sixties, are still at it thirty years and a clutch of knighthoods later. I suppose Mr Major would cite the redevelopment of the cinema as evidence of ‘the recovery’.

  8 November. The Government is preparing to sell off the forests and nature reserves. I wonder whether it ever occurs to the fourteen-year-olds who staff the Adam Smith Institute that such seemingly unrelated policies have something to do with the rise in crime and civil disorder generally. Paid to think the unthinkable, do they not see that unless the State is perceived as benevolent – a provider of amenities, parks, art, transport even – how should it demand respect in its prescriptive and law-giving aspect? Particularly when the law is represented by Group 4.

  24 November. Some junior minister blames the Bulger murder on the Church of England’s failure to teach the difference between right and wrong. Poor Church. It’s supposed to hold the Government’s coat (and its peace) while the Government kicks the shit out of society, and then it has to take the blame for the damage that’s been done.

  28 November, Leeds. Fewer beggars in Leeds than in London, though I notice today a young man approach a woman asking for some change. ‘Oh, don’t!’ she wails in a tone so heartfelt it’s as if his necessities are the day’s last straw.

  Forty years ago beggars in Leeds had specific locations. Bond Street was patrolled by the smarter prostitutes but also by Cigarette Liz, an old gypsyish woman in half a dozen coats and with a stained tab end always dangling from her lips. Outside Trinity Church on Boar Lane was a man with a flat cap and deformed legs, his hands resting on what as a child I took to be blocks of Sunlight soap which I thought he was selling, but which were the grips on which he hauled himself along. No one seemed to give him anything, perhaps because, like me, they just thought of him as a feature of the street.

  Someone I took for a long time to be a tramp wasn’t at all. Dirty, often drunk, in a greasy overcoat and very Jewish, he would hang around the art gallery or slump over a book of paintings in the reference library, where he would be periodically woken up by the staff and told, ‘No sleeping.’ This was the painter Jacob Kramer, an early Vorticist and contemporary of Nevinson, William Roberts and Wyndham Lewis. I had often looked at his portrait of Delius in the art gallery without knowing that, like Proust’s Elstir, this down and out was the painter.

  Roberts, who was Kramer’s brother-in-law, was often to be seen in Camden Town in the seventies. An apple-cheeked man, he looked like a small rotund farmer but wasn’t at all amiable and if one got in his way on the pavement he would unleash a torrent of abuse. Knowing his wife slightly, I was once asked back to tea but made to promise that should Roberts appear I was to show no interest in painting. When he didn’t I was both relieved and disappointed.

  29 November. In one strategem for not working today I find myself carefully cleaning off the accumulation of dried ointment from the nozzle of the Vaseline Derma Care hand-lotion dispenser.

  1994

  13 January. Having supper in the National Theatre restaurant are Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert. ‘I suppose you like this place,’ says Lindsay. I do, actually, as the food is now very good. I say so, and Lindsay, who judges all restaurants by the standard of the Cosmo in Finchley Road, smiles wearily, pleased to be reassured about one’s moral decline.

  Gavin L. is en route for Tangier to see Paul Bowles. I say that Bowles must be quite old now.

  ‘Yes,’ says Gavin. ‘Eighty-two.’

  ‘That’s not so old,’ says Lindsay.

  ‘Well it’s a funny age, eighty-two,’ says Gavin. ‘I’ve known several people of eighty-two who haven’t made it to eighty-three.’

  I don’t think this is meant as a joke.

  15 January. I go into the chemist in Camden High Street and find a down-at-heel young man not quite holding the place to ransom but effectively terrorizing the shop. He keeps pulling items off the shelves, and waving them in the face of the blonde assistant saying, ‘This is mine. And this is mine. The whole shop’s mine. It’s bought with my money. So don’t you order me out of the shop, you fucking cow. I allow you to work here. ‘The mild, rather donnish Asian pharmacist is a bit nonplussed, and as he serves me I offer to go next door to Marks & Spencer’s for their security man. But the blonde assistant is pluckily standing her ground. The young man has a really mean face, and the pharmacist thinks the best thing is to wait until he goes. Which he is about to do when he spots a small woman in her sixties at the other end of the counter, looking at cosmetics.’ And that goes for you too,’ he says, shoving his face into hers and taking a handful of eyeliners.

  Suddenly the little lady erupts.

  ‘Right,’ she says, ‘I’m a policewoman,’ and she brandishes her identification in his face as they do in police series. ‘You’re nicked.’

  She isn’t exactly an intimidating figure and he’s practically out of the shop now anyway, but it seems to decide him – he darts off into the bustle of the High Street.

  ‘I wasn’t having any truck with that,’ says the unlikely policewoman, putting away what quite plainly was her bus pass, and gets on with buying some face cream.

  The moral I suppose, is that you can get good behaviour off the television as well as bad.

  20 January. At Paddington a throng of bewildered travellers gaze up at the Departures board, where there’s a bland announcement saying that, due to buildin
g work at Heathrow, many services have been rescheduled earlier than in the timetable – i.e. everybody misses their train. I sit down meaning to have some coffee from my flask, only to find it’s broken (an old-fashioned accident, breaking flasks something I associate with the forties). I wander round the station with the dripping flask looking for a litter bin, but because of the risk of bombs there are none. I can’t just put the flask discreetly down lest it be mistaken for a bomb itself and the whole station grind to a halt, so it’s ten minutes before I find a railwayman who will take it off me, by which time my train is in.

  25 January. Having spoken at Norwich, I trek across England to Birmingham to speak there, never more conscious of Larkin’s strictures about going round the country pretending to be oneself. It’s a beautiful morning, the flat fields made dramatic and Dutch by floods and huge skies, but the whole journey is ruined by two schoolboys going off for university interviews. They try to impress one another with their knowledge of current affairs and hone their interview techniques. ‘I like that Michael Howard,’ says one. ‘And Kenneth Clarke’s a good bloke too.’ Neither boy, I suppose, has ever known anything but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to.

  At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights ‘class, then do another Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience.

  26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by Tristram) as one of the books he was putting in the guest bedroom at Chatsworth. ‘I wish he’d leave a copy in all the bedrooms,’ drawls Tristram. ‘Then it would be a best-seller.’

  Take the second draft of the filmscript of The Madness of George III to be printed. Nick Hytner has the good idea of fetching the King back from Kew to Westminster to prove to the MPs that he has recovered from his madness. Of course, it never happened, but the nearer one gets to production the bolder one gets. I hope it’s boldness anyway.