The Civic Restaurant is in the basement of the Town Hall, which also houses the Crown Court. All through the long evening’s filming the corridors upstairs are thronged with lawyers and policemen, awaiting the verdict in a murder trial. A twenty-year-old man is accused of battering a baby to death; there are also cigarette burns on its body. To the police and the lawyers it seems an open and shut case, but the jury has surprised everyone (and ruined all social arrangements) by staying out for seven hours. The police attribute this to the fact that the foreman of the jury is a member of the Howard League of Penal Reform and herself an unmarried mother. The judge had been hoping to go out to dinner and his Bentley waits in Victoria Street. The court caterers have gone home and eventually the judge’s chamberlain lines up at Kennedy’s, the film’s caterers, and gets some dinner there for the judge and the high sheriff. Meanwhile the lawyers and bored policemen drift down into the basement to watch the filming and we chat.
One of the good things about being in a group, engaged in what to other people seems a glamorous activity is that I can chat to these lawyers about their job and to the policemen about theirs, behave in fact in the way writers are generally supposed to behave, but which I seldom do. I’d normally sidestep policemen and would want to keep out of the way of their prejudices lest they expect one to corroborate them, but established as part of another scene, with a setting and frame of my own, I find I am set free, enfranchised in the way people of a more outgoing temperament are all the time.
Suddenly there is a flurry of activity: the jury is being called back and the lawyers and policemen scurry back upstairs into the court. The judge’s chamberlain takes me and some of the crew and puts us in the well of the court. It is like a theatrical matinée, the cast of one show going to see another. Indeed, when he follows the judge on to the bench the chamberlain gives us a little showbiz wave. The jury now file in, surprisingly informal and at ease, the men in shirtsleeves, one woman with her knitting. The judge is kind and courteous, emphasizing they must feel under no pressure to bring in a verdict. What he wants to know is whether there is any likelihood of them coming to an agreement. The foreman must answer yes or no. She asks when. ‘Ah,’ says the judge, ‘I mustn’t answer that. That would be to put pressure on you. Obviously there will come a time when you are too tired to go on, but the very fact that you have asked that question seems to indicate to me that point has not yet been reached.’ It is like Oxford philosophy. The jury files out to deliberate further and out we file to do reverses on shots already filmed. I am in the corridor two hours later when the verdict comes through. A man walks through the policemen shaking his head in disgust, saying, ‘Manslaughter. Seven years.’ The prisoner was a good-looking boy. Naively I expected to see some depravity in his face.
We finish at 11.30 with the customary call, ‘Right, that’s a wrap.’ The judge could have said the same. ‘Manslaughter. Seven years. And that’s a wrap.’
16 March, Leeds (Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf). More filming in the Town Hall, this time in a corridor which leads from the cells. Two men are led by in handcuffs, the father and uncle of a family, both deaf and dumb. The father had been sleeping with his children and allowed the uncle to do the same. Mother, father, uncle, all were deaf and dumb, but the children could speak and speech was the father’s downfall. ‘Would this be any more Life,’ says Hopkins in the play, ‘would this be any more Life than a middle-aged lady sitting reading in a garden?’ Yes, I’m afraid it would.
18 March, London. When I come back from filming – emerge, as Goffman would say, from an intense and prolonged period of social interaction – I feel raw, as if I have in some unspecified way made a fool of myself.
11 April, Morecambe (All Day on the Sands). A bright, bitter cold morning. Over the sand the low tumbled hills of the Lake District and one white mountain. Blue council buses ferry schoolchildren along the empty promenade. Old couples take the air. Why do people find the seaside out of season sad? I never do. It’s much sadder when the streets are filled with tired families, cross because they’re not happy. Which is what the film is about.
Two women pass. ‘I said to him, “If you’ve brought me here to mix with a lot of old people, you’re mistaken. You’ve got the bowling green to go to. Well, I’m not spending the rest of my life on bowling greens.”’
An old gentleman watches the filming on the front. Apparently he made boots for Field Marshal Earl Haig. Another front. This information he volunteers readily to anyone who comes near him, so I keep out of his way, suspecting he is a bore. This is foolish, since to be a bore about making boots for Earl Haig constitutes interest. A life flying this small flag. Had he met the Field Marshal?
‘Oh, yes.’
‘What was he like?’
A long pause. ‘Very smart.’
14 April, Morecambe (All Day on the Sands). Alun Armstrong, who plays the father in the film, is full of jokes and stories and on the go the whole day. This morning he sits apart, silent and withdrawn. I ask him what’s the matter.
‘I woke up in the night and I’d nothing to read, so picked up my Gideon’s, opened it at a page, the way you do, thinking there might be some sort of revelation, change my way of life and so on. And it’s Ecclesiastes, “the joker is a foolish man”, “empty pots make most noise”; all that stuff. I mean my story. So I’m piping down a bit this morning.’
On a wall on one of the roads off the promenade in clear large letters written without haste and correctly spelled: ‘Mark Lambert is a Paedophiliac (Ask Tracy)’.
30 April, Hartlepool (Afternoon Off). In my mind’s eye I had seen this play taking place in Scarborough or Harrogate. It is the story of a Chinese waiter on his afternoon off, searching the town for a girl called Iris, whom he has been told fancies him. I’d got the idea from a Chinese waiter I glimpsed from a car, wandering about a small town on early closing day. That had been in Lewes in 1972. Now it is six years later and it’s not Lewes, it’s not Harrogate but somewhere that couldn’t be more different, Hartlepool.
It was this main street that gave Stephen the idea of setting the film here. The buildings all date from the same period, around when the town was founded in the 1880s. The date gives it the look of a town in a western, the main street lined with saloons, shipping offices, tackle shops and behind it, like in a western, the desert. Only it’s a desert of rubble where all the symmetrical side streets have been demolished, leaving only occasional outcrops of bright, boiled brick, where the grander buildings await a more elaborate and accomplished destruction. A sense too of the proximity of Germany and the Baltic coast. The dullness and loutishness of a rundown port; pubs, prostitutes. Sailors returning.
Sunday morning and the street is closed off, emptied of cars as rails are laid down for the camera. It’s Meccano time, a big tracking shot, ‘real filming’. Along the pavement a wavering trail of blood leads the length of the street. Last night a man was stabbed and wandered along, holding his arms, looking for a taxi. Blood is sticky. It smears the pavement and members of the unit examine it curiously. It does seem indelible, more so than paint. Seagulls yelp over the empty street and mount each other on chimneystacks this grey Sunday while boys in baggy trousers phone possible girls from shattered phone boxes.
1 May, Ηartlepool (Afternoon Off). We film in the sluice room of the cottage hospital. Racks of stainless-steel bottles and bedpans, a sink that flushes and a hideously stained drum on which the bedpans are sluiced out. This room would be my mother’s nightmare. Conditions are cramped and I crouch behind the camera tripod in order to see the action. I am kneeling on the floor under the bedpan sluice. If my Mam saw this she would want to throw away trousers, raincoat, every particle of clothing that might have been touched and polluted. This has got into the film. Thora Hird plays a patient in the hospital being visited by her husband. ‘I bet the house is upside down,’ she says to him.
‘It never is,’ says her husband. ‘I did the kitchen floor this morning.’
‘Which bucket did you use?’
‘The red one.’
She is outraged. ‘That’s the outside bucket. I shall have it all to do again.’
I am assuming this is common ground and that the tortuous boundary between the clean and the dirty is a frontier most households share. It was very marked in ours. My mother maintained an intricate hierarchy of cloths, buckets and dusters, to the Byzantine differentiations of which she alone was privy. Some cloths were dish cloths but not sink cloths; some were for the sink but not for the floor. There were dirty buckets and clean buckets, brushes for indoors, brushes for the flags. One mop had a universal application while another had a unique and terrible purpose and had to be kept outside, hung on the wall. And however rinsed and clean these utensils were they remained tainted by their awful function. Left to himself my Dad would violate these taboos, using the first thing that came to hand to clean the hearth or wash the floor. ‘It’s all nowt,’ he’d mutter, but if Mam was around he knew it saved time and temper to observe her order of things. Latterly, disposable cloths and kitchen rolls tended to blur these ancient distinctions but the basic structure remained, perhaps the firmest part of the framework of her world. When she was ill with depression the order broke down: the house became dirty. Spotless though Dad kept it, she saw it as ‘upside down’, dust an unstemmable tide and the house’s (imagined) squalor a talking point for the neighbours. So that when she came home from the hospital, bright and better, her first comment was always how clean the house looked. And not merely the house. It was as if the whole world and her existence in it had been rinsed clean.
Grand Hotel, Hartlepool. Breakfast. The waitresses are two local girls who are marshalled, instructed and generally ordered about by an elderly waitress with jet-black hair and glasses. This morning she is off. A man behind me raises his voice to ask whether anyone is serving his table. The two young waitresses whisper briefly, then one goes across. The man studies the menu.
‘I would like fresh grapefruit.’
‘Are you suffering from diabetes?’
A hush has fallen on the room.
‘I beg your pardon?’
The waitress smiles helpfully. ‘Fresh grapefruit. Are you diabetic?’
The man is now in a towering rage. ‘No, I am not diabetic. Furthermore I am not suffering from Bell’s palsy, tuberculosis, cancer or Parkinson’s disease.’
Everyone buries themselves in their cornflakes as the waitress, scarlet, rushes from the room to tell the kitchen of this madman.
2 May, Hartlepool (Afternoon Off). I take photographs in the old cemetery by the sea on the north side of the headland. The graveyard is flanked by two huge factories, where the pier of Steetley Magnesite runs out into the sea. The graves are of dead mariners, a Norwegian from a shipwreck, a man killed by a shell in the bombardment of Hartlepool in 1914 and many men and children killed ‘in the course of their employment’.
Filming gives one an oblique perspective on English life, taking one into places one would not otherwise go, bringing one up against people one would never normally meet. This morning busmen in the depot on Church Street, yesterday the chef and waiters in the hotel kitchens. I have very little knowledge of ‘ordinary life’. I imagine it in a script and come up against the reality only when the script gets filmed. So the process can be a bit of an eye-opener, a kind of education. Cameramen in particular are educated like this, men of the world who have odd pockets of understanding and experience gleaned from the films they have worked on. I imagine someone could be educated in the same way by promiscuity.
Sunderland. An old-fashioned shoe shop. High ladders and shelves piled with shoeboxes. Feeling this is what a genuine writer would do I make a note of the labels:
Alabaster Softee Leather
Clover Trilobel Fur Bound Bootees
Buffalo Grain Softee Chukkas
Malt Gibsons
Fawn Suede Apron Casuals
Burnished Brown Concealed Gusset Casuals
Red Derby Nocap
Tan Gibson Bruised Look
Mahogany Lear Peep Toe
3 May, Hartlepool (Afternoon Off). We are filming an OAP concert at St Hilda’s Church Hall. The Chinese waiter wanders on to the stage while two entertainers are giving a rendition of ‘Pedro the Fisherman’ to the whistled accompaniment of an audience of old ladies. They arrive in a coach, smart and warm in fur hats, check coats and little bootees with one solitary man. I see my father in him, going with my Mam on the WI trip from the village. ‘Well, your Mam and me always do things together. We don’t want splitting up to go with lots of different folks.’ And he was not embarrassed by it.
My mother’s description of her clothes:
My other shoes
My warm boots
My tweedy coat
That greeny coat of mine
That fuzzy blue coat I have
My coat with the round buttons
Like the inventory of a medieval will.
Casual onlookers find it difficult to detect the hierarchy of a film unit. Who is in charge? It seems to be the cameraman. He is making them move all the lights anyway. Or is it one of those two young men who keep changing their minds about where everybody in the audience is meant to sit? Perhaps it’s the man with the long microphone. Certainly, now that he’s shaken his head they’re changing it all again. The proper actors haven’t even appeared yet, you’d think they’d have some say. Suddenly everything settles down and somebody shouts out (quite rudely), ‘Settle, everybody, settle’, and the boss turns out to be the scruffy young man who has been sat on the window-sill doing the crossword. He scarcely looks old enough.
And so it was in the days when Mam and Dad used to come and watch the filming. Dad would think he was talking to a key figure on the film, when in fact he was talking to one of the props boys or the animal handler, members of the unit I’d scarcely come across and whose names I didn’t know. Once when they visited me at Oxford they took my scout for a don, and in the theatre my dresser for John Gielgud. And it’s happened to me. When we were on Broadway with Beyond the Fringe the Kennedys came backstage after the show. Having been introduced I spent most of my time talking to a distinguished but rather abstracted young man who, though (and perhaps because) he kept looking over my shoulder, I took to be an important section of the New Frontier. He was a secret serviceman.
13 May, Hartlepool (Afternoon Off). The final sequences with Peter Postlethwaite and Stan Richards, in the Municipal Art Gallery and Museum, which combines art, archaeology, natural and local history. Downstairs is an exhibition of flower arrangements, ‘Britain in Bloom’, with the comments of the adjudicators affixed: ‘It speaks to me’; ‘Lovely arrangement, but a bit delicate flowerwise’. Upstairs a case of stuffed birds and in another case, ‘Hartlepool in Palaeolithic Times’. There is an old bicycle, a Japanese suit of armour and a dismal collection of pictures, scarcely above the highland-cattle level. Kids wander through, bored out of their heads, mystified by a culture that can comprehend a Japanese suit of armour, a stuffed otter and a calcified Roman waterpipe.
The filming finishes as filming usually does, with a wild track. In the midst of clearing up everybody suddenly freezes into silence and immobility as on sound only the actors record their lines.
The Insurance Man
The Insurance Man is set in Prague. It begins in 1945 with the city on the eve of liberation by the Russians, though the main events of the story, told in flashback, take place before the First World War. The film was shot in Bradford, where every other script I’ve written seems to have been shot, and also in Liverpool, a city I didn’t know and had never worked in. Bradford was chosen because among the few buildings the city has elected to preserve are some nineteenth-century warehouses behind the Cathedral. From the nationality of the merchants originally trading there, this neighbourhood is known locally as Little Germany. The trade has gone but the buildings remain, the exteriors now washed and sandblasted but the interiors much as they were when
the last bolt of cloth was dispatched in the 1960s. Liverpool likewise has many empty buildings, and for the same reason, and there we had an even wider choice. I found both places depressing – Liverpool in particular. Work though it is, a play, however serious, is play, and play seems tactless where there is no work.
9 July 1985, Connaught Rooms, Bradford. These masonic chambers on what’s left of Manningham Lane serve as part of the Workers Accident Insurance Institute, the office in Prague where Kafka was a conscientious and well-thought-of executive. It is only the first day of shooting, and already I feel somewhat spare. We are filming scenes in the lift, which is just large enough to contain the actors and the camera crew. There’s no hope of hearing the dialogue, so I sit on a window-sill and read, wishing, after writing nearly a score of films, that I didn’t still feel it necessary to be in attendance at the birth. Just below where we are filming is Valley Parade, Bradford City’s football ground, where two months ago dozens of fans perished in a fire. Glance down a back street and there is the blackened gateway.
10 July, Holcroft Castings and Forgings, Thornbury. Periodically between 1911 and 1917 Kafka helped to manage an asbestos factory set up by his brother-in-law. The hero of The Insurance Man is Franz, a young man who contracts a mysterious skin disease, seemingly from his job in a dyeworks. As a result he is sacked and comes to the Workers Accident Insurance Institute to claim compensation. He fails, but Kafka, anxious to do him a good turn, offers him a job in his brother-in-law’s asbestos factory. The story is told in flashback thirty years later when Franz, now an old man, comes to his doctor to be told that Kafka’s good turn has sealed his death warrant. Kafka describes in his diary the dust in the original asbestos factory and how, when they came off shift, the girls would dash it from their overalls in clouds. Even so I feel the design department has overdone it: dust coats every surface and lies in drifts against the machinery. I mention this to Richard Eyre, wondering if it’s a little too much. It turns out we have had nothing to do with it: the forge, shut down six months ago, is just as it was.