Untold Stories

  Whenever I see anyone with a shaven head, a boy particularly, I still think of them as poor, as such boys generally were when I was young. I even thought it of Beckham yesterday, sullenly leaving the pitch in Eindhoven.

  17 June, Yorkshire. In the morning I find a bee trapped under a cloth in the house and revive it by giving it a blob of honey into which it sticks its tongue or nozzle or whatever, greedily sucking it up so that it soon gets back its buzz and flies away. Contrast this with the evening when I go out with my salt pot and ruthlessly track down slugs and snails, the awful cocktail of salt and slime now waiting by the garden window to be emptied.

  18 June. Halted at Doncaster this evening by an electrical fault, we are eventually turned out onto the platform to wait for the next train. It’s a blessing, though, as it’s around 7 o’clock and the platform bathed in sunshine still. Fifty years later, and still a sucker for summer evenings, I remember the hours spent waiting on country platforms in 1948 or 1949 when I had a Runabout ticket and went all over the North and East Ridings. The mood persists when we get back on the train so that the landscape seems taken back in time: the fields as plush and waist-deep in corn as they ever were, embankments thick with blossom-laden elders and in the hedgerows even, it seems, elms still – all suspended in amber evening light.

  All this is much better put in John Cheever’s The Wapshot Scandal:

  She went to the window to see the twilight, wondering why the last light of day demanded from her similes and resolutions. Why, all the days of her life, had she compared its colours to apples, to the pages of old books, to lighted tents, to sapphires and sere ashes? Why had she always stood up to the evening light as if it could instruct her in decency and courage?

  12 July. I don’t hear many sermons nowadays but they don’t seem to have changed much – viz. the Archbishop of Canterbury at yesterday’s service for the Queen Mother: ‘She is someone who can help us to travel that country we call life.’

  24 July. The News of the World publishes photographs of dozens of paedophiles whom it labels beasts and wants ‘nailing’. I wonder if in the seminar room of Oxford’s Rupert Murdoch Professor of Communications such tactics are the subject of academic discussion: ‘Naming and Shaming: Rebekah Wade on Circulation Boosting, Its Postures and Properties’.

  5 August. I saw Alec Guinness two days before he died. Though the papers say he had been ill for some time he had not been seriously incommoded until the last few weeks and had no notion that he was dying. Almost the last thing he said to me as I was going was to ask where I was getting the train.

  ‘Petersfield.’

  ‘Liss is better. It takes ten minutes off the journey.’

  This bending you to his will, gently though he did it, was entirely characteristic and the way he had always been, particularly on the hundreds of occasions he took me out to supper.

  ‘What are you having?’ he would ask.

  ‘I thought I’d try the bream.’

  ‘Oh, the bream? Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, I rather fancied some fish.’

  ‘Sure you don’t want the lamb? It’s very good here.’

  I hesitate.

  ‘No, I think I’d prefer the bream.’

  ‘Would you? Oh.’

  He seemed disappointed so I would relent.

  ‘Oh, all right. I’ll have the lamb.’

  ‘You don’t have to. Have the bream by all means.’

  And so we would go on in a ritual with which all his dining companions were familiar: part of a procedure designed to make sure you weren’t just choosing something because it was cheap (this, except at the Connaught, seldom entering my head) or to please him, though pleasing him and endorsing his choice were often the quickest way of terminating the discussion. So on this last occasion I should have said I’ll go via Liss but don’t, and this time he is too weak to argue.

  His bed has been brought down to the corner of the living room so that when he lies down, a handkerchief over his head against the sun, he is effectively turning his face to the wall. Still I come away with no notion that this is the last time I shall see him. People keep ringing up to console me. It’s like being consoled for the destruction of a view or the disappearance of a part of the landscape.

  8 August. To the Cottesloe in the evening to talk to Humphrey Carpenter about his book That Was Satire That Was and answer questions from the audience. It goes well enough though I feel only slightly less inarticulate than I was in the period we are discussing. At one point Humphrey asks me about the end of satire and what I feel about it now. It’s another question I don’t satisfactorily answer and wake in the night wishing I’d thought to recall my last satirical fling, sometime in the early 1980s at Drury Lane in an Amnesty concert, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, and a sketch I did with John Fortune.

  Two upper-class figures are comparing notes about sex, one of them picking up lorry drivers (or what he fondly imagines to be lorry drivers) in the lavatories of Notting Hill, the other claiming to have exuberant sex with his wife. The best line comes when the gay one asks, re some straight-sex marathon:

  ‘How long did it go on?’

  ‘Well, if you include the foreplay and the wind-down afterwards, I don’t suppose we had much change from three hours.’

  ‘Three hours? Good God! you could be in Leeds in that time!’

  The audience, which had come expecting to chant the Python parrot sketch, didn’t like all this talk of sex one bit (didn’t like anything, I suspect, that they hadn’t heard fourteen times before) and we came off to virtual silence, the other performers, as is usual on such occasions, gathered in the wings to watch, now drawing back from us in a very New York fashion lest our lack of success be somehow infectious. That was the end of satire for me and also, I’m happy to say, the end of appearing in those mammoth charity shows which always turn out overlong, slyly competitive and never the least bit heart-warming.

  10 August. Appalling scenes on the Portsmouth housing estate which is conducting a witch hunt against suspected paedophiles and the nation is treated to the spectacle of a tattooed mother with a fag dangling from her lips and a baby in her arms proclaiming how concerned she is for her kiddies.

  The joy of being a mob, particularly these days, is that it’s probably the first time the people on this estate have found common cause on anything; it’s ‘the community’ they’ve been told so much about and for the first time in their lives each day seems purposeful and exciting.

  11 August. En route for Petersfield and A.G.’s funeral I turn off the A3 to look at Ockham church and eat my sandwich lunch in the churchyard. It’s locked but a rather grand woman who’s working in the churchyard opens it up. It’s the church of William of Ockham and Ockham’s razor (in Latin) is inscribed on mugs for sale at the bookstall. Coming out, I thank the woman and she says I’m lucky because she wouldn’t normally be around but they’ve been having trouble with the myrrh. The church hadn’t seemed to be particularly ritualistic so this puzzles me.

  ‘The myrrh?’ I say.

  ‘Yes’.

  ‘You mean the incense?’

  ‘No, no. The myrrh. For the grass. It’s broken down.’

  At Petersfield we go down to the church in a people-carrier. It belongs to Sally, Alec’s granddaughter, and probably wouldn’t have suited him at all but it seats everybody nicely, and as it doesn’t look at all funereal none of the waiting photographers takes a second look. The note of ‘Alec wouldn’t like this’ keeps recurring and is perhaps the most vivid way in which he is recalled.

  The coffin is borne in and on it a cushion with his decorations. When he was given the CH he thought it unlikely that he’d ever get to wear it, having no tails now that would fit him, and that the only time it might be seen would be on his coffin. This is remembered in the nick of time and it’s disinterred from the bottom of the wardrobe or wherever and pinned to a cushion which Merula, his widow, had embroidered years ago with a flowing tapestry of Walter, A.G.’ s f
avourite dog. Once when A.G. was appearing in the West End Walter was run over by a milk float and slightly injured. The dog was so loved that this news had to be kept from Alec lest he be unable to take the stage.

  The service is simple and being Catholic to me is utterly mysterious, as I never understand how they get the Mass over with quite so quickly, Holy Communion in the Anglican service more of a journey. Nowadays there’s the handshake in common which, even though today I know everybody, I still don’t find easy and it’s quite hard to see how someone as fastidious as A.G. managed it all these years; Merula would have been one of his neighbours so perhaps he always sat on the aisle.

  At the cemetery I talk to Michael and Henrietta Gough.

  MICHAEL: Who’s that woman over there who looks like Eileen Atkins?

  ME: Eileen Atkins.

  MICHAEL: That would account for it.

  The undertaker retrieves Walter’s cushion and the CH from the grave and we go back to the house which, when it was built c.1950, was in the depths of the country. Now it is within 200 yards of the M3, the roar of which was never absent in this last decade of their lives.

  14 August. Listen to the last programme in Charles Wheeler’s Radio 4 series on National Service, a discussion with, among others, Neal Ascherson, Michael Mates and Arnold Wesker. Though my own experiences (basic training in the Infantry, then the Joint Services Russian Course) were hardly typical, I find myself more in agreement with Wesker and indeed Michael Mates than I do with Ascherson.

  Wesker admits that for all its miseries and boredom he enjoyed himself, as I did, and not merely when I was learning Russian. I enjoyed drill once I’d got used to it, the sense of being part of a group wheeling and counter-wheeling on the square not much different, I imagine, from the joys of the chorus line. Ascherson and also Paul Foot seemed to consider the two years as time wasted but I suspect that part of their impatience can be put down to their having been at public school, Ascherson at Eton, Foot at Shrewsbury. Part of the pleasure I had in National Service was that it represented delayed schooling, and that for the first time in my life I was away from home. No politician would dare suggest it but six months or a year of National Service nowadays, provided the time was well used, would seem to me to do little harm and have many advantages.

  There were many bad moments during my two-year conscription, the worst entirely of my own making. En route for breakfast about a week after I began basic training I went for a pee and in the process dropped my knife, fork and spoon in the communal trough. I then had to retrieve them, rinse them off and go in and use them for breakfast. Still, since some of my fellows went on to be killed in Korea this hardly counts as an ordeal. Best were moments of intense lyrical delight I’ve seldom experienced since. South Yorkshire is hardly an area of outstanding natural beauty but having finished reassembling my Bren and ordered to take five, a soldier lying in the long grass, I would be enraptured.

  A biker delivers a letter from the BBC: ‘Alan Bennett? Can I shake your hand? The trouble is I sold all your plays for a gram of speed about five years ago.’

  23 August, L’Espiessac. Sitting in the shade of the cherry tree outside the pigeonnier in a rough, warm wind that snatches at the paper as I write. Over the door is the date 22 mai 1816, a year after Waterloo and the departure of Napoleon, when this farmhouse was supposedly a nunnery.

  Packed and waiting for the cab yesterday, I catch a Radio 3 repeat of a 1949 broadcast from the Edinburgh Festival of Kathleen Ferrier singing some Brahms songs. It’s preceded by five minutes of her talking about her career, working with Bruno Walter and plans for the future she wasn’t going to have. I’ve never heard her speak before and it’s a voice as careful and considered and indeed tragic as many of the lieder that she sings. Though there’s no trace of the Blackburn telephonist she had been only a few years before, the accent isn’t in any way ‘put on’ – low, sad and yet full of hope, as if the words themselves were lyrics and deserving of the same care in phrasing and pronunciation. When she sings the voice is at the same time austere and yet rich and with none of that unctuousness that some contraltos have. It’s her voice in The Song of the Earth and the Strauss Four Last Songs and Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody that I hear still as their proper tone, with no one else to touch her.

  Before she was really famous – it must have been c.1947 – she came to Leeds to sing at Brunswick Chapel. Uncle George made Mam and Dad go with him to hear her, and though they weren’t big ones for singing, they came back full of this young woman they had heard who turned out to be Kathleen Ferrier. What makes music inviolable still for me, and preserves it from the poisonous flippancies of Classic FM, are scenes like that, a Methodist chapel in the slums of Leeds lit up and packed with people on a winter night in 1947 and the voice of Kathleen Ferrier drifting out over the grimy snow.

  27 August, L’Espiessac. Remember as I labour up and down the pool in the late afternoon the old lady in Gstaad who had always wanted a swimming pool of her own but her husband wouldn’t have it. He then died and having dug one hole for him she dug a much bigger hole for herself and when we called one morning in 1971 she was chugging up and down the pool like a little water beetle, never happier in her life.

  28 August, L’Espiessac. Pick out from this holiday bookcase As They Were, a book of travel pieces by M. F. K. Fisher, and read ‘About Looking Alone at a Place’, an account of a winter visit to Arles in 1971. I am shamed by its exactitude of expression and, though the language is simple, her ability to hit on a phrase. She’s like Richard Cobb in finding out the ordinary rhythms of a place, its habits and the flavour of the small lives lived there – waiters (and the shoes of the waiters), hotel receptionists, attendants in museums. Born 1908 and now presumably dead. I have never heard of her.

  2 September. In a piece in the LRB on Buñuel Michael Wood mentions among ‘a number of startling and now famous images’ in Viridiana ‘a small crucifix that flicks open to become a menacing knife’.

  The film came out in 1961 but I didn’t see it until sometime in the 1970s after Buñuel’s much more popular films like Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. However, on the BBC’s Not So Much a Programme in 1965 I played a pipe-smoking vicar with on his desk a crucifix that doubled as a pipe rack – a small blasphemy that provoked a question in Parliament.

  The difference between the images is revealing: Buñuel’s resonant and bold, Catholic and dangerous, mine Anglican, cosy and not threatening at all. Lindsay Anderson was a great admirer of (and borrower from) Buñuel and in the comparison of the two images he would have found all that was wrong with England.

  2 October. Finish Peter Nichols’s Diaries, a good read and hard to put down. He’s blessed, as Osborne was, with droves of relatives to whom he seems far more attentive and considerate than ever I managed to be to my few. Still, they repay the attention and are a good source of material. I may not be the one to talk but with Nichols the vestibule between Life and Art is quite short and nobody lingers in it long.

  Also reading Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, which is hard going but full of interesting stuff about the ceremonial life of the late medieval church and its systematic dismantling under Edward VI and Elizabeth. I hadn’t realised that the Elizabethan Settlement also meant the end of the mystery plays, which were pretty well forgotten by 1580. It shames me that I am more outraged by these events of nearly five hundred years ago (particularly by the iconoclasm) than I am by anything that’s currently happening (and to flesh and blood) in Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone.

  25 October. In the obituaries that I saw of Alec Guinness not much mention was made of his wife of sixty years, Merula Salaman, who was treated as if she was just an appendage to him. Now, when she too has died, would have been the time to make amends but death hasn’t brought her out of his shadow, with no one giving a proper account of Merula herself as distinct from Lady Guinness. That wasn’t a role she particularly wanted to play, especially in the late 1940s when Alec became a film
star and felt he had to lead a film star’s life. Even when she was dying she talked with horror of those days, of the number of frocks she was required to have, the amount of changing that went on and the difficulties of dining in gloves.

  Brought up as a wild country child in a large eccentric family (which deserves its own chronicler), she was happy as soon as the opportunity occurred to leave the high life to Alec and spend most of her time in the house that her architect brother had designed in Hampshire. Here she was surrounded by dogs, kept goats, had a donkey in the field and painted in a style that was vaguely Russian but which only came into its own when she took up needlework. Her needlework pictures are glowing with colour and intricate in texture, medieval in their richness. It was only in the last ten years or so that she had the confidence to exhibit them, Alec always nervous she would show him up or show herself up. They sold immediately and I bought several only to have Alec thank me as if I were doing it as a favour to him.

  This was nothing new. Merula was, for instance, a superb cook and when I first stayed at Kettlebrook would produce delicious meals which Alec would apologise for – behaviour which she took in her stride, knowing it would pass. And when I’d been there two or three times (and always had second and even third helpings) he stopped apologising. The truth was that she made him a nicer, less awkward, more accessible person but even after sixty years of marriage she still found it odd that they got on and that she could cope with his fussing and over-propriety. But her affection for him didn’t waver and only a few days before she died, when she scarcely had the strength to hold a pen, she wrote a poem praying that they would soon be reunited and this was read at her funeral.