Untold Stories

  ‘Would you like hot nuts?’ asks the stewardess.

  The purpose of this very much flying visit, paid for by Random House, is to do a five-minute ‘segment’ on the Today show, the book club of which has selected (or had selected for them) The Lady in the Van and The Clothes They Stood Up In as their this month’s read. It’s actually the choice of Helen Fielding, whom I’d imagined utterly metropolitan but turns out to be from Morley, though now living in Los Angeles presumably on the proceeds of her two bestsellers. After the segment we have tea in the Pierre and talk about Leeds, and I walk down the corridor where forty years ago Dudley Moore and I saw Stravinsky.

  I avoid downtown and notice how, in the car to the airport, I don’t look back to take in the view of the towers of Manhattan. It’s something I’d always done as a kind of farewell every time I came away from New York. Not today. Brooklyn cemetery on the right, Queens on the left, Manhattan maimed so not to be stared at.

  5 November. To the British Library to record an edition of Radio 4’s Bookclub in which a panel of readers, chaired by James Naughtie, questions me about my stuff, some of which figures in a little exhibition laid on by the Library, including the original script of Beyond the Fringe and another of Forty Years On, both now part of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office archive. Back in 1960 the reader pencilled a note on the Beyond the Fringe MS that it was ‘full of silly pseudo-intellectual jokes’. Forty Years On maybe deserved a similar comment but as censorship was abolished while it was still waiting to be read it is unmarked. More thrilling by far is Anne Boleyn’s copy of Tyndale’s English Bible, a compact and handy volume along the fore-edge of which she has written in red ‘Regina Angliae’. I am allowed to hold this Bible, as she must often have held it, and wonder if it’s the Bible she had with her in the Tower or on the scaffold.

  11 November. Much talk of republicanism, recalling Brooklyn-born Joan Panzer’s remark twenty years ago: ‘England without the Royal Family? Never. It would be like Fire Island without the gays.’

  13 November. Apropos the Queen’s Speech, Andrew Marr on The World at One talks of the future saying, ‘If the war with Iraq goes well …’, the conditional to do not with the likelihood of war but only with its conduct. No one demurs. But Bush is extraordinary. Seldom can there have been a leader of a modern democratic nation who showed such unfeigned eagerness and enthusiasm for war. He must be Saddam Hussein’s biggest asset.

  22 November, New York. I am reading Wittgenstein’s Poker, an account of the events leading up to the clash between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge in 1946. It’s fascinating but as with all accounts of philosophy I can never get my mind round the questions at issue – Popper the general, Wittgenstein the particular is how I make sense of it. Both were bullies and in a gender-specific way: I can’t imagine two women going head to head like this or being so single- (and so bloody-) minded. I had not known that Wittgenstein’s attitude to his wealth (or his ex-wealth) was as ambiguous as it appears to have been, or of the high-level negotiations that bartered much of the Wittgenstein fortune for the lives of his two sisters, who remained in Vienna throughout the war. With both philosophers holding forth to their respective circles and riding roughshod over any opposition, I long for some bold student to stand up and say that this way of teaching philosophy defeats it own purpose and isn’t worth the bruised feelings and human diminishment arguing with Wittgenstein and Popper seems to have involved.

  It’s encouraging, though, to find that Wittgenstein’s mature (but coded) thoughts about being in love seem scarcely above my own sixteen-year-old level. One of his last unrequited passions was a medical student, Ben Richards, who is pictured in the book looking remarkably like Ted Hughes – who was almost Wittgenstein’s contemporary at Cambridge. Wittgenstein died in 1951; had he survived a year or two to coincide with Hughes it would have been an interesting conjunction. One anachronism (I think) is that the authors imagine Wittgenstein buying tomato sandwiches from Woolworth’s. If there was a café in Woolworth’s in Cambridge he might well have bought sandwiches to eat on the premises but I don’t think in 1946 Woolworth’s were doing takeaways. (More reports please.)

  23 November, New York. Back for another ‘segment’ on the Today show, I stop and talk to a handful of peace protestors who have unfurled their home-made banners around the statue of Lincoln on the north side of Union Square. They are standing in the middle of the farmers’ market and are of a muchness with most of the stallholders: worthy, decent, unmetropolitan figures in late middle age, muffled up against the biting wind but not chanting or speechmaking, just a group of twenty or so standing there in silence. I ask a woman if they have come in for much abuse. ‘No. Not here. This is a liberal neighbourhood, you see.’ She has a petition which I offer to sign but since I’m not resident there is no point. I say, rather futilely, that many if not most people in England feel the same and wish them luck. Like dissidents seen once in Moscow they make me feel both comfort-loving and inadequate.

  3 December. My old school, Leeds Modern (subsequently Lawnswood) School, is about to be demolished, new premises having been built on the playing fields in front of it. The new school doesn’t look much of a building, whereas the old school is a handsome example of its period (c.1930). Its demolition illustrates almost to the minute what Brendan Gill, late of the New Yorker, christened the ‘Gordon Curve’ after the preservationist Douglas Gordon of Baltimore. ‘This posits that a building is at its maximum moment of approbation when it is brand new, that it then goes steadily downhill and at 70 reaches its nadir. If you can get a building past that sticky moment, then the curve begins to go up again very rapidly until at 100 it is back where it was in year one. A 100-year-old building is much more likely to be saved than a 70-year-old one.’

  Nowadays presenting itself as sensitive to its surroundings and careful of its inheritance, Leeds has been happily demolishing decent architecture for most of my life. Still, all it will mean now is that in order to avoid passing the scene of the crime I’ll not take the Otley road out of Leeds but instead go past Kirkstall Abbey, which Leeds would probably have demolished too had Thomas Cromwell not saved them the trouble.

  5 December. My fears as to my celebrity rating earlier in the year are happily allayed this morning by an invitation to appear on Through the Keyhole, Sir David Frost and Paradine Productions’ series for BBC1. This is not, the letter assures me, Sir David in interrogatory mode. Gravitas has been laid aside and when he comes through the keyhole in the person of his proxy, Loyd Grossman, it’s ‘just a bit of fun and promotion’. Though previous guests have included Eartha Kitt, Gloria Gaynor and Neil Sedaka, I have to say no and write explaining how, as so often happens in our wacky showbiz world, in the same post came another offer, the chance of some temping as a tripe dresser in Hull. Showcase though Through the Keyhole surely is, most reasonable people would, I think, agree that the latter is a more tempting proposition. I send my regards to Sir David and to Mr Grossman, whom I have never met but whose sauces often enliven my lonely dish of spaghetti.

  2003

  1 January. A Christmas card from Eric Korn:

  This is the one about Jesus

  And his father who constantly sees us

  Like CCTV from above

  But they call it heavenly love;

  And the other a spook or a bird

  Or possible merely a Word.

  Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinity

  By this highly dysfunctional Trinity!

  10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening again. This is presumably the origin of Larkin’s remark that before he died he fully expected to hear ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ recited by a thousand Girl Guid
es in the Royal Albert Hall.

  12 January. Read Macbeth for maybe the second time in my life (and I don’t think I’ve ever seen it). Much of the language is as opaque as I generally find in Shakespeare but I’m struck by how soon he gets down to business, so that within a scene the play is at full gallop. No messing about with Lady M. either. No sooner does she learn Duncan is going to visit than she decides on the murder. Oddities are Macduff ’s abandonment of wife and family in order, seemingly, to save his own skin, though the scene in which his wife is discussing this with Ross is unbearably tense, the audience knowing she is about to be murdered. The ending is as abrupt as the beginning, with not much in the way of a dying fall from Malcolm, who’s straight away off to Scone for his coronation. Most relevant bit:

  … Alas, poor country,

  Almost afraid to know itself …

  … where violent sorrow seems

  A modern ecstasy.

  14 January. When I am occasionally stumped on a grammatical point, having no English grammar, I consult a copy of Kennedy’s Latin primer, filched more than thirty years ago from Giggleswick School. It’s only today that I notice that some schoolboy half a lifetime ago has painstakingy0 conveted The Revised Latin Primer into ‘The Revised Man Eating Primer’. Perhaps it is the same boy who has inscribed across one of the pages: ‘G. H. Williams, Lancs and England’.

  22 January. Watching Footballers’ Wives, I see among the production credits the name Sue de Beauvoir.

  I do hope she’s a relation.

  1 February, Yorkshire. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.’s shop when a clock chimed. I’ve never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full Westminster chime, was so appealing that we talked about it on the way home and later asked Mrs H. to put it on one side. Today we collect it and it looks every bit as dull as we remember, but now on the table behind the living-room door it seems very much at home. And the sound is of such celestial sweetness that when it does chime it’s hard not to smile.

  9 February. To Widford in the Windrush valley near Burford for a second look at the church built on the site of a Roman villa, the mosaic floor (now covered over) once the floor of the chancel. There are box pews, aged down to a silvery grey, a three-decker pulpit, Jacobean altar rails and the remains of whitewash-blurred medieval wall-paintings. It’s an immensely appealing place, not unlike Lead in Yorkshire or Heath near Ludlow. Good graves on the north side, some for a family called Secker, who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.

  The Windrush tumbles through the weir on this mild winter morning, but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II’s favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.

  15 February. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the tube as crowded as the rush hour, then walk up Charing Cross Road to where the anti-war march is streaming across Cambridge Circus. There seems no structure to it, ahead of us some SWP banners but marching, or rather strolling, beside them the Surrey Heath Liberal Democrats. Scattered among the more seasoned marchers are many unlikely figures, two women in front of us in fur hats and bootees looking as if they’re just off to the WI. I’m an unlikely figure, too, of course, as the last march I went on was in 1956 and that was an accident: I was standing in Broad Street in Oxford watching the Suez demonstration go by when a friend pulled me in.

  Today it’s bitterly cold, particularly since the march keeps stopping or is stopped by the police, who seem bored that they’ve got so little to do, the mood of the march overwhelmingly friendly and domestic and hardly political at all. I’d have quite liked something to march to, even (however inappropriately) ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, but the nearest we get is (to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine’) ‘We all live in a terrorist regime’, which isn’t a chant I feel entirely able to endorse. At Albemarle Street we split off and go and have lunch at Fenwick’s, having, I suppose, walked a third of the route.

  On the TV news the police estimate the numbers at 750,000, the organisers at two million, the true figure presumably somewhere in between. Whether anyone has ever nailed the police on why they routinely overestimate the numbers for demonstrations they approve of (like the so-called Liberty and Livelihood March) while marking down more dissident movements, I don’t know. They would presumably deny it as vigorously as their not infrequent throttling of black suspects.

  26 February. For much of last year the post in Gloucester Crescent was delivered by a delightful French girl, Stephanie Tunc; blonde and pretty, she was chatty, funny and also very efficient. Unique among the French of my acquaintance, she didn’t like France one bit and pulled a face if you told her you were going on holiday there. Before Christmas she and her sister took off for South America and this last week the market men in Inverness Street got a postcard from Stephanie in Peru, which they pinned up on one of the stalls.

  Then yesterday the new postman told us that having run out of money in Peru she and her sister had come back from South America to Miami. Sunbathing on the beach they had been run over by a police car, which had then reversed over them. Stephanie was dead and her sister in a critical condition.

  ‘Add something,’ I note as I transcribe this entry. But there is nothing to add. A lovely, lively girl is senselessly dead. That’s all.

  8 March. A phrase often in the mouth of Bush and Blair is ‘Our patience is exhausted.’ It’s a phrase that is seldom used by anyone who had much patience in the first place; Hitler was quite fond of it.

  14 March. To Oxford to vote for the chancellor, though it doesn’t seem very long since I did the same for Roy Jenkins. At Bodley I’m overtaken by A. N. Wilson, who’s brought his gown in a Sainsbury’s bag, though it’s part of Roy Jenkins’s legacy that gowns are no longer required on such occasions. This doesn’t stop many of the voters swishing about in them for the benefit of their families, who are then left at the door of the Divinity Schools while the graduates go in to participate in the mystery.

  Not much of a mystery now, though, as in another of Jenkins’s reforms there is no ceremony at all and certainly no vice-chancellor enthroned in Convocation waiting to take your voting paper and lift his hat as Patrick Neill tipped his twenty years ago. Now Neill is himself a candidate in what feels more like a local council election, with trestle tables, ushers and the proctors taking the votes. One of Tom Bingham’s proposers, I vote for him and no one else, the single transferable vote (another Jenkins inspiration) likely, it’s thought, to favour Bingham’s chief rival, Chris Patten. At the table I hand in my paper to one of the junior proctors, a weary-looking don who, in what is perhaps a ritual humiliation, demands some evidence of identification. I hand over my Camden bus pass, which he scrutinises as grimly as an Albanian border guard, even checking the likeness. Andrew Wilson sails through unchallenged.

  I walk back through the streets of Oxford and as always I have a sense of being shut out and that there is something going on here that I’m not a part of; not that I was a part of it even when I was a part of it.

  16 March. One of the lowest moments this year was Tony Blair and Jack Straw misrepresenting the French and German position on Iraq in order to encourage xenophobia and get more support from the Murdoch papers.

  17 March. A Bin Laden associate reported as being ‘quizzed’ by American agents in Pakistan. Were suspects ‘quizzed’ by the Gestapo, I wonder. Other people torture; we quiz.

  19 March. What is particularly bitter is to hear one’s own moderate, pragmatic and indeed patriotic sentiments in the mouth of the Foreign Minister of Germany, Joschka Fischer, while our own prime minister parrots the American line, a case, I suppose, of Speak for England, Jos
chka. Meanwhile the troops get ready to ‘rock and roll’, as they call it this time; last time it was ‘shooting fish in a barrel’.

  21 March. The first soldiers killed. If our army had been made up of conscripts no one would have tolerated this war for a moment. However much these are ‘our boys’, the war can only be waged because the US and the UK have armies of mercenaries.

  24 March. G. was on the bus en route for Camden when a woman opposite leaned across and said: ‘I suppose you think I’ve got this sore throat because I’ve had a cock in my mouth? Actually I’ve been in Germany, but I wasn’t going to let them rearrange my face.’

  6 April. All of Rupert Murdoch’s 175 papers are in favour of the war, though he always claims that his editors are independent and decide for themselves. I wonder whether the Rupert Murdoch Professorship at Oxford maintains the same fiction. I know I’m a bore on the subject and thought to be an unworldly fool, but so long as it bears his name this grubby appointment is a continuing stain on the reputation of the university that solicited it.

  10 April. George Fenton has been in Berlin talking to some of the Berlin Philharmonic, with whom he is due to record and conduct his Blue Planet music. They go out to supper in a restaurant in what was East Berlin, a vast converted warehouse where the food is superb. The Germans are all very nice and hugely taken with recent events: ‘The world has turned upside down. The best golfer in the world is black; the best rapper in the world is white; and now there is a war and, guess what, Germany doesn’t want to be in it.’

  The sense of impotence is what one never gets used to, of being led into ignominy and not being able to do anything about it except march and, one day, vote.

  22 April, Yorkshire. Drive up towards Kirkby Lonsdale then along Wan-dales Lane, the old Roman road from Burrow to Sedbergh. Walking down one of the green lanes below the fells we come across a fold with a stone stile and in the centre of the fold a boulder so huge it looks like an ancient feature of the landscape, walled for its own protection; an erratic perhaps, carried down and deposited here by the melting glaciers of the Ice Age and then become the centre of some ancient ritual.