Untold Stories
It’s a lovely day and strolling along the lane towards Leck we find a similar fold with another boulder and a hundred yards along a third and a fourth. All are neat, grazed by sheep which have access through a cattle creep under the wall, and all have stiles. They seem ancient, fit snugly into the landscape and are immensely pleasing to look at, some of the pleasure admittedly being in their discovery and their mystery. Are the boulders prehistoric? Or stations along what is plainly an ancient track, some of which is banked up and possibly Roman?
We turn back and drive down to the nursery at Brownth waite, which is attached to an old-fashioned farm where there are hens and their chickens scuttering about, sheep and today a huge turkey. It’s a farm out of a children’s story, kept by a nice oldish woman and her son, both expert gardeners, their nursery full of rare plants, and ending in a gate to their own garden, which overlooks the valley.
We ask the son about the sheepfolds and the son smiles indulgently at the thought that they might be ancient monuments. They’re actually part of an installation or a series of installations by Andy Goldsworthy, who put up a hundred or so similar folds as Cumbria’s Millennium Project. It was an expensive do, costing £500,000 or so, and involved shifting the boulders down from the fells with earthmovers besides building the folds that surrounded them. An additional burden, I would have thought, was likely to have been the scepticism of the local communities that were home to these ‘sculptures’, though nobody could object that they’re not wholly in the tradition of the countryside in which they’ve been sited. However the only criticism our market gardener has is that Goldsworthy refused to allow any guide to be printed to the location of the folds, the public meant to come across them by accident just as we did and presumably to ask the same kind of questions – who made them, what for and when?
28 April, Yorkshire. Our clock has been losing time, so this morning we pack it up ready to go to Settle to be overhauled. Like a dog being taken to the vet it seems to know where it’s going and as soon as it’s in the box begins to chime, chimes all the way down in the car and only stops when we find that Mr Barraclough, whose retirement job it is, doesn’t have a clock surgery today. So now it’s back home, though still in its box, sulking perhaps, but occasionally giving a plaintive chime.
3 May, Yorkshire. The cherry tree that my father planted just by the back door some thirty years ago is now not much more than a stump. It was radically pruned a few years back in an effort to cure the blackfly that annually infested it, making the leaves clumped and scorched like burned fists. Even then, with so few leaves, it still got infested, though it was the only tree in the garden that I was ever driven to spray. A few years ago, in desperation, I planted a vine (Vitis coignetiae) just over the wall in A.’s garden (and so in full sun) and began to train it over what was left of the cherry tree. It flourished, so much so that it has covered the stump with its broad heart-shaped leaves, the cherry is virtually obliterated and the tree now looks like a mop-headed catalpa. It’s one of my few ventures into creative gardening and the only time I’ve had foresight enough to devise a remedy for a problem and the patience to see it carried through.
One drawback is that with so few leaves there is very little cherry blossom, but this year the coignetiae has compensated for that, too, as its newly emergent leaves are a darkish pink on the front and white at the back so that they look as much like blossom as leaves. It reminds me of a Claude Rogers painting I once tried to buy and now here it is outside the back door.
15 May. After supper we go down to look at the Titian exhibition, now in its last few days at the National Gallery. It’s ten-fifteen and the doors have only just closed so that the rooms still smell of the hordes that have been passing through; there are screwed-up tickets and abandoned programmes on the floor with, a few feet above the clutter, these sublime paintings.
As usual in galleries I feel inadequate and somehow ungiving and am quicker through the rooms than R., like a child wanting to see what’s next, though this means, too, that I can keep having a sit down as I wait for him to catch up. Some of the wonder the paintings inspire is at Titian’s technical accomplishment: his rendering of stuff, the fur and the fabric and the raised and knotted embroideries on the fabric, all of which melt into a brown mess on close examination, and only achieve form when one steps back. Oddly favourite is a portrait of the (unappealing) Pope Paul III in a faded rose-coloured cape enthroned on a worn velvet chair, the supreme pontiff just a lay figure there to demonstrate the painter’s skill with his materials. Next to him the irresistible portrait of the twelve-year-old Ranuccio Farnese and another of Clarissa Strozzi that could almost be a Goya.
Least impressive is the much advertised reconstruction of Alfonso d’Este’s camerino which doesn’t work because a) the room is too large and b) certain elements are missing and c) the NG’s Bacchus and Ariadne apart, I don’t altogether like the paintings. I don’t care for his last pictures much either, while recognising how (in every sense) far-sighted they are. The Flaying of Marsyas is a disturbing picture, the detachment of the satyrs watching the torture of their fellow creature chilling; Marsyas’ upended eye, blank with a horror beyond feeling or fixed in death, is done with a single dot of white paint, a dot I’d like to see enlarged or in detail.
Now it’s a quarter of an hour before midnight and we walk back through the dark and deserted gallery, the feeling of privilege we had when we were first able to do this ten years ago never lost; it’s the greatest and most tangible honour I have ever been given.
Lying in bed, though, I think of the time I invited Alec Guinness to go round with me. Having given him careful instructions which door to come to, I waited in the lobby until well past the appointed time. Never late, he eventually arrived cross and out of sorts, claiming I had sent him to the wrong door. I hadn’t, but I should have known that any attempt to return his always munificent hospitality would end in tears. He so disliked being beholden to anyone that he was bound to fuck things up if you ever tried to give him a treat. Though whether he knew this (or knew it about himself) was never plain.
26 May, Yorkshire. A dullish day, though fine enough to garden, which we do until, around five, we take some rubbish down to the dump in Settle. It used to be on the edge of a disused quarry and reminded me of the place where the Virgin Mary appeared to St Bernadette at Lourdes, as seen in The Song of Bernadette, a film which terrified me as a child. Now it’s in Settle itself, an immaculately kept installation below the railway with a series of skips all lined up and with steps and a platform as for the launching of a ship rather than the filling of a skip. The man in charge has a commodious hut, where he may very well live, and is cheerful and helpful and this, plus the fact that disencumbering oneself of rubbish always lifts the heart, makes most people come away in a cheerful frame of mind. It isn’t all rubbish, though, and today as I junk some of the mysterious accoutrements that always come with a vacuum cleaner I spot some quite ancient-looking decorated wood. Alas, one of the rules of the establishment (displayed on a painted board) is that one cannot go through the contents of the skip, so I have to leave my fancied medieval panels to their fate.
Afterwards we go the back way along the Feizor road, stopping to walk up the green lane towards the Celtic wall. The lane is lined with patches of water avens, the dusky purples and pinks in its strawberryish flower growing in among the spokes of yellow wood spurge, an arrangement more effective than anything you’d get at Pulbrook and Gould.
29 May. That Tony Blair (as today talking to troops in Basra) will often say ‘I honestly believe’ rather than just ‘I believe’ says all that needs to be said. ‘To be honest’ another of his frank-seeming phrases.
11 June. Why isn’t more fuss made over Charles Causley? Looking through his Collected Poems to copy out his ‘Ten Types of Hospital Visitor’, I dip into some of his other poems, so many of them vivid and memorable. Well into his eighties, he must be one of the most distinguished poets writing today (if he still is).
But why does nobody say so and celebrate him while he’s still around? Hurrah for Charles Causley is what I say.*
23 June. The woollen hats worn by boys nowadays often take the form of medieval basinets or such helmets as soldiers wear in a French Book of Hours. A boy comes by this morning with just such a helmet looking as if he might be coming off duty from the foot of the Cross.
25 July. John Schlesinger dies. The obituaries are more measured than he would have liked, the many undistinguished films he made later in life set against A Kind of Loving and Sunday, Bloody Sunday. He wasn’t by nature a journeyman film-maker, taking whatever came along, but was forced into this way of working by having three houses to keep up, one of them in Hollywood, and always leading quite an expensive life. What none of the obituaries says is what a joy he was to work with, though no one had a shorter fuse, besides being wonderfully funny, particularly about his sex life.
Short, solid and fat, John looked like the screen Nazi he had once or twice played in his early days as an actor; he was a scaled-down Francis L. Sullivan, managing nevertheless to be surprisingly successful in finding partners. Not invariably, though. Sometime in the 1970s he was in a New York bath house where the practice was for someone wanting a partner to leave the cubicle door open. This Schlesinger accordingly did and lay monumentally on the table under his towel waiting for someone to pass by. A youth duly did and indeed ventured in, but seeing this mound of flesh laid out on the slab recoiled, saying: ‘Oh, please. I couldn’t. You’ve got to be kidding.’ Schlesinger closed his eyes and said primly: ‘A simple “No” will suffice.’
6 August. Driving along the back road from Muker to Kirkby Stephen, we spot down in the valley another of Andy Goldsworthy’s circular sheepfolds and a mile or two further on a complex of folds that at first we take to be a development of his art but which on closer examination turns out to be the real thing: a series of three or four walled enclosures set round a one-chamber single-storey cottage used for dipping and shearing sheep. And still used, seemingly, the long stone-lined pit brimming with evil-looking oily dip, a ragged fleece hanging by the wall and the ground carpeted in flocks and curds of wool. It’s a sinister place and much as it must always have been, an old board blocking one of the cattle creeps hinged with scraps of ancient leather. That it can at first sight be mistaken for one of Goldsworthy’s installations says much for the authenticity of his work.
14 August. Another death: Cedric Price, for many years the partner of Eleanor Bron and an inspirational figure to many architects. He was a figure of eighteenth-century exuberance with views on conservation that were shockingly at variance with received wisdom. Cedric didn’t believe in preserving buildings that had outlived their usefulness; he would have made a good character in a modern-day Ibsen play. At Cambridge as an undergraduate he was once in the Rex cinema when the adverts came on, including one for Kellogg’s Ricicles. ‘Rice is nice,’ went the jingle, ‘but Ricicles are twicicles as nicicles.’ Whereupon Cedric boomed out: ‘But testicles are besticles.’
By their jokes ye shall know them.
The elegance of the black building crew up the street is a constant delight. Today one comes down the street in a lemon-coloured shirt, his head wrapped in a bandanna of matching shade and a white dust mask pushed up above his forehead. He is like a wonderfully exotic rhinoceros, but with a grace and self-assurance that wouldn’t be out of place on the catwalk.
24 August. Our GNER train from Leeds stops at Retford, where passengers are bussed down the AI to Grantham, the line between being under repair. It’s around seven and the clouds are beginning to break up and the journey is redeemed by a vision on the eastern horizon of the towers of Lincoln Cathedral, caught in the late light of the setting sun. It’s the kind of thing that would have immensely excited me as a boy (and quite excites me now). I’ve driven up and down this road hundreds of times and never seen it before, but that’s because in a coach you’re hoisted above the hedge and given an artist’s prospect of the countryside.
28 August. T. Blair claims to the Hutton Inquiry that if the BBC had been right and the Iraq dossier had been ‘sexed up’ he would have resigned. This is presumably intended to pre-empt any calls for his resignation at the conclusion of the Inquiry, which, whether it reports so or not, has conclusively shown that this is exactly what happened to the Iraq dossier. I suppose ‘sexed up’ is a euphemism for ‘hardened up’ (‘stiffened up’ even), fastidiousness about language not being one of the characteristics of Blair and Co.; one of the many distasteful aspects of the whole affair is that anyone (Lord Hutton included) engaging with the issues has to do so in the language dictated by Number 10.
14 September. Finish reading Toast, Nigel Slater’s memoir of his childhood. It’s such an enjoyable book I regret reading it so quickly, bolting it in fact, the metaphor appropriate. Food apart, it’s also a very sexy book. The young Nigel must have had some sort of glint in his eye because he’s always getting shown a bit of the action until at fourteen he starts spending his evenings hanging round the local lay-by spying on couples having it away. Life finally takes off when he fucks a girl-friend with his best friend watching from the other bed. An idyllic childhood I would have said. The rest is history. Or cookery.
25 September. To Folkestone to speak at the Saga-sponsored literary festival. We have tea at the seafront hotel and sitting on the balcony in the warm sunshine I reflect on how seldom it is that I see the sea. The tide is in and the waves are breaking only a yard or two from the road and although it’s quite busy there is something restorative about sitting here, watching the brown waves edge up the narrow beach. On the horizon to the south is the power station at Dungeness and beyond it, I imagine, Derek Jarman’s now much visited cottage, trips to it one of the features of the festival. There are three or four ships motionless on the horizon, putting one in mind of Larkin’s ‘To the Sea’, though there is no ‘miniature gaiety of seasides’ here, just the occasional grim jogger toiling along the front.
Saga itself turns out to be a tall modern block set in a steep park above the sea and alongside the offices an even more modern auditorium up to which several senior citizens are already labouring. The lavishness of the set-up – the vast terrace outside the auditorium above the sea, the spacious park and the many-storeyed office block – combine to make it slightly sinister, as if the ostensible purpose of the organisation, the interests and welfare of old (er) people, is just a front as it would be in a Bond film, say, a cover for international criminality with a hatch opening in the cliff-side parkland to reveal a hangar humming with the mechanism of some project that will take over the world. And all the thousands of employees are old. As the audience certainly are at my meeting, though very amiable and jolly. At the finish I am presented with a stick of Folkestone rock the size of a barber’s pole, sign books for an hour and then get the train back; home by ten-thirty.
30 September. A memorial service for John Schlesinger. It’s in the synagogue opposite Lord’s and though it’s Liberal Jewish I don’t feel it’s quite liberal enough for me to tell the bath-house story. Still, there are a lot of laughs in the other speeches, so I do feel able to give John’s own account of his investiture with the CBE. John was so aware of his sexuality that he managed to detect a corresponding awareness in the unlikeliest of places. On this occasion HMQ had a momentary difficulty getting the ribbon round his sizeable neck, whereupon she said, ‘Now, Mr Schlesinger, we must try and get this straight,’ the emphasis according to John very much hers and which he chose to take as both a coded acknowledgement of his situation and a seal of royal approval.
4 October. To Ely to look at the cathedral, last visited all of twenty-five years ago when the town was still a lost place like Beverley or Cartmel. Nowadays, like so much of East Anglia, it thrives and today is the Harvest Festival. At the west end of the nave is a pen of sheep and a few roosters crowing their heads off and in odd corners all over the cathedral little heaps of baked beans, cling peaches and custard powde
r, the staples of such occasions, and which, as Clive James noted, will later be distributed among the poor and devout old ladies who contributed them in the first place. A truer symbol of the locality’s harvest would, I suppose, be a sheaf of emails or a roll of print-outs, electronics round here more profitable than agriculture.
The sheep attracting most of the visitors, the rest of the cathedral is blessedly quiet and there is much to see. Our favourites are a little eccentric, with mine the late fifteenth-century cloister arcades outside the south door, bricked up presumably at the Dissolution, and R.’ s a fragment of wooden tracery from the prior’s study and the framework of a door that once housed the library cupboard for the monks. But there’s much more spectacular stuff, even though the methodical iconoclasm of East Anglian puritanism is more in evidence here than in York, say, with even the little fragment of glass preserved and restored in one of the cloister windows having the Virgin’s face scratched out. Every statue and saint is headless or faceless, with the mutilations in the Lady Chapel looking so fresh they might have been done by the vandals of today.
The shop is doing a brisk trade in tea towels, table mats and all the merchandise that were I Jesus I’d be overturning. And, as always, no decent postcards, the want of a proper series of black and white reproductions of architectural details such as you find in French cathedrals an indictment of … whom? The cathedral chapter? The dean? Unenterprising photographers? Or just, as Lindsay Anderson would say, ‘England!’
Why the west tower is not one of the wonders of European architecture I don’t understand. It’s as extraordinary and asymmetrical as Gaudí and a staggering achievement for its time, every bit as astonishing as Pisa, which its arcades recall, though lacking the lean that would put it in the big league and have people gawping (which of course I wouldn’t want anyway). ‘Oh, grumble, grumble,’ says R.