Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (72 page)

Then across London to dinner with Richard Seymour and his wife at his little terraced cottage on the main road at Richmond. The smell of the trees and the countryside and the glimpse of the river’s bend are wonderful and remind me how rough our part of north London is.

Look through the
Mirrorstone
dummy – see most of Alan’s drawings for the first time. The holograms are much smaller than I expected and not really as comprehensive a part of the book as I’d imagined.

Foresee the dangers of the Maschler approach. He has so sold the book on the new techniques that I think there is a distinct danger that the hype could rebound on him.

A sour, gusty morning of continuous rain. Shop for food, read the papers, then across the road to the Oak Village residents’ ‘Spring Lunch’.

I meet the new people from No. 1 Julia Street. He’s called Denis, which must have given him a few uncomfortable moments when Helen’s been out at night shouting for the cat!

Find the [
East of Ipswich
] unit in Walberswick rehearsing the gents scene, with the car. Tendency of John Nettleton to huff and puff in comic fashion. Suggest to Tristram that John deliver the line with less effort. This he does on the third take and it sounds much better.

A local, with rich, upper-class accent, cycles by – ‘Out of the way, you
bloody
people!’

I am at the location, right in front of Glan-Y-Don,
¹³²
at eight o’clock.

Elinor [our production manager] and her local team are deploying
extras along the beach. Occasionally they have to be moved back as the tide reaches its height. But someone seems to have boobed and the tide, which is supposed to turn at nine, rises remorselessly and seems to delight in hurling the odd wave at any extra we place, and at every camera position we set up.

We keep retreating, then re-setting, and the sea calms, then out of nowhere a line of salt-white foam hurtles across the beach, forcing everyone to leap out of the way – with varying degrees of success.

Various shots around the house with Edward Rawle-Hicks – who is daily becoming more secure and solid in the part. Rather a poignant moment as I pass Glan-Y-Don this morning on my way to its film equivalent and there are the Palins of the 1980’s having breakfast.

Send a Stanley Spencer postcard of Southwold beach 50 years ago to Puttnam to tell him that our lunch plans of two and a half years ago are becoming film!

The catering truck is parked behind the toilets at the far side of the pier – one of the least salubrious spots in all of Southwold. Here the unit spreads itself beside the dog-shit, the oil and the remains of scattered dry bread crusts which even the seagulls ignore.

At home William greets me with news of 94% in his chemistry mocks – best in the year – and Rachel has one of the leads in the Gospel Oak fourth-year play. Tom has been learning how to defend himself with a short stick and is covered in bruises.

Open one or two of my pile of letters. Someone wants me to do
The Missionary
as a stage musical.

After lunch, in an upstairs room amongst the narrow bedrooms of the Crown [Hotel], Ken Pearce [the editor] shows the first rushes I’ve seen. Very encouraging. Every beach shot is highlighted for me by the wind, which blows at the hair and the ladies’ dresses and tugs at the windbreak and seems to epitomise east-coast holidays.

Bundle things together and set off about midday. I feel tired and not particularly happy, as if some dark cloud is temporarily settled over me. Very curious feeling. Vestiges of shyness. Or is it just that a film unit is a potent and demanding entity and you’re either part of it completely or just a visitor? I’m uneasily in between.

They’re at The Mount.

Inside ‘Tregarron’, the combined efforts of Sally’s design team, the costume, actors and actions are very satisfying to behold. It’s the ‘white soups’ scene, with the room silent save for the joyless scraping of soup bowls. We’ve put one of the ladies – Miss Chatty or Miss Oliphant – in a neck brace, after seeing so many of them around Southwold.

To the location early.

Innes is quietly putting pressure on me to write ‘another version’ of Graham Crowden’s sex-talk speech, omitting words like ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’. He is worried about ‘losing some of our audience too early on’. I refuse to write an alternative because, as I say to Innes, ‘I know that’s the one you’ll use’.

Quick look at rushes. Leave Tristram to go to Aldeburgh for Dame Janet Baker and dress and drive out to Tinker Patterson’s house on the marshes. Tinker, Norman Parkinson’s favourite male model, had encountered me in The Mount, which he now owns, grasped my hand warmly and said how delighted he was to find another Old Salopian and would I come round to dinner so he could tell me stories of School House in 1944?

Margot, Tinker’s dynamic German wife, has just returned from the Continent – stealing menus for her new patisserie/coffee house on North Parade. An act of purest optimism, but she says there are a number of new, young professional people coming to Southwold who will patronise it.

Tinker tells me of a prep school master who used to come around and check the boys’ hand positions before they went to bed. ‘Hands Up North’ he would say, which meant that they should point their hands palm upward and lay them on the pillow. ‘Hands Down South’ meant only depravity.

We have a simple supper – ‘You’re talking about school, so I’m afraid it’s school food,’ says Margot, modestly.

Tinker gets out school photos and tells me of boys like Spurway and Cameron and how he’d once been asked to eat food off the floor. He clearly loved his Salopian days and wants to know how much it had changed in the 13 years between his leaving and my arriving.

Then we get on to talking about East and West Germany and how the Baltic Coast is like Suffolk and how soap-powder is still considered a luxury item for Margot’s cousins in the East. Tinker tells how Margot’s father – a Stuka pilot in the war – wore an Iron Cross at a recent posh dinner at Fishmongers’ Hall – much to Tinker’s amusement.

A beautiful and tranquil sky as I leave.

We finish at 6.35 beside the lighthouse in Stradbroke Road. Nineteen days and four nights, 23 shooting days altogether.

Celebrate the end in the Sole Bay Inn with a pint of Adnams with Nat [Crosby, the cameraman] and Innes and Tristram and others. A moment to savour. The relief, the feeling of achievement and the sympathetic surroundings, the bond of the team, all combine in a low-key but incredibly satisfying moment. Eventually Tristram and I are left talking as everyone leaves, as if in a curtain call at the theatre.

I have my reservations still about some of the sequences, one or two moments of performance and amount of cover left un-shot, but, all in all, I’ve never felt something done as close to the way I wanted it done as this.

At eight we repair – Tristram to the Crown, myself to Sunset House – for a bath and brush-up before the end-of-filming party at nine.

We’re in the Upper Room [at the Crown Hotel] and music is already blaring out – 50’s hits. Innes makes a short speech and thanks me for ‘introducing us all to Southwold’. Granny sits happily in the midst of it all, attracting, as if by some perverse magic, all the tallest men in the room, who have to bend double or sometimes even treble to listen.

Go to see the latest possible Python property purchase. This is a collection of buildings off Delancey Street in Camden Town.

The layout of the odd assortment of buildings around a central ‘courtyard’ feels just right for our purposes. There’s a very good space for André, promising surroundings for Anne and Steve and the office, as well as small, low buildings ideal for viewing theatres, production offices and editing rooms.

TG scrambles, burrows, prowls, plans, elaborates. He responds so unfailingly positively to life that all I can do is watch and marvel. TJ has a black eye. He went to the help of a black man who had been nearly run down by a car in South London and was punched in the eye by one of the assailants – who were white.

We have tea and citron pressés in the Delancey Street Café and discuss next moves. Very positive feelings all round, but the asking price of £420,000 is considered excessive. TJ counsels an offer of £300,000. Anne feels she can start no lower than £360,000.

Have officially left Barclays Bank after 25 years. First Coutts cheque signed today.

Start the day with a huge surge of optimism for the great-grandfather, Brita Gallagher story, encouraged by a
Listener
book review of
The Tender Passion
, a survey of Victorian attitudes to love, sex, attraction, infatuation, etc.

For an hour or so I’m convinced that at last this is the answer to screenplay problems. But, as I run in late morning in order to think over the idea, various difficulties cloud my previous optimism. Chiefest of these is that, were I to play the main man, I should be casting myself as a straightforward, sexually-involved clergyman, and that has a familiar ring to it. So I return, dripping sweat in this high humidity, with only the frustration of another clear path ahead blocked.

Anne rings to discuss how she should approach purchase of the Delancey Street complex. She thinks the seller will definitely
not
budge below £400,000 (he’s shifted already from 420G, I point out). The more I think about the place, the more positive I become. It
is
right, somehow, and I would hate to lose it. Anne decides to go back (she feels much as I do), with a ‘final’ of £380,000.

Our offer for 68a Delancey Street (£395,000) has been accepted!

Chilly, windy, overcast morning for the tenth Oak Village Street Party. Miss the lunch as I have to go to Harrods for a book-signing. Read some limericks to a polite, but bewildered group of shoppers in the children’s book department, then sign for an hour and a half and shift 120 books.

Last week someone sold seven in two hours, so I feel I’ve earned my champagne and smoked salmon sandwiches in an office looking out over Knightsbridge. Harrods, like the transatlantic airlines, has suffered considerably from Americans’ fear of Europe since the Libyan bombing.

Back to the street party. Dance, flinging myself into some R&R with Helen. To bed at half past two for the second night running, after enjoying late-night chat with Mr Brown on the corner, who told me that I ‘should have been born an Irishman’. High compliment indeed!

The morning not a good one. As time drifts by, I resort to all the writer’s time-wasting devices – walking downstairs, making phone calls that aren’t vital, pottering, reading snippets of other works – and all the time hoping that, like Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ last night,
¹³³
something would strike and show me the future.

I read some of
The Tender Passion
and also some more of great-grandfather’s notebooks (he did mention young women, or just women, an awful lot), but by the time one o’clock comes I am not much further on with a decision.

Relieved to be temporarily released from my frustration, I go to Odette’s for lunch with Eric I. He gives me some encouragement, partly by telling me that he’s been writing very badly recently, and partly by a very sympathetic response to the Victorian idea.

By 6.30 I’m at the Commons to meet David Mitchell, the Transport Minister (Railways). He takes me to the Commons Bar. No-one else I know there except Roy Jenkins at a table by the window. Amidst the
almost suffocating leather and oak panelling, have a beer – the Minister a tomato juice.

He advises me to feel free at any time to ask him or his department for any help with facts and figures and he assures me that he keeps telling the DTP that we are not ‘dangerous’.

Drive over to the Riverside Studios by Hammersmith Bridge to see Max Wall (now 78) in
Krapp’s Last Tape
with TG, Helen and Maggie. Max is marvellous. He moves carefully and precisely, his timing and eye for detail are exact and delightful. Maybe it’s because, as TG says later, Max
is
Krapp. Audience predominantly young.

Afterwards we stay for a drink with him. It’s as if no years have passed since Pembroke Castle and the rain in summer ’76. Max still drinks a pint of Guinness, slowly. He remembers
Jabberwocky
line for line and we talk nostalgically of John Le Mesurier and others he remembers with generous enjoyment, and how he used to keep his teeth in a little bag at his belt. He talks quite cheerfully about his various ‘conditions’. ‘Fallen arsehole,’ he confides, out of the girls’ earshot.

JC rings from a hospital bed where he’s having a cartilage operation. The goldfish film seems set for May/June ’87.

Robert H comes round for dinner. Talk over Robert’s plans for various theatre groups he’s trying to help, but I resist his pressure to commit Gumby funds. It’s not so much the money as the fact that I have too many fingers in too many pies. I must reduce my involvements or they will at worst swamp me and at best become a blur of half-participation.

Tell him about the Victorian film. His advice is that I should write the Edward Palin character for another actor than myself, someone physically different – only then will I break away from the good old
Missionary
types.

At 2.30 to Rachel’s classroom for the last progress report on any of our children at Gospel Oak. Mrs Deadman says Rachel combines the best of
Tom and William, that she has great potential – she was one of two girls who did not drop a point in her maths test – she is sensitive and easily bruised, but has developed a toughness and determination which will carry her through.