Murderers and Other Friends (28 page)

It's no secret that Harold's theatrical sense of aggression sometimes explodes into real life drama. It's less well known that he is kind and generous, loyal to the friends he helps in all sorts of unheard of ways, seeing them out of difficulties or getting their poems printed. On the morning after dramatic and seemingly serious quarrels he is a great one for sending flowers.

After the season of plays at the Lyric we did a revue (a vanished form of entertainment, greatly to be regretted) called
One to Another,
which was largely written by Harold, N.F. Simpson and me. Harold's sketches were unforgettable and greatly applauded, in contrast to
The Birthday Party
which, with the notable exception of Harold Hobson, had been quite misunderstood by the critics. As a trio we wrote an evening of three plays, which were also done by Michael Codron at the Arts Theatre and the Criterion. It was during rehearsals for this triple bill that the late Emlyn Williams said to me, as the oldest writer present, ‘Well, you just got into the New Wave as the tube doors were closing!'

In all these years Harold seemed quite unpolitical, as far removed from the business of party politics as his hero and mentor Samuel Beckett. The only event which might be called political, and which moved him to anger, so far as I can remember, was the fact that his son was expected to take part in religious teaching at school. Later, I think much later, he became concerned with American imperialism in South America. He was also
convinced
that in Britain police horses are trained to shit on demonstrators. The aggression of dictatorships and power politics had been strongly confined in the claustrophobic world of his plays; later his feelings became more widely diffused and, perhaps, less focused.

It was the end of the eighties, the world had changed, and those headily optimistic days when we had done our plays together had receded as deeply into the shadows of history as the fighting forties or the tinkling twenties. Penny and I went out to dinner with Harold and Antonia Pinter and I happened to regret the apparent absence of left-wing journalists; even old lefties such as Woodrow Wyatt and Paul Johnson had fallen victim to the stentorian siren song and apparently erotic allure of Mrs Thatcher. The
New Statesman
, once powerful and respected, had sunk into a swamp of sociology and political correctness; the
Spectator
had captured the young who, dismissing all political ideals as airy-fairy claptrap, had become middle-aged long before their time. All we had believed in was dismissed as dangerous or absurd or both. After I had gone on in this vein for a while, Harold had me rattled by exclaiming, ‘Do you realize what you've been saying! What're we going to do about it then?' It was some time since the Bishop of Durham had dismissed miracles as vulgar conjuring-tricks, so I didn't think we could convert conservative newspaper-owners or bring Bernard Levin out in favour of Neil Kinnock overnight. But it did seem we might get a few friends together to discuss the situation. Antonia, who, having been married to Hugh Fraser, a leading Conservative MP, was experienced in such gatherings, said the great thing was that someone should read a ‘paper'. So invitations were sent out for the first meeting: the date the 20th of June 1988, the place Harold and Antonia's sitting-room. I think that what I, at any rate, wanted to do was to redress the balance of the political debate and remind everyone too young to remember that we had done pretty well with a Labour government.

As Antonia suggested, we had a ‘paper' and Anthony Howard read it. He said that it was quite inconceivable that Labour could ever win another election, and we listened in growing gloom. In the subsequent discussion we did our best to raise our spirits with more optimistic forecasts. Germaine Greer came, and Salman Rushdie, Melvyn Bragg, Peter and Thelma Nichols, Margaret Jay, Michael Holroyd, Margaret Drabble and many others. In the subsequent meetings, when Denis Healey, Jonathan Porritt, John Smith and Barbara Castle came with ‘papers', we began to educate ourselves. As David Hare said, the meetings were our evening-classes.

We did, however, have an immediate and hilarious effect on the world outside Campden Hill Square.

News of our meeting, ferreted out by Frank Johnson, who worked at the
Sunday Telegraph
, first appeared in his paper a few days after our inauguration. The reaction that followed showed how far the press had moved towards the Thatcherite ideal, which was, put briefly, that there is no such thing as society so we needn't worry about that; private citizens should devote their energies to getting on in the world, making money, buying shares and voting Conservative at appropriate intervals, and for writers and artists to worry their pretty little heads about politics is simply laughable. Even such a respected columnist as Peter Jenkins in the
Independent
thought that the idea of a Socialist intellectual had become absurd and, with a surprisingly vogueish view of political history, said that ‘radical chic' had gone out of style and ‘reactionary chic' was now the rage. So we awoke to find ourselves ridiculously newsworthy. In numerous London houses Tory groups were meeting and discussing politics unpilloried; indeed, Mrs Thatcher's ideas for government emerged from smoke-and claret-filled rooms. It was clear that no such luxuries were to be allowed to the left. We were meant to assemble in draughty church halls, drink strong tea and wear anoraks with bobble hats. A
Spectator
diarist went so far as to accuse Antonia of some kind of treachery because she allowed leftish bottoms to perch upon the sofas on which the Conservative Philosophy Group had once sat listening to ‘papers'. The headline on the
Spectator's
cover,
LADY ANTONIA'S INFIDELITY,
promised more revelations than the paper was able to deliver.

There is another assumption and that is that only the poor should be allowed to complain on behalf of the poor. If you earn a regular income, or have put by a few savings, you should forget the unemployed and avert your eyes from those sleeping in doorways. This is a convenient belief for those in power as it may silence eloquent voices of criticism; my only regret now is that our voices were not more eloquent, and that we didn't make better use of the free publicity awarded us. A final objection was that a belief in social justice imposes on those who hold it an obligation to adopt habits of particular austerity, Conservatives being free to lead the life of Riley. This seems absurd to me. A taste for champagne didn't stop Nye Bevan introducing the Health Service, any more than an occasional whisky deterred Mrs Thatcher from imposing on British politics the moral values of the Chamber of Commerce and the corner shop.

Looking back on that summer I think we should have thrown our meetings open to the public. Harold, it must be said, thought otherwise. Perhaps his way of writing gave him a taste for secrecy; at any rate he saw us as conspirators faced with deeper and more complex conspiracies, with moles burrowing into our midst and throwing up earthworks for the amusement of the public. Perhaps, and he may have been right, he thought that secrecy made us more interesting. In any event, our meetings were to be shrouded in silence. With Campden Hill Square staked out by journalists, we retired to Ruth Rogers's Italian restaurant on the river at Hammersmith, just opposite the building which will always be known as Harrods Suppository. There we were to hold a meeting at which Harold was to be the chairman. He was greatly concerned that our revolutionary plots should not be leaked to the press by the waitresses.

Of course our hiding-place was discovered; not a particularly hard task as one wall of the restaurant is mainly glass. I arrived with Penny and Ann Mallalieu in her van, out of which rolled two empty beer cans, none of my doing, when I got out. My arrival with the falling cans and '
two women
' was described as part of the lingering evil of the permissive society. But, as the restaurant was besieged by reporters, Harold became more and more determined that no journalist should be admitted.

One potential customer had been promised a table, in error, on that night when the River Café was filled with what the paper called ‘literary lefties'. He was someone who worked on a news programme at the BBC and he had booked dinner for four. He entered the restaurant and, seeing such people as Germaine Greer and Melvyn Bragg, David Hare and Gavin Ewart dotted at various tables, he looked forward to a delightful evening in a well-patronized eatery. To his surprise, someone he later described as ‘a man with a black pullover and heavy horn-rimmed glasses' approached him in a hostile manner and asked if he was a journalist. When he was compelled to admit that it was, indeed, his profession, he was unceremoniously turfed out. Then he sat on a wall and consulted his Filofax to make sure he'd got the right date. Nothing daunted he made another attempt to enter the restaurant, but
‘the same man'
was ready for him and ejected him once more. In the end the River Café had to provide a free dinner for this innocent journalist and his friends on a safer date.

Behind the glass door we listened to an investigative journalist telling us about his inquiries into the ways of the army. ‘When the police searched my place,' he said, ‘I knew how women feel when they are raped.' ‘When we get a Labour government,' a Socialist member of the House of Lords muttered indignantly, ‘we'll have that chap behind bars in no time at all.'

Our meetings continued and grew in interest, at least to us. We discussed the programme regularly with Harold and Antonia and the four of us met one night over a pub in the Portobello Road. We had reached agreement on the next subject for discussion when Penny said, in all innocence, that she'd seen
Scandal,
a film about the Profumo affair. Harold, forever as unexpected as his plays, took the greatest exception to this and felt it was a terrible thing to make a film about Mr Profumo and discreditable to watch one.

‘I don't see why,' Penny was brave enough to say. ‘I thought in art no subject was taboo.'

‘Art!' At this there was a Pinter explosion. ‘Oh, “art”, is it? Of course that makes it perfectly all right, doesn't it? I'm so glad it's “art”! It doesn't matter what sort of harm it does so long as it's “art”! How wonderful!'

We were already in the Theatre of Menace but Penny went on to say, ‘Well, I was a child at the time of Profumo. I mean, to me he's a figure in history. Like Henry VIII.'

‘Henry VIII!' If Harold had been at the end of his tether it now snapped. ‘Did you say Henry VIII? That does it! Henry VIII absolutely puts the tin lid on it. I just can't sit here and be told that Profumo's just the same as Henry VIII!'

At which point, coming, somewhat late, to Penny's assistance, I was moved to say something controversial, such as, ‘Piss off, Harold!' The Pinters left us and we sat thinking about life without the 20th of June Group and decided that we could probably endure it; but then, after a very short while, they were back, smiling in the most friendly fashion. I expressed my sincere admiration for Harold's writing and the awkward moment was soon forgotten, particularly as the Pinters explained that they felt sensitive about
Scandal
because they feared a film might be made about them one day. We have filled many empty moments since then in trying to cast such a movie.

In time Harold left the 20th of June Group, but we continued to meet without him. The occasions were less dramatic and no longer grabbed the headlines. Whether we helped the Opposition I don't know. At least we made it clear that a number of writers hadn't fallen for the mercenary charms of the new Conservatism. We owed the dissemination of this message largely to the newspapers which came to mock us.

Mrs Thatcher was toppled by the machinations of her own party, and Labour was deprived of its greatest electoral asset. In her book she has dismissed Neil Kinnock as a leader always to be relied on to play into her hands, and after the election they both departed into the political shadows. He left abruptly and with him went, so it seemed to me, a link with the heady old days of the Labour Party. He was the holder of the torch which had been passed on from Nye Bevan and then by the somewhat tremulous hand of Michael Foot to Neil, his protégé.

When I first met Neil he had only recently become leader of the opposition. If Mrs Thatcher had a poor opinion of him, he had little time for her. ‘She retreats into stylized arguments,' he said. ‘I don't rate her highly at all.' His wife Glenys had given him a Gothic ornamented board from a chapel into which hymn numbers could be slotted; he said he would use it to keep the score in his Question Time bouts with the Prime Minister. He had to fight against heavy odds: a huge Conservative majority which often shouted him down, a press which gave him more bad notices in a week than most writers get in a lifetime, and an apparently irresistible temptation to pack too many words into every bulging sentence. But fighting is something he understands. He has said he has a certain contempt for those who cower in the gents during pub fights (as I certainly should) and don't join in. As the election drew nearer, journalists followed Neil around in the hope of tempting him to blows, just as they followed his son Stephen round Cambridge hoping he'd drift into some newsworthy love affair. In neither of these doubtful activities were they successful.

This red-haired, pugnacious character is best seen at home with Glenys and their two glamorous children. On his own ground Neil's charm and enthusiasm seem irresistible and the wonder grows at the fact that the great British public found it so easy to resist them. It's hardly enough to say that the voting millions had never found their way to Acton and so never realized that England might have become a brighter and more enjoyable place if Neil had moved into Downing Street. It's not enough to know that the Kinnocks are the sort most people would like to have living next door, which could hardly be said for the members of the Cabinet they finally voted into power. Something, in those heady months that led up to April 1992, got lost. Perhaps it was the great British bottle.