Semi-Detached (42 page)

‘What
did I say?’

‘You
told me not to step on the poster you were designing.’

Jimmy
Mulville I knew already but not well. As we slithered away in the borrowed car
they talked up their ideas, and Jimmy kept turning round to make a point
directly in my face, or he lifted both hands off the wheel to gesture, or
buried his head on his chest and slewed over the road. He didn’t see very well
when he laughed. He had ginger hair and a twelve-year-old’s mottled red face.
His eyes filled with watery excitement when he had your attention. He usually
had crusted eyelids.

In Ely
we drove to a suburban street. Rory had an appointment with a girl he’d met in
a bookshop. Her husband was an optician. Jimmy and I made a cup of tea. She and
Rory went upstairs.

We left
the house an hour or so later, but it had snowed while we were inside. Before
we got back in the car, we had to search for long twigs and sweep our
footprints off the drive, so that she wouldn’t have to explain to her husband that
three men had called at her front door while he was away issuing spectacles.
And then we skidded off.

Jimmy
was even more excitable on the way back. The road was covered with sleet. The
windscreen wipers kept stopping. It was getting dark. We met the rush-hour
traffic and almost slithered into a ditch. It was an ordinary day near the beginning
of the Easter term. This was better. I felt more secure.

I
couldn’t stay in Madingley Road. There was no room. So I was put up for the
next few months in the house of the highly ‘imitable’ Harry Porter, the senior
treasurer of the Footlights (Harry had a fluting voice that everybody could
impersonate). He lived in Warkworth Street behind the police station at the
back of Parker’s Piece.

My son
lived in a house in the same terrace of Victorian villas in his second year.
When I went to pick him up at the end of term I could stop to stare up at Harry’s
first-floor sitting room. The gentlest of men, shy, impeccably polite and
always slightly distant, the legend was that Harry had been a young fellow of
enormous promise in Tudor history. One night in London he had picked up some
rough trade who had chopped his face to pieces with a broken bottle. His red
face still bore the scars. His college, just to be helpful, had promptly kicked
him out, but Selwyn took him in. He never really ‘did History’ again. His job
now was to coach people in ‘ordinary degrees’, that is people who had failed
the system, and were considered too hopeless to manage a third.

But
Harry’s life’s work was to mentor the Footlights. If you appeared regularly in
smokers you would inevitably find yourself invited back to his house. ‘I rather
think you might like this …’ he would say as he wandered off to the shelves
at one end of his womb-like sitting room and carefully put on one of his huge
collection of Max Miller records. We drank his wine and prodded him.

‘Well,
the funniest person I
ever
saw in Footlights …’ We would lean forward
on the plush seats by the ivory-shaded lights hoping to learn. Was this Cleese?
Or ‘Cleass’, as Harry liked to call him? ‘…was a man called Michael Roberts.
And now of course … he’s a
postman
in New South Wales.’

Harry
was there to comfort. In the midst of gross failure, he could almost always
remember a far worse disaster. ‘Of course, the longest revue ever …’ he might
start with a serious look of alarm in his eye’… was mounted by John
Bird.
It was about the nuclear
bomb.
I think it was three hours
long.
Most
of the audience had left before the
end
and they refused to cut a word
despite the fact that Commander
Blackwood
was very
upset,
for
some reason. I thought it was rather funny’ For Harry what mattered was the
current lot. He was always perfectly happy to reassure them that legends were
rubbish in their day.

But
when I lived in his house I existed in a sort of limbo. Directing
Bartholomew
Fair
only took up a few hours of the day Rehearsals could only happen in
the late afternoon or evening. I spent an astonishing amount of time in bed,
dozing until late in the morning, in a half-world between sleep and
wakefulness, disturbed by vivid examination dreams, breaking the surface
relieved that I wasn’t taking a French paper in the afternoon, tangled in bed
sheets, trying to persuade my dreaming self that I wasn’t reading French anyway
During the day I found myself becoming a townie. I would visit the municipal
library to read the papers, or swim at the big glass-fronted city pool across
Parker’s Piece.

I might
have been free to rehearse, but my cast weren’t. They were all still involved
in their university life. I had to wait until after lunch. So I clambered into
bed with an actress, and then later into a bath with a comedienne. Charlotte
was writing me letters about her gardening and apologizing for being so
demanding in our relationship.

I loved
Bartholomew Fair
even if much of the demotic slang was largely
incomprehensible. Jonson is to Shakespeare as Surtees is to Dickens, a
celebrant of sex, swagger and the prosaic. The cast practised by swearing in
their own language and then transferred the inflections to sixteenth—century
blasphemies. We visited Petticoat Lane to watch traders run an illegal
auction. Mike Arnold, the Arts Theatre stage manager, built a two-storey wooden
scaffold. My enormous cast carried huge bundles of vegetables and bales of
cloth on to the set during the first half and then carried them all off again
during the second.

Nobody
is in charge of university theatre at Cambridge. No professor of drama chooses
favourites, encourages the unworthy or boosts the unwilling. It is a naked
fight amongst the totally unqualified. I recognize the glint in the eye of the
Cambridge Mafia today. It is a political glint. Successful directors learned to
play the game at Cambridge, while still in a small, unthreatening fish pond.
Bartholomew
Fair
was my final stab at playing the game. Around this time BBC Radio
Light Entertainment offered me a job, and I took it. It wasn’t what I really
wanted to do. I decided to work in radio for a few years. I thought I would get
back to directing later — probably.

There
was a party to celebrate the successful conclusion
of Bartholomew Fair.
I
recall the huge numbers on somebody’s stairs, and the exquisite feeling that
this experience would have to give over to some mundane reality In the event,
it was nothing as predictable as work. Shortly afterwards a letter came from
Charlotte. I have it here in the suitcase. It is a masterpiece of controlled
anguish. It begins by telling me that my bank has been in contact. She has paid
my outstanding rent. After dealing with these she almost casually mentions
that she has crabs.

It
would be difficult to conceive of less appropriate visitors to the studied
gentility of Park Village East. In a dignified tone she doubted that she had
introduced them, but explained in some detail (knowing me well enough) how I
could get rid of them using Prioderm shampoo. Only then did she break down and
fall to recrimination and despair. I decided to come clean — well, as clean as
possible in the distinctly grubby circumstances. I confessed. She told me how
she’d taken comfort with some bloke called Stephen, riding bicycles near banks
of primroses and listening to Monteverdi in the pouring rain. Naturally, I
became furiously jealous and highly contemptuous at the same time. She kicked
me out.

During
the Easter vacation, I joined Rory McGrath, jimmy Mulville and Martin Bergman
in the ‘White House’, a grim motel just outside Cambridge, to write
Tag
and
go off the rails by way of compensation. ‘One night we went looking for a jam
factory,’ Rory told me. ‘All over north Cambridge-shire, looking for a jam
factory in the middle of the night. And finally, after three hours, we found
ourselves outside the biggest jam factory in the whole of Britain, Chivers’, a
huge place, in the middle of the night. And you looked at it and said, “That’s
not the one.

The Footlights
revue,
Tag,
was workmanlike. The staging was neat. I had a row of
bathing huts, or changing cubicles, in and out of which, through swing doors,
the cast popped to perform the sketches in quick succession.

I
refused to have any discussion of the title during rehearsals. Every Footlights
revue wasted half its rehearsal period in the search for an amusing title.
A
Clump of Plinths, A Jug of Warm Water, A Big Hand on Your Opening.
The Arts
Theatre, a professional organization after all, had to produce advance
publicity. Commander Blackwood, the general manager, dispatched his underling,
the assistant manager called Melvyn, to the ‘Prompt Corner’, a tiny café in the
passage round the back of the theatre. ‘We have to have a title now,’ Melvyn
said.

Jimmy
stirred his coffee.

‘I know
you haven’t been able to think of one. I have. How about
Michael Foot Lights
up the Room?’
Nobody even acknowledged that he had spoken.

Rory
finally nodded. ‘Melvyn, can you tell Commander Blackwood that we do have a
title.’ Melvyn got out a notebook. ‘We want to call it
Twelve Inches of
Hairy Cock.’

‘It’s a
pun,’ Jimmy explained. ‘The poster would have a pair of trousers with its fly
open and a cockerel’s head sticking out.’

‘A
hairy cockerel, though.’

It was
eventually called
Tag
because of the poster — a wrestling advertisement
with pictures of the cast, including Robert Bathurst and Nick Hytner, in
grunt-and-grapple leotards.

A
bust-up makes everybody conscientious. It certainly made me caring with
Charlotte: attentive letters and frank confessions. I went on tour with
Footlights as far as Oxford and sat in the pub opposite the stage door playing
Leo Sayer’s ‘When I Need You’ on the juke box. It was that dismal.

But I
had an appointment of my own. I couldn’t continue. I had to start work at the
BBC at the beginning of July I had to drag myself back to London. Where did I
stay, though?

‘Oh,
you went to live at home,’ Charlotte told me.

Home? I
went back to Epping? But I couldn’t have done. Did I really?

I had
seldom been back to Epping in those last three years.

If I
did, it was unexpected. I would return from a tour to find the house locked up
and them away on holiday I would bring a pile of washing and a fellow member of
cast to doss down and I encouraged them to bring their washing too.

I had
been happy to assume that my parents were there when and if I wanted something.

I had
taken this from my father, I suppose. In a sense, he was a hermit in his own
household all his life: noisy at meal times, demanding and needy perhaps if he
wanted attention but the rest of the time happy not to have a fuss (unless it
was his own fuss)., following rituals which he had ordained, apparently heavily
burdened with his ‘work’, whether that was work on his boat or the rather more
mysterious dignified occupation that he undertook in the hospital.

I took
that from him — not, I fear, the necessity but the self-importance. Like a
child lost in its own intense play it freed my father and me to assume that
somebody else would take care of the lesser things in life, even the decisions
about what to do next. I had got busy and preoccupied. Just like him.

Had
they missed me? There is no family as emotionally bound together as the family
that takes that sort of thing for granted. If all we did, throughout my teenage
years, was grunt at each other and get on with our lives then that was because
we felt no need for comment. Nobody said ‘love you’ before they put the phone
down. Nobody worried about their relationship and demanded kisses. We took it
for granted that my father wouldn’t want to attend prize-givings or moments of
personal triumph. (‘He works so hard, your father. You know he gets so little
time to go on the boat.’) Arguing was as much part of the status quo as the
meal times, but so was resigned acceptance. My father never really interfered
in my life after I left school.

The
year before we separated, Charlotte and I had sat in the house in Epping on the
blue fake-leather-covered sofa nursing a bottle of wine. It was one o’clock on
New Year’s Day and my parents had gone to bed. I looked around and felt all the
oppression of Hartland Road and the London suburbs in the yellow wallpaper and
the black Welsh inherited furniture (‘the coffer’) and the fake gas log fire
and the Dralon curtains. What were we doing there? What was this New Year,
then? When I got my own house, my parents could come to me, so I could open a
second and third bottle of wine if I wanted, so I could switch the television
off if I wanted, so that people could come and go as they wanted, so we could
play loud music and dance until dawn if we wanted, not sneak around at
midnight. I wasn’t going to do this again. So I didn’t. I live now in the
middle of the West End. I have a house in the country. I avoid the suburbs and
everything associated with them. But let’s face it. I go to bed at half past
twelve on New Year’s Day. Some of us have work to do.

Apparently
I went back to Epping and lived at home when I started my first proper job.
Quite probably I arrived by tube at Great Portland Street station, which is
just opposite where I live now I haven’t travelled very far since.