The Blue Touch Paper (13 page)

Before my university life had got underway, there had been a moment of ill omen. Michael Yearwood, who was my senior by a couple of years, had been sent away by his ambitious parents to board at King's School, Canterbury. At Oxford he had switched from reading law to reading theology. Michael followed up this decision by abandoning formal education altogether. As a next-door neighbour who had been the subject of regular unfavourable comparison, I had no doubt about the cause. Michael had read law at his father's insistence. A fellow scholarship boy, he had been forced up through the system like a hothouse plant. Far more than me or my sister, he was expected to perform. Hardly surprising he had buckled under the strain. A few years later, his mother Sheila, the paragon of all respectable virtue, could no longer endure the tangible, desolate silence of red brick. She took off all her clothes, left them on Bexhill beach and walked naked into the sea. Critics, both of left and right, like to look back on the social revolutions of the 1960s and claim that such revolutions were nothing more than surface changes in lifestyle. What, they ask, did a more progressive approach to personal morality, to music, to dress and to youth actually achieve? I knew the answer, because I had experienced at first hand the price of life in a repressed and moralising suburbia. If lifestyle could kill, why on earth was it not worthwhile to change it? If it saved one life? Surely I could
never prove that away from the numb panic of 32 Newlands Avenue, Mum's exemplary best friend would not have killed herself. But Sheila would at least have had a chance, which she might or might not have taken.

In those days, thank goodness, culture
was
ordinary. Although the country looked so much poorer than it does now, all governments of whichever party, inspired by the great settlements in health, education and social security of the 1940s, saw it as their duty to pay for students' education. Whatever your background, getting a grant from your local authority was a formality. My latest scholarship, just £60 a year, was an honour, not a serious source of subsidy. The common practice in Cambridge was for students to attend lectures organised by the university but to take weekly supervisions, usually in twos, in their own college. My first supervision partner at Jesus was Humphrey Davies, a thoughtful and mature contemporary who had won the college's other English scholarship. The moment I heard Humphrey talking about poetry, it was clear to me who was truly clever and who wasn't. Within a few weeks of setting off on the English syllabus, Humphrey decided the subject could never be intellectually serious and began studying Chinese in the afternoons to give himself some proper roughage. When, after a few more weeks, he decided to drop English altogether and take up Arabic as his principal study, he continued his Chinese, just as a hobby. The rest of us complained, Humphrey alone did something about it. But he also chose to stay socially among our first-year group. Fellow English students included the amiable Christopher Hudson, who at the age of eleven had helped me transcribe Wilde into the Harewood school magazine. For our first two terms, the undergraduates of our year were stunned into staying close, huddling together as if none
of us could quite believe how unrewarding it was going to be to read English literature at Cambridge. We were immobilised by a shared disappointment. The experience inoculated me for life against art which needs a framework of art theory to be understood. I knew the racket of art theory too well: I'd had expert training.

One of the reasons for our disillusion was the absence of Raymond Williams. We saw him on the first day we arrived and never thereafter. It was as if he had a clipboard at the ready, waiting only to dispatch us as fast as possible. Serene, distant, wearing a Bob Dylan cap, he had the desolate formality of a figure from a Pina Bausch ballet. Perhaps it was his experience as a captain in the 21st Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery during and after the invasion of Normandy which made him seem old before his time. He gave off an unmistakeable air of tweeds and mustard baths. Raymond lost no time in farming us out to be taught by graduate students and making it clear meanwhile that he had no interest in supervising us himself. We found that throughout the university English was being taught in a way of which, had he followed it more closely, Raymond would have heartily disapproved. Kenneth Tynan called the English literary scene ‘all wasps and no honey' – a perfect description of Cambridge in the mid-sixties. The teaching at Lancing had been about the discovery of literature's achievements. University teaching was about the punishment of its shortcomings. As far as our captious lecturers were concerned, the purpose of art was to fulfil the expectations of the critic. Unsurprisingly, by those impossible standards – because, believe you me, these were very
difficult
critics – nearly everything flunked. At some point, that most austere of literary figures, F. R. Leavis, had concocted an unlikely but influential theory
that society was awash with consumerist rubbish, the notion of community had been destroyed, and that therefore the future of civilisation depended on its universities. The central preoccupation of those universities should, for some reason, be the study of English literature, which alone could provide society with its renewed moral axis. Quite how and why was often asserted but never explained.

Leavis's theories had not, however, generated a spirit of benevolence and inclusiveness in the university faculty. Far from it. As usual, disciples boasted the faults of a hero without practising his virtues. The followers were mean-spirited and envious, as only lifelong academics can be. Leavis himself had gone in for the silliest kind of list-making, which excluded from consideration all writers the critic regarded as less than first-rate. He had even come out with a book called
The Great Tradition
, which listed those few strugglers – Shakespeare, I guess, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot, sometimes Milton, sometimes not – who met with his hard-won approval. Like Thomas Hardy, Dickens was said to lack ‘the seriousness and formal control' of a great novelist, though for some reason his most inaccessible work,
Hard Times
, was grudgingly admitted into Leavis's sheltered accommodation. A working-class outsider himself, Leavis nevertheless believed that the ineffable vulgarity of nasty popular culture had destroyed people's ability to relate to each other. Like an aristocrat, he believed in elites, only in his case they happened to be elites of sensibility rather than birth. When he was told that Ludwig Wittgenstein had been seen queuing for a film at the Arts Cinema, Leavis was amused at the philosopher's frivolity. He said that after a day of philosophy you ‘perhaps need a period of complete mindlessness to recover'. Interestingly, this was almost the exact reverse of what
most students felt. After a pointless day in which a critic tried to bring some errant poet or novelist to heel, we could at least slip off to enjoy the carbonated vitality of the cinema. Stimulation flowed like spring water from the films of Godard, Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Malle and Losey. Had Leavis ever been to a cinema? Did he have any idea that in the 1960s, both for content and for stylistic originality, cinema was at least literature's equal if not its superior? What novelist came near?

Towards the end of my first year, two things happened which broke my gloom. First, I found myself more and more in the company of a second-year Jesus student who, with his stubble, dark glasses and packs of Gitanes, bore more than a passing resemblance to Jean-Luc Godard himself. Tony Bicât was an untypical undergraduate. For a start he was a passable jazz drummer, whose godmother, for some reason, had endowed him with a field in Hampshire, planning permission thrown in. From this bequest, Tony had money to dress in chic handmade suits and jackets which were hardly common currency among students. He believed his mother, Packly, to be a White Russian whose family had fled the revolution, though later he discovered that the family was in fact Chechnyan. In the chaos of short-lived governments, his grandfather had even briefly been prime minister. His father, a noted artist, had left school at fifteen to paint scenery and design sets for the Ballet Rambert and the Mercury Theatre. Not only was Tony a welcome breath of cosmopolitan fresh air who opened up worlds of painting and music of which I knew very little, but we also shared the same satirical sense of humour. To us, everything was funny.

The second change in my mood was brought about by my deciding to have a go at acting. I'd done a little at school, usually as a pilot fish to Nigel Andrews. Now here was my chance to
move centre stage. After doing a couple of small parts, I was cast in a revue to go to the Edinburgh Festival at the end of the university year. The critic Clive James, then a graduate student and the producer of the Footlights, had been planning to go, but he had pulled out, leaving behind a title –
Best Laid Mice
– and a few sketches. He had given his blessing to the rest of us to get on with it. There were only four people in the show, which went on at the cheerless Lauriston Hall in the rainy, granite back-streets of Edinburgh late at night. It fell to me to pad the evening out with some excruciatingly clumsy skits and songs. When, in a review, the
Scotsman
newspaper described me as ‘a real actor in the making' I was genuinely mystified. We all slept together in a sort of barracks in a basement on the Royal Mile, and listened every night to both sides of the Beatles' just-released
Revolver
. Diana Quick, whom I met that year at the Festival and who became a lasting friend, describes me at first encounter as having been ‘shy and formal'. Perhaps I was just ashamed.

An accidental feature of the revue was a physical similarity between me and Richard Cork, a fellow undergraduate who was already a gifted draughtsman but who, by the strange rules then obtaining, was forced to idle for two years reading English before he was allowed to move on to his true interest, the history of art. He would later go on to be the popular and well-read art critic of
The Times
. We were both over six foot tall and slender as a switch. Steve Gooch, the chosen director for the following term's Experimental Theatre Group production, seized on this similarity and decided to present Shakespeare's
The Comedy of Errors
, which depends for its plot on a comic confusion between two men, both called Antipholus, and their servants, both called Dromio. Steve's resulting production was fresh as a daisy and full of teenage high spirits, and in December 1966 we were sent
off on a high-speed tour of France and Switzerland. In seventeen days, we gave performances in Aix-en-Provence, Grenoble, Lausanne, Fribourg, Berne, Zurich and Lyon, where the local paper described us as ‘looking like distinguished herons who could have served in the Guards'. At several venues, much to our surprise, Richard and I were mobbed at the stage door. We were pleased that none of the screaming fans knew which was Syracuse and which was Ephesus. Better still, few cared.

In 2007 Stephen Wright, who played one of the Dromios, discovered in his attic forty-five minutes of 16 mm film which he had not remembered he had shot on the tour. Taken aback, he invited the cast and crew who had worked on the play to his house in Ealing for a warm evening of wine and abundant buffet, in which we were given an unlooked-for opportunity to examine our young selves. We sat on the floor to watch the black-and-white film which, hand-held, felt as if it had been shot by Raoul Coutard, the most fashionable cinematographer of the 1960s. Some parts look as if they are being seen through a bush. The emulsion bubbles through endless grainy images of our bus travelling along snowbound roads, and of students sleeping at every improvised opportunity, backstage, on benches, on floors, in gorgeous smoky cafés and on the cross-Channel ferry. The women throughout are serene and beautiful, as if used to staying calm under pressure. But the men of the period are like puppets, dancing around nervously, chain-smoking, mugging, making V-signs, joking in a sort of jerky hyperactivity which would later be familiar as the physical lexicon of Monty Python. I am dressed throughout in white jeans and a polo-neck. How uneasy we were, how insecure.

It was moving for all of us that night in West London to reassemble forty-one years on. My Adriana had spent her life
as a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. The attendant lord who had followed me everywhere on stage had become deputy head of MI6 before losing out on the top job and going into private security. One of the most admirable of our number, Jonathan James-Moore, vivid again as Doctor Pinch, with upstanding hair and perfect comic timing, had only recently died from cancer, aged fifty-nine. But the film also confirmed what I had long known: I couldn't act. I had an unfortunate mix of being self-conscious without being self-aware. On stage as off, I was unable to calculate what impression I was making. If I stretched out an arm, I had no internal monitor to tell me what the gesture looked like from the outside. But it did occur to me some time in my second year at Cambridge that, although I couldn't act myself, I might have some modest gift for helping others. First, I staged a version of much the best dramatic writing T. S. Eliot ever did, a witty, rhythmic fragment called
Sweeney Agonistes
, and, cheered by that, I decided to plunge in headlong and direct a production of
Oh What a Lovely War
.

Joan Littlewood's collage of songs and facts from the First World War had affected me when I'd seen it in her own production in 1963. Its boldness was revolutionary. Charles Chilton, a radio producer, had researched the informal lyrics soldiers had added to familiar Edwardian songs and made a documentary,
The Long, Long Trail
. From this rediscovery of what the war had felt like for the soldiers below ground level, Littlewood had made an original piece of angry agitprop. I couldn't hope to match her ensemble of working-class actors, who brought to the pierrot show their shared history. Their authenticity was not available to me. But instead I could give the evening a kind of garish poetry, a passionate sincerity which was all the more potent for being amateur. We were guileless
in a way which was oddly affecting. David Pountney, later director of the English National Opera, conducted the band. Mark Elder, later conductor of the Hallé Orchestra, played in the pit. And in one of those god-sent pieces of casting which make directors look clever, Germaine Greer, the future author of
The Female Eunuch
, played the Sergeant Major. No one who saw and heard Germaine, in black fishnet stockings, striding through the audience and belting out ‘I'll make a man of every one of you' has ever forgotten it.