Time to Be in Earnest (38 page)

The first two weeks of this month are going to be exceptionally busy, leaving little time either for this diary or for the accumulating general correspondence.

On Friday, 1st May, I spoke at the Global Spring Conference of the International Women’s Forum at the Park Lane Hotel, Piccadilly, having been asked to do so by Katharine Whitehorn. There were 300 senior women present from this country, the United States, mainland Europe and further afield, to discuss the role of the arts. The session at which I spoke was somewhat pretentiously entitled “Cultural Vibrancy and Social Cohesion,” but the speakers were all very well worth hearing, not surprisingly since they included Janet Suzman, Genista McIntosh, Prue Leith, Rabbi Julia Neuberger and Baroness Symons.

The next day I came to Dorset to attend the Dorset Arts Festival, speaking in the Old Court House in Dorchester. I have given talks at a large variety of venues, but none more interesting. I sat in the huge judge’s chair while the audience were disposed about the court in the jury box, the dock and the spectators’ galleries. It was a peculiar and sobering experience to be sitting in the very seat the magistrate had occupied when he sentenced the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Before my session began I went down into the cells below the court and then walked in the footsteps of the former accused, negotiating the narrow stairs and finding myself in the dock with the suddenness of a jack-in-the-box. It must have been intimidating for those Tolpuddle men to come from that claustrophobic darkness into the light of the crowded courtroom and to gaze for the first time into the magistrate’s eyes on the level of their own. No doubt it was intended to be intimidating.

I spent Saturday and Sunday with Rosemary in her cottage outside Wareham, and then went to Winterborne Houghton to spend two days
with Tom and Mary Norman. I had told them that I longed to see cowslips; they were part of my childhood walks in the Shropshire countryside, seen, too, when I cycled as a schoolgirl along the flat roads of the fens, but I rarely come across them now. Tom drove us into West Dorset. We walked along a stony ridge, across two fields and then found ourselves in a sloping meadow leading down to a valley. The field was covered with cowslips, a shivering sea of bright yellow blossom with hardly space to plant a foot between the clumps. It was a warm spring day with some breeze and it seemed that the whole air was delicately and subtly sweet. I had asked to see cowslips and was seeing them in an almost unbelievable abundance.

This morning Tom and Mary drove me to Poole to speak at a luncheon in aid of Dorset Victim Support, held in the old town. This went well, and I am now in the train travelling back to London. I shall be only briefly at home before it is time to go to Oxford on Friday to speak at a conference on “The Novel and Society” at Rewley House.

On Sunday afternoon I left Heathrow for Paris to promote the French edition of
A Certain Justice
. It was a good day for a flight. The rural landscape passing beneath us looked, as always, like a needlework collage; the hemstitched fields, the silver satin of rivers, the clear linen patches of green and yellow and the tightly knotted woods of dark green wool appeared so cunningly contrived that I half expected the whole design to be drawn up and hung against the blue backcloth of the sky.

I was met at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle by Dominique Fusco, whom I have known since my books were first accepted by Librairie Arthème Fayard. As usual, I had been booked into a small and charming hotel, Le Duc de Saint Simon, where I was greeted by the same receptionist. Fayard had filled the elegant sitting-room with magnificent flowers: lilies, clusters of orchids and roses.

France was the last European country to take my books, but Fayard tell me that I am now their highest-selling foreign author.

Fayard had hoped I could stay for longer than two days but it wasn’t possible, so I saw nothing of the city and the whole time was taken up with the usual programme of newspaper and radio interviews, all of
which took place at the hotel. But it was pleasant to be in Paris, as it always is.

Yesterday a farewell dinner was given for me at her apartment by Mlle. Denise Meunier, the distinguished elderly and academic Frenchwoman who has translated nearly all my novels. The guests jabbered away in French, changing to English when they saw I wasn’t with them. I just about held my own but wished, as I always do when in Paris, that I was more fluent in the only foreign language which I have any hope of understanding. It seems ridiculous that I had a French lesson every school day of my five years of secondary education but still can’t speak the language with any confidence. Children today are more effectively taught; but then they have television, videos, foreign visits and exchanges and language laboratories. But acquiring foreign languages is a talent as well as a skill. I have met people on my travels who can learn and be fluent in a new language in a matter of months. My paternal grandfather was such a one, but his talent has certainly not been inherited.

I have had three very happy days at Trinity College, Oxford, where on Wednesday I gave the Richard Hillary Memorial Lecture. Like most of my generation, I have a lively memory of first reading his autobiography
The Last Enemy
. Hillary stands for a generation of young men from the university Air Squadrons who fought in the skies over Britain. He was shot down, and on the first occasion was badly burned and disfigured, but managed to persuade the RAF to let him fly again. It was his last flight. An additional tragedy of his death was that he took a fellow airman with him, and one who was married with small children. I can understand that Hillary needed to prove himself by flying again, but the RAF should not have given way to his insistence.

Before the war Hillary was a typically privileged Oxford undergraduate, too handsome for his own good, selfish, arrogant and hedonistic. But the war changed him, as it changed, for good or ill, everyone who took part in it. I am not sure I believe that the poignant final chapter in his book is strictly accurate, but it does show that he had become a writer.

One of the pleasures of Wednesday was meeting the heroine of that
book, Denise, now Denise Patterson, a widow. During the war she was engaged to Peter Pease, a friend of Hillary’s who was also killed, and it was she who, steadfast in courage and courageous in grief, most helped Hillary through the trauma of his burning. In the book she is described by him as beautiful; she remains beautiful today.

Yesterday and today I gave seminars to some of the English students and post-graduate students. The Master gave a dinner in the Lodge this evening. It was a wonderful night and we were able to stroll on the lawn, glasses in hand. I sat next to George Carman, QC—a guarantee of fascinating conversation. When I was researching
A Certain Justice
I was advised to go to the Law Courts when he was appearing, to learn what cross-examination could be. I did so and he was indeed formidable.

An additional pleasure of three memorable days has been meeting the English tutor Dinah Birch and discussing with her the Victorian novel. I very much hope that we meet and talk again.

I took Nina Bawden and her husband Austen Kark to dinner at the Halcyon Hotel, a small return for the succession of wonderful meals I have enjoyed at their house in Noel Road. It was warm enough to sit outside, which was initially pleasant, but a noisy quartet at an adjoining table made conversation difficult and we asked to be moved inside. An excellent dinner and, as always, the ease and comfort of dear friends.

It was on this day, eight years ago, that I stood with Ruth Rendell and helped knock down a portion of the Berlin Wall. The evidence is a small piece of rubble with one smooth painted surface which rests on a shelf in my bathroom and bears in ballpoint the date, 16/5/90. The colours were a garish purple and red when I hacked the piece away with one of the chisels an enterprising German was hiring out to those who wanted to make their small mark on history. The colours have faded now and the date would have been indecipherable had I not inked over the figures a few months ago. Both Ruth and I had been to Berlin on a previous occasion to lecture for the British Council, and she and her husband Don were anxious to see the Wall coming down.

I still remember clearly my earlier visit, from 1st to 8th December in
1986. Then I stood on one of the high platforms near the Reichstag. The night was very clear and cold, the trees around totally bare. I gazed out over the Wall and the dead floodlit area beyond, imagining the watching eyes and asking myself whether the Wall would come down in my lifetime, or even in the lifetime of my grandchildren. But the city then was one of the most thrilling I have ever visited. The air crackled with a mixture of excitement and tension and no one seemed ever to go to bed. I remember one young West German writer saying that he lived in the most terrifying city on earth and could never bear to leave it. I often remember cities by the quality and distinctiveness of their street lighting: Berlin seemed a city of harsh floodlights. I stood at Checkpoint Charlie, as brightly lit as a film set, and saw in imagination the lonely hero of a Graham Greene or le Carré novel, walking with studied nonchalance along the floodlit road towards the waiting motionless figures.

I can remember what people in Berlin told me, but not their names, nor what they looked like. One, a distinguished film director, told me over dinner that his passion for cinema began as a young boy living in the British-occupied sector. His mother had to work and left him with a minder, and she would take him to the cinema as soon as it opened and leave him there, with such food as she managed to provide, until late at night when the last programme ended and he would be collected and taken home.