Untold Stories (31 page)

31
May
. A late birthday present from Mary-Kay Wilmers, a mug dated January 1889, commemorating the gift by Colonel North of the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey to the then borough of Leeds. There is a picture of Kirkstall and the inscription: ‘Built in 1147. Destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in 1539.' This was what most people believed in Leeds when I was a boy, the notion that there could have been two iconoclasts both named Cromwell but a century apart too much of a coincidence for them to take. The idea that it was ‘built in 1147' is equally silly.

Run into Edmund White, who tells me what a revelation
Beyond the
Fringe
was when he saw it in New York in 1963, how sophisticated it seemed and how camp. He ends up by asking me, as Harold Wilson once did: ‘Were you one of the original four?'

I wonder whether there were any shy, retiring Apostles: ‘Were you one of the original twelve?'

14
July
. I wish there had been rollerblades in my time (though I would probably have thought them ‘not my kind of thing'). They seem the epitome of grace. Skateboarding, on the other hand, now looks clumsy and, however skilfully done, somehow desperate and without art.

25
July
. Dubbing the kind of characters I write about – denizens of retirement homes, ageing aunties, old people on their last legs – I choose suitably solid, old-fashioned names: Frank, Harold, Arthur, Nora, names of their period. Just. Because, of course, the personnel of these designated scrap heaps is altering. Ranged in vacant rows or stood immobile by a radiator, these shrunken creatures still answer to Hannah, Arthur, Peggy and Bill. But soon it will be Melanie and Karen, Dean and Sandra Louise. Somewhere I wrote some half-heard dialogue on the edge of a scene outside an old people's home: as the middle-aged
children of one deceased resident come away carrying his meagre possessions the matron is helping another old man out of the ambulance, saying: ‘Hello! Welcome! You're our first Kevin!'

12
August
. The BBC are planning some elite channel, and have written to Anthony Jones, my literary agent, saying that since I was so distinguished and award-winning etc. they would be happy to pay
£
3,500 for my entire oeuvre. What happens if you're not distinguished and award-winning, my agent wonders. Do you pay them?

Read an article suggesting that Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel were largely done by another painter, Cavallini, now forgotten because, unlike Giotto, he was not singled out for mention by Vasari. I don't believe this, if only because the name Cavallini lacks substance. He sounds like a juggler or a conjuror appearing on the halls: The Great Cavallini.

14
August
. From time to time, sitting in the garden chair outside my front door, I hear an audible thud and a fat, emerald-green caterpillar drops from one of the lime trees onto the car bonnet. Today one lands on the flags and is straight away assailed by a wasp which either bites or stings it so that the caterpillar wriggles in pain. I watch this process for a while, then stamp on the caterpillar to put it out of its misery. Later another caterpillar falls and is picked up by the resident blackbird, which pecks away at it. There is more flinching from the caterpillar but this I watch with no distaste at all, just glad that the blackbird has found a decent meal. The hen blackbird, which was rather stupid and which I thought the cats had got, is now about again.

31
August
. An American woman who witnessed the accident to Princess Diana is interviewed on television and says that she noticed that the air bag was ‘fully deployed'. An entirely correct usage, I'm sure, but who in England other than a technician would think to say it?

2
September
. Hysteria over the death of Princess Diana continues, people
‘from all walks of life' queuing down the Mall, not merely to sign the book but to sit there writing for up to fifteen minutes at a time. Others, presumably, just write ‘Why?', which suggests a certain cosmic awareness besides having the merit of brevity.

‘What a treasured possession these books will be for her two sons,' says the BBC commentator, which has echoes of Ernest Worthing and the Army Lists. It also summons up the last scene of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and the thousands of tea chests in a dusty unvisited cellar. Apparently, similar volumes are to be opened all over the country and it will be possible to analyse regional differences in the degree of mourning.

3
September
. The order of service is published for the funeral, the music to be played, Albinoni, Pachelbel and Elgar's ‘Nimrod'. It's the apotheosis of Classic FM. The Dean: ‘And now from Elgar's
Enigma Variations
“Nimrod”, which is on page two of your Order of Service and No. 17 in this week's Classic Countdown.' The poor Queen is to be forced to go mournabout. I suppose it is a revolution but with Rosa Luxemburg played by Sharon and Tracy.

4
September
. ‘God created a blonde angel and called her Diana.' This is one of the cards on the flowers outside Kensington Palace that the BBC chooses to zoom in on. It purports to be from a child, though whether one is supposed to be touched by it or (as is my inclination) to throw up isn't plain.

HMQ to address the nation tomorrow. I'm only surprised Her Majesty hasn't had to submit to a phone-in.

5
September
. HMQ gives an unconvincing broadcast: ‘unconvincing' not because one doesn't believe that her sentiments are genuine (as to that there's no way of telling), but because she's not a good actress, indeed not an actress at all. What she should have been directed to do is to throw in a few pauses and seem to be searching for her words; then the speech would have been hailed as moving and heartfelt. As it is she reels her message off,
as she always does. That is the difference between Princess Diana and the Queen: one could act, the other can't.

I remember, regretfully now, one of HMQ's lines in
A Question of Attribution
which, when we were looking for cuts, we took out: ‘I don't like it when people clap me because there may come a time when they won't. Besides I'm
there
. It's like clapping Nelson's Column.'

After supper we go down to look at the scene in the Mall, which is full of people not particularly silent, no mood at all, really, just walking up and down as if coming away from an event, though it's also like a huge
passeg-giata
. People crowd to the walls and hedges, where there are flowers and little candlelit shrines; flowers fixed to trees, poems, painted messages; a Union Jack and teddy bears (which always bode ill). Many are Asian and the populousness of it, as well as the random milling about, make me think that this is perhaps what India is like.

The evening is redeemed by an extraordinary sight. Despite the hundreds and hundreds of people trooping past, here, on the grass by the corner of Stable House Street, is a fox. It is just out of the light, slinking by with its head turned towards the parade of people passing, none of whom notice it. It's quite small, as much fawn as red, and is, I imagine, a vixen. It lopes unhurriedly along the verge before diving under the hedge into St James's Palace grounds. Besides us only one woman notices it, but that's probably just as well: such is the hysteria and general silliness it might have been hailed as the reincarnation of Princess Diana, another beautiful vixen, with whom lots of parallels suggest themselves. We walk back through Green Park where, set back from the Victoria Memorial, is a bright little bivouac, which I take to be people pitching camp and staking a claim for the procession tomorrow. In fact it's the HQ of British Telecom, half a dozen technicians squatting under their orange canopy, their interest focused on computer screens. It's the kind of subject Eric Ravilious would have picked out, or Ardizzone in the Western Desert.

Walk back through Shepherd Market, now smart and gentrified, cafés on pavements and all that. Except it hasn't altogether changed, as in one
corner there's an open door, a lighted staircase and a notice: ‘New Tasty Babe Upstairs'.

15
September, Yorkshire
. Blackberrying up Black Bank, taking with me one of Miss Shepherd's old walking sticks. Huge clusters of berries so that one can gather them almost by the handful. Never so utterly at peace as when picking blackberries or looking for mushrooms, the spread of Ingleborough and Pen-y-ghent still sunny while black clouds gather over Morecambe. A flock of sheep comes up the road and won't pass me until I stand in the ditch. The pretty farm girl who is bringing up the rear seems almost as reluctant to pass as the sheep, just giving me a shy ‘Hello' and running on. A mountain ash tree, weighed down with huge swags of crimson berries, catches the last of the sun. It's like something by Samuel Palmer; paint it as bright and glowing as it is and it would seem like a vision.

25
September
. The
Bradford Telegraph and Argus
rings at about ten-thirty to say that Jonathan Silver has died. I last spoke to him in July, when he rang to say that I had been much in his mind since he was now wholly at the mercy of his doctors and so was feeling like George III. Some of their procedures (a baseball cap filled with ice worn for some hours to preserve his hair from radiotherapy) would not have been out of place in the eighteenth century. I am normally immune to enthusiasm and even recoil from it but Jonathan's was irresistible, and I admired the fact that he had created at Salt's Mill an arts centre, a bookshop, a restaurant and a gallery crammed with Hockneys, and that it wasn't simply pious or well intentioned but worked well on every level, artistic and commercial.

He was proud of the success of Salt's Mill and delighted to show it off, even taking one round the premises of the various firms whose rents made the running of the gallery possible. A look of patient indulgence would come over the faces of these northern executives, knowing that he was obsessive and bearing it patiently, because, had he not been so, the Mill would never have taken off.

In a way it's fitting that the setting for all this should have been Saltaire, the inspiration of the Nonconformist nineteenth-century mill owner and philanthropist Sir Titus Salt. Voluble, pony-tailed, brimming with enthusiasm, Jonathan Silver was his worthy successor.

26
September
. Listen to a superb recording of
Tristram Shandy
read by John Moffatt, who manages to make sense in the reading of stuff that is almost incomprehensible on the page. John was once doing some Chekhov in Edinburgh and heard a lady coming away afterwards say: ‘There was a lot of laughter at the end of the first act, but I soon put a stop to that.' He also played in Perth, where
The Cherry Orchard
was billed as
The Cheery Orchard
.

30
September
. Read
The Birth of Shylock and the Death of Zero
Mostel
by Arnold Wesker, an account of his attempts to get his play
Shylock
produced and how it flopped on Broadway. Much of it I find sympathetic, though the only lesson I can draw from it is that playwright and director should never correspond. The text is full of letters from Wesker to Peter Hall, from John Dexter to Wesker and from Wesker to anyone who would listen. The last letter I wrote concerning a production of one of my plays was in 1977, when I tried, with the permission of the director, to change the performance of one of the actors in
The Old Country
. It didn't work, as letters in my experience never do work; however larded with praise, they almost invariably cause offence. You can say what you think or not, but never write it down.

6
October
. Rowse dies, the obituary in the
Independent
by Jack Simmons much kinder than one might have expected. I only met him a few times, first in 1973 at All Souls, when he was so pleased with himself and so concerned to strike the ‘me me me' note that he was untalkable to. When I used to see him as an undergraduate I was always struck by his massive forehead, a feature that doesn't come out in photographs. Bruce McFarlane, while he made fun of him, says somewhere in his letters that there
was another side to him, one of great kindness and consideration. There must have been more than met the later eye because as he got older he was a terrible bore, one reason he was passed over for honours for so long presumably being that the great and the good who decide such things had been given too many earfuls when dining at All Souls.

He was a compulsive diarist, Bruce saying that when he was out walking Rowse often fell behind in order to write down one of his remarks. It's said in the obituaries that Eliot liked his poems but this doesn't accord with Charles Monteith's story of coming into Eliot's office at Faber's one morning and finding him pacing the room, groaning. ‘More poems from Leslie Rowse. Oh God.'

He came up to Oxford (as he never tired of telling you) as a scholarship boy from Cornwall, the son of working-class parents and with what was presumably a broad Cornish accent. What I've always wanted to know is when exactly his native tones gave way to the exaggerated Oxford accent he always affected. Was it a sudden change or did it happen gradually? It's one of the many questions I should have asked McFarlane but never got round to.

24
October
. Headline in the
Observer
: ‘Boy, six, raped by girl of 14'. This is the main front-page headline and presumably what the
Observer
thinks is the most important item of news this weekend.

7
November
. Isaiah Berlin dies. I've never understood (as he claims he never understood) why he should have been held in such high intellectual esteem. His writing is windy and verbose and the only one of his books I've managed to get through is
The Hedgehog and the Fox
, read when I was twenty. He was the darling of the
New York Review of Books
, which in the eighties seemed to carry pieces about him in virtually every issue.