Untold Stories (36 page)

In a later obituary it's said that she approved of the Falklands War and one begins to see that for all her goodness and mild appeal she may have trod the same path as her contemporaries Amis and Larkin. Masked though she was in kindliness and general benevolence, she may have ended up as far from her radical beginnings as they did, Dame Iris's spiritual journey not all that different from Paul Johnson's.

10
February
. At Christmas G. and R. gave me a subscription to
This England
(‘Britain's Loveliest Magazine'), which at first seemed a conventional magazine of the countryside with thatched cottages, country houses and even Patience Strong. Closer examination shows it to be more sinister: it is seemingly the house magazine of the Society of Saint George and dedicated to the preservation of the English identity. A second number comes today, more virulent than the last with columns of correspondence all fervently opposed to the European connection, denouncing Labour (and half the Conservatives) as traitors. It's the usual stuff, except to find a magazine ostensibly devoted to singing the praises of the countryside but peddling such rot is quite disturbing. And of course not a black face to be seen. It's the kind of publication one laughs about, but go a thousand miles across Europe and sentiments no more rancid and parochial are inspiring neighbours to slit each other's throats.

12
March
. Reading P. Ackroyd's
Thomas More
, which I finish today, leaves me in two minds, the tolerance and scepticism of the author of
Utopia
and the dogmatism and heresy-hunting of the lawyer never adding up and not
short of hypocrisy. It's hard not to feel there is something specifically English about this two-mindedness (More's, not mine). Ackroyd writes how during his time in prison More was tormented by fears of torture and the barbarities of his possible punishment, without it seeming to occur to him (or Ackroyd) that the torments he had himself visited on heretics were just as terrible. Nor did these have a dogmatic justification as intended to save the victims from the pains of hell; More rejoiced in the cruelties since they gave the poor souls a foretaste of eternal fire. However noble his conduct in the face of death it's difficult to feel much sympathy with him. Henry VIII is a devil but that doesn't make More a saint.

In the afternoon to Kendal and the Abbot Hall Gallery, notable for its collection of Romneys (Romney died in Kendal). Less taken by the finished portraits, which are staid and wooden, than by his preliminary sketches, some of them so rough and full of energy they're reminiscent of Frank Auerbach, though none of this dash survives into the finished portraits. Occasionally funny, too, particularly a sketch of
Two Lovers Startled
by a Young Person
, a child gazing at a snogging couple.

22
March
. Good example of journalistic spite last week when I was rung by the
Independent
(journalist's name forgotten) wanting my comments on a movement for Yorkshire independence. I say I have none. ‘What, none at all?' ‘No,' and I put the phone down. In the item the next day it is recorded that I have no comment despite having written such ‘treacly' plays about the region. An untreacly (and incorrect) joke about Yorkshire via George Melly:

7
April
. I call at the Regent Bookshop in Parkway to find Peter the proprietor's mother there with a bundle of papers she's brought in for him to photocopy. She is from Vienna, which she left in 1938 at the age of twenty, her parents having managed to find someone in England who
would employ her and her two sisters as domestics and so procure them visas.

Here is her passport stamped with a large red J and the letters she wrote after the war trying to find out what happened to her parents, both dead in a camp. I come away thinking about the supposed shame stamped on the passport and the grudging visa that had saved her life. The issues then all seem so clear and much more shocking than what now happens every day on the borders of Yugoslavia. Easier to be indignant about, too, with, sixty years ago, the rights and wrongs so unquestionable. Whereas nowadays one says: ‘Well, they've always been at each other's throats,' and ‘If the Serbs weren't doing it to them they would be doing it to the Serbs.' And so I often don't read any of the five or six pages the papers devote every morning to Kosovo, as maybe I wouldn't have read about the Jews clamouring to get out of Germany and Austria in 1938.

13
April
. Watching
Great Expectations
on TV, I found it lacked (and rather prided itself on lacking) the element of the grotesque that Dickens needs, one reason being the costume design. Most costume dramas, whether on stage or film, tend to assume that fashions came and went in the past much as they do today. But it's only in the last fifty or sixty years that there've been large retail outlets like Burton's or M&S which have homogenised fashion. Before that, the latest thing must have impinged on ordinary lives much less, so that there would be characters in 1830 still going around in the fashions of 1800, say. My grandmother in 1949 was still wearing the long duster coats she had worn in 1920 and Queen Mary looked like an Edwardian lady all her life: dying in the fifties, she still dressed as she had in 1910. Look at Ford Madox Brown's
Work
: only the middle and upper classes are dressed in a contemporary way; the workmen, the flower seller and the poorer characters are dressed in what comes to hand – fashion doesn't enter into it. Portraits, too, are deceptive as the sitters generally choose to be in their Sunday best.

Apropos of which, one of the many pleasures of Judy Egerton's National Gallery catalogue of
The British School
is her dissection of the
hunting gear worn by Lord Ribblesdale in Sargent's famous portrait. Though he seems the epitome of high fashion, in this as in much else he isn't typical and certainly isn't wearing what the well-dressed Master of Foxhounds might have chosen but an assemblage of favourite garments that are no less striking for being utterly individual.

16
April
. Foul young businessman on the train making arrangements for the evening with a girlfriend via his mobile phone. ‘Save some for me,' he says, and as he signs off: ‘Be kissed.'

1
May, Oxford
. Outside the Museum of Natural History in Parks Road is a large stone disc curved, faceted and looking like a giant turtle shell. The label says it's a ‘septarian concretion', consisting of limestone formed 165 million years ago and found in the Bicester clay in 1984. Similar limestone concretions, though more the size of tortoise shells, are in various gardens and borders in our village in Yorkshire, having been found in the bed of the village beck, where they're unsurprisingly not called ‘septarian concretions' but ‘pudding stones'.

We look round the Museum, much more spick and span than it was when I was last here as an undergraduate, when the cast-iron roof and elaborate arcading were less well thought of and more of a piece with the dusty dinosaur skeletons down below. Wanting to ask about porphyry, I spot a middle-aged man rearranging one of the showcases and ask him if he knows anything about stones. ‘I should do,' he says. ‘I'm one of the curators.' I tell him about visiting Chastleton, the seventeenth-century house near Chipping Norton newly restored by the National Trust, and it turns out he was the expert called in to advise on the conservation of the stonework. The Trust was anxious to know where the stone had originally been quarried. He told them to walk across the field opposite the house and when they came to a dip in the ground and the house disappeared from view that would be where the stone came from. And so it was.

12
May
. I go to the post office for my bus pass. The woman behind the
counter leans over and says confidentially: ‘Is it your first time?' It's as if I'm going to a brothel. Except that in a brothel they don't require proof of residence or identity and I'm sent home to get them.

14
May
. A piece in the
Independent
about David Blunkett tackling failing standards in education. I am pictured, though whether as evidence of decline or hope for the future I can't make out. Either would please me.

Judging from newspaper reports, the congregation at Ted Hughes's memorial service in Westminster Abbey was an odd mixture, with a surprising number of old aristocratic biddies (the oldest being the Queen Mother), and society (the dead poets society, I suppose) well represented. It's no secret that the Laureate had put it about a bit, which, of course, isn't mentioned in the tributes, though there is some comment afterwards that the service had more of Hughes than it did of God and that it was altogether too free-form. I rather wish it had been more so, and done on the lines of Graham Norton's current TV show, so that the priest in charge could have said: ‘All sit … but
remain standing
those who had any sort of fling with the deceased.'

15
May
. Finish reading
A Pacifist's Wa
r
by Frances Partridge and start reading
Stalingrad
by Antony Beevor, both books covering the same period though from different angles, foxholes at Ham Spray and foxholes at Stalingrad hardly the same.
Stalingrad
is unsurprisingly a bestseller, the course of the conflict making it compulsive reading and almost Homeric, the two vain and wilful leaders like the gods meddling with and frustrating the best efforts of their generals, and the troops on both sides suffering unimaginable hardships. So, though I'm feeling quite low this morning, I look round my cosy book-lined room and think: ‘Well, at least it's not Stalingrad: it's warm and I don't have lice.'

The struggle in the ruins of Stalingrad I think I knew about as a boy from a series in
Hotspur
or
Wizard
; there was certainly a storyline set in the tunnels under Odessa and I think Stalingrad, too. This can't have been much later than 1943, the war I suppose a godsend to comics whose
writers kept up with its progress. The setting of ruined cities, though, may have eventually got monotonous or confusing; I'm not sure now, for instance, that I'm not mixing up Stalingrad with a slightly later series of stories set in the ruins of Monte Cassino.

11
June
. Watching them Beating the Retreat on TV last night, I remember how, when I was doing basic training at the start of National Service, against all my inclinations and instincts I came to enjoy drill and how (had I played the trumpet) I might have been quite happy as a military bandsman.

8
July
. It seemed unlikely that Classic FM could get worse but it has. I switched on briefly yesterday to hear an announcer (all of whom feel it necessary to have a smile in their voices) saying: ‘That was the very catchy third movement of Sibelius's Violin Concerto.' Still, one should no doubt be grateful their pronunciation has improved. I was startled in its earlier days to hear a presenter announce the ballet music from ‘The Female Guardee'. This turned out to be
La Fille mal gardée
.

Actually a ballet called ‘The Female Guardee' might be quite interesting. Better than
Giselle
anyway.

24
July
. Wake this Sunday morning with what seemed in my dream a superb title for a play: ‘The Fun to be Had with Models of Dubious Sensibility'.

30
July
. Jessye Norman has been appearing at the Barbican. She is touchy about her size and, having difficulty getting into a small aeroplane, is supposed to have been told by the air hostess to try getting in sideways. ‘Lady,' she is said to have remarked, ‘I ain't got no sideways.'

It would be a nice joke if she had ever made it, which she hotly denies and seemingly rightly as today I came across the same joke in a nineteenth-century
Punch
cartoon by L. Ravenhill, the vehicle the lady was trying to get into then a horse-drawn omnibus.

10
August
. Any war that is fought these days, in the Falklands, the Gulf, the Balkans or wherever, must as a matter of course become straight away the subject of tactical analysis, seminars at Sandhurst and a general post-operational picking to pieces. This is for the benefit of both the military and the armaments manufacturers and it is not new. I am reading
Alabaster Tombs
by Arthur Gardner, who, discussing the representations of fifteenth-century armour on church monuments, writes: ‘It is recorded that after a battle the squires and armourers held a sort of inquest over the bodies of the slain in order to discuss how best to prevent or ward off the blows that had proved fatal in the fray.' So among the camp followers finishing off the dying and stripping the dead there would be a more purposeful and professional group making notes. And as with the increasingly sophisticated developments in today's armaments, so the adjustments consequent on these medieval inquests were a mixed blessing: ‘The results of their conclusions were not always satisfactory as armour became so heavy that in some fighting the knights were found dead from exhaustion without any sign of blow or wound.'

Gardner's book was sent to the publishers in November 1939, and like the excavation at Sutton Hoo earlier that year must have seemed an almost quixotic gesture of faith in permanence and continuity at a time when general destruction was in prospect and alabaster tombs and Saxon burial ships were hardly top priorities.

26
August
. Switch on the radio after supper and catch most of Elgar's First Symphony, music which invariably transports me back to boyhood and walking up Headingley Lane on a summer evening after a concert in Leeds Town Hall. The evocative power of music is, I suppose, greatest when heard in live performance. This is a recording but it still casts a spell because I have come on it by accident. Had I put on the recording myself the spell would have been nowhere near as powerful because self-induced. Why this should be I can't think, though doubtless Proust would know.