Untold Stories (47 page)

I walk back through the streets of Oxford and as always I have a sense
of being shut out and that there is something going on here that I'm not a part of; not that I was a part of it even when I was a part of it.

16
March
. One of the lowest moments this year was Tony Blair and Jack Straw misrepresenting the French and German position on Iraq in order to encourage xenophobia and get more support from the Murdoch papers.

17
March
. A Bin Laden associate reported as being ‘quizzed' by American agents in Pakistan. Were suspects ‘quizzed' by the Gestapo, I wonder. Other people torture; we quiz.

19 March
. What is particularly bitter is to hear one's own moderate, pragmatic and indeed patriotic sentiments in the mouth of the Foreign Minister of Germany, Joschka Fischer, while our own prime minister parrots the American line, a case, I suppose, of Speak for England, Joschka. Meanwhile the troops get ready to ‘rock and roll', as they call it this time; last time it was ‘shooting fish in a barrel'.

21
March
. The first soldiers killed. If our army had been made up of conscripts no one would have tolerated this war for a moment. However much these are ‘our boys', the war can only be waged because the US and the UK have armies of mercenaries.

24
March
. G. was on the bus en route for Camden when a woman opposite leaned across and said: ‘I suppose you think I've got this sore throat because I've had a cock in my mouth? Actually I've been in Germany, but I wasn't going to let them rearrange my face.'

6
April
. All of Rupert Murdoch's 175 papers are in favour of the war, though he always claims that his editors are independent and decide for themselves. I wonder whether the Rupert Murdoch Professorship at Oxford maintains the same fiction. I know I'm a bore on the subject and thought to be an unworldly fool, but so long as it bears his name this
grubby appointment is a continuing stain on the reputation of the university that solicited it.

10
April
. George Fenton has been in Berlin talking to some of the Berlin Philharmonic, with whom he is due to record and conduct his
Blue Planet
music. They go out to supper in a restaurant in what was East Berlin, a vast converted warehouse where the food is superb. The Germans are all very nice and hugely taken with recent events: ‘The world has turned upside down. The best golfer in the world is black; the best rapper in the world is white; and now there is a war and, guess what, Germany doesn't want to be in it.'

The sense of impotence is what one never gets used to, of being led into ignominy and not being able to do anything about it except march and, one day, vote.

22
April, Yorkshire
. Drive up towards Kirkby Lonsdale then along Wan-dales Lane, the old Roman road from Burrow to Sedbergh. Walking down one of the green lanes below the fells we come across a fold with a stone stile and in the centre of the fold a boulder so huge it looks like an ancient feature of the landscape, walled for its own protection; an erratic perhaps, carried down and deposited here by the melting glaciers of the Ice Age and then become the centre of some ancient ritual.

It's a lovely day and strolling along the lane towards Leck we find a similar fold with another boulder and a hundred yards along a third and a fourth. All are neat, grazed by sheep which have access through a cattle creep under the wall, and all have stiles. They seem ancient, fit snugly into the landscape and are immensely pleasing to look at, some of the pleasure admittedly being in their discovery and their mystery. Are the boulders prehistoric? Or stations along what is plainly an ancient track, some of which is banked up and possibly Roman?

We turn back and drive down to the nursery at Brownth waite, which is attached to an old-fashioned farm where there are hens and their chickens scuttering about, sheep and today a huge turkey. It's a farm out of a
children's story, kept by a nice oldish woman and her son, both expert gardeners, their nursery full of rare plants, and ending in a gate to their own garden, which overlooks the valley.

We ask the son about the sheepfolds and the son smiles indulgently at the thought that they might be ancient monuments. They're actually part of an installation or a series of installations by Andy Goldsworthy, who put up a hundred or so similar folds as Cumbria's Millennium Project. It was an expensive do, costing
£
500,000 or so, and involved shifting the boulders down from the fells with earthmovers besides building the folds that surrounded them. An additional burden, I would have thought, was likely to have been the scepticism of the local communities that were home to these ‘sculptures', though nobody could object that they're not wholly in the tradition of the countryside in which they've been sited. However the only criticism our market gardener has is that Goldsworthy refused to allow any guide to be printed to the location of the folds, the public meant to come across them by accident just as we did and presumably to ask the same kind of questions – who made them, what for and when?

28
April, Yorkshire
. Our clock has been losing time, so this morning we pack it up ready to go to Settle to be overhauled. Like a dog being taken to the vet it seems to know where it's going and as soon as it's in the box begins to chime, chimes all the way down in the car and only stops when we find that Mr Barraclough, whose retirement job it is, doesn't have a clock surgery today. So now it's back home, though still in its box, sulking perhaps, but occasionally giving a plaintive chime.

3
May, Yorkshire
. The cherry tree that my father planted just by the back door some thirty years ago is now not much more than a stump. It was radically pruned a few years back in an effort to cure the blackfly that annually infested it, making the leaves clumped and scorched like burned fists. Even then, with so few leaves, it still got infested, though it was the only tree in the garden that I was ever driven to spray. A few years ago, in
desperation, I planted a vine (
Vitis
coignetiae
) just over the wall in A.'s garden (and so in full sun) and began to train it over what was left of the cherry tree. It flourished, so much so that it has covered the stump with its broad heart-shaped leaves, the cherry is virtually obliterated and the tree now looks like a mop-headed catalpa. It's one of my few ventures into creative gardening and the only time I've had foresight enough to devise a remedy for a problem and the patience to see it carried through.

One drawback is that with so few leaves there is very little cherry blossom, but this year the
coignetiae
has compensated for that, too, as its newly emergent leaves are a darkish pink on the front and white at the back so that they look as much like blossom as leaves. It reminds me of a Claude Rogers painting I once tried to buy and now here it is outside the back door.

15
May
. After supper we go down to look at the Titian exhibition, now in its last few days at the National Gallery. It's ten-fifteen and the doors have only just closed so that the rooms still smell of the hordes that have been passing through; there are screwed-up tickets and abandoned programmes on the floor with, a few feet above the clutter, these sublime paintings.

As usual in galleries I feel inadequate and somehow ungiving and am quicker through the rooms than R., like a child wanting to see what's next, though this means, too, that I can keep having a sit down as I wait for him to catch up. Some of the wonder the paintings inspire is at Titian's technical accomplishment: his rendering of
stuff
, the fur and the fabric and the raised and knotted embroideries on the fabric, all of which melt into a brown mess on close examination, and only achieve form when one steps back. Oddly favourite is a portrait of the (unappealing) Pope Paul III in a faded rose-coloured cape enthroned on a worn velvet chair, the supreme pontiff just a lay figure there to demonstrate the painter's skill with his materials. Next to him the irresistible portrait of the twelve-year-old Ranuccio Farnese and another of Clarissa Strozzi that could almost be a Goya.

Least impressive is the much advertised reconstruction of Alfonso d'Este's camerino which doesn't work because a) the room is too large and b) certain elements are missing and c) the NG's
Bacchus and
Ariadne
apart, I don't altogether like the paintings. I don't care for his last pictures much either, while recognising how (in every sense) far-sighted they are.
The Flaying of
Marsyas
is a disturbing picture, the detachment of the satyrs watching the torture of their fellow creature chilling; Marsyas' upended eye, blank with a horror beyond feeling or fixed in death, is done with a single dot of white paint, a dot I'd like to see enlarged or in detail.

Now it's a quarter of an hour before midnight and we walk back through the dark and deserted gallery, the feeling of privilege we had when we were first able to do this ten years ago never lost; it's the greatest and most tangible honour I have ever been given.

Lying in bed, though, I think of the time I invited Alec Guinness to go round with me. Having given him careful instructions which door to come to, I waited in the lobby until well past the appointed time. Never late, he eventually arrived cross and out of sorts, claiming I had sent him to the wrong door. I hadn't, but I should have known that any attempt to return his always munificent hospitality would end in tears. He so disliked being beholden to anyone that he was bound to fuck things up if you ever tried to give him a treat. Though whether he knew this (or knew it about himself) was never plain.

26
May, Yorkshire
. A dullish day, though fine enough to garden, which we do until, around five, we take some rubbish down to the dump in Settle. It used to be on the edge of a disused quarry and reminded me of the place where the Virgin Mary appeared to St Bernadette at Lourdes, as seen in
The Song of Bernadette
, a film which terrified me as a child. Now it's in Settle itself, an immaculately kept installation below the railway with a series of skips all lined up and with steps and a platform as for the launching of a ship rather than the filling of a skip. The man in charge has a commodious hut, where he may very well live, and is cheerful and helpful and this, plus the fact that disencumbering oneself of rubbish always lifts the
heart, makes most people come away in a cheerful frame of mind. It isn't all rubbish, though, and today as I junk some of the mysterious accoutrements that always come with a vacuum cleaner I spot some quite ancient-looking decorated wood. Alas, one of the rules of the establishment (displayed on a painted board) is that one cannot go through the contents of the skip, so I have to leave my fancied medieval panels to their fate.

Afterwards we go the back way along the Feizor road, stopping to walk up the green lane towards the Celtic wall. The lane is lined with patches of water avens, the dusky purples and pinks in its strawberryish flower growing in among the spokes of yellow wood spurge, an arrangement more effective than anything you'd get at Pulbrook and Gould.

29
May
. That Tony Blair (as today talking to troops in Basra) will often say ‘I honestly believe' rather than just ‘I believe' says all that needs to be said. ‘To be honest' another of his frank-seeming phrases.

11
June
. Why isn't more fuss made over Charles Causley? Looking through his
Collected Poems
to copy out his ‘Ten Types of Hospital Visitor', I dip into some of his other poems, so many of them vivid and memorable. Well into his eighties, he must be one of the most distinguished poets writing today (if he still is). But why does nobody say so and celebrate him while he's still around? Hurrah for Charles Causley is what I say.
*

23
June
. The woollen hats worn by boys nowadays often take the form of medieval basinets or such helmets as soldiers wear in a French Book of Hours. A boy comes by this morning with just such a helmet looking as if he might be coming off duty from the foot of the Cross.

25
July
. John Schlesinger dies. The obituaries are more measured than he would have liked, the many undistinguished films he made later in life set against
A Kind of Loving
and
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
. He wasn't by nature
a journeyman film-maker, taking whatever came along, but was forced into this way of working by having three houses to keep up, one of them in Hollywood, and always leading quite an expensive life. What none of the obituaries says is what a joy he was to work with, though no one had a shorter fuse, besides being wonderfully funny, particularly about his sex life.

Short, solid and fat, John looked like the screen Nazi he had once or twice played in his early days as an actor; he was a scaled-down Francis L. Sullivan, managing nevertheless to be surprisingly successful in finding partners. Not invariably, though. Sometime in the 1970s he was in a New York bath house where the practice was for someone wanting a partner to leave the cubicle door open. This Schlesinger accordingly did and lay monumentally on the table under his towel waiting for someone to pass by. A youth duly did and indeed ventured in, but seeing this mound of flesh laid out on the slab recoiled, saying: ‘Oh, please. I couldn't. You've got to be kidding.' Schlesinger closed his eyes and said primly: ‘A simple “No” will suffice.'

6
August
. Driving along the back road from Muker to Kirkby Stephen, we spot down in the valley another of Andy Goldsworthy's circular sheepfolds and a mile or two further on a complex of folds that at first we take to be a development of his art but which on closer examination turns out to be the real thing: a series of three or four walled enclosures set round a one-chamber single-storey cottage used for dipping and shearing sheep. And still used, seemingly, the long stone-lined pit brimming with evil-looking oily dip, a ragged fleece hanging by the wall and the ground carpeted in flocks and curds of wool. It's a sinister place and much as it must always have been, an old board blocking one of the cattle creeps hinged with scraps of ancient leather. That it can at first sight be mistaken for one of Goldsworthy's installations says much for the authenticity of his work.