Untold Stories (72 page)

Much of my work I have stayed outside. I do not find myself in
Forty
Years On
, for instance, though much of my reading is there. I am in some of my other plays but can't find myself in others –
The Madness of George
III
, for instance, or
A Question of Attribution
– and on the whole I prefer those plays from which I am absent to those in which I too clearly hear the sound of my own voice.

This absence from one's own work is abolished by death, or will be in my case, I imagine, because of having kept a diary. In life a journal is a separate thing, a commentary running alongside one's life even when (as in my case) extracts are occasionally published.

Death, though, coalesces all one's writings and wipes out the difference. Virginia Woolf is remembered as much for her diaries as for what she would have thought of as her proper work, but all now is just the work of Virginia Woolf.

Though there are diaries and diaries. Virginia Woolf's diary was livelier than her novels, as Philip Larkin's diary was probably livelier than his poems, though in a different way. Her diary enhanced her reputation; his (he felt anyway) wouldn't have, so his dutiful executrix put it into the shredder. Feeling as he did about death, the surprise to me still is that he cared.

When I do crop up in my own work I'm not a prepossessing figure. If I do write about (or at least around) myself the eidolon, the lay figure I advance into the picture and shelter behind, is generally downtrodden and middle-aged and often involved in some sort of pedagogic activity – a lecturer at a polytechnic, for instance (
Me, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf
), a teacher at the local comprehensive (
Intensive Care
). Even when I (if I can use the word) have a proper job, like the harassed provincial insurance man in
Kafka's Dick
, the job gets elbowed out of the way because of academic pursuits. Since teaching undergraduates is the closest I have ever come to having a normal job I suppose this is why, suitably disguised, it regularly smuggles itself into my written work.

That said, though, also evident is a deep uneasiness about learning and in particular books. It wasn't something I had been especially aware of when writing but I found quite late in the day that I had been writing and rewriting the same scene for half my life. In this set-up someone stands looking at a bookcase, baffled and dismayed by what one is expected to assimilate and despairing of ever doing so. It occurs in
Getting On
; in
The
Old Country
; in the film of
Prick Up Your Ears
; and in
Kafka's Dick
. And the thought is always the same: ‘How will I ever catch up?'

Though the character doing the looking and the despairing is often myself, the scene crops up even when I am nowhere to be found. I do not see myself in any form in
An Englishman Abroad
but sure enough here it is again, this time with Coral Browne looking at the books belonging to Guy Burgess. One couldn't get much further from an English provincial schoolboy than the Australian grande dame Coral Browne, but when she's looking at the bookcase in Burgess's Moscow flat that's what she is: me, as a boy or an undergraduate, baffled by the world of words.

Of course one isn't always able to make a certain identification. Am I – though it's no dream of mine – also the provincial boy in
The Old Country
, picked up by an establishment figure to spend an idyllic evening in his underpants looking at back numbers of
Country Life
? I hope not, but who am I to say?

I note another recurrence, or a preoccupation, something at any rate that seems regularly to crop up. I seem to have a fondness for, an affinity with, the maimed and the stigmatised. It is not charitable, still less Christian, and they don't get much sympathy or understanding. Indeed it occurs first just as a joke, part of the opening speech of my first play,
Forty
Years On
. The headmaster addresses the school (which is also England) at his farewell speech day.

Bombardier Tiffin was just the first of a series of less comic and variously maimed or stigmatised characters who turn up in plays over the years. There was Cross, a boy with a club foot who goes with an Edwardian cycling club on its outing to Fountains Abbey in
A Day Out
(1972).

In
The Old Country
(1977) there is a brief encounter with a child murderer; in Marks (1982) a boy stigmatises himself by getting tattooed; in
The
Insurance Man
(1986) a young man is disfigured by a creeping eczema that gradually covers his whole body, and there are dozens of maimed characters besides as this is a play about Kafka and his job as accident and compensation assessor for a Prague insurance company. I suppose, too, though I had not thought of it, that George III was maimed mentally and physically by the attack of porphyria which is the subject of
The Madness
of George III
(1991).

The prevalence of the damaged and disabled says something about me. It's not, as I might like to pretend, a plea for sympathy and understanding for the handicapped; this doesn't really come into it. However irritating and unfair it may seem to the actually disabled, these characters turn up out of a sense of identification because I do not think it is fanciful to suppose writing itself a form of disablement; it's certainly a handicap when it comes to getting on with things, writing in some sense a substitute for doing.

Roaring, which you occasionally do in the ordinary world with laughter, in Leeds means also to cry, ‘Don't start roaring' a warning to a child to fetch it back from the brink of tears. I roared a lot when I was a child – out of shame, rage or simply because I couldn't see any other way out. Now, I suppose, the writing has replaced the roaring but the reasons are much the same.

When the young Stephen Spender told T. S. Eliot he ‘wanted to be a poet' Eliot rather tartly responded, ‘I can understand your wanting to write poems but I don't quite know what you mean by being a poet.'
*
Being a writer is not quite the same as writing. The evidence of a lifetime's work, his or her books ranged on the shelf (or shelves), ought to reassure someone who writes that he or she is indeed a writer. But nothing, not the books in the shop window or the play on the stage or shoals of letters from delighted readers, furnishes such assurance but only the act
of writing itself, the fingers flying over the keys or, in my case, pushing the pen across the paper.

Still, it is always easier to be it than to do it, easier for the public, too, who prefer what they have had from a writer to what they might be given. Being it is comfortable, so far as the public is concerned: this is the writer they have got used to. Doing it is less comfortable: the writer might be wanting to try something new.

The real mark of recognition for a writer or any artist, perhaps, comes when the public begins to want him or her to die, so that they can close the book on that particular talent, stop having to make the effort to follow the writer any further, put a cork in the bottle.

Between being and doing, though, the writer sometimes has no choice. Larkin was someone who, on his own admission, ceased to be able to do it and just had to be it for the last ten years of his life, in the process becoming far more famous not doing it than he had ever been doing it. To E. M. Forster, too, this happened.

But any writer would say that, though the sales and plaudits come not with doing it but having done it, the useful medal to have would be one bestowed, as it were, on the field of battle, hung round your neck in recognition of yet another fruitless morning spent at the typewriter or after a week or even months spent staring out of the window.

‘
Che cos'è la sua data di nascita?
'

I turn my head sideways on the blood-soaked pillow. ‘9–5–34.'

Expressionless, the doctor in the Pronto Soccorso writes it down as a thought occurs to me, and I raise my head. ‘
Domani il mio giorno natale
.'

Hardly a joke, in the circumstances it merits a smile, but from this mirthless young man nothing is forthcoming. I lay my head down again. At least I seem to have stopped bleeding.

Birthdays were never made much of in our family. Mine, as I told the Italian doctor, is on May 9 and my brother's too, though he is three years older than I am. The coincidence is always good for a laugh, particularly when it dawns that we must both have been conceived during the old August Bank Holiday, sex confined to the holidays perhaps, or unconfined by them. But that I should have had my beginnings in the cheerless surroundings of a boarding-house bedroom has always seemed to me a melancholy circumstance. Morecambe it would have been, or Filey, linoleum on the floor, jug and basin on the wash-hand stand, and the room smelling faintly of the methylated spirits my mother always brought for the pad on which she heated her curling tongs; meths for me, a lifetime later, still the smell of the seaside.

The kind of establishment we stayed in turned out its boarders, rain or shine, at ten in the morning and there was no coming back between meals, so it would have been done at night, the act itself stealthily undertaken,
mindful of the strange bed and my two-year-old brother sleeping beside it and conscious, too, of the thin walls and the adjacence of other boarders, not sleeping perhaps, whose glances would have to be negotiated over the next morning's sparse breakfast. Other people were always very much a consideration in my parents' lives; mine, too, I suppose, so much of my timorous and undashing life prefigured in that original circumspect conjunction.

We were both born at home, my brother's an awkward birth requiring forceps, with my mother's screams said to have been heard down the street. I still have the bed, the polish at the foot of it scraped and scratched by my mother's feet during the initial stages of that reluctant arrival. Had mine been a difficult birth, the persistence with which untoward events occur on and around my birthday would, though I am no believer in astrology, make a kind of sense. But I seem to have come into the world with no fuss at all, my mother recalling only the bedspread, embroidered with flowers and butterflies, and how the midwife, making the bed after an examination, would always exclaim: ‘Butterflies to the bottom!'

Neither my brother nor I ever had a party, the fact that our birthdays coincided not doubling the festivities but serving to cancel them out. By the time I was of an age to care about this the war was on, and parties and presents, like oranges and bananas, something that had been discontinued ‘for the duration'. In later years things were to improve slightly, but unless we made a point of getting our own presents we'd build up a backlog of gifts ungiven that stretched back years. We were not particularly poor so there was no sense of deprivation about it. Whatever deprivation my brother and I felt was ceremonial: it was not so much the actual presents we missed as the want of occasion. Other people made more of their lives than we did. Wanting birthdays, parties and presents was just another instance of the way our family never managed to be like other families. Even where birthdays were concerned we could not achieve ordinariness.

We sometimes tried, though. My parents' birthdays came within a week of each other so, like ours, tended to coalesce and we would buy them a joint present. Dad was shy and undemonstrative so that, whatever
the gift, the actual giving of it was guaranteed to put him off: he could never simulate the show of surprise and gratitude such occasions required. His coolest reception was for a coffee percolator, a present which ignored the fact that they had never drunk fresh coffee in their lives and weren't going to start now. Dad rightly detected a hint of social aspiration in the gift, the message being that it might be nice if we were the kind of family that did drink fresh-brewed coffee. Dad would have none of it. ‘Faffing article' was his way of describing it and in due course the jug part ended up in the cupboard under the sink where it came in handy when washing his hair.

Presents were fraught with peril, the subtext to ‘Many Happy Returns' so often ‘I think you're the kind of person who'd like this (or I wish you were)'. Even the longed-for bike I got when I was ten came with the same sort of message: not the dashing, speedy bike other boys had, or a racer with drop handlebars like my brother's; mine was big, heavy and safe and, since it was still wartime, probably made out of the reconstituted iron railings that had been recently stripped from suburban walls in order to aid the war effort. Clumsy, upright and dependable, it was the kind of bike one went to church on, and I duly did.

Cut to twenty years later, and I have just learned to drive and am about to buy my first car. The general view seems to be that I need something solid and dependable, opinion favouring a Morris 1000 (‘Your sort of car'). But in the nick of time I remember my old bike and switch to a scootier primrose-yellow Mini. With my next car I went even further and got a Triumph Herald, and while it didn't quite have drop handlebars, it was at least a convertible.

It was only when I reached fifty and started looking back that I began to think there might be something inauspicious about my birthday, and tried to count the occasions around that time when I'd strayed close to the edge of life, even been at death's door or somewhere in the vicinity. There had been the time in Sardinia in 1966, when I suddenly collapsed after vomiting blood. The island was still quite primitive, but was just beginning to be promoted as a holiday resort, chiefly by the Aga Khan, who had
built a grand hotel but hadn't yet got round to providing a hospital. In the meantime, the only medical centre was a semi-monastic establishment run by the Frate Bene Fratelli, an order of Franciscan friars.

Dying, like much else in Italy, is something of a spectator sport and the steps of the monastery were lined with sightseers awaiting the arrival of the more spectacularly sick. As I was borne in on a stretcher, black-shawled ladies gazed down at me, raised their eyes to heaven, and crossed themselves: I was obviously a goner. In more sophisticated medical surroundings I would, of course, have been in no danger at all, as all that had happened was that a duodenal ulcer had burst and, without knowing it, I had been losing blood. Dramatic as it is, this is seldom a life-threatening condition (though my father had nearly died of something similar) and in normal circumstances a prompt blood transfusion will restore the drooping patient.

But these were not normal circumstances. Diagnostic equipment was primitive and the chief weapon in the therapeutic armoury of these delightful monks seemed to be prayer. It was some time, therefore, before my complaint was diagnosed, and when the remedy was agreed to be a blood transfusion it was still a long time coming, the monks seeming reluctant to fill what was so plainly a leaking bucket. So, for a few days, my life steadily drained away while the monks told their beads and somebody else told the
Daily Mirror
. ‘Fringe Boy in Deathbed Drama' was the first my family heard of it.

At the lowest point of my fortunes my two companions went into Olbia to find some supper. I was feeling ghastly, but it only came home to me how desperate my situation was when one of them kissed me. Since she had never kissed me before, she plainly did not expect me to be there when she returned. It was the kiss of death.

There was another portent besides. Finding me alone, two novice monks chose this moment to give me a bed bath. I was lying on the bed, stark naked and virtually drained of blood, when one of them lightly lifted my dick (which, in the circumstances, was the size of an acorn) and let it drop again. ‘…
è
,' he said, the simple monosyllable given a melancholy falling inflexion, eloquent of pity and resignation. That, at any rate, was
one message. The other was more implicit and more sinister: namely, that he was unlikely to take such a liberty were the body he was washing not, in effect, dead already.

Fortunately, that night they began to transfuse me and I eventually received twelve pints of blood, given mostly by sailors from the nearby naval base. It was customary, at any rate in Sardinia, for blood donors to follow their blood to its destination, perhaps to see that it had gone to a good home. So over the next ten days I would wake to find a mute Italian sailor by my bed, smiling and twisting his hat in his hands and nodding reassuringly. I was even visited by would-be donors, those who had tried to give me blood but who were from the wrong group. In those days I don't suppose there was all that much to do in Sardinia, visiting the hospital quite a high point. Nowadays, they probably go water-skiing.

I wasn't struck down again in the same way until May 1980, when I inadvertently took an aspirin. I remember looking in the glass and thinking that my face seemed to be acquiring an interesting artistic pallor, when I suddenly passed out, the aspirin having made my stomach bleed. That, too, was around my birthday, but in the intervening years the connection between birth and death had been maintained when I spent my fortieth birthday at Russell Harty's father's funeral. Russell had been sent round by his mother to give a neighbour the not unexpected news that Fred had died. ‘Oh dear,' said the neighbour, ‘I am sorry. Mind you, I had a shocking night myself.'

On my fiftieth birthday I was filming in Ilkley. Nothing untoward occurred until the evening, when I was taken out to supper by Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. Came my salad of mixed leaves and there, nestling among the rocket, were several shards of broken glass.

‘
Very
mixed,' said Miss Smith.

‘No,' said the waiter. ‘It's a mistake.'

I reached the 1990s without mishap, though Miss Shepherd, the lady who lived for fifteen years in a van in my drive, died at the end of April 1989, after which the undertaker rang up wondering if May 9 would be a suitable day for her funeral.

‘Why not?' I said. I was only surprised that I hadn't thought of it myself.

In the spring of 1992 I had arranged to go with a friend to Italy for the weekend. All being well, May 9 would find me in Todi. Writing that Italian name, I see it has a (German) death in it, but that is fanciful. What was not fanciful was that going to Italy meant that I would not be able to go to someone's funeral which, unsurprisingly, fell on my birthday.
*

The friend with whom I was going on holiday was Rupert Thomas. At that time, May 1992, I am not sure that I would have called him my partner, or indeed known what to call him, though partners is what we are now. Friend, I suppose I would have said then, though in 1992 such a friendship is still novel enough for me not to know what to call it (and to hope to get away without calling it anything at all). Rupert is thirty years or so younger than I am and might easily be mistaken for my son. This embarrasses me, though not him, who has more reason to be embarrassed.

At that time we did not actually live together, though what was to happen in Italy was one of the factors that brought this about.

Even now, ten years after the event, I am reluctant to acknowledge these arrangements both because that is the way I have always led my life, but also because I would prefer them not to be made explicit, just taken for granted. But though what was to happen still does not make entire sense to me, without avowing this friendship it makes no sense at all.

Our plane was due to arrive in Rome at 9.30 on Thursday evening. We were to collect a hire car and had arranged to spend the night at Ladispoli, a small seaside town twenty kilometres or so to the north, from where we could make an early start for Todi the following morning.

Ladispoli is a modern town from what little we can see of it in the dark, and we drive down straight suburban streets lined with shuttered two-storey villas, looking for our hotel. There is no one about, no lights in the
houses hidden behind high walls hung over with a few dusty fig trees. It's a place of Chekhovian dullness, the centre a long tree-lined street ending in a square that scarcely qualifies as a piazza, with one or two cafés still open and a few people sitting outside. Some boys ride round aimlessly on mountain bikes; there is a closed funfair and festoons of dead fairy lights in the trees.

Booking in at the hotel, we find there is no food to be had, and so walk back to the square, where we have coffee and a sandwich. Paying the bill, I ask the woman at the counter the whereabouts of the sea and she points me down the road. It's now about 11 o'clock. And as I write these prosaic details down – the cashier, the time, the people sitting outside – I realise it's in an effort to find meaning in what is about to happen, as if the time might explain it, or the dullness of the place, something that I may have missed which might help it to make sense.

The distance from the café to what turns out to be a little promenade is only a few hundred yards along a sandy half-made road, past another line of shuttered villas. Rounding the corner onto the front, I see half a dozen young men sitting on the sea wall opposite. They are talking and some almost shouting, though not more vociferously than Italians often do.

The instant we appear, and it is the instant, with no time to size us up or to say, as one might have conventionally scripted them to do, ‘Hello! Who've we got here?' – no, quick as thought, two of them are coming across the road to meet us. And though they effectively block our way so that we stop, there is no break in their excited chatter, except that it now seems to include us, as if we have arrived, somehow opportunely, to illustrate a point in their argument, the Italian they are speaking not eloquent or expressive, or pleasant to listen to, as Italian is, but harsh, assertive, jabbering almost.