Writing Home (24 page)

24 September
,
Yorkshire
.
Kafka’s Dick
opens at the Royal Court, and Richard Eyre rings at noon with the gist of the notices. They are mixed, with only the
Standard
and the
Financial
Times wholehearted in its favour. Wardle in
The Times
strikes his usual ‘Bennett has bitten off more than he can chew’ note, just as he did years ago with
Forty Years On
. What he means is that I have bitten off more than he can chew. Billington trots out his school essay on Kafka, and few of them bother to say that it is a funny evening. I walk in the fields above Austwick looking for mushrooms. Find none. Well, one must take it like a man. Which means that one must take it like a woman – i.e. without complaint.

26 September
,
Ljubljana
. Here playing a small part in a BBC drama series,
Fortunes of War
, an adaptation of Olivia Manning’s
Balkan Trilogy
, Yugoslavia standing in for Romania, Ljubljana for Belgrade. The people here are Slovenians, tall, fine-looking and Roman in their grace and self-assurance. A few (Croats?) are small and fierce and heavily-moustached, and look as if they are taking a day off from herding the goats. ‘Ah, partisans!’ I find myself thinking. There is a good deal of smoking, and they kiss as if it had just come off the ration. At the next table in our restaurant tonight, two couples in their late twenties. One couple cock their cigarettes, go into a clinch, and kiss long and lingeringly. The meal is on the table, but their companions wait, watching without impatience or embarrass
ment as the kiss goes on, the cigarettes burn down, and the food gets cold.

Through a gateway I see student actors in a garden rehearsing a play. I can’t hear the dialogue and would be no wiser if I could, but it only takes a minute to see that it is
Hamlet
. A tall young man stands centre-stage watched by an older couple. Two actors come on, have a word with the older couple, then saunter innocently over to the lone figure and chat before scurrying back to report. Hamlet is in jeans and bomber jacket. He looks tiresome, but I can’t tell whether this is because he is a tiresome actor, or because he is playing Hamlet tiresome, or whether, divested of the poetry, tiresome is what Hamlet is.

I October
,
Grado
. Two days off from filming and I drive into Italy. Still depressed about
Kafka’s Dick
, I come by chance on the village of Aquileia. Knowing nothing about the place, I go into the church (a cathedral, as it turns out) and find a huge mosaic floor laid down in the fourth century. To read Kafka is to become aware of coincidence. This is to put it at its mildest. His work prefigures the future, often in ways that are both specific and dreadful. Sometimes, though, these premonitions are less haunted. In my play Kafka is metamorphosed from a tortoise and is also sensitive about the size of his cock. So to find here, by the west door, a mosaic of a cock fighting a tortoise feels not quite an accident. In Aquileia, the guidebook says, they represent a battle between the forces of light and darkness. I buy a postcard of the mosaic, and the postcard-seller tells me there is a better example in the crypt. This takes some finding: the tortoise isn’t in the crypt so much as in a crypt beyond the crypt, and even there hidden behind the furthest pillar, just where Kafka would have chosen to be. It seems if not quite a nod then at least a wink, and I drive on in better spirits.

13 November
. The notice has gone up for
Kafka’s Dick
, so Richard Eyre and I take the cast out to supper. Alison S. and Vivian P. particularly ask not to be put next to Charles L. (who is eighty-six next week), because he tries to touch them up. Coming offstage at one point in the show he always likes to get in a salacious remark to A. which sends her on stage flurried and blushing. He’s very good, though, on anti-memoirs. ‘You worked with Edith Evans, Charles. What was she like?’ ‘She was a miserable cow.’ More theatrical memories are of this nature than is ever let on.

20 December
. Run into stately, plump Don Warrington moving slowly up the Crescent. Says he has to go to Newcastle for Christmas. I say I like Newcastle. ‘Why? It’s all vomit and love-bites.’

24 December
,
Yorkshire
. I find a little artificial Christmas tree in a box in the junk room and put it up. It’s not the tree we had as children, but some of the ornaments are the same, including the fairy that went on top, back to back with Santa Claus. Santa has long gone, and the fairy is pretty battered, a slit in her celluloid head for a tiny cardboard tiara, her wings bits of kitchen foil Mam put on ten years ago, along with a skirt made of lampshade fringe. Her painted hair-do is a twenties shingle, and I suppose she must be about as old as I am. Perhaps through being suspended by the neck from the top of the tree every Christmas for fifty years, the look in her painted eyes is of sheer terror.

2 January
. Reg, who kept the junk stall in the market, has died, and today is his funeral. Where his stall stood outside The Good
Mixer there is a trestle-table covered with a blue sheet, and a notice on a wreath of chrysanthemums announces that Reg Stone passed peacefully away on Boxing Day and that his cortège will be passing through the market at three o’clock. Until I read the card I’d never known his last name.

Reg’s stall was a feature of the market long before I moved here in 1961. Then he had two prices, sixpence and a shilling. In time this went up to a shilling and five shillings, and latterly it had reached 50p and
£
1. To some extent he shaped his price to the customer, though not in a Robin Hood sort of way, the poorer customers often getting charged more, and any attempt to bargain having the same effect. I have two American clocks, both in working order, that were five shillings apiece, and an early Mason’s Ironstone soup dish that cost sixpence and hangs on the wall of the kitchen. Local houses used to be full of treasures from Reg: model steam engines, maple mirrors, Asian Pheasant plates, rummers – all picked up for a song. Once I saw a can of film (empty) with ‘Moholy-Nagy’ round the rim, and only this last year Harriet G. got some Ravilious plates for 50p. Money didn’t seem to interest Reg. Scarcely glancing at what one had found, he’d take the fag out of his mouth, say ‘A pound,’ then take a sip from his glass of mild on the pub window-sill and turn away, not bothered if one bought it or not.

I go down at three. The table is now piled high with flowers, mostly the dog-eared variety on offer at the cheap stall in the market, petals already scattering on the wind. One or two of the long-established residents stand about, old NWI very much in evidence. Thinking the cortege will arrive from the Catholic church, we are looking along Arlington Road when it comes stealing through the market itself. It is led by a priest in a cape and an undertaker bearing a heavy rolled umbrella that he holds in front of him like a staff of office or a ceremonial cross. The procession is so silent and unexpected that it scarcely disturbs
people doing their normal shopping, the queue at Terry Mercer’s fruit stall gently nudged aside by the creeping limousines. The priest stops at the top of the street, turns, and stands looking down the market as if the street were a nave and this his altar. The flowers are now distributed among the various cars, more petals falling. In one of the limousines a glamorous blonde is weeping, and in other cars there are children. Just as I never thought of Reg as having a name, so a family (and a family as respectable as this) comes as a surprise. And for a man I never saw smile or scowl, laugh or lose his temper, grief, too, seems out of place.

8 January
,
Egypt
. To Cairo to film another scene in
Fortunes of
War
. The Ramses Hilton is on the site of the demolished Anglican cathedral, the view from the sixteenth floor taking in the Nile, the back of the Cairo Museum, three flyovers and, dim shapes beyond the tower blocks, the Pyramids. On stand-by for filming, we take a trip down the Nile by three-decker river boat, on which we have lunch. The boat never reaches even the outskirts of Cairo, and, since many of the buildings on both banks are in the process of demolition or construction, it’s like a boat trip down the Harrow Road. The streets are filthy, the pavements torn up, no architecture of any distinction, and all of it in the same dusty, dun-coloured stone. And yet it is a delightful place, wholly redeemed by the people, who are open and friendly, the men tall and handsome, the women of a ripe biblical beauty, heavy-eyebrowed, voluptuous and bold, none of them veiled and on seeming equality with the men. As for beggars, there are now more in London than in Cairo.

The most striking feature of the boat trip is an entirely rural island of lush green fields and primitive cultivation with a mud-brick farmhouse at the edge of the water where boatmen are mending nets, women washing clothes, and the farmer trots
round the fields on a mule, all this virtually in the middle of the city. It looks almost as if it has been laid on for passing tourists, and in the West that’s just what it would be: a folk park or an urban farm.

9 January
,
Cairo
. When they are not called for filming, the cast spend much of the day lounging round the hotel swimming-pool. P. is wearing a bikini, and whispers to her neighbour that before putting it on she has had to shave a little. She reckons without the blind and therefore sharp-eared Esmond Knight (eighty-two), who is on the other side of the pool, and he calls across, ‘Could I inquire, my dear, what you did with the clippings?’

I spend the day with Magdy, a student who turns out to be a Muslim fundamentalist. He has left his temporary job at the Cairo Museum because the scantily clad foreign ladies put wicked thoughts into his head: ‘They come in with their closes very high up on their legs and no closes on their shoulders, and I find something in me that desire them.’ He also thinks that chopping people’s hands off for theft is not entirely a bad thing. We take the river bus to Old Cairo. Magdy has never been on the river and insists on sitting next to a lifebelt in case we capsize. We see some of the Coptic churches, and I try to explain to Magdy about Jesus. ‘We believe he was the Son of God.’ ‘God have a son? That is stupid. Does he have an aunt, an uncle? Who is his mother?’ I point to a picture of the Virgin. ‘Who her husband?’ ‘She was a virgin.’ ‘Of course. All women virgin till married. I marry virgin’ (though presumably not one with closes that come high up on her legs).

Down the Nile float gobs of vegetation which I take to be clumps of rushes or some kind of water lily, but so rich and fertile-looking that one knows as soon as they hit land they will take root and grow. Swallows swoop low over the water and at
dusk cluster in the dusty eucalyptus trees. Some may have summered in Craven.

10 January
,
Cairo
. One of the company, Diana H., spent her honeymoon in Cairo. The marriage did not last long, and when she learned she was to be filming in Cairo she wondered where the unit would be staying. It was the Ramses Hilton, where she had spent her honeymoon. When the desk handed her her key it was the same room.

Every day in the late afternoon the hotel fills with tourists, and after breakfast empties again as they depart for Luxor and the boat up the Nile. Many are English. ‘Palm trees are nothing to us,’ one said today – ‘we’re from Torquay’

12 January
,
Cairo
. To Gizeh, where, in hot sunshine, we ride camels and horses around the Pyramids. Not expecting much, I am not put off by the litter and trash, and even the dead dog my camel steps round does not seem out of place. The Sphinx, like a personality seen on TV then met in the flesh, is smaller than one had imagined, and it’s quite hard to tell how tall the Pyramids themselves are. In the distance stand the towers and skyscrapers of Cairo, in the misty morning sunshine a sight every bit as remarkable as the Pyramids. Odd that one marvels at stone piled up in one shape but not in another, both of much the same height. Were our world largely wiped out, would tourists flock to Croydon as they do to Cairo?

Beyond the Sphinx, on the edge of the desert, is a Coptic cemetery, and, as we ride past, a funeral arrives. Painted green and looking like an ammunition locker, the coffin is handed out from an old Commer van to be passed over the heads of the crowd into the graveyard, the shrieks with which the women urge it on towards the grave not much different from the shouts the men use to encourage the camels. Mine farts continuously,
and on one occasion manages to spit down my neck.

A discussion of sex life uncovers the fact that in this unit of fifty and more people, most of them quite young, no one is known to be having an affair.

14 January
,
Luxor
. Here by overnight train, waking as the sun comes up and farmers on donkeys scurry along paths beside barriers of tall sugar cane and, somewhere over the flat fields, the Nile. By cab from the ferry to the Valley of the Kings. What I had been expecting, I realize afterwards, was a landscape out of
King Solomon’s Mines
, but it proves to be not much more than a large quarry, whatever shape and grandeur it may have had now obscured by the huge heaps of excavated spoil, among which are the shafts going down into the tombs. I traipse dutifully round three or four, but am soon weary. Struck by the freshness of the colours, the dark-blue ceilings thick with stars and the hair of the Pharaohs chiselled in tiny regular diamonds as sharp and fresh today as when they were done three thousand years ago. Still, a long way to come for that. Handicapped too by ignorance. Luxor is Thebes, but is it Oedipus’s Thebes or Tiresias’s ‘Thebes below the wall’? I don’t know, the guidebook doesn’t say, and if it did I don’t suppose it would insert the place into my memory. It’s not nine o’clock and yet the place is already crowded with parties picking their way over the hard flints under a cloudless sky. What are these jaded tourists looking for? Some flicker of wonder, some sensation or reminder of a sensation they once had, perhaps as children when they first gazed on the world? Is tourism like pornography – blue films and the holiday slides both a search for lost sensation? I can see some (serious) point in guided tours with a very particular interest – the sex life of the ancient Egyptians, say, or hairdressing under the Pharaohs. One would pick up more
because incidentally. It’s Forster’s Only what is seen sideways sinks deep.’