Writing Home (25 page)

Our cab takes us on, and we stop at the edge of a field to look at the Colossi of Memnon, but so sated am I with antiquities (after two hours only) I do not even get out to look. In any case these statues have been so quarried and defaced their heads are just jumbles of masonry, a reality disguised by the artful photography of the guidebooks, the world never as pretty as it is photographed.

15 January
;
Luxor
. Tea on the terrace of the Winter Palace Hotel, a brown stucco building no different from the Winter Gardens of many an English seaside town because built around the same time and nowadays as run-down and deserted as they are. We watch the sun set over the Nile, a scene captured by dozens of tourists with film cameras, who wait as if for the passage of royalty.

19 January
,
Cairo
. Early at Cairo Airport, we wander round the departure lounge, where Christopher S. discovers a museum. It’s just one room, looking out on to the tarmac, and has a score or so showcases of various periods – Ancient Egypt, the Copts, the Mamelukes – with only a few exhibits in each: a wooden tablet of a saint in glory, vases for viscera with smiling dogs ‘heads, a fragment of Greek alabaster labelled ‘Man carrying something on his shoulder’. There’s more satisfaction in these few (I’m sure) inferior artefacts than in a morning spent traipsing round the tombs. It’s partly because we have time to kill and here is just one room and nothing else – no other objects queuing up for attention, no visions of rooms unvisited, treasures overlooked. (Madame de Sévigné on sightseeing: ‘What I see tires me and what I don’t see worries me.’) It’s also that the museum itself is something
discovered, a found object, an oddity.

It saves its best surprise until last: a painted limestone statue,
c
. 3000 BC, of two monumental figures: Iuh and his wife Mary They sit enthroned in their ceremonial wigs, the woman’s real hair peeping out from underneath, their expressions, insofar as they have expressions, solemn and unsmiling. Except that Iuh has his left arm round his wife’s shoulder, which is, according to the label, ‘a mark of affection’. It is another version of what inspired Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’, where the effigies lie hand in hand. That turned out to be a bit of sentimental nineteenth-century restoration, whereas this husband from the Old Kingdom has had his arm round his wife for four thousand years. I think. I hope. As maybe Larkin hoped.

Our flight is announced, and when I come out of the museum the domestic departure lounge has emptied, travellers and airport workers gathered at the far end of the room kneeling in prayer.

18 February
. Children are less coy than the Department of Health. In the playground at Primrose Hill, Aids is referred to as ‘the bum disease’.

I March
. The tabloids full of some ‘Russell Harty is gay’ shock horror. The first inkling of it came last week in Giggleswick when Mrs Walton, Susan Brookes’s mother, went upstairs to get ready for her stint at the Oxfam shop in Settle. Her house overlooks the recreation ground, where she saw four men seemingly playing football, though rather on the old side to be doing it. The recreation ground borders on Russell’s garden, and the men were kicking the ball once or twice then deliberately booting it over the wall. They would then take it in turns to climb over and retrieve it, meanwhile spying on the house. Mrs Walton watched this curious game for a while and couldn’t make
it out until she saw the spread in the papers this morning.

The youth in question describes Russell’s flat as ‘scruffy… it had plates on the shelves and the paint was a dirty orange’. So much for R’s Staffordshire figures, carefully chosen decor and expensively distressed paintwork.

14 March
,
Oxford
. To Oxford to cast my vote for Roy Jenkins as Chancellor. Only 9.30, but the line of voters is already round the Sheldonian and the atmosphere that of a cocktail party. The average voter is about my age, tall and armed with a beaming wife, both determined to make a day of it. Never was there such a feast of complacency, so many silly men showing off to their womenfolk in their robes. Some have got themselves up not simply in gowns but in hoods as well, remaining gowned long after they have voted and probably only to be persuaded out of them when they get into their pyjamas. And oh what a convivial queue, merry with the prospect of drinks in Oriel and lunch in Wadham, jokes shouted to friends, contemporaries spotted – isn’t this
fun
! It’s like the theatre at Chichester, the same tall families, the same assurance of happiness and their place in the world. That is Theatre, this is University, both their birthright. Inside the Divinity Schools there is a scramble to fill in the voting-form, with a pig-faced university official bullying any dawdlers. We line up finally before the Vice-Chancellor, Patrick Neill, who looks about as lively as the mercury in a thermometer. He tips his hat, and twenty minutes later I’m heading back down the M40.

9 April
. Seeing the flag blowing over the Polish Embassy in Portland Place reminds me how as a child I found flags of other nations a disappointment. The Stars and Stripes was OK, but, that apart, in the Union Jack we did seem to have bagged all the best colours. The flags of other nations were the genteel shades
of ice-cream, and as often as not with a fiddling little motif to distinguish them from other flags to which they were all too similar. Ours was best.

16 April
. A letter from the director of the Thorndike Theatre at Leatherhead, where they are producing
Forty Years On
. The title of the play within the play is ‘Speak for England, Arthur’ and the schoolboy cast hold up letter-boards to spell it out for the audience. Part of the stage directions is that, before getting it right, one or two of the boys should get their letters jumbled. One of the eighteen local schoolboys doing it at the Thorndike has discovered that if jumbled still further they can come up with ‘O Grandfather, Real Spunk’. This is not incorporated into the production.

13 May
. Colin Haycraft and I are chatting on the pavement when a man comes past wheeling a basket of shopping. Out of the way, you so–called intellectuals, ‘he snarls,’ blocking the fucking way.’ It’s curious that it’s the intellectual that annoys, though it must never be admitted to be the genuine article but always ‘pseudo’ or ‘so-called’. It is, of course, only in England that ‘intellectual’ is an insult anyway.

28 May
. Mary Hope’s sister-in-law has cancer and is in intensive care at the Royal Free. Because of staff shortages her ward has to close down at weekends, and on Friday she was wheeled across the hospital to a ward where, with men on one side, women on the other, there was scarcely room to move between the beds and several patients were dying. Here she stayed all weekend. If the Labour Party could fight the election on the state of the Health Service alone, it would win hands down.

29 May
. A letter from David [Ned] Vaisey at Oxford saying that
John Carey thinks my ‘Kafka at Las Vegas’ too ‘ruminative and ambling’ to qualify for a university-sponsored lecture. Ned, though finding it ‘a good read’, tends to agree, and suggests an undergraduate society might leap at the prospect. Or I could take my stand alongside the seller of
Socialist Worker
in Camden High Street on a Saturday morning and deliver it there.

7 June
. With Mrs Thatcher safely ahead in the polls, that voice and the little scuttling walk threatening to lead us into the next century, Conservative commentators like P. Worsthorne feel it now safe to admit that perhaps there is just a little truth in the general distaste for Thatcherism, the decay of manufacture, the throttling of the Health Service etc., and in the last few days of the campaign it might be as well to look at these details. The well-being of half the country, and all it is now is an election garnish: ‘Conservative Party: Serving Suggestion’.

17 June
. Lord Hailsham, the Arthur Negus of the English law, is at seventy-nine put out of office. Not before time, some might think, but on
News at Ten
he is feeling a bit sorry for himself. He was just the same the only time I met him, after one of Ned Sherrin’s shows in the sixties, but then his complaint was not neglect or ingratitude but poverty. Very much one of the ‘You must grin and bear it’ school (inequities dismissed with a chuckle), he doesn’t like it when he gets the mucky end of the stick. Not that most people would consider the House of Lords and the Lord Chancellor’s pension exactly mucky.

20 June
. A list of queries comes from the German translator of
Kafka’s Dick
:

Other questions:

2 July
. All the life has gone out of politics. I switch on the televised debates from the House of Lords and it is like a clip from a Hollywood epic of Ancient Rome. While Nero or Caligula rules, the footling Senate goes through the motions. Like the trams at Beamish or the mills of Ironbridge, democracy, once part of the English heritage, will soon be part of English Heritage – a property of the Department of the Environment.

3 July
. My TV film
The Insurance Man
has won the Beautiful Human Life Award in Japan, and Robert Hines, the young actor who starred in the film, has been out to Tokyo to collect the citation. He calls round with a souvenir for me. It is a headband as worn by Kamikaze pilots.

In the market today: ‘Listen, there’s nothing you can teach me about road-sweeping.’

16 July
. Watch the first of two programmes by Tony Harrison about death. It begins at Blackpool, where Harrison was conceived in August 1935. Harrison comes from Leeds, as I do, and August Bank Holiday at the seaside was when I was conceived. So, too, was my brother: three years older than me, he has the same May birthday. With us it was Morecambe not Blackpool, which my mother always thought a bit common. If
we ever went to Blackpool she made sure we stayed at Cleveleys or Bispham – ‘the refined end’. The era of package holidays came too late for my parents and they never went abroad, but had they done so the same standards would have applied. Mam would soon have sussed out the refined part of Torremolinos or a select end to Sitges.

2 September
. Evidence of madness: a woman entering Marks & Spencer’s and saying brightly ‘Good morning!’

A young mother passes the house wheeling a pram. She is wearing headphones. The baby is crying desperately.

14 September
. A. ‘s dog is run over and she takes it to the vet. The dog’s name is Lucky, and in this particular practice people are called in not by the name of the owner but by the name of the pet. So the receptionist comes into the waiting-room and says, ’Lucky Davies?’

I November
,
Switzerland
. On the train from Gstaad to Montreux. It is the
train panoramique,
and since this is Sunday it’s crowded out, with people standing in the aisles. In front of me sits a man, about forty, French or possibly American, reading a magazine of pornographic stories in English. ‘Her body arched to receive his quivering member’ is one paragraph heading. Beside him sits a businessman, who glances curiously at the magazine and once or twice at its reader but makes no comment. He eventually gets off at the same moment as the porn-reader decides to go to the buffet car for some coffee. The porn-reader leaves his magazine on the seat to keep his place. Not having seen him go, a middle-aged couple take the seats, and the husband picks up the magazine and starts leafing through it. He shows it to his wife, and they are still looking at it
when some time later the French/American returns with his coffee. ‘I see you’re having a good time with that,’ he says in French, completely unabashed. Equally unembarrassed, they agree that they are, and some discussion of the magazine follows. In the middle of this the magazine-owner points out without rancour that the husband is actually sitting in his place. The husband promptly gets up, the porn-reader sits down, and he and the wife (ankle socks, anorak, a schoolteacher possibly) carry on their amicable conversation about the magazine, with the husband occasionally joining in. It’s a curious scene for a Sunday afternoon, and one hard to imagine taking place in England. In its directness it is like the beginning of a film by Bertrand Blier, except that there sexual connections would be being made. There is none of that here, just human beings confronting each other without judgement or preconception. Not so much humanity as specimens of humanity. And not what the Swiss are supposed to be like at all.

15 November
,
Yorkshire
. This Week’s Cause of Cancer in the
Sunday Times
is bracken, the spores of which are said to affect the lungs. The Department of Health is reported to be concerned about ‘how to get this message across’ without causing a mass exodus from the countryside. One reason for mass exodus being as good as another, it’s also been disclosed that, after Chernobyl, an area of fifty miles centring on Skipton, and therefore including our village, was (and possibly still is) a radiation blackspot. The weekend after Chernobyl the local CND had organized a barbecue, and I remember Graham M. telling me how it had rained so hard he and his family (three children under six) had given up trying to shelter and got happily soaked. It was this rain that carried the radioactivity which is now said to be still present in the bilberries on the moors. Along with the bracken spores, of course.

I December
. Read a poem by Tony Harrison about his childhood in Leeds in which he recalls that the slang for the rhubarb which filled the fields in and around the city was ‘tusky’. I recall it too, reading his poem, but cannot remember when I was a boy in Leeds ever calling it that myself. Other boys did, I remember. Other boys nicked rhubarb from the field’s edge. Though I did it too, it was more fearfully than the others. They were part of the gang as I never was, quite, and not being part of the gang (the last to be picked, the first to be turned out) I never felt easy using their language. So with me it wasn’t ‘tusky’; I stuck to ‘rhubarb’. In later years, and for the same reason, I never said ‘bird’ or ‘screw’, and today hearing myself say ‘guy’ I winced and felt it an imposture.