Time to Be in Earnest

by P. D. James

  WEDNESDAY, 27TH AUGUST

  My elder grandson’s wedding day. His bride (an Australian, whose family came from Malta) wanted a civil ceremony with no one else present except themselves and their two witnesses. It rained heavily all morning, but I hope it was fine for their ceremony. There is to be a church blessing to which the family will be invited on 4th October in Blythburgh church.

  Yesterday I went from Victoria to Horsham, where brother Edward met me and took me to his and his wife Mary’s new home in Henfield. I felt rather ashamed not to have visited them earlier, but we had a good day with much family talk. After lunch Edward and I explored the village, which has some very agreeable Regency houses, and then took his usual path along the edge of a field of linseed where we sat together in the strong light of the setting sun and gazed over the golden-brown field towards the Downs. We spoke about childhood and I asked Edward if he had a memory of a single childhood birthday. My own seventy-seventh had reminded me that I couldn’t remember any early birthday celebrations. Neither could he.

  It seemed to us, talking gently together, that our childhood had been lived on a plateau of apprehension with occasional peaks of acute anxiety or fear. That may have been good for me as a writer, less good, I suspect, for my sister and brother. We were always afraid of my father, as indeed were most of our friends who, when they came to the house, did so with some apprehension. Perfect love may cast out fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love. I think that my father would have liked children who were more affectionate, even while his severity inhibited the open affection of which I think he had received so little in his own childhood.

  One of the characteristics which caused us most embarrassment was his almost pathological reluctance to part with money. I remember the misery at the beginning of each term in trying to extract from him my games sub, which I think was either a shilling or one-and-sixpence in old money. I was constantly reprimanded for my carelessness in forgetting it. I could never, of course, have brought myself to say that I had asked for it without success and was too frightened to go on asking.

  Father was an indefatigable gardener, but the garden was disciplined rather than tended. The result was always spectacular. Everything flourished in his hands. The garden at Roseford Road was a rough plot when he bought the newly built house, his first overambitious house purchase, and he set to work to produce order and plenty in strict geometrical patterns. A square lawn on which we were not permitted to tread was laid front and back. Straight paths were bisected by others at right angles. Vegetables sprouted in precise rows; peas which were never picked until the pods were yellowing, cabbages with hearts as tight as footballs. It was almost intolerable for him to see anything picked. Despite the abundance my mother would creep out surreptitiously to pull up a cabbage where it would be less noticed—always a hopeless task—or to dig up a single root of potatoes, carefully smoothing over the soil. I grew to realize that Father’s childhood had been insecure and that, when he began work at fifteen in the Patents Office in London and had to support himself on a meagre wage, he would sometimes go hungry. The garden represented security and abundance. But from time to time, perhaps to impress, perhaps to buy popularity, he would invite colleagues from the office to come and plunder, and they would move among the beanstalks and the peas happily filling their baskets while my mother watched with understandable resentment from the kitchen window.

  I can understand my father’s insecurity because, for most of my early life, I shared it. When I was a child I couldn’t settle to sleep until I had entered into my private world. My imaginings were always the same: I am in a low, large, single-storey building in the Bull Ring in Ludlow. It is composed of innumerable bedrooms, each containing an immense bed. There are hundreds of us sleeping there and in the middle of one of the beds I am anonymously huddled. Outside the building, guards parade, perpetually on watch. No one knows where I am and I couldn’t be safer. Thus protected securely, I am able to get to sleep. I can’t remember at what age I let go of this nightly ritual.

  After we moved from Ludlow to Cambridge, we ate as a family only occasionally on Sunday. We three children and my mother ate in the kitchen and my father had his lunch and dinner brought to him on a tray in the dining-room. I can remember Mother placing it down before him with an expression compounded of resentment and slight apprehension; being brought up in a boys’ boarding school was no training for a good cook. Even when she was in hospital and I took over the cooking, Father would still eat on his own. I now realize that, like me, he needed at least one period of absolute solitude during the day and perhaps this was his way of ensuring that he got it.

  My father was a great deal more affectionate to his grandchildren than to his children, as often happens, and when he was old and living alone in a small house at Southwold, I grew to admire the qualities he had always possessed: independence, courage and his own brand of sardonic humour. Unfortunately these are not the qualities which are most important to small children. But his own life wasn’t easy. He began work at fifteen, fought in the First World War as a sergeant in the Machine-gun Corps, and spent all his working life in a job which gave him small satisfaction. I like to think that his last years were happy. In his old age I began to realize how much I loved him. But then, I think I always had.

  We had dinner at the local restaurant and then went home to bed. Edward gave me a copy of an Australian publication about the history of the 215th Battalion in 1940–45 which made mention of our father’s youngest brother, Padre Jimmy James, who served with the Battalion and won the Military Cross for going unaccompanied in a jeep to the German lines to recover the bodies of dead comrades. He was, apparently, the only padre to receive the MC. I met him and his wife on one of my publicity visits to Australia and have an earlier memory of him when he came to London to march in the victory celebrations following the end of the war.

  Edward, now seventy-four, is almost blind in one eye and has impaired sight in the second. Apparently the near-blindness is due to deterioration which can’t be corrected, so that he has to face the certainty of blindness. He bears it all with his usual stoicism and now listens to audiotapes instead of reading. He is still able to garden and to see most of his shrubs.

  Returning this morning I was met at Victoria by Frances Fyfield, who took me in a taxi to Camden Passage, where we spent an agreeable half-hour trying on jewellery (but not buying) before having an excellent lunch at Frederick’s.

  SUNDAY, 31ST AUGUST

  On Thursday to Southwold for a long weekend with Françoise Manvell. I first met Françoise when I was invited, and went to, Boston University for three months to teach the detective story or, as they say in the United States, the mystery. She is now a widow but was then married to Roger Manvell, who was teaching film at Boston. They were both kind and hospitable to me and I welcomed the companionship of compatriots when living abroad for even a few months. Françoise is not strictly speaking a compatriot; she is French and lived in Paris during the occupation and liberation, a time which is fascinating for me to hear about.

  We arranged to travel to Southwold separately, as Françoise drove herself from Oxford. I caught my usual train from Liverpool Street and arrived in time to share a lunch of smoked salmon sandwiches in the conservatory with Clare and Lyn who were already there. Clare was peeling apples to make chutney, and the strong smell of apples, vinegar and spices pervaded the kitchen and will undoubtedly remind me of this weekend whenever I smell it again. Françoise arrived shortly after four.

  The weekend has been spent resting, walking, talking and, on Friday, driving to Leiston, where Françoise and I enjoyed ourselves hunting in the Trading Post. The owner clears houses and her huge shed-like shop has the attraction of a childish treasure trove. Apart from the fun of occasionally finding a treasure or a domestic object needed but no longer made, there is something poignant and nostalgic about the accumulated leavings of dead lives: the old wedding photographs and remnants of tea-services, the
sentimental Victorian prints, the formal photographs from the 1920s of earnest children posed against obviously spurious backgrounds and gazing into the lens with concentrated innocence. I remember a similar photograph taken when I was eleven and had just started at the Cambridge High School: my mother standing behind a synthetic wall (she was always sensitive about her size), myself with hair unnaturally tidy, held back with a slide, wearing my pleated gym tunic, Monica and Edward seated.

  Among a pile of objects we both found something to buy: Françoise a Doulton Victorian toothbrush-holder large enough to make an attractive flower vase, and a very pretty glass vase, also nineteenth-century, and myself two turn-of-the-century blue specimen vases, which I bought as a present for Clare.

  I was the first up this morning and heard the news of the death of the Princess of Wales as soon as I turned on the radio for the 7 o’clock news. My reaction, which must have been shared by millions, was disbelief, as if the natural order had somehow been reversed. Death has power over lesser mortals but not this icon. It took a few seconds of listening to the newscaster’s sombre voice to realize that this wasn’t a carefully contrived publicity stunt; this was reality, horrible, brutal, ugly and final.

  The four of us went to St. Edmund’s Church for the 11 o’clock service and it seemed appropriate to take part in the order, the dignity and the well-known prayers of the 1662 Mattins. The priest was at another of his group churches and the service was taken by a layman wearing doctor’s robes. He preached a short but remarkable sermon which could not have been bettered: Christian, scholarly and sensitive.

  After lunch at the Swan, Françoise and I spent most of the afternoon and evening watching the BBC tribute. It is never easy for public figures to react appropriately at short notice to such a tragedy. Well-worn adjectives begin to sound like a mantra and the reiterated tributes seem fulsome and platitudinous. I thought that the Prime Minister was impressive, the Archbishop of Canterbury inadequate. The most moving tributes came from ordinary people whom Princess Diana had met, sometimes briefly, who spoke of her warmth and her loving concern and who obviously felt that they had had a personal relationship with her. This, I imagine, would have pleased her most.

  The process of beatification was well under way by the end of the day and will no doubt continue. There was something so horribly appropriate about the manner of her death, and I have the feeling that we were all involved in a Greek tragedy with the whole country as the Chorus. Beautiful, wilful, complicated, destructive and doomed, it is hard to believe that she could have found happiness. Her comfort was always in the love of strangers and, if she most wanted that love to be intense, personal and universal, today, at least, she would be satisfied.

  September

  TUESDAY, 2ND SEPTEMBER

  Frances Fyfield arrived at 11 o’clock for our last session in connection with a Times interview with me. In the course of general discussion about writing we spoke about copy-editing. Frances said that she doubted whether any novel could be absolutely accurate in every detail and that the last person to spot a mistake was usually the author, who was too involved with plot and characters to notice small inconsistencies or typing errors. I know that I am occasionally a careless writer in this respect and, as my books are long and complex, they do need very careful copy-editing; this they certainly receive. Apart from the Faber copy-editor, who is usually excellent, the proofs are read by Peter and Jane. Peter is meticulous about language, deleting, for example, the superfluous adjective in the phrase “wide panorama,” and methodically noting the number of duplicated words.

  Ruth Rendell held her publicity party for her new book Road Rage at the Groucho, but I was unable to be there as I had undertaken some months ago to speak at the University Women’s Club. I managed to reach Ruth at her London house both to explain and to congratulate her on the reviews for Road Rage. Ruth, who, with her husband Don, is a long-standing friend, is a remarkable and prolific writer, regularly producing novels which explore with power and high imagination the darker corners of the human psyche. She used to find the conventions of the detective story too restrictive and some critics would agree that her best novels are those written under the pseudonym Barbara Vine. But she is now beginning to use the Wexford saga as an opportunity to deal with social affairs about which she feels concern. Neither Ruth nor I are didactic writers and I never set out to point a moral or to deal specifically with a social problem. But if a novel is set in the modern world, social and political concerns necessarily intrude. In the first book in which my woman detective Kate Miskin appears, A Taste for Death, I didn’t set out to explore the problems of an intelligent, ambitious and underprivileged young woman fighting her way to seniority and success in the machismo world of the police, but the book would not have been realistic if these problems hadn’t been dealt with. Because the detective story is usually set unambiguously in its own time and place, it often gives a clearer idea of contemporary life than does more prestigious literature. If we want to know what it was like to work in a City advertising office in the early 1930s, there is no better book than Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise.

  The dinner at the University Women’s Club was, I think, successful and it is always a pleasure to be in this attractive, comfortable and well-managed club with its ambience of unpretentious feminine tranquillity. But the evening left me exhausted because of the high level of noise at dinner. I realize now that I really cannot tolerate being battered by a cacophony of shouting voices, but it is difficult to know what to do about it. Peter, who is a neuroscientist, has explained that in youth the human brain has the facility to distinguish between the sounds it wishes to receive and others, thus effectively shutting out loud background noise, but that this ability decreases with age. But then, I am becoming intolerant of almost all loud noises and, in particular, of pop music. It blares out in shops, assaults my ears in taxis, is piped into offices and seeps from the earphones of fellow passengers in trains and on the Underground. And now we have the intrusive nuisance of the ubiquitous mobile phone to disturb the peace of railway journeys. Perhaps the train companies should consider introducing quiet compartments as well as those for nonsmokers.

  WEDNESDAY, 3RD SEPTEMBER

  Derek Parker, who edits the journal of the Society of Authors, came for a brief interview to gather material for an article in the journal following my appointment as President of the Society. Polly-Hodge, as always with male visitors, was outrageously flirtatious and affectionate, laying her head on his knee and effectively covering his trousers with white hairs. Happily he is a cat-lover and didn’t mind.

  We talked about the Society and whether there would be an advantage in applying for affiliation with the Trades Union Council. On the whole I have never been in favour, but certainly wouldn’t strongly dissent if a majority of members want affiliation. I don’t think there is much evidence that they do. We talked about support for the public library system and he asked my views on whether a small charge should be made for each borrowing. My strong dislike of imposing a charge arises from my early experience when I depended on the Cambridge Public Library for virtually all my reading. The library was education, meeting-place, refuge and treasure trove, although it was poorly equipped and ill-housed compared with the large public libraries of today.

  There, too, in the reading room I would read the newspapers. It was there one Saturday morning in 1936 that I first read the news of the uncrowned King Edward VIII’s infatuation for a divorced American woman, Mrs. Simpson, for whom apparently he was prepared to give up the throne. It seems incredible in these days of media power and intrusiveness that a secret of such importance could be kept from the British public so effectively and for so long. It was achieved because a small group of powerful men, politicians, courtiers and newspaper magnates could exercise a far more effective censorship than almost anything possible today.

  The public library was essential to my generation because we couldn’t afford books. I pointed out to Derek tha
t it is now possible to buy a classic in paperback for under a pound. The range of paperback fiction is enormous and the huge expenditure on the Lottery doesn’t suggest that borrowers would find it an imposition to pay a small charge, perhaps when borrowing new hardback books. But the administrative cost might outweigh the advantage, and I still retain that vestigial dislike of charging for public library borrowing.

  Afterwards I shopped in Kensington High Street. The flower stall outside St. Mary Abbot’s Church had set up a trestle table with a huge pile of tissue paper and there was a continuous sale of flowers to people on their way to Kensington Palace. This extraordinary festival of mourning is like an infection. It is oppressive and poignant, but also alien and disturbing. I have a feeling, uncomfortable and irrational, that something has been released into the atmosphere and it isn’t benign. The real woman has become smothered by acres of plastic and decaying flowers. The crowd was extraordinary. The women—and the great majority were women, many with prams or toddlers—walked, eyes fixed with a kind of desperate intensity as if afraid they would be late or were on their way to the first day of a sale. They didn’t communicate or even look at each other. One could almost believe that an official edict had gone out that flowers must be laid within three days on pain of condign punishment. There is a growing and disturbing animus against the Royal Family whose reticence is clearly neither understood nor sympathized with. I shall feel relieved when Saturday is over.