A Short Walk from Harrods

by Dirk Bogarde

  ‘Is it a decent part. Size, I mean?’

  ‘Three main characters. Yes. I mean I’m not supporting or anything.’

  He read it, as he always did every film script or play I had ever accepted, and passed his opinion. Whatever his opinions, I always made the final decision. ‘I’d think it was quite a decent idea. I’d go for it, if the director is any use. Do we know him?’

  Knew of, had all the details to hand: splendid Eileen Atkins had agreed, they were trying to get Lee Remick to commit. She would if I would. In that little sitting-room I suddenly knew this was a chance I’d not be offered again. The chance to get out of the welcoming, caring hotel, out of the deadening routine of a non-life, and a reason (if I really needed one) for going back to England. I now realized, fully, that I could no longer avoid the obvious. Life was shredding away rapidly. I would have to accept. Pack the fourteen cases (fifteen with a large box which had arrived one day with ‘JAFFA ORANGES’ on its side) and get up and move on to something with at least the chance of a future.

  ‘I’ll say yes. Okay?’

  ‘Okay. Fine.’

  ‘You know what it means. Actually? Brutally?’

  ‘Back. I know that. Accept the thing. Let’s start up again. There is still time.’

  ‘Well, we can always come back. I’ll rent a house somewhere. Short lease. Chelsea area. If things work out we can come right back, it’ll be summer then, easier to flat-hunt here.’

  ‘Don’t pretend. We won’t come back. This part is over. Call them and accept.’

  *

  A long time ago, outside Senequier on the port at Saint-Tropez, toying with an early drink, I saw, with a slight fall of pleasure I confess, a young actor I barely knew (I had once worked with his stepfather) preening along on this bright September day with a tall, vivid, red-headed girl wearing not very much at all, but what there was were pink and white dots, and it was a bikini. That’s how long ago it was. Seeing me he waved and bounded towards my table, the bikini’d girl dragged protestingly (from shyness) behind him. His wife, it transpired, and how were we all? We were all delightfully well, thanks, and do sit down. So they did. I mean, what else?

  We all shook hands, ordered drinks, laughed a good deal and were still happily together in a restaurant on the port much later eating lobsters. Maude (my name for her) and I have remained devoted friends ever since. We have been through pretty well every eventuality, good and bad, that life can chuck at one and survived intact. A friendship of that kind is for treasuring.

  Her regular friends call her merely by her surname, Mel-ford; her given name is Jill, which dates her and doesn’t suit her. I call her Maude because she more resembles a Gaiety Girl than a suburban Jill. Maude Melford is very music hall and jolly. And, with some reluctance at first, she accepted the name and it has stayed thus.

  A long preamble, this, but she is a fixture in my life, so it is essential to know her. She acts, she decorates, she can fix fuses and cook up a feast, gardens and plants things, can paint walls and clean floors, muck out ponds, knows every auction room in town as well as half the estate agents. She will drive you to hospital, to a funeral, a garden party. She is gay, bawdy, sentimental and joyful – in short, she is a sort of Swiss Army knife: screwdriver to scissors, corkscrew and nail file. And extremely attractive. Every man should have one. Who else to call from Paris, therefore, once I knew that I was taking the show on the road again, than Maude?

  ‘Maudie? Hi. It’s me.’

  ‘Hi! How’s “me”? Problems?’

  ‘In one. I’m in Paris, as you know. Coming back.’

  A longish pause.

  ‘What do you need?’

  ‘A house. Short lease. Small. Hasker Street, Markham, Bourn? One of those.’

  ‘I see. Anything else?’

  ‘South facing. With a garden if possible?’

  ‘Goodness me. You do ask a lot of your friend.’

  ‘Furnished, darling.’

  ‘Guessed that. Medical reasons or work?’

  ‘Bit of both. But work. In a month, six weeks.’

  ‘You’ve been away so long you probably don’t know how impossible it is to get anything like that. Unless you are very, very rich?’

  ‘I’m not. Poor after five months here. Pennies.’

  ‘You are in for a surprise. Where do I call you and when?’

  I packed the fourteen suitcases in the cramped little sitting-room, gave away enough old clothing to fill a single Oxfam depot to the hotel staff, most of whom, below stairs, were from Vietnam or Algeria, and left for the airport in two enormous cars. It had been suggested that with so much luggage it would have been wise, and more comfortable for Forwood, if we took the train and the ferry. But I insisted on flying, thinking it less tiring, so we did. And that evening, as we slumped into chairs in a small suite at the Connaught, exhausted but safe, with a large drink each, we watched the news on television.

  A ferry capsized in Zeebrugge – Fate obviously had some other trick in store for us. Maude had found a house, just what I had asked for, garden and all, for a very fair rent. The owner, a chum of hers, lived in the basement, I got the rest. It was an agreeable place altogether, and Maude sped about with sheets, soap, magazines and flowers, and after two or three days at the Connaught (to deal with the BBC and the television people) we moved to Chelsea. A new chapter started.

  It seemed to me that the line had been traced on the map of the future and that it would be unwise to ignore the route laid down. I was now near (within walking distance of) doctors, there were friends close by, Maude took me to Safeway’s and Tesco, explained the prices and money, and we walked round Peter Jones, rented a television set, bought some tea, milk, sugar and so on, and, finally, I unpacked and started to settle down until I learned, too late to weep, that the entire film was now to be made in Cardiff. Not London after all. I had signed a contract; we were too far in. Cardiff it had to be, and Cardiff and its alarming Holiday Inn it was. Except that I insisted on getting back to London every weekend. I got to know the motorway extremely well. So one commuted between a plastic and veneer suite five floors up in the Holiday Inn, overlooking a car park and a Private Bookshop, and I started work on my first British-made product for over twenty years.

  Before work begins it is necessary to submit oneself to a medical examination for insurance; just so that, in the event of you suddenly falling dead, no one is going to be ruined in the company. It is not a very serious matter this. As long as you can haul yourself, upright, over the doctor’s threshold, give a urine sample without much fuss, and sign the questionnaire without shaking, you’ll be passed fit. I was – to my mild astonishment, for the bronchitis attacks in Paris had left lingering trails of wheezing and gasping and a general feeling of malaise. So I sought a medical for myself, which I deemed essential if I were now to be responsible for two people, plus a rented house, plus a very long role in a saga for TV.

  All seemed well, although my legs turned to jelly at the sight of two intense black spots on the X-rays over both lungs. I was briskly assured that these were my nipples and not important. However, smoking three packs of cigarettes a day was of importance. I was strongly advised to stop. That day. I did: finished off my packet of Extra Longs, chucked it away and never smoked again. I had smoked since I was at school in Scotland, from the age of thirteen. Grabbing secret fags in the school lavatories was about as exciting and fulfilling as anything that happened to me up there. But ever since Patrick had introduced the word ‘cancer’ into my vocabulary that hot day down in the Long Room, I had given in to my weakness and took a cigarette as soon as the last one was finished. It was particularly intense, I found, when I was writing up in the olive store. I smoked constantly, ash piled in ugly mounds everywhere, crushed butts stank to heaven. It was astonishing to me after my examination that I had suffered as mildly as I had. A ‘little touch of asthma’ was all I was told. It was enough to be going on with.

  I knew very well, driving down that first day
to Cardiff and the saga, that I was about to play two roles. One for which I would be paid, modestly, which people would see, and the other which merited no payment at all and which no one must see. The role of carer, the dictionary states, means, among other things, ‘heed, caution, charge and protection’. I did not really require a definition. I knew very well. The film work was pleasant, my companions warm and affectionate, all was pretty well. Sometimes I got an afternoon off and went down to the coast to walk along a beach, smell the salt, listen to the sea, feel the wind. One returned to the fifth floor of the ill-named Holiday Inn almost recharged.

  But it was, other than work on the show, a soul-less existence. Especially for my ailing manager. He had nothing to do, apart from scribble down sums on sheets of paper and fuss about with his pocket-calculator.

  ‘We can’t possibly have spent that much in Paris! All I ever bought were those two bloody animal prints on Quai Voltaire, and they were for peanuts …’

  But the figures grew more and more alarming. Paris, for five months, in a small, but charming, suite, plus air fares, taxis, doctors, not to mention the house champagne, all made a disastrous hole in my fortunes. Such as they were.

  Though at least it did give him something to do, apart from the walks along the beach, which he could manage because the sands, or pebbles, were firm to walk on, and which almost broke the spell of ill health for a little. However, two days before the very end of shooting, after such a walk, he suddenly collapsed in the suite with a temperature of 103°. So cold that his teeth rattled like dice in a box.

  Piling him into his bed, grabbing all my bedding from my room, covering all with our coats made no difference. I called down urgently to the ever-smiling uncaring automatons at the desk (‘Welcome! I am Debbie, how can I help you have a nice day?’) for a hot-water bottle. It took them by horrified surprise and an hour and a half to deliver. When it arrived I’d almost forgotten why I’d called for the thing, and the grudging elderly maid asked if I wanted it filled with hot water? I said, ‘Yes. Very hot’, and she said, ‘Du!’ and that she never knew where she was! The last people in the suite had been an entire football team celebrating their victory, and she had a terrible time of it, and Du! the water in the bath would be hot enough. So …

  Forwood said weakly that he was sick to death of hotel rooms and rented houses, for God’s sake, and that he was certain he’d be better just as long as he could get settled down ‘with my own things around me. They’re still in store, in Cannes.’

  Two days later I drove with him up the M4 to London. For the last time. His temperature had temporarily stabilized, the saga was finished (or my part in it anyway), and although he looked pretty frail and washed out, he appeared to get better from the moment that we paid the toll on the Severn Bridge.

  ‘Selectivity’ was one of Norah Smallwood’s favourite words, which she drummed into me every time she returned a manuscript, or part of, covered with her vigorous deletions. ‘Get to the point! Don’t faff about, carry on with the story line. Be selective!’

  So I’m trying to follow her instructions. There is no need to witter on about lawyers, accountants, solicitors, how I got my first cheque book, or how strangely difficult it was to find oneself a French resident in one’s own land.

  My arrival in London was a bit of a shock, after the familiarity of living, as I had done for so long, cosseted by the Connaught. Now, thrown suddenly into urban life, on one’s own, after so many years, in someone else’s house, having to cope by oneself with food, and drink, the laundry, the gas meter, the shopping (a very different matter to the market in town, and far more nerve-wracking), I confess that I found myself in an extremely disjointed state. I had to remember how to cross a road, not to call people in shops ‘Monsieur’ or ‘Madame’, as had been my habit, never to shake hands with a waiter (I do, anyway), and try to work out that there were now fifty pence to what had been, when I left, ten shillings. It was bewildering, to say the least. So I’ll be selective, leave all that stuff as background, and get down to basics.

  Maude and I went from one unsuitable house, or flat, to another. I grew weary of other people’s grubby kitchens, tobacco-filled rooms, dingy curtains, filthy bathrooms and refrigerators full of left-overs and fish fingers, underwear hanging over baths to dry. Not all the places we saw were like this – some were staggering in their splendour, opulence and the absurdity of their prices – but in the main it was evident to me that the French could teach the British and Scandinavians a good deal about cleanliness and house-pride. However, nothing was of the least interest. Too expensive, too dark, the wrong area or a pub on the corner. Bernard Walsh, the excellent fellow who had dealt with all my house sales and purchases since the fifties, was delighted to hear from me, saddened by the reason. But, yes indeed, he’d start to look about for what I needed, took down the particulars, and launched into the attack.

  The little house in Chelsea was a wonderful haven for temporary living, while breath was caught and cases were unpacked, and it was near to every shop I needed within a very few minutes. No need for taxis now, but there always was the old hire car firm, Satchell, that I had used ever since my Rank days. They still functioned, and for those increasingly uneasy trips to Harley Street they were invaluable, and with Bob Pearson and Ron Jones, friends from long ago, unease was comforted and soothed.

  Maude managed to find a lady to come and do the things I really couldn’t do about the house, like ironing collars and much of the dismal work. She was a sullen Polish girl who, as she frequently reminded me in a growl, had been a student of something or other in Warsaw and now bitterly resented the fact that she was, as she called it, ‘kneeing always to rich people like a slave’. She was forced to accept any work she could while awaiting a visa for Canada, where, I was assured, there was a big, sympathetic, Polish community to which she knew she would be welcomed. She would never have to ‘knee to the rich’ again. She was damned certain that she would knee as little as possible to me, and when I gave her a rise in salary (to Maude’s indignation: ‘You’ll ruin the market. You pay her the fair price!’), to encourage her slothful efforts, she shrugged, stuffed the money in her bosom and said that as I was so rich I could have afforded more. I bought a whole bottle of whisky a week! She couldn’t afford that! She really was rather disagreeable, but I was assured that she was honest. So I settled for Miss Warsaw, remembering, in flashes of memory, the noisy, laughing, weeping, angry, often joyous, always brave and affectionate ‘Lady’.

  However, it was essential that I had some assistance. I was trying to write again, and had to be available to Forwood for the journeys to Harley Street, which seemed, gradually, to increase once we had, as it were, settled in London. He felt the need of medical reassurance at all times, so I saw rather more waiting-rooms and old copies of the Field and Punch than I ever wanted.

  Then Bernard called one day to say that he had found a possible house; it was not yet on the open market but he knew that it was going up for sale. Could we meet by the flower stall outside St Mary Abbot’s in High Street, Kensington? I said yes: my gut lurched with despair. ‘I have a feeling this may be exactly what you want!’ Bernard said, and I called for the hired car and we headed ‘across the Park,’

  Most of my adult life, and during all of my childhood, I had heard that to live north, ‘across the Park’, was considered to be rather a bad move. It was not quite acceptable, ‘across the Park’. The people there were ‘different’ from those south of the Park. It frankly didn’t bother me at all, from the point of view of snobbery, or inverted snobbery. I just didn’t care for it. It was a different country, Kensington. Nothing to do with Chelsea. I knew Chelsea very well, its streets and squares, its mix of people. I was at home and secure there. Kensington was an alien land to me, full of people who were similar but subtly different from the gayer, casual, more bohemian Chelsea-ites. It was more forbidding, genteel, more Victorian, uglier, seedier even, less friendly and now fast becoming a mixed-race area of tatty bed
-sits.

  Crossing the Park from south to north had exactly the same effect on me emotionally as crossing the border from England to Scotland had all those years ago when I was sent off from Euston Station into sheer, unadulterated loneliness and misery. And school. Poor spoiled brat! And spoiled brat I suppose I was that day in the car driving to meet Mr Walsh. If he was right, and it was just the house we wanted, then I’d go ahead, if all things were to be agreed, and sever my safety cords of familiarity, warmth and security in Chelsea.

  Desolation sang: but I didn’t let it show. And no one heard it. It was the right house. At least it would have been, anywhere else but where it was. But that was set aside. Forwood was enraptured. A small early eighteenth-century house, beautifully maintained, light, elegant, set in a narrow street opposite the gardens of a large monastery. It had pleasing rooms, one on top of the other, five floors connected by a simple, elegant, very narrow staircase up which, I could instantly see, much of the stuff sitting presently in store in France would never find its way.

  But suddenly Forwood was alive again, plans were being made as I wandered reluctantly about the pleasant rooms. I could hear him and Mr Walsh chattering away eagerly. There was no garden, merely what was euphemistically called a ‘patio’, exactly eight feet long by five wide, backed by a high wall smothered in a rampant Nelly Moser, with some terracotta pots crouching about the stone-paved floor stuffed with ferns: ferns because it was obvious that, even on a hot August day, the sun never glanced into this dark pit except, perhaps, for a fleeting second or two in the evening. However, it was exactly what the patient wanted, and the sudden gentle spurt of energy, the rousing of interest, the lifting of his sad spirit, made its purchase imperative.

  Bernard was given instructions to start negotiations right away, which he did, while I contacted the firm in Cannes to release the stored furniture and send me a copy of the inventory (I had one which Forwood had compiled in France, but theirs was shorter for customs), and told them that I would advise them of the exact dates. They said it would be sent off immediately, but I had to contact the UK branch of XYZ who would be responsible for carting the stuff to Kensington, when the time was right. My heart plummeted at this news. XYZ was the same firm who had destroyed so much of my furniture and goods on the way out to France.