…when the clogs dropped
shattering the day, a bird flew
and something final snapped.
Finally, to end this family saga, my mother: like Carole’s mother, dear Charlotte was sweet-natured, always optimistic, and she looked after my father with unstinting devotion when he had a stroke. She had a fine voice and loved to sing jazzy numbers, my father playing behind her on the piano and sometimes on his accordion. ‘Some of These Days’, a song made famous by Sophie Tucker, was one of her favourites. The regular musical soirées they held at home were one of the joys of my childhood, and I would lean over the banisters to listen long after I’d been sent upstairs to bed. The actress Miriam Karlin often came, and Theodore Bikel too before he became a star and moved to America. The hugely talented Bikel, who was to be Oscar-nominated and win Tony Awards on Broadway, sang in many languages, accompanying himself on the guitar, which greatly appealed to my parents’ multicultured friends.
A strong-minded woman, my mother had played hockey for England in the first Maccabiah Games in Tel Aviv, returning soon after to teach English to young children. She loved Israel (though not its Prime Minister at the time, Benjamin Netanyahu, of whom she was fiercely critical), and her many Israeli friends, and worried about that tiny country until her last breath. Many of those she met there joined the British Army during the war as members of the Jewish Brigade, and they would come to my parents’ house in Edgware, diving under the Anderson shelter in the front room when the sirens went. She lived until she was almost ninety-nine and even in her nineties managed to create a stir when she went to hear Leonard Cohen at the O2 Centre. Somehow Sky News got wind of it and sent a crew to interview her – ‘Leonard Cohen’s oldest fan’ – in her flat, and she talked to them for hours, being rather disappointed they only used a few minutes on the news that evening!
In his later years Spike Milligan would come to stay with my mother, and they would reminisce and down a few glasses of Italian wine together. Just before Spike died, I drove my mother to see him at his house in Rye. As we left, I took several pictures of him standing at the door waving goodbye, the last goodbye, but when I got home I discovered to my dismay that there was no film in my camera. What would Spike’s idiot Goon Show character Eccles have made of that?
My mother’s spirit was such that she defied death on a number of occasions, amazing the specialists each time after they’d written her off. ‘She’s done it again’ is all her devoted doctor, Lewis Sevitt, could say.
This, we are told, is a fight she cannot win,
she’s old, her life’s been rich.
We’ve heard those lines before,
it’s a script we’d like to ditch.
As always, my father’s photo watches
from her bedside table. A doctor, he’d
be relieved to see her stable.
A kind nurse adds a little brandy to her drink.
She beams a smile again.
‘Le chayim’ we hear her quietly proclaim.
She calls me by my name.
A toast to life.
The mood’s completely changed.
There’s talk now of her going home.
She’s sitting upright in a chair,
no longer seems deranged.
She looks towards the door. Born in
1914 she knows a thing or two about war,
and will defy them all once more.
I raise an imaginary machine gun to
the sky to let triumphant bullets fly.
Somehow she always managed to do it again – or at least until that sad day in March 2013 when she finally smiled goodbye.
10
IN THE HOT SEAT
It was a hot summer’s afternoon and Aldus Books was like a ghost town, with most people on holiday. That was the moment a man named Max Nurock, calling himself the Ambassador of Israel, chose to announce himself. Since there was no one else around in the editorial department that day, it fell to me to receive him. A tall, white-haired man with a slight Irish lilt to his voice, he explained that he had been sent by David Ben-Gurion to discuss the book he was writing for Aldus.
In fact, as I discovered, Ben-Gurion was not so much the author but the overall editor of the book in question, The Jews in Their Land, a history of the continuous Jewish settlement in the land of Israel from biblical times to the present. He had conceived the book, was writing the important modern section himself, including the years he was Prime Minister, and had assembled a team of eminent scholars to write the earlier chapters. I knew hardly anything about it, being much too new and lowly to be involved in such a major project, but things were to change as a result of that afternoon’s meeting. Had he been there, Douglas Hill would have taken charge, but there was only me and only one thing for it, and that was to see whether Foges was available and willing to receive our visitor. So I plucked up my courage and, having answered Mr Nurock’s questions as best I could, I left him in my office, climbed the stairs and was relieved to see Joyce in her usual guardian position outside Foges’s half-open door. She went in, explained who I was, explained who Nurock was, told me to go in and explain it all myself, and when I’d hesitantly done that, Foges suddenly bellowed, ‘Bring him up!’ (Foges never spoke, always bellowed.) He added that I should stay – and that is how I became involved in the Ben-Gurion project, which I was eventually to take charge of, alongside the art editor, Felix Gluck, who was designing what was to be a lavishly illustrated book. A refugee from Hungary, Felix was a person of immense charm and flair, another of those remarkable creatives in the Aldus office. He was a highly sensitive man, unsurprisingly considering he’d been interned by the Germans in the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he’d contracted TB, having to spend two years in a sanatorium in Davos before coming to England. He was also a considerable artist, and his linocuts and pastels on leather have won prizes and been exhibited in galleries around the world.
Listening to the high-pitched conversation between Foges and Nurock, I came to realise that the book was a nightmare of a project which was floundering, since none of the editors Foges had sent to Israel to work on the text – which had been originally written in various languages and badly translated – had got very far. These included a bestselling American author Foges had hauled in at God-knows-what cost in desperation. Thus there was still no agreed text, as Nurock kept pointing out, to Foges’s obvious irritation. However, he had the latest version with him, which he handed to Foges, who handed it to me, and suddenly I was in the hot seat.
And hot seat it was, for once I’d read through the draft text I realised what a ticking bomb had landed on my desk. This was Aldus’s big project and all eyes were on it – and now on me. The complex problems of the Middle East seemed like nothing compared to this. But slowly, paragraph by paragraph, I waded through the chapters, looking up and double-checking everything in the growing mountain of history and reference books piled up on the floor around me. Unlike my great-grandfather Morris, I was no expert on the Bible, but I was slowly becoming one as I worked my way through it all. What a long and enthralling story it was (or at least should have been), and what a fought-over land, from Canaan and the battles with the Philistines through the various bloody occupations and revolts over the centuries to the tragedies and triumphs of the modern era. Fortunately, Felix Gluck was by my side and determined to make the book visually stunning, approaching it like one possessed, rooting out rare pictorial material, commissioning maps and even at one point (to Foges’s fury) persuading (paying!) the Israeli Air Force to take aerial photos for him. If Foges could be uncontrollable, so too could the wayward Felix, and it was inspiring to work with him.
Apart from all this, it was to Felix I turned when Sidgwick & Jackson finally sent me the proofs of my new book of poems along with a mockup of the jacket. It filled me with alarm since, as I mentioned earlier, I’d called the book First Poems. Big mistake, since the Sidgwick designer had assumed it was a book of children’s poems and had a pi
cture on the jacket of a little girl in a field holding up a book called First Poems! How the editor at Sidgwick had let it go through, I couldn’t imagine (although having been in publishing this long, I now can!) but he was full of apologies when I phoned him in panic. He agreed I could change the title to 33 Poems, and took up Felix’s offer to design a new cover. As a result, four of Felix’s linocuts now featured on the jacket, and they reflected the mood of those early poems of mine perfectly. I was pleased to be able to return the compliment a few years later, when he asked me to write the preface for a book of exquisite linocuts he had made while in the sanatorium, a touching love story without words, published first in Germany and then posthumously in England under the title When We Are Together Again.
By now, Felix and I had become firm friends, and he did his best to shield me from Foges’s impatient interventions. It was not a job that could be rushed, for apart from making the text read well in English, it had to be accurate. Although I now seemed to be working day and night on the book and at weekends too, the clock had to stop, if only momentarily, as Carole and I had finally decided to tie the knot. My first port of call with the hot news was the Abse home. Their approval was important! ‘How wonderful,’ said Dannie (what else could he say?), only to be interrupted by their young son David declaring, ‘But Daddy, you said Jeremy was too young to get married.’ Not even Joan could cover that one up, and many were the times I reminded Dannie (and David!) about it over the years.
Dear Laurie Lee responded in characteristic style:
Congratulations and welcome to the happy band of those already under contract. I felt strongly that something was in the air and only just resisted, when I last wrote to you, asking you, wasn’t it about time. Beautiful Carole, we’re lucky to have her signed up for us. There’s only one small uncertainty. I’ve noticed that footballers’ girlfriends turn out in all weathers to watch their heroes playing, but once married they stay home and dry. If your marrying Carole means we shall lose her at the readings I shall create a scene at the wedding.
Laurie’s letter ends by thanking me for finding a replacement for him at a concert in the Birmingham Festival as his wife Cathy was due to give birth ‘that very day’, as indeed she did, to a daughter named Jessy, for whom Laurie wrote a beautiful book called First Born, in which he expresses in fine poetic prose his wonder at the birth. (We were lucky enough to republish this little classic at Laurie’s request shortly before he died.) Meanwhile, he’d made a typically Laurie suggestion for his replacement: ‘T Blackburn is sure to love Birmingham. He even looks like B/ham.’ On another occasion, when he’d had to cancel through illness, Laurie wrote, ‘I’m out of hospital now and happy to get out of London before anything worse happens. Medical confusion was such that I nearly sacked my surgeon and called in Dichter Abse. So you can tell how bad it was!’ I loved getting Laurie’s notes, with their dry humour, but was always sorry when he couldn’t make a concert. What I didn’t know then was that Laurie suffered occasional epileptic fits. I once appeared with him on a television programme from Bristol on which we both read poems, and during a break in the recording he asked me to accompany him while he went in search of a chemist, clutching my arm tightly all the while. It was only much later that I realised why.
* * *
In September 1963, the first of the monthly Tribune poetry readings took place at the Robert Street Library, with Elizabeth Thomas in the chair and five poets reading. The library was packed, and I was thrilled to see Michael Foot standing at the back. Those CND marches, and his electrifying speeches in Trafalgar Square, were not something one could easily forget. The readings drew more and more people as the word spread and were becoming quite a major feature of London literary life. As Elizabeth reminisced in a letter she sent me some thirty years later:
I remember very well indeed your coming into my office and suggesting that Tribune should try to organise poetry readings – something almost unheard of in those days. If you remember, they went on successfully for about three years and had almost every poet with an established reputation – and a number of newcomers, some good, some awful! A number of poets from overseas came to read there too…
There was indeed a great variety of poets, and there were some memorable moments. I recall Brian Patten wanting to read by candlelight (am I imagining that? I think not), and a quite ill-tempered exchange between Dannie Abse, who’d been reading, and the poet Philip Hobsbaum, who was in the audience. ‘But Dannie,’ Hobsbaum interrupted at one point. ‘Dr Abse to you,’ shot back Dannie – so uncharacteristic of him, he must have been really riled by whatever it was Hobsbaum had said. I remember Joan, ever the peacemaker, trying to calm everyone down afterwards. A recently rediscovered correspondence with the poet Robert Nye, who was then living in north Wales and was to become a bestselling novelist, reminds me that we were both reading on that lively occasion, and I must have been more roused by Hobsbaum’s intervention than I remember – maybe in those young days I felt more passionately about things – to judge from the letter I wrote to Nye at the time:
I must say I admired Dannie for stepping so smartly on what was obviously a personal attack by Hobsbaum. It seems to me remarkable that anyone who writes poems as dull as his should have the audacity to talk like that to someone who writes real poetry. However, that is London literary life for you … they hate to have anyone around who won’t jump into the ring where they crack their particular whips.
Robert agreed, and had been kind enough to invite me to Wales, to which I responded, ‘I would like to come back to Wales for a lengthy visit some time, and I envy you the peace and time for writing – though I must say that I may well need the pressures of London to produce the kind of poems of solitariness that I write.’ Robert’s tempting response was, ‘I take your point about London being necessary to you in one sense. Still, come and see me some time. It’s very quiet and the landscape has a curious hanging quality which makes for some inwardness of one’s feelings, I find.’ He concluded with a reference to the Tribune reading: ‘I liked some of the poems you read … I feel there’s a lot of wildness in you that you really ought to open up. There are few enough now with any wildness at all. Ignore my remarks if they seem to you tactless.’ They certainly don’t seem to me now at all tactless and must have given me pause for thought at the time, though I’m not sure I’ve ever released that supposed tiger in my tank.
Much more dramatic than the brief Tribune spat which prompted that correspondence was the tour for the Welsh Arts Council that took place later that autumn – three nights, starting at the King’s Hall, Aberystwyth, on Friday 22 November 1963, with further concerts at the Brangwyn Hall in Swansea and at the New Theatre, Cardiff, all more or less full houses, and four poets reading – Laurie Lee, Dannie Abse, John Smith and me. John, dapperly dressed and immaculately coiffed, always surprised the audience with his deadpan wit and original approach, and although he was a devotee of classical music he’d quickly responded to Garrick’s creative brilliance, writing several long poems specially to be read with jazz (‘Mr Smith’s Apocalypse’ was particularly successful).
We arrived in good time at Aberystwyth, testing the mike and going through a few things before withdrawing in the usual way to the local pub as the audience began to arrive. Then someone shattered the laughter and general bonhomie with the words, ‘Kennedy’s been shot’. Nobody could quite take it in and we all gathered around a radio as the manager of the hall entered to confirm the news.
The concert was due to start in thirty minutes; the hall was packed. What should we do? A decision had to be made, and the manager made it. We would continue with the concert but would begin with a two-minute silence with us all on stage. We agreed and huddled nervously in the wings, still only half-believing, while the manager marched on stage and made his solemn announcement, bizarrely ending it with the words: ‘Now, Laurie Lee and his boys will come on stage and lead the silence…’ And Laurie Lee and his boys did just that, and when the electric s
ilence ended the audience unexpectedly burst into applause. They were in a theatrical environment, and in a theatre that is the natural reaction, I suppose. So the memorable concert continued, with cheering after the music and applause after every poem as never before, the audience seeming to find hidden meaning and significance in almost every word. Where were you the night the news of Kennedy’s assassination broke? I certainly know where we were.
The night that President Kennedy was shot – the programme cover for that memorable concert.
After that the whole weekend tour was more than a little surreal. On the coach from Aberystwyth to Swansea, Laurie got out a recorder from his case and started to play (perhaps that’s why I always thought of him as the Pied Piper). Then, arriving early at the large Brangwyn Hall on Saturday afternoon, with the concert not due to start for several hours, Laurie walked on stage with his violin and began to play Stéphane Grappelli-style jazz. Michael Garrick joined in and Shake Keane, too, on a bass that happened to be lying there. As Laurie launched into a piece called ‘Dinah’ (‘Dinah, is there anyone finer, in the State of Carolina…’) he directed his violin towards Carole, wooingly and as though playing especially for her. What a man of mystery and surprises he was, as I was to discover.
Then, after the sell-out Swansea concert, on to Cardiff, Dannie’s home town. And next morning the home-town boy appeared at breakfast in the hotel we were all staying at to say that he’d found a pair of blue knickers in his bed, demanding to know who’d put them there. (‘Explain them to Joan’ was our response!) It was some time later that the mischievous Laurie confessed that he was the culprit, though we never discovered where he had got them from. So much for the innocent lyrical poet! Cardiff always seemed to produce surprises. On a return visit the following year I remember a very intoxicated Vernon Scannell swaying on stage and Dannie’s unworldly mother saying afterwards, ‘I think your friend Vernon was a little shikker.’ The way she used the colourful Yiddish word ‘shikker’ – which means drunk or tipsy – made it sound as if a naughty Vernon had been taking an illicit sip or two from the sherry bottle. A little ‘shikker’ was definitely not what the unsteady Vernon was that night.
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