Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  Referring to the fact that the service was in a church, Victoria wrote, ‘I hope you won’t find it a bit peculiar.’ They’d wanted, she said, a church reflecting her dad’s Englishness, and St Bride’s was perfect because it was near Bouverie Street, where he worked for all those years, and was considered a journalists’ church. She went on to tell me that they ‘were understanding and open-minded’ about Alan ‘being born Jewish’… I felt as if she wanted my approval, but it was certainly not for me to reason why or judge.

  Everything was carefully planned and the timing extremely tight. I chose to read an autobiographical piece Alan had written for My Oxford, cut and trimmed to fit the timing, leaving a minute or so to lead in with a few personal words. Arriving a little early, Carole and I crept into a small café around the corner, where we found Sandi Toksvig, who was also speaking, with her partner. Sandi told me she’d never been so nervous in her life, and I felt that if she was nervous then I was entitled to be, too. We chatted for a few minutes then made our way to the church, which was already packed with many famous and familiar faces. I was given instructions to bow to the cross when I went up to speak (which, without meaning any offence, I could not do), and to be careful not to trip on the steps. I sat with Carole at the front, next to David Frost and his wife, waiting my turn. Following the bidding prayer and a hymn, Christopher Matthew spoke, and then, after some music and the reading of a Shakespeare sonnet, it was my turn. I made my way slowly towards the altar, tripped on the steps, winked at the large photograph of Alan that faced the congregation, and did my bit.

  Shortly after, a copy of the Canongate book arrived in the post with a warm note from the Corens thanking me for my words at the service. The volume was handsome, but I didn’t really need to open it, for it contained pieces we had published over the years with which I was well acquainted. However, for Alan’s sake I put it carefully on the shelf where all thirty-six of his books that we’d published had place of honour. I felt they could hold their own.

  I miss Alan, our walks on the Heath, the extraordinary excuses he’d come up with when he didn’t want to go somewhere, the novels he never wrote (and perhaps never intended to). He and Anne might even have come with us again to our house in Normandy, as they did soon after we’d bought it, Alan falling asleep in the hammock in the garden after driving in an impossibly short time from Calais. And I would have liked him to be here when I started writing poetry again after so many years, for he was continually asking me when I was going to, and though he might have been critical, it would have been the critical voice of a friend. And perhaps he might have written that ‘auto-biography’ we’d contracted him for.

  29

  BLUES IN THE PARK

  If the emphasis in this saga has shifted from poetry to publishing, it is for the not-so-simple reason that for a very, very long period the poetry had dried up – scribbled lines here and there from time to time, perhaps, but nothing focused on or followed through. There were occasional readings for special events – such as the tribute concert for the dazzling – if anarchic – saxophonist Joe Harriott. That was at the invitation of Michael Garrick, who wrote afterwards, ‘It was quite like old times. “Blues for the Lonely” [a very early set-to-music poem of mine I’d recorded with Mike and Joe] sounded v. fine and somehow extremely appropriate.’ Much more recently, in 2009, there had been a tribute concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall for the trumpeter Ian Carr, where I joined with Michael again to read a poem he’d set to music and which we’d often performed with the remarkable Ian. In the years since our many concerts together, Ian had won a wide following as leader of the jazz-rock group Nucleus, and the hall was packed, with the veteran bassist Coleridge Goode sitting in the front row, and people queuing to pay their respects. As well as these, there were several events following Vernon Scannell’s death – one at the ICA with various poets reading and Michael playing solo on a keyboard between poems, and another – a poetry and jazz gig – in Aylesbury, where Vernon had taught. ‘A happy reunion, indeed,’ wrote Michael in his autobiography, ‘bringing us all together, Vernon, writer par excellence, now sadly missing. Forty-eight years ago, I was lucky enough to have been asked to contribute to the first of such evenings and we played to large audiences. For me,’ he continued wistfully, ‘it represented ideal circumstances for honest, intimate, and largely unexpected sharing of language of the heart.’

  I sensed that Michael, always so positive, was trying to draw me back into the arena, but for all these excursions, my poetry cupboard remained bare as I continued to experience what I would jokingly refer to as ‘the longest writing block in literary history’. For me, however, it was far from being a joke, and I kept thinking, ‘One day, one day…’ while staring at the jottings and scribbles I could no longer read. And then, one day indeed, like the first primrose after a hard winter, a line came and started playing in my head. I wrote it down quickly, before it faded. Then, to my surprise, another followed, and I set to work on it, compulsively, teasing the words out. After several days’ struggle, there it was, a poem called ‘Now and Then’ which starts:

  I had opinions then on

  many things, strongly felt, or

  so I thought, and springing hotly

  from the tongue, unsought…

  Another poem, ‘Final Set’, swiftly followed, drawing on the imagery of tennis, my boyhood passion, but acknowledging the passing years,

  I have to say

  The serves aren’t what

  they were, the lobs

  fall short, the drives

  that grazed the lines

  now dent the net.

  The volley’s limp, inept.

  I was coming up to a ‘special’ birthday, and perhaps that was the ‘now or never’ stimulus I needed. Who knows? The ways of the muse are mysterious indeed. Carole arranged a party at home, and instead of the speech people were calling for, I read the two poems (‘It’s your birthday, your party, do what you f***ing like,’ were the encouraging words of the irrepressible Ms Lipman). It felt good, I felt whole again.

  * * *

  It’s always been a wonder to me, the way poems gestate, and how quite traumatic experiences may stare you in the face yet remain buried in the unconscious for many years, perhaps for ever. When my father died in 1990, I thought the poems would flow, for, as I have shown, he was a significant force in my early life. But they didn’t.

  We were on holiday in France when I got the news that he’d been rushed into hospital with a severe heart attack, the phone call that we all dread (‘grief just a phone call away’ as I later put it). I’d spoken to him on the phone only a few days earlier, when, quite calmly, he told me he’d been for all kinds of tests for his heart (for he suspected something) but had been given the all-clear. He’d had a debilitating stroke some years earlier, but never any heart problems. ‘I think the specialists are wrong,’ he told me, and sadly he was right, as he invariably was when it came to diagnoses.

  Rushing to Nice Airport that early summer morning, as the sea eased in and out uncaringly, I’d managed to get on the first plane to London and sat hunched in the cabin, isolated as never before, staring blankly at the racing clouds, pencil in hand… but the lines that came to me were not my own, but those of Dylan Thomas: ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.

  When, an eternity later, I finally reached University College Hospital, I ran down the corridors to the intensive care unit, feeling that every second mattered, to find my mother and my brother David sitting in pale silence around the bed where my father lay propped up, with tubes everywhere. Only the life-support system, I was quickly informed, was keeping him breathing, and they were all waiting for my permission to switch it off. My mother and brother had already given theirs.

  I stroked my father’s hand and spoke to him urgently, sure he could hear me, feeling like an executioner. ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light,’ I wanted to tell him, but to no avail. My mother, still the good doctor’s wife who’d cared
for him heroically since his stroke, was telling me she’d always promised never to allow him to become a vegetable, and this was the moment of truth. She and my brother, quite a bit younger than me but far more in command of himself and the situation than I was, impressed on me that there was no real option. As a lifestyle coach, David’s training had perhaps helped prepare him for this moment, though it is hard to imagine that anything really could. Two doctors, who suddenly appeared as if on cue, endorsed what they were saying. And so it came to pass. But it was some twenty-four years and only after my mother died and I began to go through their effects that the lines began to come, sparked by small things, details, as my mind began to filter them – his walking sticks and cloth cap hanging in the hall, his old accordion lying unwanted beneath the lonely piano, an old cigar box, his patients’ medical details filed away confidentially in a cabinet. And those things led to memories of much earlier days, too, when he was a GP and I a young schoolboy, a time when he had a dispensary at the back of his surgery where he mixed his own medicines in giant oval jars similar to those used for gobstoppers in the local sweet shop, and I would watch him.

  Finally, I picked up my pencil and started to write. Was it that life, and the reality of death when it faced you head-on, had been too potent, too real, for poems? I’d never thought so – indeed, I had imagined that poetry fed on them. In the end, as was to happen with my mother too, though more immediately, it did, yet not when I expected it to, and not in the way I’d expected. But is it not always the unexpected that produces the poetry? Here are the final lines of ‘A Doctor’s Call’, one of the poems I finally wrote about my father:

  Then, fragile years later, on one indelible

  day, his own faltering heart finally gave way.

  Dismayed, I found myself surveying the drips

  and tubes and the frightening battery of

  machines they tried to save him with, and

  thought back to those bottled cures of his.

  Who knows, they may just have done the trick.

  * * *

  The publishing, meanwhile, continued. I was now working (as JR Books) within Laurence Orbach’s Quarto Group and was shortly to join Iain Dale’s Biteback (as the Robson Press). I should explain that part of the original Robson Books deal with Chrysalis prevented me from using my own name in the event of my leaving; but with my move to Biteback in mind, I managed to renegotiate this and reclaim my name, though it seemed sensible to vary its usage slightly to avoid confusion (at one London Book Fair all three of ‘my’ imprints were displayed, which confused even me!).

  Iain and I got on well, part of the strength of this new combination deriving from the fact that our interests and tastes could not be more different – Iain being steeped in the political world with extensive contacts, as a result of which Biteback has become a leading political publisher. On top of this, the LBC radio programme he hosted every weekday with great aplomb and expertise had increased his reputation. My interests, as any reader of this book will know by now, lay in other directions. Poetry is something Iain is decidedly not interested in and he would reach for his metaphorical gun whenever it was mentioned (it became an open joke). However, in his second-in-command, James Stephens, Iain had a particularly able, literary-minded associate with wide publishing experience on whom he relied to an increasing extent, and a meticulous first-class editor in Olivia Beattie, who was particularly helpful to me when producing the final manuscript of my most recent book of poems, as she has been with this book. It made for a strong and friendly team.

  I moved quickly to establish the Robson Press list alongside Iain’s essentially political one, and I remain proud of many of the books we published. Some, by such authors as Peter Brookes, Ann Treneman, Bel Mooney and Frederic Raphael, I have already mentioned, but there were also some new departures, such as Ivan Fallon’s widely acclaimed book on the financial crisis, Black Horse Ride (which came via Vivienne Schuster at Curtis Brown), and a book Ivan subsequently brought me, on which he had collaborated: A Bazaar Life, the autobiography of (Lord) David Alliance. It is the truly remarkable story of a man who came to this country from Iran as a penniless youth, sleeping rough on the streets, who became one of Britain’s wealthiest and most charitable men, establishing a major business school in Manchester and being instrumental in the secret airlift of Iran’s dwindling Jewish community to Israel. I enjoyed working, too, with the great Russian violinist Viktoria Mullova and the celebrated Chinese chef Ken Hom on their respective biographies. Viktoria, who had fled to the West in 1983 after winning the gold medal in the Tchaikovsky Competition, famously leaving her Stradivarius behind, played Bach for us at the launch of her book, and Ken cooked for us at his. No one can say that publishing does not have its savoury moments. It was also particularly gratifying to publish, quite recently, Alfred Brendel’s collected essays and lectures, Music, Sense and Nonsense, already in its third printing.

  The irrepressible Stanley Johnson was another author who kept the home fires burning with his wittily titled second volume of autobiography, Stanley, I Resume. I loved the opening, in which he describes being abandoned by his lady friend on his 50th birthday and deciding, since he was alone, to trim a large tree in his extensive country garden. Sitting on a branch, he attacked it with his chainsaw – and, in classic cartoon style, crashed with it to the ground. I suppose you could say, with regard to Boris, that the son never falls far from the tree.

  Now, though, parallel with the publishing, was the poetry, as more and more poems arrived. I can’t say the floodgates exactly opened, but there was a narrow door though which, with increasing frequency, I managed to seize them. I felt revitalised, and able at last to look Dannie Abse in the eye when he talked about a poem he was working on, though I was reticent about showing him what I was up to, feeling unsure and somewhat defensive. For me, writing poetry has always been an essentially private act, an experience which is mine alone, to be shielded from the eyes of others. Strange, then, you might think, to read them in public as I sometimes do, yet somehow once the poem is cold on the page, there is a kind of distancing which makes it possible, though it must be said there are certain very personal poems I would never be able to read in public, feeling too exposed, too vulnerable. I had felt that protectiveness about writing my poetry from an early age, however inept my early attempts, as my clever friends went to top universities and set out on their successful careers. Perhaps it was a kind of compensation for not having pursued a similar academic path, a way of making up for missed opportunities. However illusory, it seemed to build a wall around me, giving me a kind of secret strength which at that raw stage of my life I needed.

  More good things were starting to happen. In March 2011, Michael Garrick phoned to invite me to the Guildhall School of Music Jazz Festival, which he was directing – not to read, but to listen to various poems of mine read by student actors, some to Michael’s settings played by the school’s star jazzmen, whom he had rehearsed carefully. There were also poems by some of the other poets who had taken part in our events over the years. It was in effect a student poetry and jazz concert, and took me back to when Michael and I had met. Unfortunately, I was away for the concert but went to the final rehearsal, which gave me the chance to chat to the performers and offer a suggestion or two. The standard was exceptional and it was a memorable experience.

  By then, Michael had become a real force in the jazz world, and not only in that milieu, having worked a great deal with schools and choirs and composed such ‘religious’ works as his Jazz Praises, which he had developed from a number of shorter pieces, including his ‘Wedding Hymn’ (inspired by Dannie Abse’s beautiful poem ‘Epithalamion’) and his ‘Anthem’, which I was surprised to read in his autobiography, Dusk Fire, had sprung from a poem of mine. Jazz Praises was performed in many churches, including St Paul’s Cathedral. It was for his wide-ranging, educative, innovative work that he was awarded an MBE in 2010. As the never easy-to-please Humphrey Lyttelton wrote, ‘Mike’s
inventiveness, his zest for musical exploration, is little short of uncanny.’

  At one point I’d tried to effect a collaboration between Michael and the composer John Taverner, whom I had met through Nicholas Snowman and the conductor David Atherton (Carole was actually roped in to bang a kind of cymbal at appropriate moments in the premiere of one of Taverner’s pieces at the Queen Elizabeth Hall). In an undated letter Michael sent me after their first get-together, he wrote:

  Met John Taverner today. Fine fellow. We both felt the need of an extramusical theme or backcloth for a joint work. For the time being we feel we could use jazz soloists in an orchestral setting, as ‘cadenza players’ (i.e. no jazz rhythm section) or portrayals of definite characters in a drama, e.g. Jonah, Archangels, Prometheus, and who else?! He’s coming to the Phoenix on August 21st. Can you join him?

  Sadly, despite several meetings and the initial enthusiasm on both sides, nothing came of what might have been an exciting venture. A real shame.

  I realised that it was coming up to fifty years since the first ‘Poetry and Jazz Returns to Hampstead’ concert, and I discussed with Dannie and Michael Garrick the idea of an anniversary concert. They thought it a good idea so I approached the directors of Pavlova House, where the Hampstead Literary Festival largely took place, and they responded warmly to the idea of hosting it. Michael lined up Dave Green (bass) and Trevor Tomkins (percussion), and I started to think about the poetry element. It was a shock to realise that so many poetry and jazz stalwarts had passed away, but I had an idea. As well as inviting Dannie and Alan Brownjohn to read, we could still feature the poetry of other regulars. Accordingly, I invited Laurie Lee’s daughter, Jessy, to read her father’s lyrical poems; actress Celia Mitchell, Adrian Mitchell’s widow, to read his fiery poems; and their daughter Sasha to sing. Thomas Blackburn’s novelist daughter Julia and granddaughter Natasha agreed to read Tom’s poems, and so on. It was to be a celebratory occasion. Michael and I were both excited at the prospect of bringing it all together once more. We worked carefully on the programme, and Michael, an excellent mimic, even opted to read some of Spike Milligan’s comic verse to add a little jollity, and one or two of Vernon Scannell’s war poems.