Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings

by Craig Brown

  But is Dahl’s account to be trusted? The two men clearly part on amicable terms, as Dahl sends Fisher a copy of Kiss Kiss, his latest book of short stories, and encloses a photograph of Fisher beside a cricket pitch, looking towards the camera with an amused expression on his face. The photograph dates back over thirty years, to when Dahl snapped it as a schoolboy at Repton.

  On the opening page of this copy of Kiss Kiss, he writes: ‘The headmaster was roaring with laughter. There was a “click” behind him. He looked round and saw the thin boy holding a camera in his hands. “Dahl,” the headmaster said sternly, “if it is ribald you will suppress it!” Today, thirty-two years later, the boy is a little frightened that the headmaster will feel the same way about these stories. But he offers them, nevertheless, with gratitude and affection.’

  The gratitude and affection are apparently still there when Dahl visits his old school in the 1970s to deliver a speech in which he praises Geoffrey Fisher, who has recently died, as a ‘thoroughly good’ man. This also accords with the view he took of him as a boy, in a letter home to his mother written at around the time he took his photograph. ‘He’s most frightfully nice but he’s a religious fanatic. Far too religious for this place.’

  These warm tributes, delivered in three different decades, are hard to square with what follows.

  In 1984, now aged sixty-seven, Roald Dahl publishes Boy, an autobiography of his childhood. A chapter titled ‘The Headmaster’ begins: ‘The Headmaster, while I was at Repton, struck me as being a rather shoddy bandy-legged little fellow with a big bald head and lots of energy but not much charm. Mind you, I never did know him well because in all those months and years I was at the school, I doubt whether he addressed more than six sentences to me altogether ...’

  Dahl then tells how, after leaving Repton, this sadistic headmaster had ‘bounced up the ladder ... to get the top job of them all, Archbishop of Canterbury! And not long after that it was he himself who had the task of crowning our present Queen in Westminster Abbey with half the world watching. Well, well, well! And this was the man who used to deliver the most vicious beatings to the boys under his care!’

  Dahl goes on to describe a flogging Fisher meted out to Dahl’s boyhood friend Michael. In Dahl’s account, Fisher tells Michael to take down his trousers. ‘The great man then gave him one terrific crack. After that, there was a pause. The cane was put down and the Headmaster began filling his pipe from a tin of tobacco. He also started to lecture the kneeling boy about sin and wrongdoing. Soon, the cane was picked up again and a second tremendous crack was administered upon the trembling buttocks. Then the pipe-filling business and the lecture went on for maybe another thirty seconds. Then came the third crack of the cane ... This slow and fearsome process went on until ten terrible strokes had been delivered, and all the time, over the pipe-lighting and the match-striking, the lecture on evil and wrongdoing and sinning and malpractice went on without a stop. It even went on as the strokes were being administered. At the end of it all, a basin, a sponge and a small clean towel were produced by the Headmaster, and the victim was told to wash away the blood before pulling up his trousers ... If someone had told me at the time that this flogging clergyman was one day to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never have believed it ... If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.’

  But Dahl is not telling the truth. Though Michael was beaten by a headmaster, it was by the next headmaster, a man called John Christie; Fisher had already left the school.

  Why does Roald Dahl falsely identify Geoffrey Fisher as the cane-wielding, pipe-smoking, sanctimonious sadist? Is it, as some suggest, because accusing a former Archbishop of Canterbury of sadism is more news-worthy than accusing someone unknown? Or is it simply a case of mistaken identity? But if the latter is the case, and Dahl really believes Fisher guilty, why does he go to a man he believes to be a ‘sanctimonious hypocrite’ for spiritual guidance following the death of his little daughter? And why does he send him his book, with its loving inscription, and that photograph, taken all those years ago, of the man he described at the time as ‘frightfully nice’?

  ROALD DAHL

  OFFERS WRITERLY TIPS TO

  KINGSLEY AMIS

  Iver Grove, Iver, Bucks

  Summer 1972

  Authors with money crave esteem. Authors with esteem crave money. Authors with neither crave both. Authors with both crave immortality. For these reasons, meetings between authors can be edgy.

  Since the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954, Kingsley Amis has accrued sufficient money and esteem to arouse the envy of even his closest friends. Or especially his closest friends: ‘It’s not his success I mind so much as his immunity from worry and hard work, though I mind the success as well,’ frets Philip Larkin to his girlfriend Monica Jones in 1955. ‘... He and Hilly struck me as a pair of DIRTY RICH CHILDREN – they have no worries, they REFUSE TO SUFFER ...’

  In 1972, Amis is a guest at a summer party thrown by the wealthy, esteemed playwright Tom Stoppard at his beautiful Palladian villa. Within seconds, he is bristling with irritation. This is inevitable: he has long been both the victim and the laureate of irritation. Irritation is his muse. Before the party has got going, he has already been irritated by the monotony of his fellow guest Michael Caine, and by what he sees as the wrong-footing tactics of his host. Previously, Stoppard has always greeted him with a ‘full Continental-style’ embrace. Though Amis tends to dislike this ‘when it comes from a man outside the family’, he has tried to make allowances. ‘Oh well, I had thought, the chap was a Czech, after all ... and obviously no queer, and it would be churlish to back off. So for the next couple of times, resigning myself, I had got off the embracing mark simultaneously with him. Then this time, or one like it, he stepped back from my outstretched arms with a muffled cry of shock or distaste.’

  But a greater irritation is already approaching: hovering above Stoppard’s seventeen acres is a helicopter, ready to deliver a late arrival. Amis’s hackles really start to rise. ‘I could not imagine why this form of transport had been thought necessary on a perfectly normal fine day, a Sunday as I remember, and nor was any explanation proffered.’

  Out steps Roald Dahl, the most successful children’s author in Britain, perhaps even in the world.

  At some stage, ‘not by my choice’, Amis finds himself closeted with him. Dahl declares himself a great fan of Amis. ‘What are you working on at the moment, Kingsley?’ he asks. Amis starts to reply, but is interrupted by Dahl. ‘That sounds marvellous,’ he says, ‘but do you expect to make a lot of money out of it however well you do it?’

  ‘I don’t know about a lot. Enough, I hope. The sort of money I usually make.’

  ‘So you’ve no financial problems.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that either, exactly, but I seem to be able to ...’

  Dahl shakes his head, and cuts Amis short once more. ‘I hate to think of a chap of your distinction having to worry about money at your time of life. Tell me, how old are you now?’

  Amis says that he is fifty.

  ‘Yes. You might be able to write better, I mean even better, if you were financially secure.’

  Amis, already bristling, attempts to turn the conversation around. ‘Never mind, what have you got on the –’

  Dahl is shaking his head. ‘What you want to do is write a children’s book. That’s where the money is today, believe me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know how to set about it.’

  ‘Do you know what my advance was on my last one?’ Dahl can’t wait to tell Amis, who acknowledges that it certainly sounds like a large sum.

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ says Amis. ‘I don’t think I enjoyed children’s books much when I was a child myself. I’ve got no feeling for that kind of thing.’

  ‘Never mind,’ replies Dahl. ‘The little bastards’d swallow it.’

  Amis is the sole sourc
e for this conversation. He recalls it, nearly twenty years later, in his Memoirs, first published a year after Dahl’s death in 1990. Has Dahl become the victim of the same sort of story-telling he once meted out to Geoffrey Fisher? ‘Many times in these pages I have put in people’s mouths approximations to what they said, what they might well have said, what they said at another time, and a few almost-outright inventions, but that last remark is verbatim,’ declares Amis. He will never deviate from his insistence that ‘never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it’ is an exact transcription of what Dahl said.172

  In his account, Amis goes on to say that children are meant to be good at detecting insincerity, and would probably see through him. He may be boring Dahl a good deal, ‘but that was perfectly all right with me’. At length, Dahl cuts in.

  ‘Well, it’s up to you. Either you will or you won’t. Write a children’s book, I mean. But if you do decide to have a crack, let me give you one word of warning. Unless you put everything you’ve got into it, unless you write it from the heart, the kids’ll have no use for it. They’ll see you’re having them on. And just let me tell you from experience that there’s nothing kids hate more than that. They won’t give you a second chance either. You’ll have had it for good as far as they’re concerned. Just you bear that in mind as a word of friendly advice. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I rather think I’ll go in search of another drink.’

  With what Amis describes as ‘a stiff nod and an air of having asserted his integrity by rejecting some particularly outrageous and repulsive suggestion’, Dahl walks away. Amis is left feeling he has been looking at a painting by Escher ‘in which the eye is led up a flight of stairs only to find itself at the same level as it started at’.

  That night, Amis watches the news on television, and notes it includes ‘no report of a famous children’s author being killed in a helicopter crash’.

  KINGSLEY AMIS

  IS DEPOSITED BY

  ANTHONY ARMSTRONG-JONES

  in Slough

  November 1959

  Queen magazine is planning to run a feature called ‘Top Talkers’, about the most brilliant conversationalists in the country. The top talkers all gather for lunch, together with a fashionable young photographer, Tony Armstrong-Jones, who has been hired to take the pictures. At one point, the editor of Queen, Mark Boxer, suggests it might be a nice idea to put a new photograph of Princess Margaret at the top of the feature, labelling it ‘Top Inspirer.’

  ‘I object strongly to that idea,’ says Armstrong-Jones.

  ‘So do I,’ says the equally fashionable thirty-seven-year-old novelist Kingsley Amis.

  ‘What don’t you like about it, Tony?’ asks Boxer.

  ‘Well, I feel professionally that either I’m the photographer for the feature or I’m not, and it’s a bit messy to have somebody else’s work mixed up with mine.’

  There the matter rests. No one thinks to ask Amis what his objections might be.

  Some months later, Amis is hired by an advertising company to promote Long Life beer in a campaign which, in his own words, is intended to show ‘a succession of supposed notables, including, I need hardly say, Humphrey Lyttelton, whose presence in such a series is apparently enforced by law, all swigging away at the relevant beer and crying up its merits’. The photographer, once again, is Anthony Armstrong-Jones.

  The group of beer-swilling notables assembles for lunch one Friday in November. After cordial greetings, Amis says to Armstrong-Jones, ‘I see that bloody colour-block of Princess Margaret got in after all, then.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me why you were against the idea of its going in?’ asks Armstrong-Jones.

  ‘Well, just that the woman obviously has no mind at all – you remember that crap of hers about it not being any good our sending the products of our mind up into space while our souls remained stuck down below in the dives and the espresso bars – schoolgirl essay stuff. I just thought she didn’t fit in very well with some of the people in the article in Queen. That’s all.’

  To which Armstrong-Jones replies crisply: ‘I can assure you you’re quite wrong. She is in fact an extremely intelligent and well-informed woman.’

  ‘Oh, you know her, do you?’

  ‘I have met her on several occasions.’

  ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I had no idea she was a great chum of yours. How tactless of me. I really didn’t know.’

  Amis seems to feel that he has settled their slight disagreement perfectly amicably. After lunch, the group reassembles in Armstrong-Jones’s studio in Pimlico. The photographic session begins. Amis manages ‘a number of sips and swallows of beer, pretended to have many more, looked at it, into, round, through glass after glass of it while Armstrong-Jones photographed’. After a while, Armstrong-Jones says, ‘Don’t go on drinking that filth. It’s getting flat, too,’ and asks his assistant to stir in some Eno’s Liver Salts, to give it a frothy head.

  As with most photographic sessions, this one lasts a good deal longer than planned. By the end, Amis has been joined by his wife, Hilly. Armstrong-Jones asks them what they are doing for the weekend. Amis says they are off to stay with his friend George Gale near Staines.

  Armstrong-Jones declares that he is going to Bath, which is in the right direction, and insists on giving them a lift, if they wouldn’t mind waiting for him to finish at the studio. Amis suggests he could take the southern road, and go via Staines – just a mile or two further on – and have a drink with the Gales before pressing on.

  The finishing at the studio takes rather more time than Amis had imagined. Eventually, they pile into the car, and set off on the northern road via Slough, which is Armstrong-Jones’s customary route. On the outskirts of Slough, he says he feels thirsty, and suggests they all pop into a pub. They stop and have a drink, and then, as Amis recalls, Armstrong-Jones ‘said it had been fun and did the nearest thing possible to driving off leaving us standing on the pavement’.

  The Amises are left to find a bus to Staines, wait for it, board it, and then be driven along a circuitous route before arriving at their destination nearly an hour and a half later than if they had set off by themselves.

  A month or so passes. Amis is sitting in his study in Swansea when his guest, who has heard the story of their abandonment in Slough, tells him that it’s just been announced that Princess Margaret is going to marry Tony Armstrong-Jones.

  ‘Look, sonny,’ says Amis, ‘try and think of something a bit less obvious next time.’ But it is true: the television coverage confirms it. Amis’s friend George Gale later explains that ‘it wasn’t just a matter of him wanting a bit of company in the car and sod you. The devious bugger. What? I mean he was paying you back for insulting his girlfriend even though you didn’t know she was his girlfriend. Pretty bloody impressive, you have to admit. He’s upper-class, I keep telling you, which means he doesn’t end up one down to the likes of fucking you.’

  Amidst the chorus of jubilation greeting the news of the royal engagement, a single173 sour note is sounded by Kingsley Amis, who suggests to an American friend that it is ‘such a symbol of the age we live in, when a royal princess, famed for her devotion to all that is most vapid and mindless in the world of entertainment, her habit of reminding people of her status whenever they venture to disagree with her in conversation, and her appalling taste in clothes, is united with a dog-faced tight-jeaned fotog of fruitarian tastes such as can be found in dozens in any pseudo-arty drinking cellar in fashionable-unfashionable London.’ He adds that he is ‘seriously considering forming a British Republican party to burn the happy couple in effigy on their wedding night. And why wasn’t I sent an invitation? Eh?’

  LORD SNOWDON

  IS MOTHERED BY

  BARRY HUMPHRIES

  Chez Moi, Addison Road, Holland Park, London W14

  November 1966

  Lord Snowdon is enjoying a quiet meal with friends at one of London’s most chic restaurants when a man emerges from the gents’, walks a few paces int
o the dining room, and drops his trousers.

  The trouser-dropper in question is an up-and-coming Australian comedian called Barry Humphries, who is at present appearing in a weekly satire show on the BBC with Eleanor Bron, John Wells and the composer Stanley Myers.

  One evening after work, Stanley Myers and his girlfriend and Barry Humphries and his wife go out to dinner together at Chez Moi, the swish new restaurant in Holland Park. Disconcerted that nothing vulgar has yet happened, Myers attempts to persuade Humphries to perform one of the practical jokes for which he is fast gaining a reputation.

  Humphries is a long-time devotee of pranks, many of them elaborate. They emerge naturally from his Dada-ist period at Melbourne University, where his street work includes planting a roast chicken in a dustbin, coming along the next day dressed as a tramp, burrowing for the chicken in the bin, then pulling it out and guzzling it. This prank is later expanded and extended to aeroplanes: before boarding, Humphries fills a sick-bag with Russian salad, then pretends to be sick mid-flight and spoons the contents into his mouth.

  He also used to enjoy planting an accomplice posing as a blind man on a Melbourne commuter train, bearing a white cane and with a leg in a plaster cast. The ‘blind’ man would then start reading a piano roll, as though it were braille. Stepping into the compartment bearing a foreign newspaper, Humphries would scream foreign gibberish at the man while destroying his piano roll and kicking at his plaster cast. ‘Commuters were often transfixed in horror,’ recalls Humphries. ‘No one ever pursued me. Mind you, I ran as fast as I could. People tried to comfort my blind friend. He would always say, “Forgive him.” It was very funny to do and very hard not to laugh. It’s a bit hard to say what effect the stunt was meant to have, since it was meant to amuse us, a kind of outrageous public act.’174