‘Not at all.’
‘I thought I ought to give the permissive a try. Now the children are grown-up, you know.’
‘It’s entirely a matter for you to decide. I mean, it’s your life and …’
‘And you can’t advise me?’
‘I’m afraid not. Or only not to do anything you might regret.’ I was beginning to feel sorry for Frank.
‘Oh dear.’ She sounded disappointed, but she was kind enough to give me an excuse for my uselessness. ‘I suppose that the fact is, you’re having food.’ And then she ran out of money again.
Thoughts of my childhood returned to me in inappropriate places.
We lawyers went to see blue movies in the office of the Obscene Publications (The Dirty) Squad at Scotland Yard. The officers of this branch of the Force have a discouraging club tie, on which a book is depicted being cut in half by a larger pair of scissors. A Constable works the projector in order to show the lawyers involved the questionable films which are the subject of criminal proceedings.
That day I had visited Scotland Yard with a most charming and courteous Prosecuting Counsel, always elegantly dressed from a wardrobe that ran to double-breasted waistcoats, broadly striped shirts and a bowler hat. He arrived at the building with a rolled umbrella and, as I happened to notice, a tin of film.
The official programme that morning was extremely depressing, consisting, as I remember it, of a couple of masterpieces entitled Toilet Orgies and Double Pain Date in the Tower of Terror. During the showing of these works I had recourse to the usual device of removing my glasses, so the screen was reduced to a comfortable and pinkish blur. While the officer in charge of the projector was changing a reel, my courtroom opponent told us that he and his wife kept a remarkably well-stocked herb garden which had been filmed by a friend. Unhappily they had no means of showing the film and would the Constable be good enough to run it through the projector? The Constable was good enough and for a blissful ten minutes we sat watching a gentle wind stirring the mint and thyme, the tarragon and the rosemary, before we were reluctantly returned to the depressing world of Adult Viewing. I had come a long way, undoubtedly too far, from my father’s garden.
In my mother’s time some of the kitchen garden had reverted to its natural state and the shrubbery at the top of the orchard had returned to jungle. But, in her eighties, she did all she could to keep the flower beds as they had been when my father was alive. She was, as she always had been, shy, timid and extremely sceptical. She didn’t return to drawing or painting, her loves before she met my father, as I hoped she might have done, but, with no clear idea of leaving England, she started to learn Italian at evening classes.
I told my mother that I had gone to America and helped secure the services of Mr Dustin Hoffman for a film, and she laughed; but more tolerantly than she had done when I had told her about being a part-time Judge. I told her about the four short plays I had written dealing with middle-aged love, which would be done in one evening and called Come As You Are, and the difficulties we had casting them. ‘It’s always been the same with you, hasn’t it?’ she said. ‘One step forward and then one step back.’ At least I was able to tell her that Glynis Johns had agreed to act in the plays, and she said that now I had got that settled perhaps I could concentrate on my work at the bar. She had come to Westminster Abbey and the House of Lords when I took silk. She had seen me in the elaborated version of my father’s fancy dress, the knee-breeches and lace cuffs and silk stockings and said, ‘You do look rather killing.’ We never mentioned the radio plays I had written about my childhood and my father, some of which I had turned into a play for television.
In time a new hand would be dealt to me, although many of the cards would be distinctly familiar. There would be other years of unlooked-for happiness, another marriage, another child (the child of middle age so greatly loved because you can see much more clearly the limit set on your time together) who would run through the daffodils or climb among the blossom to have breakfast on a sunny morning on a rickety platform in a cherry tree. I would reclaim the kitchen garden, clear the jungle, and on Sundays my children and stepchildren would come, bringing a new generation to go on the treasure-hunts and hide in the copses. The house would hear sounds and see sights it never dreamed of: the sound of opera which I discovered as a new and magical world when I was past fifty, and of parties and people who had drunk too much falling into the swimming pool which my mother would never have permitted and would have decided made the place look far too much like a ‘Road House’, which perhaps it does.
The years of delayed adolescence were over. I was looking for someone with whom I could attempt again, after many hard lessons learnt, the difficult and risky journey of a marriage.
There were false trails and mirages. I met an Israeli model who had been an army sergeant in her own country, but had borrowed a military vehicle to escape across the border and find freedom in the world of high fashion. I was fond of Rachel, but she talked a great deal about battles and the delight she would have in machine-gunning Arabs, and at mealtimes, when she looked at the food her profession forbade her to eat, her large dark eyes would fill with tears. I had also met a very beautiful girl who was an Angel. She rang me up and asked me to take her out to lunch so she could tell me about it.
‘I’m an Angel,’ she said. ‘It came to me when I was sitting on a mountain in France. One of the Angels of the Lord. So far I’ve only told three people.’
‘Really. Who are they?’
‘The man who’s Head of the Methodist Church, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and you. I chose you as representing the atheists.’
‘And what did the others say?’ I asked, as Captain of the Unbelievers.
‘The Cardinal said that there might be an opening for me doing good works among young people, and the Methodist asked me if there were a history of insanity in my family. What do you think?’
‘Oh, I’m absolutely convinced you’re an Angel.’ It takes, of course, an atheist to show any degree of faith in these sceptical times.
However the Angel, who had been living with a dress designer in the King’s Road, went off to join a colony of mystics and Rachel went to New York and married her gynaecologist. At a New Year’s Eve party, as the sixties rattled to a halt, I met my future wife. When she told her family about our meeting, her mother protested and asked if I were not an older man. When she heard that I was, in fact, only a year older than she, I doubt if my future mother-in-law was greatly reassured.
I visited the family in the faint hope of being approved of as a suitor. My future wife’s mother was an enthusiastic swimmer who left their Kentish farm every day of the year to plunge into the grey and unwelcoming waters of the English Channel. She had won the record for staying in longer than anyone else on Boxing Day. It was in a windy April that I made my first visit and, when she told me how the ‘townees’ stood on the beach and laughed at this grim endurance test, I said that ‘townees’, of course, understood nothing of the splendours and delights of year-round bathing. I should have held my tongue. That afternoon I, who hadn’t heard English spoken on a beach for many years, was led tiptoeing across the cruel shingle towards a grey, icy and even more cruel sea. As I groaned and sank into the gritty, marrow-chilling water, I was not only plunging into the future but swimming back, towards a childhood when I stood shivering on the beach near my uncle’s beach hut in Sussex, washing myself free, I hoped, in that symbolic and agonizing gesture, of the grimy accumulation of the years.
We took a house in Ravello, near to the Villa Cimbrone with its row of pale statues on the edge of the precipice between the garden and the sea, where I had first met Arthur Jeffries. It was a big house with marble floors and a four-poster, and a view down to the Mediterranean where we could see the white steamer off on its regular, punctual journey to Positano. My mother, almost nine years after my father had died, made her Great Escape from his house and garden. She climbed aboard an aeroplane for the first t
ime in her life and came to stay with us in Italy.
I met my mother, who was blinking in the sun and spurning all assistance, at Naples airport. We embraced then, as if we had met after a long, long separation, and on that happy, all-forgiving coast the reserve, the sort of wariness with which we had always treated each other, melted away entirely. I couldn’t remember why I had thought for so long that my mother was a stranger to me, totally involved in the supreme sacrifice of her life with my father. And in the hot sunshine, in the marble shadows of the house, or out on the terrace among the bougainvillaea, drinking cold ‘Caruso’ wine and looking miles down to the sea, she giggled, made jokes, became a girl again, the large-eyed, shy but also daring girl she had been when a schoolteacher in South Africa, she galloped bare-back on her pony or stood naked in a waterfall.
In Italy my mother climbed down to the beach, took the long day’s boat trip to Capri, sat on a chair put for her in the doorway of the grocer’s shop as we did our shopping or tried out, on a grinning Sorrentine butcher, the careful and perfect Italian which she had learnt in Marlow. Each morning we met on the terrace, whilst the others were still asleep, and she was wearing a dressing gown with her long hair down over her shoulders like a young girl. She would smile and say ‘Buon Giorno’ and we would kiss and plan another day of our great new-found friendship, at ease in a foreign house and a garden where my father had never been.
Home in England my mother was careful not to watch Voyage Round My Father when it came on television. I had the chance of writing a longer version to do on the stage at the Greenwich Theatre, which she would also never see. I went with my son, still at school and always passionate for Greece, to Rhodes. We puttered round the island on hired motor bikes and took donkey rides up to Lindos and boat trips to the Turkish coast and, at night, I sat in the hotel bedroom and wrote new scenes for the play.
Perhaps my mother was right and I should never have started on the work in progress. The writer’s gluttony for material, his habit of eating his life as a caterpillar consumes the leaf it sits on, and spinning it out changed and perhaps unrecognizable, may not only be an embarrassment to his immediate family. Writing down events is the writer’s great protection, his defence and his safety valve. Anger and misery, defeat, humiliation and self-disgust can be changed and used to provide a sense of achievement as he fills his pages. And yet the catharsis is often too complete, the life he has led vanishes into his work and leaves him empty. After months of writing dialogue for my father I became confused, unable to distinguish between what he had said and what I had invented for him to say. Gradually he left me and became a character in a play. In giving him to other people I came, after a time, to lose him for myself. I don’t think that this means that I should have done as my mother wanted and not written the play. The process is one of the many disadvantages of the writer’s life, like the constant guilt at not working. It is, perhaps, what makes writers less interesting to talk to than many other professionals: their lives are no longer there to be discovered privately. They have been thrown open to the public.
The play was to open in Greenwich on 27 November. A set had been designed consisting of large mechanical cubes which would move about the stage suggesting a change of place, and could be opened to disgorge properties. By some happy chance the machinery in these devices (like most stage machinery) failed to work on the opening night and the audience was able to concentrate on the play without the distraction of menacing geometric shapes dancing the Merry Widow waltz. Mark Dignam, who played the part of my father so well on television, was to do it on the stage, and we had the same director, Claude Watham. All that November we were working in the cold and fog of a South London rehearsal room, in search of those far distant moments at breakfast when my father had cursed cold plates and runny eggs and expounded Darwin’s theory and sung Pretty Little Polly Perkins of Paddington Green.
A neighbour, walking along the common, kept an eye on my mother’s house. Once she didn’t answer to a ring and the police were sent for. They drove out through the snow, climbed a ladder and peered through her bedroom window to see her sitting up in bed reading Italian short stories. Usually quiet and courteous she rebuked them severely. One evening in that November, however, my mother was trying, as she had so often done with my father, to finish the crossword. Her blood pressure had been high in her last years and she had a stroke and fell on to the carpet in front of the dying logs of her modest and economical fire.
When I saw her in hospital my mother smiled. She seemed distressed but, with her immense courage, amused at her helplessness. We held hands but, as it had been so often with us, she couldn’t speak.
As I say, the play was to open on 27 November. On the 26th we worked all night, the lighting was difficult, the stage machinery didn’t work, the overworked Greenwich technicians were exhausted and no one had any particular faith in a play that had no story and was more about blindness than sex. The next day part of my life, which had been, and perhaps should have stayed, my own private and particular concern, was to be revealed. I sat in the deserted stalls of the theatre, watching an endless lighting rehearsal, drinking cooling instant coffee and became filled with gloom and apprehension. Far away from the theatre she wouldn’t visit, in a small country hospital, my mother died without regaining her speech. The next night her part was taken by an actress.
The advocate goes through changing emotions in the course of a case. At first he feels nervous, cast down, perhaps, by the obvious difficulties. His nerves are calmed, as are the actor’s, as soon as he opens his mouth and he begins to think he can find answers to most, at least, of the difficult questions. He works out his final speech which is his way of putting his case to the Jury as convincingly as possible. When he rises to speak he is nervous again, his hands may be sweating and his voice uncertain. It’s a long slog, two or three hours perhaps, of standing and sweating and trying to persuade, and then comes a moment of intense relief. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the Jury,’ the advocate may say, particularly if like me he has more than a touch of the Marshall Halls, ‘my task is done. The defence is now in your hands.’
He sits down and there is always, I think for advocates, an extraordinary lightening of the spirit. The job is done for better or for worse, you have said all you can say. You are free from the burden of responsibility. In a mood of rare relaxation you close your eyes, dimly aware that somewhere, it seems very far away, a Judge is summing up.
Of course there are bad times to come. The Jury are sent out to consider their verdict and there is nothing you can do, you feel too tense to read or even to do the crossword, you fill yourself with ‘coffee’ in the Old Bailey canteen until you are awash with the greyish, tasteless liquid, and then you go down to the cells to cheer up your waiting client. Such meetings are seldom happy; you think of all the questions you might have asked and the points you might have made in your speech. You work out the most your client is likely to get and, looking gloomily on the bright side, calculate just how long that means by taking off a third plus the months he has been in custody already. You wonder if it’s a good sign that the Jury have been out for so long and know, secretly, that it probably isn’t. Then, as often as not, a silence falls between you.
In the years that were to come, I was to invent a down-at-heel old barrister with a certain low courtroom cunning who was to become the hero of a television series. I sat in the usual embarrassed silence with an East End totter whom I had been defending on a charge of attempted murder. He had been accused of stabbing the man next door with the knife he used to cut up carrots for the pony that drew his cart. The motive suggested was that the son of the next-door neighbour had stolen my client’s Victory Medal. As we sat together, the totter and I, in the cells beneath the Old Bailey, waiting for a word from the Jury, and as I thought, as usual, of all the things I might have said, art took its revenge on life.
‘Your Mr Rumpole could’ve got me out of this,’ the totter said, ‘so why the hell can’t you?’<
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Life seems to have been full of verdicts. The editors of Oz magazine were sent to prison one weekend for publishing their ‘Schoolkids’ number; a few days later an Appeal Judge set them free. In the end their convictions were set aside. Alec Guinness played Voyage Round My Father at the Haymarket. On all these occasions I walked Law Court corridors waiting for verdicts, or stood on Paddington Station to buy the papers and read the notices, with a dry mouth and a certainty of disaster. For that year, the year I sat in Court and discussed the love life of Rupert Bear, the year my mother and father, gone from me as the characters in plays leave and take on another and more remote existence, were acted in the West End, disasters were, temporarily, postponed. There would be other verdicts, other opening nights, and other closing speeches. There is always time for failure.
I walked into the house and felt that I didn’t own it and that I had no right to move the books or rearrange the furniture. We lit a fire and the chimney smoked, we opened cupboards and drawers feeling like intruders. I went into the winter garden and thought of how it might be put back in time to the day when I planted a tree and met Penelope, to when Henry Winter came to stay, to when I sat beside my father’s hammock and he swung himself gently as I read him the Sherlock Holmes stories which he already knew by heart. So much of the garden had vanished into the icy and tangled undergrowth that I didn’t know how it could be managed.
That is how it was, a part of life, seen from one point of view. Much more happened that I cannot tell or remember. To others it would be, I am quite sure, a different story. I have written all I can write about it now, and these are the things that stayed with me for a while, before they left to go into a book.
My father about to avoid doing anything too heroic
My mother as a young woman
CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE Page 25
