A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  When we got back to England, Linda kept in touch with Christmas cards, presents and invitations, but when she died, and Paul married Heather Mills, we lost touch with Paul and his family for a while.

  Not long ago, Paul invited me to a party for old friends, which provided a chance to meet his new wife, Nancy. His older daughter Mary was there, with her own children. I had not seen her since she was a teenager.

  I decided to tell Mary something I had always believed but not mentioned to her when she was little – that she had been conceived at our house in Portugal. The dates were clear. Exactly nine months, almost to the day, after they had stayed with us, Linda gave birth to their first child together, Mary.

  Mary was charmed. She gave me a hug and said I must be er, what is it, step-godfather or something?

  Margaret was not at Paul’s party, of course, as she always refused to go to such events. When I told her afterwards what I had said to Mary, she said it was an awful thing to do, so embarrassing, she would never have done that, but typical of me, showing off.

  We were glad to have had that year abroad. And did not regret it, then or afterwards. But we were never interested in or attracted to the idea of doing it again. Not for that length of time. After six weeks of the sun we were saying oh no, not another perfect day.

  The people you end up being friends with abroad, however charming, are not the friends you would make or meet in real life at home. You can never properly, truly, deeply get to know people, either locals or expats, when you are only ever passing through their lives.

  I missed so much reading the English papers every day, and the magazines, and the radio. I did buy one of those so-called worldwide radios, supposedly capable of picking up London, but I could never get it tuned properly to the BBC. Or remember what half-hour in the day there was an interesting programme. There were some lessons learned from that year abroad. I am a little Ingerlander at heart. And a creature of routine.

  On the other hand, every January after that year abroad, when it came to my birthday on 7 January, I moaned and groaned, saying oh if only we were still on a beach in the sun, now, do we always have to put up with these English winters?

  10

  LONDON LIFE

  We came back to London at the fag end of the sixties. While we were away, nothing much new seemed to have happened. People still looked and dressed the same.

  We have a photo of us on the beach at Praia da Luz in 1968 with Paul and Linda and it is interesting now, all these decades later, when I look at it, to see that Margaret has a Vidal Sassoon-type hairstyle, which clearly she must have had done in that style a year earlier, before we left London. And she is also wearing a miniskirt.

  She did go to Vidal Sassoon now and again, and so did I – because men went there as well. I was doing it for copy reasons, to find a West End barber I could interview for my New Rich and New Poor book. Trendy sixties snippers were said to be making a fortune.

  Despite that photograph, we did not consider ourselves in the fashion swim in the sixties. I always felt dowdy when with the Beatles. But everyone who was alive and well in the sixties could not help reflecting in some way the times we were living in. Even if you only realised it later. My mother, in her pre-war snaps with my father, looks ever so chic in what appears now to be fashionable twenties clothes, but she was never remotely a fashion plate. You reflect your times, even if you are not aware of it at the time.

  There is another snap of me walking up to Brookfield primary school with Caitlin and Jake. I am wearing very fashionable slightly flared white trousers, a sort of grandad T-shirt with buttons down the front and rimless sun specs, the sort John Lennon used to wear. I also have sideburns. That photo, so the family always says, makes me look a bit like George Best. Their implication is that I must have been trying to ape Besty. I always reply, oh no, George Best was trying to look like me. Well not me personally, but that was the style we all copied, chaps of my age, trying to look vaguely fashionable. George Best looked like lots of people, but of course his image is set in aspic, as being so typical of the sixties, whereas everyone else who was there has changed their styles and moved on. Or is dead.

  The further we get away from that decade, it does strike me that there was a certain, identifiable sixties style, so different from the boring clothes and styles which went before, such as they were. There were no teenage styles when I was growing up in the early fifties. For a start, there were no teenagers.

  On returning to London, I did go and visit Carnaby Street, which had seemed the world centre of young London fashion before I went away, but now was full of people up from the suburbs, walking up and down, gaping at the windows, and now and again buying stuff. They were all Brits, from the provinces. Not many foreigners, they all came later.

  The sixties shop which most amazed me was Biba. Their first store had opened in 1964, and had modest publicity, but a big new one had opened in Kensington High Street which we visited not long after we came back to London. I thought it was incredible. Every nook and cranny, every corner of the vast emporium, had been decorated and designed in the most amazing materials and drapes in all colours, a visual explosion of art deco and modern psychedelia. The shop itself was a work of art, before you even looked at the items on sale.

  The staff were equally amazing. None of them seemed to be working, in the sense of actually trying to sell you anything. They stood or lay around, looking beautiful, considering themselves part of the overall design. Customers were being ignored, left to push and shove, allowed to try things on with no supervision. A lot of them walked out in the clothes, without paying. The losses must have been appalling.

  I remember seeing Donovan there, the pop star. He stopped and spoke to Jake and Caitlin who were wearing floppy, purple Biba caps. He wanted to know where we had got them. I told him they came from Biba. While there, Margaret had bought herself a pair of knee-high purple canvas boots, which laced all the way up. Took ages to put on but they looked great, as she always had good legs. So I suppose it was not quite true that we were not in the fashion swim.

  Habitat was also a revelation, but in a different way. That was more professional and organised. It too opened in 1964 on a small scale, gradually getting bigger premises. When the Tottenham Court Road one opened, we seemed to go there every Saturday. We started chucking out our dark, elderly furniture and Victorian button-back chairs and sewing tables we had been so proud of just a few years earlier. Instead we were filling the house with Scandinavian-style, hard-edged, unadorned, gleaming pine tables, chairs, day beds. Then we moved on to covering the kitchen and bathroom walls with pine boards which we then sealed with Ronseal. Which of course we regretted, about ten years later, when stripped pine became awfully old hat.

  The more I think back to the sixties the more I am convinced it was a fascinating decade. Not just the changes in cultural and social attitudes, which helped me progress on the Sunday Times, but in the streets, the shops, the homes.

  I do find it very hard to think of what were the styles of the seventies, apart from awful flapping trousers, platform heels and long hair. I can’t even think of anything which symbolised eighties style, at least which affected me. As for the nineties, we are still in them, aren’t we? Practically yesterday.

  I know I do romanticise the sixties. But it did mean so much to me, when so many things in my life and Margaret’s life happened and when our family and careers began. I know it was as much the fact of being aged in our twenties and early thirties, rather than it being the sixties. Most people look back to their twenties and thirties with fondness and nostalgia. I assume there are people now who go dewy eyed about the 1990s or 2000s. Do they refer to it as the 2000s? Who cares. I am still in the sixties.

  In 1969, when we came to London, we each came home with a completed novel. We had taken it in turns every morning while abroad, two hours on, two hours off, to look after the children while the other one wrote.

  I had dropped entirely the book about univers
ity students, originally The Class of ’66, which then became The Class of ’67 and then ’68, and then I gave up. It was all out of date. Students had changed so much in just three years. More so on the continent with various demonstrations and action groups, but even in the UK they had become more political and involved.

  I had completed half the interviews, which I then never used. They are lying around the house somewhere. Anna Ford, who had been at Manchester University, later became a well-known TV presenter and newsreader. Buzz Goodbody, then at Sussex, joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, becoming one of their first and youngest female directors. She committed suicide in 1975. There is still an annual award for young directors in her name.

  While abroad, I had decided to write another novel, The Rise and Fall of Jake Sullivan. My hero was a lout, a working-class yob, who has become a property millionaire. In my mind, he was a bit like John Lennon in his attitudes, and a bit like John Bloom, a washing machine magnate I had interviewed, and also a publisher friend called Gareth Powell. I had not used anything from their lives, just how I imagined they looked at the world.

  To my hero, Jake Sullivan, fighting to make his property millions, it was all a laugh. He didn’t mind if he did go bust, in fact going to prison for debt or bankruptcy would be part of the process. Failure was part of a being a success, so what did it matter. I interviewed quite a few people who had made money out of property, so I got to know how the system worked.

  In the book, the hero Jake, now very rich and flash, meets an old friend from school who has gone to university, got a proper job, done the right things, but has no house or money, unlike Jake who was useless at school, but ducked and dived and amassed a massive property empire. Jake hires his friend – whom I based upon me – as his Surprise Assistant. All he has to do is organise surprises for him. Once I had thought of that wheeze, it was good fun to write. If the plot got stuck, and I got bored, then I could spring another surprise. Jake does end up in prison.

  Naturally it was full of bad language, farting, wanking, grabbing people’s balls in meetings, with Jake insulting and humiliating people and being foul-mouthed, just as he had been at school. Charles Pick at Heinemann was appalled. He wanted all the bad language out. Even the success of the Beatles biog could not make him change his mind.

  I stuck to my guns, said he was a hero of our times, this is what the new breed of self-made tycoons are like. I suppose the success of the Beatles biog had given me the confidence not to worry about possibly not getting another publisher to accept it. I did have the security of some money in the bank – though I had decided not spend any of it for seven years. This was the period I was told that the Inland Revenue can always come back and demand more tax.

  Richard Simon, my agent, had left Curtis Brown and set up on his own. When Heinemann finally said no, Richard agreed to try it on another publisher. This turned out to be an enormous stroke of luck. The book was taken on by Tony Godwin of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, with whom I worked so happily for the next ten years, producing seven books.

  When I first went to see Tony, I was so impressed that he had read the novel twice and made notes, created graphs, charted the rise and flow of the narrative. I could not believe anyone would take my fiction so seriously. I always felt I was a fraud as a novelist, compared with Margaret. I was writing novels because, well, I can’t now quite remember. It just seemed the thing to do. Everyone with any sort of writing ambition always thinks they would like to write a novel.

  In fact I went on to have three novels published with Tony, till I realised I was better off, life was easier, sticking to non-fiction.

  Jake Sullivan did well, got a lot of coverage, and the film rights were sold to Robert Stigwood, a pop music impresario who had a big success with the Bee Gees. I had met him by chance at Brian Epstein’s country home, when they were doing various pop music deals together. He had now decided to go into films and this would be his first film venture.

  I was to do the script and he hired a clever and bright young director, Tony Palmer, who had made his name in TV. We were given the use of an office in Mayfair, just vacated by a supergroup he was handling, called Cream.

  Tony and I went off to scout locations, found possible places to shoot, spent a lot of time and money on the script and did auditions. The person we chose for the part of Jake was John Alderton. He turned up in character, wearing a flash suit, shouting his mouth off, and seemed perfect. So we signed him up.

  But the film never got made. Robert Stigwood decided instead to put his money into a pop music film, Saturday Night Fever, which turned out to be a Hollywood blockbuster.

  I still have the film script of Jake Sullivan lying around somewhere. Perhaps one day somebody will see it as a period project about the sixties, but I doubt it. So my brilliant career in films, as a screenplay writer, ended with one film made and one script lying gathering dust.

  I can hardly remember now the four other novels which I went on later to do – three with Tony at Weidenfeld and one for Bloomsbury. I can’t recall the names of the characters or the plots, if any. So you will be spared.

  One of them, A Very Loving Couple, published in 1971, appeared a few years ago on a reading list from some new university. Which surprised me. One called Body Charge, which was about gay bashing on Hampstead Heath, plus football, has recently been republished in America. A Californian publisher who specialises in gay books from the past had somehow come across it and brought it out in a new edition.

  I have just got down a dusty copy of A Very Loving Couple from my shelves, to check the date, and I noticed that the copyright belongs to the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain. I had forgotten that. It was the beginning of a period in which Margaret insisted we should start giving money away. I put it off at first, saying we might need our money some time, if one of us falls ill, needs years of care, but she said no, we should do it now, while we are both young and healthy. She argued that we were now earning enough for our needs, plus we had the money saved after our year abroad. (It came in total to about £50,000, which I left in various building society accounts for seven years.)

  In the end I gave away about five books and Margaret did the same. What happened was that once a book idea had been accepted by a publisher, and the contract drafted by the agent, we then put the contract in the name of the charity. They then received all the monies. In effect, we worked for a year for nothing. The charities we donated books to included Shelter, Marie Curie Cancer Care and several others.

  People used to think it was some sort of fiddle, that Multiple Sclerosis was a company owned by us in the Bahamas, and that all we were doing was avoiding tax. We were, in a sense, avoiding tax – by avoiding any payment and working for nothing. John Fowles, whom I had interviewed for Atticus early in his career, and who was now at the height of his fame and fortune, wrote to us to ask about it. He said he wanted to donate a book to charity, and wanted to know what sort of wording should be used. I think Fowles heard about what we were doing through one of our publishers. They could not believe it at first. They did not lose, of course, nor did our agents, because they got their 10 per cent by still representing the book, even though it was now owned by a charity.

  Tony Godwin eventually left Weidenfeld and moved to the USA, which was a loss for me. For about ten years he had commissioned almost every book idea I thought of. However dopey. We got on so well, he was so supportive, even with topics, such as football, in which he had no interest at all.

  Tony lived for a while in a penthouse flat in Gloucester Crescent, Primrose Hill, after he had separated from his wife Fay Godwin, who became a well-known photographer. He invited me and Margaret one evening to a dinner party. He had cooked and prepared and served it all on his own, after a hard day at work. I was most impressed.

  There were about six couples there, mostly authors published by him, and for some reason, towards the end of the meal, the chat got on to Antonia Fraser. She was not there, but she was one of Tony’s autho
rs. The conversation had turned to her biog of Mary Queen of Scots, which was selling very well. Margaret was not asked her opinion, but that of course did not hold her back. While admiring the research and the work Antonia had put it into, Margaret declared that she felt it was a shame Antonia was not a better writer.

  Tony jumped up, absolutely furious. He said he would not allow any of his authors to be criticised in his house. Margaret should either retract what she had just said or leave his table.

  We were all stunned, people looking at each other in amazement. We had never seen this side of Tony, though of course as his author, it was nice to realise he defended his authors, even behind their backs.

  Margaret said if that was how Tony felt, then fine. She then got up and left the table. I did not quite realise at first what she had done, or where she had gone. Perhaps she had just gone to the lavatory, so for a few moments I quietly carried on eating, my head down, saying nothing. When I had finished the dish, which was the pudding, and she had still not reappeared, I got up and went downstairs to find her. I found her outside, further down the street, standing beside our car. She had no key and could not drive. She was patiently waiting, leaning against the car.

  I made a face, glared at her, waiting for her to tell me what she was going to do. Was she coming back or not? Along the pavement suddenly arrived the panting Tony. He had run down the stairs after me, not wanting to lose a second guest before his dinner party had ended.

  Tony said he was sorry, he had not meant to dismiss Margaret, and never thought for one moment she would leave. Margaret said she was sorry she had spoken out in that way.

  Then Margaret pointed at the car, pointedly. She was indicating that she wanted it unlocked and driven home. I thanked Tony for a lovely meal. We both got into our car and left. I saw Tony lots of times after that for work reasons, but the incident was never mentioned again.

  In 1972, our third child, Flora was born, a surprise package, after a gap of eight years. I can’t remember planning to have another. It just seemed to happen. A blessing. We used to say she was a mistake which turned into a flower, hence her name. Though of course not in her hearing. No one likes to think they were not planned.