by Unknown
That must have been in 1938 and I was seventeen.
But I had made a start. You have to do it somehow, and that was the way for me and I knew, without a shadow of doubt, baggy transparent bloomers and all, that I had found my metier. It seems a very long time ago now.
After that I rather think we did a Christmas pantomime, ‘Babes In The Wood,’ as far as I remember I was in it, neither a Babe nor a Robber but a Wicked Uncle. I remember that I did help to do some of the scenery, which was very useful for future work, and wound up the old portable gramaphone for ‘God Save The King’ at the end.
Nineteen Thirty Eight brought my supreme moment of triumph when your father suggested, in a round about way, that we might do ‘Journey’s End’ which would be a very ‘timely’ play. It was timely alright, because we were on the brink of another war at the moment.
Naturally the Ladies in the Company got fearfully huffy because there was no part for them in ‘Journeys’ End’– but things were sorted out, the male members made sure of that, and we started rehearsals and I was asked to do the scenery once again. This time it was easier, a dug-out, mud, wooden boxes and beds, and I painted everything on huge sheets of brown wrapping paper. It was very effective – I thought. But with the war news growing ever more desperate it was thought more prudent to cancel rehearsals and we all got on with digging slit-trenches, fitting gas-masks, and filling sand-bags. As far as I was concerned my great moment in a great play had gone for ever.
But it had not. In the September Mr Chamberlain waved that idiotic piece of white paper and we all really believed there would never be a war in our time. Rehearsals started again, and ‘Journey’s End’ opened and was a triumph. People were greatly moved to see a play about something they had just managed to avoid, a desperate war.
The following September it started. And the world, and this place, this hall, this village, none of them was to be quite the same again.
But there were wonderful times here: the Saturday Dance, swooping about in ‘The Valeta,’ avoiding the plainer girls during the ‘Paul Jones,’ whirling about in the last Waltz which was always ‘Goodbye Sweetheart,’ and during which your father wisely lowered the lights from time to time so that kisses could be sneaked before we all put on hats and coats and cycled to our homes in the area. In those happy days this village was still very much a village. Freelands stores faced The Bull across the green, and we all knew each other and exactly what we were all up to. Gossip was simple, un-malicious, deeply interesting, and about the most daring thing anyone had to do was to catch the ’bus to Haywards Heath or Lewes.
But I had had my very first crack at acting in the role of ‘Raleigh’ in ‘Journey’s End’ and I knew that nothing would deflect me from my path as an Actor. And nothing did. Not even the war which took us by shocked surprise that hot September Sunday. However, it was a long time before I could settle down and just do my job: I had another job to do for those six years and it was a long time before I came back to the hall here, or the village. I wonder, this evening, how many of you sitting out there came to the old Dances? How many of you played Robins in paper beaks and wings with little red breasts for ‘Babes In The Wood,’ how many of you laughed and applauded ‘Alf’s Button?’ How many of you will say ‘Ah! They were the happy days then, war or no war, we managed, we laughed, we danced, we had a lot of fun, and we worked for it.’
And how many of you know, as I do, that we had the best of it all, the very best, and that those far off days will never come again?
Were’nt we really very lucky?
Love from Dirk
To Bee Gilbert Clermont
13 January 1983
Dearest Sno –
Oh my goodness yes! ‘Raw’ as an egg you were.1 And none the worse for that. Feather boas, pink velvet hats, frilly black frocks and black stockings, and eating your hair in handfuls .. I so well remember my ‘suite’ at the Gellert .. and I. breaking up a wardrobe, and me suggesting we all went off to Vienna, wondering, deeply, if it would work or if I. would be difficult or you would hate schnitzels and kaffee mit schlag. And it was all a wonder: was’nt it?
Catching the last leaves of the autumn as they blew across the mountain field outside Semmering .. seeing that great stag, remember? near the little caff we had a veal steak and chips at. Or did we have bangers?
Whatever it was, it was all a splendour and the years have not staled the memory even though, alas! we are getting older and older. Well … not THAT old, but older. Fuck it. [ … ] Last year was a bugger of a year for us: things got very grotty and Tote was un-well and got treated with the wrong drugs for the wrong symptons and got iller, and I whizzed him to and from London a couple of times, and we got that sorted out. And now he’s better, thank God, but it was an ugly time and Clermont started a little slide. However it all perked up, as I say, and the slide halted. But one had been warned that growing older was a fact to be faced, not a fact to try to overlook.
I wrote all the time, in a desperate sort of way to kill panic, and found it a vastly useful occupation. The new autobio. comes out in March .. and there is a novel three quarters finished .. which I’ll have to lay aside while I do my piece with Miss Jackson2 whom I deeply love.
We arrive sometime after this letter may reach you. That is to say about the 25th. At the Konnot. Until mid-March. a funny film. I dont know if it will work, but hope to God it does! Arnold Bennet was Father of it, and so it is not what you might call ‘new’. But we are making it like ‘new’ Movies .. and new Scripting. There is not a whiff of Ealing or Rank about it anywhere. I’ve battled and struggled and I’ve won! That part anyway. And G.J likes it and has graciously consented to join me. We had a whale of a time in Hollywood on the ‘Pat Neal Story’ which no one saw when it was chucked onto British TV on New Years Fucking Night! What about that for planning? A lovely story about brain-tumors is JUST the thing to send you off to trample people to death in Trafalgar Square. Except they were all there anyway.
But we so enjoyed the experience of being actors together that we did all we could to find a subject. And G. found this. So … we are financed; we have been given Westminster Abbey to shoot in; and I like everyone connected with the thing because they all fit my RULE. No one old or middle-aged! Remember? And these are all about nine or thirteen.
I am most amused about the film Andrew is making.1 I am […] certain that [he] will do something very odd with it: he’s good with children, as I know.
‘Wind In The Willows’2 sounds fun. Can I be Mole, please?
Delphine Seyrig3 is a smashing actress and the biggest pain in the arse I have met in a hundred years. So watch out. She is a soppy, affected, very up-tight Feminist Movement Lady and can pick quarrels like chocolates from a box … but she is super at her job. And speaks, as you probably know, faultless English. When I last worked with her, on ‘Accident’ with Losey, she was less of a pain in the neck as a woman. But the years have baked her hard. I expect she’ll be lovely to you, and you’ll wonder what I was bleating about. She may have changed. Ladies, I find, often do: according to the man in their lives .... chamelions.
I think I have spelled that rong, dont you? But you’ll get the drift.
Here, I mean in France, things are going a little bit wonky with the Socialists and everyone is depressed, even the ones who were dotty enough to vote them in, houses are’nt selling, the Rich are leaving, and the big Hotels and Restaurants are in a mild state of panic. The yacht harbours have emptied because of the huge Wealth Tax, but everyone has just moved down the coast to San Remo and the Italians are rubbing their hands with glee. However I must’nt knock them too hard, the Mitterand Lot, because in their infinate wisdome they have seen fit to honour me with the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Art et des Lettres! Can you believe it? Not the Legion d’Honneur, but I aint complaining, and I long to wear my little button-hole ribbon and my medal one day. A signal honour for a foreigner: and very funny when you remember, as you now must do, that I cant spell or write v
ery much more than would fill a baggage lable! However .. it all goes to show that if you try, you get ..... something.
My sister was enraptured when I told her; because she is horse mad and thinks that the award has something to do with horses and so on.
Much nicer, I thought, than winning anything at all at BAFTA!
Anyway, anyway .. this is going on too long and it’s all waffle.
Yes, please, I think it would be lovely to come and eat at your place.
I am going to find the Konot a bit of a strain since a ham sandwich costs eight quid … so what I’ll do is give you a tellyphone call as soon as I have got in to London and as soon as the Fillum people have made up their minds what to do with me as far as make-up and hair and wardrobe are concerned … I want to look like Stanley Spencer .. but I am not sure if I shall manage it or not. We’ll see.
And then we’ll have a meeting. But no wine, alas! I’m not allowed it, I’m on a regime for the film and sip well-watered whisky.
[ … ] I’m off. Call you when I get there. I am so glad ‘Voices’ caught your eye the other day .... was’nt that a bit of luck?
Love love
Dirk.
To Penelope Mortimer Clermont
14 January 1983
Penny-lopey –
Well: you really are a bit rotten. After a hundred years sleep you suddenly open a Lillywhites box1 and decide to rite me a letter. And stuff it with hinty-bits of blame for desertion!
Who stopped first, answer me? You or I? I know. Yew.
Super to hear from you again. Really. I am a little amazed myself that we did write to each other for so many years … you beat needlewoman 12 by about four years .. I found all your letters, while researching for ‘O.M.’, all snug and crackly, fresh as paint, full of worry, illness, distress about this and that. And fun! So much fun! Especially in the American ones .. the College and all.
But I have them all. Treasured.
I dont know why one drifts away .. it’s strange. I am a timid soul, and sometimes my timidity gets wobbly and I sense things wrongly. I sort of felt that I was perhaps getting to be a drag. So stopped .. but was still there, if you know what I mean. And you probably dont.
I DISTINCTLY remember [J and C3] here and writing to you about them.
Very clearly indeed. So perhaps you lost that one in the scuffle in the Lillywhites box? That, I think was my last effort … it got no response; that I can find, (you were AWFUL about yearing letters. Christ!) so I just thought, oh well, I thought, she’s sitting in her Post Office1 and gardening away and thats that for the time being.
And I was right, was’nt I? For the time being. For today brings me your letter of December 30th … for some unexplained reason it only made this place today … perhaps you forgot to mail it?
Anyway: one did’nt dare write letters to an un-caring Post Office.
And my first book came out in ’77 .. I had two under my belt by the time I had got to ’79 … when your letters from me seem to stop, so I reckon you got that bit rong spells rong. You are tiresome.
Anyway, it’s not done to write to real Professionals. About books .. I’m not that yet: another six vols and maybe. Novice, is what I am, and trying v. hard. I sit with Fowler and Roget and God Knows What Else, and try to avoid ‘adverbs’ and ‘adjectives’ and dreadful ‘paradigms’. Although I dont really know what any of them are, truthfully. My first needlewoman, dead now, was tough. Norah Smallwood tougher, but loving and careing and wanting me to get things rite spells rite.
So I did pay heed. And never got Edited! Was’nt that good … well, just a bit here and there, minor cuts, libel clauses (Christ! It’s difficult to write about the recent past and avoid libel, anyway in my acting job.)
But no one carved me into chunks, altered my construction; or took offense at my spelling … much. Spelling drove them dotty. But thats not much of a problem, is it really?
You ask if it is happier, writing, than acting. Well: it is, in a way.
But much, much harder for me. Acting I know a good deal about .. after more than forty years I should. Writing is a new land, un-walked, full of strange paths through the peat, heather and bogs of despair. I’m having to teach myself to write. It’s difficult. I think that people like you were born with pens, or quills, or whatever, in your mouths … unlike silver spoons .. and so it was your heritage. And it shows in the pristine beauty of your work.
But I bang about in despair. Trying to be a Writer and not a Film Star Who, Surprise! Surprise! Writes.
Thats not the idea at all.
Everything in ‘O.M.’ is true, I mean about the writing, so I need’nt go into all that here. I found that the winters on the hill here were boringly tedious. No land to tend (goody, goody) and I did’nt fancy pulling rugs or tapestry or painting bad canvases … so I wrote a bit.
And there we go. Went, rather. It’s fun. The best part is knowing that your work, for it IS work, gets to such extraordinary places and brings pleasure. The Australian Outback, Kuwait, a Camp in the upper Himalayas, the Red-Eye-Special from L.A to N.Y … all manner of odd places my books go. And people write. The best thing of all. And I write back.
Only cards. But I acknowledge them all.
All this, of course, you know. Yourself. But it was absolutely new to me and deeply gratifying. Can you imagine a soldier in Lebanon (Israeli) with a paperback of a book of mine in his tank? And writing to thank me for reminding him of … childhood! Moving and amazing. And a reason for trying to write as well as you possibly can, and hook the Israeli Soldier by the lapel and say ‘This bit will fill in the boredome, the fear, or the loneliness …’ Thats EXTRA!
Never got that with Movies, really. Nothing so personal. A book is more personal than a film because, as one lady in Queensland wrote, ‘You are beside my bed … and if I cant sleep, or get the fidgets (sic) I read a bit of you ..’ Well you cant just run a Movie, even on Video, without getting out of bed, can you?
So. I’m off to London, dread City [ … ] It’ll be a six week shoot.1 Boring really. But I’ll miss the cold of Febuary here and most of the olive crop (which is a fuck-pig of a chore.) .. back to finish off novel 3, which is three quarters through. Irritating to lay it aside, but perhaps it is not a bad idea to rest it for a while and develop another part of my mind.
Not that I have much to develop. But whats left of it needs a shake-up.
[ … ] I have ratted on long enough. Off I go to do the fucking sprouts. (Kitchen) and then over to see chums who have just moved into a most unsuitable house in the next village. She wants advice on what to plant in her garden. As her only adventure in this direction has ever been an Impatiens in a pot on her kitchen window I’m in for a wearying arvo.
Thank you for taking down the Lillywhite box. Stuff this in with the others. You can fill the gap that way … ’79–83 … and happiness, health, and no white-fly in 1983 … and write again one day. But not here till after March. Then I’ll be clearing out the pond weed, cutting back the waterlilly, planting a new willow in place of the big one which died in last summers fearsome drought … and finishing off the buke.
Ciao!
With love
Dirk XX.
To Bee Gilbert Clermont
1 May 1983
Sno – oh! Sno – You were’nt roistering about in four poster beds in Shepton Mallet by any chance were you?
I discovered a cosy hotel in ‘Country Life’ today … which bore many of the distinguishing marks of your lecherous, vino-filled, day or two. Moments after getting your letter, undated (naturally) but love-filled.
And thank you.
And so here we are on May 1st .. raining. I don’t know why I always think it MUST be a sunny day with May blossom frothing in the hedges and cowslips and ladies washing their faces in the dew: I always feel quite sure it will be like this: for the life of me I can not imagine why for it never has been in all my sixty two years.
Never mind. Maybe one day it will be. At the moment we must ac
cept that it is the Workers Day, that tanks and guns will be on display, that the Students in Paris will rip up the cobbles and lob them at everyone in sight … and that it will, inevitably, rain.
And that was a long and wasted sentence if ever I saw one.
Tote is getting well quite quickly.1 Up days and down days, naturally, but with a bit of careful arrangement we manage more up’s than downs .. which is a great moral builder. He is putting on weight, moderatly, has a good colour and one crosses fingers for his first Medical in London on the 8th … tomorrow week to be exact. If that is all well, then we are on a good road, and he wont have to have another check for six months. So one waits.
I have managed, by doing my bleedin’ nut, to finish off my third novel .. ‘West of Sunset’ […] it has been useful therepy for me. I cant just sit about or look at the grass growing on the terraces in despair. Knowing that only I now can mow them, alas! What ever Tote’s state of health we have to make some very serious decisions soon. And the mere thought of Holmes paying all that loot for a mews in fucking Holland Park2 has dampened my soaring ideas, considerably! I want a dear little cottage, mit garten, in the Sloan Square area. Or near enough to Hatchards by foot! Fat chance of that, I know. We’ll have to lease something anyway. No more buying.
I don’t want the Finchley Road or Bayswater .. and I wont go an inch towards Highgate or Kentish Town! Cor’
I went to dine, when we were last in London, with Business People, who had a house in Kentish Town … it took HOURS to get there on a Sunday night. No taxi would take me, because they all said the fare back was ‘dicey’, so I hired a bloody car, and with a three hour wait (while I ate awful food cooked before my eyes by my Hostess in her kitch Kitchen) it cost me seventy quid! So no Kentish Town ta’ … even if the houses are quite pretty: if you like Pooter Land or Posey Simmonds People.
