For the Time Being (33 page)

Bully, braggart, racist, plagiarist, misogynist, liar — all this, and more, is slung at him by Treglown. Well, maybe. I don't honestly know. I do know that there were many other qualities not always offered up to a stranger for inspection. A form of protection, privacy?

Dahl was, I suppose, a bully. I must concede that. I recall a couple of disastrous supper parties at my house where he reduced the American guests of honour to sobbing misery by studied rudeness and sarcasm. He was finally forbidden the house. He didn't mind, and we occasionally met in the local butcher's, or in antique shops across the Home Counties. Affable, warm, never really close (he did not care for the cinema), we had no common bonds, apart from gardening, paintings and animals.

Later, when I was asked to portray him in the film, about the harshest part of his life, I felt no compunction in accepting. I was certain I knew him well enough, but telephoned him for his permission. He was furious about the film, but helpless to stop it:
‘We are in Public Domain. You
weren't
the first choice, you know?' I said I knew, but had I his permission? He said I was better casting ‘than the other sod', and sent me a mass of details about the clothes he wore, the actions taken and the words said during the desperate time when his first wife, Patricia Neal, suffered an appalling stroke whilst working on a film in Hollywood.

In a deep coma for weeks, she was never expected to recover. He brought her through. By bullying. Two years later she was back at work. ‘
I am right, you are wrong!'
had paid off. Easy to ‘knock' a man if you don't know him; if you never saw the courage, determination, and the love. He could be tender, cruel, funny, wondrously conceited, but then so would I be with millions of children worldwide in thrall and full of glee at my every word.

When he saw the film we had made, he sent me a copy
of Danny the Champion of the World,
and in his scrawly handwriting suggested that I could do whatever I wished with it as a film. His inscription gave me enormous joy.

He really
wasn't
such a shit, you know.

Daily Telegraph,
19 March 1994

In
The Patricia Neal Story,
Dahl's stricken wife was played by Glenda Jackson. We worked together under brutally unhappy conditions in Hollywood, but managed together to survive. She gave a staggering performance. The film was originally intended for the cinema, but it was eventually cut up and shown on television with slots for commercials. Critics who saw previews were hysterical in their praise and we both felt certain it would win the Emmy. However, it failed catastrophically because the whole of the Mid-West, the heart of America, switched channels to watch a rival programme, complaining that our film was too depressing and hospital-bound.

I dedicated to Glenda what I thought would be my final volume of autobiography,
Backcloth
(1986). The bond of friendship between us, forged in the destructive shambles of the film's production, is one which even her appointment in 1997 as Transport Minister has failed to weaken.

Damn You, England: Collected Prose
by John Osborne (Faber)

A torrential, wet, summer Sunday in the country. Two drenched figures squelching up the drive. Unexpected, unknown. Announced by my disapproving houseman as ‘A John
Osburn
and friend …' They had walked from the Green Line bus stop. All of half a mile. He stooped, sodden in a raincoat; she (Mary Ure) in high heels, blonde hair streaming, dark roots gleaming in baby-pink scalp.

Dried, provided with fresh clothing, taking tea by a blazing log fire, they gave me a limp, wet, rolled manuscript. Would I please read it? Immediately? They had to take it back to London. Up in my bedroom, vaguely irritated, I peeled apart transparent pages of blue carbon typescript: ‘The action throughout takes place …'

I read
Look Back in Anger
to the last sodden sheet. Lay supine, weak, and mentally exhausted. Emotionally shattered. A
real
play! And
what
a play!

I had never read such words, heard such anger, groped about in such despair, been flattened by such bitter fury, rage and truth. After years of prim, tepid film-scripts, mostly written by maiden aunts of both genders, I now held in my hands a piece of blistering honesty. I was mouth-dry with excitement. Would it make a film, Osborne asked? Could I ‘get it to someone at Rank?' Well, easy enough. At the time I was Golden Boy, but the typewritten reply to my urgent request begged me to remember that ‘The Cinema is a visual medium. This is all talk, much of it unacceptable or incomprehensible.' So there you go. And there it went.

I lost the film, but gained a cherished friend whose fury and kicking against the smugness and narrowness of the average Englishman of the time matched my own frustrations and anger with my
bosses, and many of my producers. In time I managed to sublimate much of my anger. Osborne never has.

In this hugely enjoyable collection of his prose, his scouring fury blazes anew, delighting, or shocking, depending on the way you feel. This is an assembly of pellucid, elegant, vibrant English you would be foolish to ignore. Much was written in the decades when I lived abroad, so a lot is new-minted for my delight. His sly, but sharp, stiletto-cuts at people are so good and so perfectly judged, so deadly, that one hugs oneself with glee to find that one is not -yet! – a victim. Here you will find all rage, all tenderness, all wit, plus seething explosive invective. It is a roller-coaster ride of swooping ups and downs. You could choke to death with fury, or with relish at his glorious audacity.

Try this one, on Bernard Shaw: ‘He writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become a chartered accountant.' Right on target! I have wrestled myself into the ground trying to make sense of Mr Shaw. Osborne's is a cruel remark. Of
course
it is! It is meant to be. Accuracy, culled from experience, often is. But if he swipes at one hallowed British figure he can revere another, Max Miller, a genius:

I loved him because he embodied the kind of theatre I admire most. His method was danger … ‘Mary from the Dairy' was an overture to the danger that
he might go too far
!

Alas! We no longer have a Max Miller to enthral, delight and outrage us. Now comedians slide from a 21-inch screen and cannot ‘hold' a house.

It seems to me that Osborne's spleen, his rage, his brutal bayonet-thrust with words, his utter impatience with timidity and fools have got him into such a situation with his critics that almost anything he writes or says will be used against him. He, frankly, terrifies them. Beneath their scorn (and a lot of that gets chucked about) lie deep unease and fear. Fear that they are swimming in a pack which they dare not leave as individuals because they really do not quite know how to swim. They can survive only in shoals, and he is the cruising shark above, snapping and spitting acid into the little
wounds of their mediocrity. After all, if they wrote as he does, would they still be stuck, filling two or three columns for the minorities?

Osborne's writing is as chilli to their muesli. He blazes against the crushing, ill-led uniformity and idle disarray of Britain today. Against the defensive lying of our politicians, the sexual bizarreness of our drab society. Against our apparent pleasure in self-loathing, self-denigration, in our backward-looking, and longing, for the chrysalis of the nineteenth century from which we still, unlike most of the rest of Europe, seem reluctant to emerge.

His title here is, I think, misleading. Osborne does not ‘damn'
England.
Only the amorphous mass who live in it, defeated, sullen, resentful, sneering, bigoted. He actually
loves
England. He still lives here, in his ‘blue remembered hills'. All he tries to do is to alert us to our terrible apathy and casualness, our dangerous inward regard. However, we shall all read him differently. Rummage about in his bran-tub … it is stuffed with glorious bits and pieces, all most elegantly wrapped. Just be careful of the sharp pieces.

You could get cut.

Daily Telegraph,
16 April 1994

To War with Whitaker: The Wartime Diaries of the Countess
of Ranfurly 1939—1945
(Heinemann)

If you buy one more book this year, do make it
To War with Whitaker.
I assure you that you will not be let down, nor demand your money back, and that you will discover a veritable feast of mixed delights, with a few bits and pieces of sadness scattered about like candied peel to add bite. It is a sort of mélange of
The Perils of Pauline, What Katy Did,
‘Jennifer's Diary' and the collected movement orders of the entire Middle East and Mediterranean Forces from 1940 to 1945.

That is as simple as I can make it. There is no literature here, no abstruse words, no Latin quotes, nothing to upset the squeamish. You will merely be reading the personal diary of a very young woman who was exceedingly brave and so much in love with her husband that when he went off to war she went along with him. And his valet Whitaker. (Her husband also took along his mother's favourite hunter, but you had better read that for yourself.) Such things were possible in those days.

The canvas is vast, from Palestine to Paris, and the cast-list too long to itemize, ranging from Orde Wingate to Queen Wilhelmina. Sometimes it is so manifestly absurd that you rub your eyes as you laugh, and have to put it all down to the glory of English eccentricity, now a commodity in short supply, alas.

Whitaker, the valet, springs from the pages imbued with such love, such sense, and with such a wondrous English attitude to all things foreign that when he arrives with a piano from Tobruk you are not in the least surprised.

Shakespeare may have had a pattern for him, but I cannot recall any other writer who discovered such a paragon. A yeoman
follower, brave, funny, wise, loyal and trusting. A lost breed today – unless the next war turns one up. Which is doubtful.

In outline, here is the story. The two young Ranfurlys, just married, in their early twenties, were up in Scotland shooting things on the moors when Hitler invaded Poland. Their lives, like everyone's, were changed for ever. The Earl of Ranfurly joined his regiment on the day of the first anniversary of his wedding and was sent off, with Whitaker (plus borrowed horse), to the Yeomanry in North Africa.

His wife, Hermione, determined not to be left behind, slipped secretly out of London to the Middle East as an ‘illegal' Army wife. By dint of her wiles and wit, bloody-mindedness, ability to type perfectly, and speak French, she managed to hang on against vigorous opposition until the end. Being well born, and indeed well connected, was not exactly a handicap. I doubt whether she would have been such a wild success if she had been the daughter of a dentist from Herne Hill.

Perfectly self-assured, filled with an irresistible awareness of herself, a glowing self-confidence, she just went at every disaster until it was mastered, and disarmed everyone she met, except for one disagreeable brigadier who had her deported when he found her working for the Red Crescent in Palestine.

She jumped ship (it was torpedoed later) in Cape Town, returned to Cairo and worked with SOE until she became distressed and alarmed by certain ‘errors' there which forced her to ‘spy on the spy'. A difficult, exhausting task. General Alexander admitted that he was honoured to be the only general who had not been ‘outmanoeuvred' by this pretty, brave, tenacious young woman.

Her husband was taken prisoner, sent to Italy, and it was three years before they were to see each other again. But she stayed on, determined to be as close to him as possible. Terrified of flying, she nevertheless flew constantly, kept the files, was private secretary to the C-in-C of the area, wrote letters for the wounded, did the political
placements
at the big world leaders' meetings.

Eventually General Wavell, C-in-C of the Middle East, granted her the chance to stay ‘officially' in the area. His wife had, after all,
trailed after
him:
all the way to Russia. There was a brave similarity. But in among the official works as his private secretary she found another duty:

… put on your gayest frock, paint your face … Then at the hospital, the smell of rotting flesh meets you in the long, dark corridors, and you begin thinking again. You owe them so much and there is nothing you can do except try not to talk of things they will never do again. Today when I took down letters in shorthand for those that cannot write I sat with my back to them so they should not see my eyes … They all wrote of victory; not one of them mentioned the price.

To War with Whitaker
is perhaps a little bit Claridge's and caviar, rather than Kilburn and kippers, but what is wrong with that, in the face of such compassion, guts and bravery?

Daily Telegraph,
10 September 1994

I was alerted to this book, months before it came out, by my literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, who told me I should grab it for review as soon as I could, because I would find it wholly enchanting. I did. It went swiftly into a second hardback edition, then a third, and a fourth. A handsome paperback was reprinted seven times.

Impeccably researched, incredibly moving, exciting, often bitterly sad, Lynn H. Nicholas's
The Rape of Europa
(Macmillan) is beautifully and engagingly written, even when recording the appalling rapacity of the Nazis and Soviets as they, in Churchill's words, dragged the ‘red hot rake' of looting and destruction through Europe's greatest art treasures. This account of the people who fought to retrieve and save a vast majority of the treasures for our future makes exhilarating and humbling reading.

Daily Telegraph, 26
November 1994