Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (38 page)

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 source 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’.

IS DEPOSITED BY

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 single
¹⁷³
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?’

IS MOTHERED BY

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 into 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

But it is the trouser trick that Stanley Myers particularly wants Humphries to perform on this particular evening in Chez Moi. It is, in Humphries’ words, ‘a simple, and perhaps juvenile, stunt which worked well only in a dignified or pretentious ambience. All that happened was that my pants fell down, apparently by accident, at a conspicuous moment. The “trick” was that I should exhibit a high degree of embarrassment.’

Humphries agrees to it. He retreats to the restaurant’s loo in order to loosen his trousers in preparation for his grand entrance. Halfway back to the table, he times the release of the trousers to perfection: ‘barely a diner in that crowded restaurant could have missed it’. With a tremendous show of shame ‘and much bowing and shrugging’, he returns to the table, where his friend Myers is convulsed with laughter.

But the joke doesn’t afford much amusement to the other tables. Quite the opposite: the maître d’ sidles over to Humphries. ‘I am sorry, sir,’ he says, ‘but we must ask you please to leave the restaurant
immédiatement
. Lord Snowdon over zair is most offended by what just ’appen.’

Two waiters then lift Humphries bodily from his chair and carry him out of the restaurant with such speed that he has no time to catch even a sideways glimpse of Princess Margaret’s horrified husband.

Out in the cold streets of Holland Park, he is obliged to loiter ‘unwined and dined’. All he has to nibble on are a few sponge fingers, which he absent-mindedly placed in his pocket after an earlier lunch at Bertorelli’s.

He tries to get back into the restaurant, but finds the door has been locked behind him. Through a chink in the curtains, he can see his wife and friends tucking into a delicious meal, ‘relieved, no doubt, that I was out of the way’.

There and then, he plots his revenge. He walks to a telephone box on the corner of Addison Road and riffles through the directory for the phone number of Chez Moi. ‘Ullo? Ullo?’ says the maître d’.

Humphries, an adept mimic, puts on the voice of an upper-class Englishwoman. ‘This is the Countess of Rosse speaking. My son Lord Snowdon is dining in your restaurant. May I speak with him urgently?’