Untold Stories (26 page)

Ordinary but not respectable, because in films respectable generally meant cowardly and there were other perils besides. One character who was always cropping up seemed the embodiment of respectability and was often played by the same actor. Not a star (I have had to look up his name), he was called Thurston Hall. With his bright white hair and substantial frame he looked not unlike the local doctors in Upper Wortley, Dr Monies and Dr Slaney, figures of some weight and even grandeur in the neighbourhood. Thurston Hall did play doctors from time to time but more often than not he was a businessman, highly thought of in the community, a person of unimpeachable morals who was ultimately revealed to be a crook. Kind to children, a president of orphanages, a donor of playing fields and a guarantor of symphony hall, he is prominent in every good cause. But the committee of charitable ladies who can always rely on him for a generous contribution would be surprised to learn that the money comes indirectly out of the pockets of their husbands, paid over to the many prostitutes of the city or in its poker dens and illicit drinking clubs behind all of which is this impeccably mannered immaculately suited villain.

That such a character in a film today would seem quite old-fashioned is the fault of the times. Villainy these days is more complicated and communities don't have pillars in quite the way they did. Two-faced respectability operates best in a setting of accepted values and that setting began to
break up, so far as the cinema was concerned, sometime in the late 1950s, with one of its minor legacies for me a lifelong distrust of well-groomed, impressive middle-aged men. When I saw General Pinochet on one of his London jaunts I picked him out as a villain simply from the films I had seen in the 1940s.

To know that one is being taught a lesson or at any rate given a message leaves one free to reject it if only by dismissing plot or characters as clichés. But I had not realised how far the moral assumptions of film story-telling had sunk in, and how long they had stayed with me, until in 1974 I saw Louis Malle's film about the French Occupation,
Lacombe
Lucien
. Lucien is a loutish, unappealing boy, recruited almost by accident into the French Fascist Milice. He falls in with and exploits a Jewish family, becoming involved with – it would be wrong to say falls in love with – the daughter, whom he helps to escape and with whom he lives. Then, as the Liberation draws near, he becomes himself a fugitive and is eventually, almost casually, shot.

The stock way to tell such a story would be to see the boy's experiences – witnessing torture and ill-treatment, falling for the Jewish girl – as a moral education in the same way, for example, that the Marlon Brando character is educated in
On the Waterfront
. That would be the convention and one I'd so much taken for granted that I kept looking in the Malle film for signs of this instruction in the school of life beginning to happen. But it doesn't. Largely untouched by the dramas he has passed through, Lucien is much the same at the end of the film as he is at the beginning, seemingly having learned nothing. To have quite unobtrusively resisted the tug of conventional tale-telling and the lure of resolution seemed to me honest in a way few films even attempt.

Mam seldom came back from the pictures in those days without being desperate to empty her bladder, the diuretic effect of the proximity of home making the situation so urgent that my brother and I would be sent on ahead to unlock the door in readiness, thus saving her the last terrible moments bent double on the doorstep.

The urgency of her predicament was never more extreme, it seemed to me, than when we had been to the Palace, a cinema off Stanningley Road. It was a bleak place, having once been a skating rink; painted red, it had double seats for courting couples, and indeed my parents had done some of their courting at the Palace in the twenties, sitting in the raised seats along the sides which were known as the Deck. In those pre-talkie days there was a scratch orchestra which accompanied the films, the violin played by Dad's teacher, Norris Best, who, if he caught sight of him in the audience, would get Dad down into the pit to play another fiddle, a summary desertion which didn't please Mam at all. Those days were long gone and in my mind the Palace is associated particularly with George Formby films, and that we had all laughed so much might account for the acuteness of Mam's discomfort on the way home.

Off Stanningley Road on the left was and still is (in 1998 anyway) a narrow ginnel, only a few feet wide, one side of which backed onto a mill or factory, the other side forming the red-brick rear wall of the houses that make up Pasture View. Coming home from the Palace, when every minute saved was vital, we would go up this ginnel as it was a short cut to
Theaker Lane, hurrying along it in single file, then round the edge of the playground of our school, Upper Armley National, before going up by Christ Church across Ridge Road into the Hallidays and home.

Passing the end of this ginnel recently, where I can't have been for fifty years, I saw that whereas in the forties the passage was clean and uncluttered and did not smell (I know this because had it been in any way insalubrious Mam, ever fastidious, would have gritted her teeth and gone the long way round), now it was half-blocked with rubbish and loose stones, elders and buddleia had rooted on the mill wall and though I didn't investigate further I knew that it would stink. No one in their senses would nowadays use it as a thoroughfare or, if they did, would just by so doing become an object of suspicion.

Fifty years ago we used to trot up there and think nothing about it, a family on their way home from the pictures. It wasn't ‘lonely'; it wasn't ‘nasty' (i.e. people didn't piss in it); it was just a useful ginnel.

Inured as one is to change and destruction, the state of this narrow passage poses questions about life in cities that are regularly and routinely posed by weightier developments … motorways, out-of-town shopping centres, debates about violence and street crime and the unending debate about the sense of community and where it has gone.

When did this ginnel fall into disuse? When did it cease to be a short cut? Chart the clogging up of this passage and you will have anatomised urban decay in the second half of the twentieth century. Was it because of cars, people ceasing to walk this bleak stretch of Stanningley Road unless they had to? Was it the demolition of houses or the decay of public transport? At what point did the stones begin to fall from the wall and cease to be picked up? Because in the forties they must have been picked up, put back or to one side and the path kept clear.

Was it the fear of being ‘attacked' that led to its decay? Because it would be a good place, as appropriate a setting for a filmed robbery or a rape as any locations manager could hope to find. I fancy once there was a lamppost at the top end but it isn't there now. I can't imagine anyone ever being responsible for this ginnel and its upkeep; it was kept up just by dint of
being used. Old ladies would use it who'd been for a walk in Armley Park, children coming home from Armley Park school, courting couples.

Why the ginnel was there at all never occurred to me, as Leeds, or the Leeds of my childhood, was full of snickets and ginnels, passages behind and between houses, unadopted paths that went along the backs of gardens, preferred thoroughfares for us as children and with no logic to most of them, just cracks in the urban set-up that nobody'd bothered to fill in. The ginnel behind Pasture View, though, seemed older than most and it was only when reading about the history of Armley I found out why.

Like so many of the suburbs of Leeds, Armley had once been a village and in my childhood the lower reaches of Theaker Lane, which we thought of as slums and where we never willingly went, were made up of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cottages, lived in originally by workers in the mills. Like many of the most interesting buildings in Leeds, they were pulled down in the fifties and sixties and now there are only high flats. And so it was in Holbeck and Wortley, Hunslet and Beeston and all the settlements Leeds swallowed up in its nineteenth-century expansion.

In those days the workers in the mills would often have to walk miles to their work and this ginnel off Stanningley Road turns out to be part of the old footpath from Wortley through Armley to the mills at Kirkstall, so that when the Pastures were built in the 1870s it had to be left open as an ancient right of way.

So what was for us just a short cut home from the pictures had once echoed at the beginning and end of the day to the rattle of clogs.

These days the mills are gone, Armley Mill now a museum and the Palace is gone too, or translated into the New Western Bingo and Social Club. The ginnel, though, is still there behind Pasture View, where, clogged with stones and rubbish, and wanting mill-workers and weak-bladdered cinema-goers or anyone heedless enough of the realities of street life in the last decade of the twentieth century as to be daft enough to use it, it will remain. ‘Welcome to Leeds' the sign on the M1 used to say, ‘Motorway City of the Seventies'.

Every Christmas or New Year I publish extracts from my diary of the preceding year in the
London Review of Books
. On a personal level these published diaries are pretty uninformative, not to say cagey, but they do give some indication of what work I was doing and where it took me, though more often than not nowadays this is no further than from the armchair to the desk.

Diaries lengthen the days. To read back over a year when nothing much seems to have happened is often to be nicely surprised, though I note how in earlier diaries much more of what I wrote down had to do with what I did whereas lately the entries are more often occasioned by what I've read or seen on television. I should get out more if only for the diary's sake.

A diary is undoubtedly a comfort. I feel better for having written it down, however hard the experience. I never enjoy, though, having to record set pieces and prefer to pick at incidents rather than try for a comprehensive account. As I've noted before, my diary is often best when written in the intervals of other writing; it's a turning away, a place for asides. What I do always dislike is not having written anything for a while and then finding I have to catch up.

Where no place is specified the entry was written in Camden Town in London, where I have lived for the last forty years. Craven is the village in Yorkshire to which my parents retired and where we still have a house.

3
January
. To
Dynasties
, the exhibition of Tudor portraits at the Tate. There are some superb pictures but, with the sitters shortly to die or be executed, many of them seem ominous or doom-laden. New to me and to R. is Antonis Mor, whose portrait of Sir Thomas Gresham looks like an Edwardian tinted photograph, and with the sitter so eerily present not entirely pleasing. All art is tiring and these paintings in particular as they're crowded with detail and every dress and doublet draws you in to trace the embroidery or work out the folds and flourishes. The poster for the exhibition is Holbein's portrait of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VI; he's not the weed that he's normally pictured but a big solid bully of a baby, the image of his father. On the Underground R. says he's never known a poster so persistently defaced, the child's brutal look seeming to irritate people. One poster that he saw had UGLY written across the forehead and another SPAM.

27
January
. To Leeds by the 9.10 train with snow flurries much of the way. We call at the British Epilepsy Association, where I have to sign some books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the grander squares in Leeds, where the posh doctors and surgeons from the Brotherton Wing had their consulting rooms. Nowadays the ring road makes the square difficult to get to and it's in a bad neighbourhood, not far from the Hyde Park street which is said to hold the record for the most burglaries in England. The British Epilepsy Association is offices only but has a steel door, having been broken into three times, one of them a ram-raid; so, coming away, I'm perhaps more conscious of vandalism and urban decay than I otherwise might be. The result is, when we see a starved-looking boy of ten and his sister, twelve or so, tugging at a bollard round some roadworks before sending it flying, I wind down the window and say primly: ‘That's a pretty silly thing to do.'
This releases a torrent of abuse from the two Bisto kids, the girl cold and dirty and in a thin anorak, the boy with snot dribbling down from his pinched little nose. As we're driving off she gives me her parting shot: ‘Get a
life
!' It's a ready-made cartoon for the
New Yorker
.

At Addingham we turn off to Bolton Abbey, deserted this cold bright afternoon with the paths down to the river covered in untrodden snow and the Wharfe winding black between the drifts. Building at the priory must have been going on until the very eve of the Dissolution, with the uncompleted west tower begun by Abbot Moon in 1520. The confidence such plans imply still surprises me as I've never quite got rid of the notion that the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Reformation altogether, was part of some general winding-down of the medieval Church. In fact, the future must have seemed bright, and when things did alter it was practically overnight.

10
February
. When Stephen Fry took off last year I came in for one or two of the jobs he'd been contracted to do, notably a couple of voice-overs for children's cartoons. Telephoned by the same company last week I agree to do another in a Posy Simmonds animated film about a pig who acts as a theatrical dresser; this seems right up my street. Except I am called today to say that, unaware of my interest, the casting director has approached someone else and ‘his agent is standing firm'. Clearly Stephen F. is back in the market.

11
February
. Turn on the radio this evening to find Brahms's Second Piano Concerto just beginning, the unexpectedness of it taking me back to 1951, when I heard it for the first time. How lofty I thought my life was going to be then, just like this music; I saw myself modestly ascending shallow staircases to unspecified triumphs, with love disdained, or at any rate transcended, always a part of it.

It's a live performance on Classic FM, a concert by the Liverpool Phil. with someone coughing badly throughout and a rather wayward account by the soloist, who sometimes slows it down so much that it almost stops,
the swooning second subject in the last movement well over the top. These days audiences know a work so well that soloists must find public performance more nerve-racking than it has ever been. To play one of the great concertos in the concert hall must be like an actor having to do ‘To be or not to be' before an audience which knows the text as well as he does.

But I loathe Classic FM more and more for its cosiness, its safety and its wholehearted endorsement of the post-Thatcher world, with medical insurance and Saga holidays rammed down your throat between every item. Nor does the music get much respect; I'm frequently outraged when they play without acknowledgement or apology a sliced-up version of Beethoven's Ninth, filleted of all but the most tuneful bits. It's like a
Reader's Digest
condensation of the classics, defined on
Monty Python
once as ‘Great Books got down to Pure'.

The only gramophone I had access to as a child was my grandma's – a red Rexene-covered wind-up job with metal needles, almost no amplification and few records to go with it. These included such oddities as ‘Ain't it Grand to be Bloomin' Well Dead' (a possible signature tune for Kafka if not for Philip Larkin) and one of the chart-toppers of the time, ‘Oh I lift up my finger and I say “Tweet tweet, Hush hush, Now now, Come come”'.

This somewhat sparse musical diet was supplemented from Hustwitt's Music shop up Tong Road, where there was an oddities box in which I found a 78 of Chopin's Polonaise in A, heard first in the film
A Song to
Remember
with Cornel Wilde as Chopin and Merle Oberon as George Sand, and the never-to-be-forgotten scene when during an energetic sforzando the consumptive Chopin's blood spatters on the keys.

I also bought a record of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, doubly unfinished in this case as I got only one record out of a set of three so it wasn't until years later I found out how it officially didn't finish. I played it so often then, though, that I've never cared for it since.

17 February
. Catch part of BBC2's celebration of French cinema and note how much more nostalgic and redolent of the past are these French clips than those from British films of a similar period:
Les Enfants du Paradis
,
for instance, the first French film I ever saw and which we were taken from school to see at the Tower in Upper Briggate in Leeds. Then when I was on the Russian course during National Service at Cambridge we used to see French films at the Arts cinema –
Une Partie de Campagne, Le Blé en
Herbe
, films which were so much part of one's life then as to be almost commentaries on it. Perhaps their vividness now has to do with the fact that they combined reading (via the subtitles) with seeing, thus reinforcing the memory.

In an interview before reading
Doctor Dolittle
on Radio 4 last year I mentioned how mysterious a character I find the Cats' Meat Man, never having come across such a character as a child. Was the meat
from
cats, I wondered then, or for cats? I'd heard of dog meat but never cat meat. Since when I've had several letters telling me about real-life characters who used to sell such meat, generally on long skewers which were sometimes just put through the letter box, one telling me how, as a child, finding this forerunner of the kebab on the doormat she had scoffed the lot. I don't think there were such itinerant characters in Leeds, possibly because it wasn't affluent enough or because this was during the war when cats had to pull in their belts along with everyone else.

2
March, Venice
. Fur much in evidence in Venice, where they plainly have no truck with animal rights, old ladies in their minks queuing along with everyone else to get on the vaporetto. One reason Venice feels like a real democracy is the absence of private transport. It's true there are taxis, but it's much harder to get down into a speedboat than to walk onto a water bus and as a result taxis are avoided by many of those rich enough to use them. Rich and poor in Venice rub shoulders with each other much more than we do and the city feels better for it.

A nice carrier bag from the Correr, red with yellow handles and on the front the signature of Leonardo da Vinci. There is a sticker inside saying ‘Used by permission of Corbis Corporation and Bill Gates', to whom I suppose Leonardo, or his signature at least, now belongs.

Note the number of retired couples among the visitors, retirement
more obvious in the British and the Americans than with the French, say (and where the Italians are concerned, utterly invisible).

In the basilica all the seats are now roped off so that one can't sit down and take it in (let alone pray) but just has to troop round, go with the flow, I suppose. Less magical now than once it seemed, the gold tawdry, the woodwork dusty, only the floors retaining their unfailing appeal. Nor is one any longer allowed along the marble-balustraded upstairs corridors that took you above the nave and much nearer to the mosaics. It's still possible, though, at this time of year, to find the piazza virtually empty at eleven in the evening, the floodlighting of the basilica not at all harshly done, so that St Mark's emerges from the gloom and seems to glow. And yet one gets a sense of the building sitting there like a spider, luring people in.

3
March, Venice
. The Correr is an ideal museum, with just the right number of paintings, many of them superb, particularly the man in the red hat which I'd always thought by Carpaccio, but isn't now, and also the
Portrait
of a Young Man
by Baldassare Estense. I don't care for Cosimo Tura, whom I usually find a sinister painter, the flesh and aspect of the living not much different from that of the dead; still I like his funny little
Pietà
with the Virgin looking at the wounds in Christ's hands as if he's making a bit of a fuss about nothing, while above them, in what I suppose is an apple tree and cocooned in a huge spider's web, is a tiny-headed devil. I'm puzzled by one painting of the Marriage at Cana where, hanging from the beams above the feast, are many rings with what seem to be labels fluttering from them. I ask the attendant, who comes over, looks at it glumly, shrugs and says: ‘
Non so
.' It's Madge H. who suggests, probably rightly, that the labels are flypapers.

10
March
. I read the Sunday papers first thing, otherwise they hang about all day like an unmade bed. I find less and less in them to read and feel like somebody stood against a wall while a parade goes by. An article in
The
Garden
, the journal of the Royal Horticultural Society: ‘Making Sense of the Celandine'.

11
March
. Depressed by an item glimpsed on TV last night revealing that Railtrack, to save itself money (and the problems of ‘leaves on the line'), has sent in squads to cut down the woodland that grows along railway lines, a copse in Blackheath for instance sawn off level with the ground. Some of the squads for obvious reasons have begun their operations at four in the morning with any appeal to planning regulations of no avail as Railtrack claim public safety as a justification. If it happened to a wood that I was fond of I'd be inclined to find out the address of the local Railtrack manager, take along a chainsaw and do the same to his precious plot.

30
March
. To Petersfield on a cold, blue day, the traffic thick over Hammersmith Bridge, where crowds are watching the crews practising for the Boat Race. Go via Midhurst to look at the Camoys tombs in St George's Church, Trotton. Lord Camoys was a veteran of Agincourt, where he commanded the left wing; he married Hotspur's widow and both of them are buried in a massive and inconveniently placed tomb at the east end of the centre aisle, smack in front of the altar. There's another much plainer tomb
c
.1478 on the north wall, carved with a symmetrically ruched frieze of draperies round the rim which seems very sophisticated for a village church, and more Italian than English.

Fragments of wall-paintings include one of
Clothing the Naked
, in which a man is taking off or putting on a shirt in a crude version of the man in Piero's
Baptism
in the National Gallery. Nosing about I see leaned up against the back wall near the vestry a dusty reproduction of Botticelli's
Mother and Child
from the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It's shielding a hole in the plaster and has an old label stuck on it: ‘From Professor Joad. BBC.'