Untold Stories (28 page)

I miss the atlas I really wanted and come away with one or two biographies, including a memoir of David Winn, an Etonian contemporary of Francis who also died young.

26
August
. Do not renew my subscription to the Friends of Regent's Park, one of whose aims seems to be to enforce the regulations against cycling in the Park. Ten years ago A. was fined
£
25 for riding her bike to the tennis courts at 7.30 in the morning, a piece of officiousness that could only happen in England. I have always thought that if the Prince of Wales or the Duke of Edinburgh meant what they say about the environment they'd long ago have put their weight behind a cycle track through the Park. Now it's out of their hands as the Park is run by some private con
cern which would, I'm sure, be only too happy to put a cycle track across the Park provided they could charge for the use of it.

1
October
. I have just finished reading
A Passionate Prodigality
by Guy Chapman, one of the books belonging to Francis Hope that I picked up in the summer. From its less than snappy title it would be hard to guess what the book is about and this perhaps explains why, so far as I'm aware, it has no reputation. Originally published in 1933, it is Chapman's account of his experiences in the First War, when he served as a young subaltern from July 1915 right through until 1920, ending up in the Army of Occupation in Germany. It's one of the best accounts of the trenches I've read, with Chapman, despite himself, falling in love with his platoon and their life together much as Wilfred Owen did. He went on to become a professor of history at Leeds, where he married the novelist Storm Jameson, and thinking about it, I realise he must have taught the man who taught me history at school, H. H. Hill. So exhilarated have I been by the book, I find myself absurdly pleased at the connection.

17
October
. Lunch in a restaurant in Chelsea with Maggie Smith and Beverley Cross. As Bev is paying the bill the proprietor murmurs that General Pinochet is lunching, as indeed he is, just round the corner from our table, though not quite within spitting distance. It's a table for eight or so, Pinochet with his back to the window, which might seem foolhardy except that in the first room of the restaurant there are three fairly obvious bodyguards, who scrutinise Bev and me carefully as we come out (and particularly, for some reason, my shoes). There's also a table nearby with four big young men, who might be heavies or might be businessmen, the fact that one can't tell maybe saying something about both. I cause the bodyguards some unease after Maggie comes out saying that sitting at an adjoining table had been Don Bachardy, so I go back in and have a word, last having seen him with Christopher Isherwood thirty-five years ago. Then he was an olive-skinned doe-eyed boy who came round and did a drawing of me. Now he looks exactly as
Isherwood did, even down to the little schoolboy sprout of hair at the back.

Apropos Pinochet, anybody brought up on Hollywood films of the forties would know instantly he was a villain. Distinguished, grey-haired and seemingly genial, he is the image of those crooked lawyers, ostensibly pillars of the community, who turned out to be the brains behind the local rackets and vice rings. They were played by actors like Edward Arnold, Thurston Hall or Otto Kruger; rich, kindly, avuncular figures, they deceived everyone in the film but nobody in the audience, who were not at all surprised to see them taken away at the end, snarling with impotent fury. Not so General Pinochet and his cronies, tucking into their fish this October afternoon, the murmur of polite conversation drowning the screams from the cellar.

25
October
. A figure (often of fun) who keeps cropping up in memoirs of the Second War such as those of Nancy Mitford and James Lees-Milne is Stuart Preston, nicknamed the Sergeant, an American serviceman who came over to work at US HQ in London, later taking part in the invasion. He seems to have very rapidly become a feature of the upper-class English social scene, setting hearts of both sexes aflutter. Lees-Milne notes (Friday, 2 April 1943) how Preston once came to see him off at Euston; Lees-Milne was actually going to Preston but he doesn't make anything of the coincidence. What happened to the Sergeant? Did he go back to America? Is he still around? Certainly his memories of that period would be interesting.
*

Being seen off for Preston by someone called Preston reminds me of a party given for Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy by Robin and Francis Hope in their flat in Goodge Street in the sixties. As the doorbell rang, Robin saw to his horror that there was on the table a bottle of Bacardi rum, which he whisked away just in time. It was only afterwards that he found himself unable to analyse or locate the faux pas that he thought he had narrowly avoided making. Why would it have mattered?

7
November
. To Whitemoor High Security Prison near March in Cambridgeshire, March that fogbound halt where I used to change en route from Leeds to Cambridge forty-five years ago. That station has gone now and the prison is built over what once were the marshalling yards, the ground too saturated in mineral waste for much else. Not that this makes it very different from the surrounding countryside, as that's pretty thoroughly polluted too, all hedges gone, the soil soused in fertiliser, a real Fison's Fen. And it goes on: as I have my sandwiches by a raddled copse, two tractors in tandem ply up and down a vast field, conscientiously soaking the soil with yet another spray. From a distance the prison might be an out-of-town shopping mall, Texas Homecare, Do It All and Toys 'R' Us. There's a crèche at the gate and a Visitors' Centre, as it might be for Fountains Abbey or Stonehenge. Reasoning that I am a visitor myself, I battle across the windswept car park but when I put my head inside I find it full of visitors of a different sort, the wives and mothers (and very much the children) of the inmates,
Birds of a Feather
territory, I suppose. At the gate proper I'm frisked, X-rayed, my handprints taken, and am then taken through a series of barred gates and sliding doors every bit as intimidating as the institution in
The Silence of the Lambs
. The education officer says that this is just the outer prison and that at the heart of it is an even more secure compound, the one from which some IRA prisoners escaped a couple of years ago. It's oppressively bleak and intimidating, the odd flower bed or shrubbery emphasising how soulless it is. It could be a business park or a warehouse at an airport – Brinks Mat, I imagine, something like this.

While the prisoners are brought down I wait in a little common room with one or two instructors and interested parties: a blind boy who teaches maths; Anne Hunt, who has been seconded from UEA; and another teacher who has come over from Blundeston Prison near Lowestoft to hear the talk. Which is actually no talk at all, as the prisoners rather than be lectured at prefer to ask questions.

There are about two dozen, mostly in their twenties and thirties, the most interested and articulate a Glasgow boy with a deep scar on his left cheek, who did
Talking Heads
as an A-level set book last year and is
counted one of their successes. He kicks off straight away with questions, which then come without any of the awkwardness or silences there were at Wandsworth. There's a sophisticated Indian with a vaguely American accent, one older man who from his questions has had something to do with the film industry and a young man in a tracksuit with a lovely lit-up face who seems unable to stop smiling. There's lots and lots of charm, which one detects as charm and so is wary of, being made to wonder what part charm has played in whatever crimes these men have committed; at the same time it's hard not to be touched by this strong desire to please.

The teachers, while gratified that their pupils are so responsive, are anxious that one doesn't think them angels. The young man with the scar is there for armed robbery, the smiling boy has been convicted of a particularly nasty murder. (‘He was quite famous for a time,' says one of the teachers.) Afterwards I regret not asking the men more questions myself, particularly about why they're here, though aware that it's not the form to do so (not the form to ask about form). The predominant feeling is one of waste, that these men have been locked up and nothing is being done with them. With resources stretched to breaking point, these classes are the next target in the event of further cuts. And this is the other impression one comes away with: the universal hatred and contempt for Michael Howard
*
– prisoners, warders, teachers, everybody one speaks to complaining how he has stripped away from the service all those amenities which alleviate the lives of everyone cooped up here, warders and prisoners alike. Indeed one gets the feeling that the only thing that is holding the prison service together and making it for the moment work is this shared hatred for Michael Howard.

Confused and depressed, I have my handprints checked to ensure I am the same person now as the one who came here two hours ago; then I drive in high winds across the chemical countryside and down the A1, managing a quick bath before I bike down to the Comedy, where I'm filling in for Maggie Smith, who has laryngitis.

9
November
. To New York, travelling economy on British Airways as I generally do, though always in the hope (seldom realised) that I might be recognised and upgraded. It isn't that I can't afford the club-class fare but
£
2,000 seems a lot of money to pay for something I dislike as much as I do flying, even though the alternative is seven hours of discomfort. There's a Yorkshire dialect word that covers this feeling more succinctly than any phrase in standard English. When you can afford something but don't like to see the money go in that particular way you say: ‘I can't
thoil
to pay it.' Which is exactly what I feel about club class. Most of my contemporaries seem to find organisations willing to pay their transatlantic fares for them, but I don't do very well here either and when Random House brought out
Writing Home
in the US last year they claimed their budget didn't run to flying me over for the occasion be it club class or economy.

17
November, New York
. I sit in Dean and Delucca on Prince Street, reading how the men in brown coats have finally come to Westminster Abbey and carted off the Stone of Scone. No one in Scotland seems in the least impressed with John Major's imaginative gesture: they've got more sense, though with the relic up for grabs there was an undignified scramble between various venues wanting it for its commercial and tourist potential. In this sense it's very much in the tradition of all the other Tory sell-offs.

The return of the largely unwanted Stone was intended to buoy up the hapless Mr Forsyth, though any favour the government might have hoped to curry north of the border has since been wiped out by the aftermath of Dunblane. Sometimes feeling I am the last person in the country to believe in the monarchy, I am surprised the Queen didn't make more fuss. The Stone, if only by association, must be considered a part of the royal regalia over which the government, constitutionally, has no say at all. J. Major obviously didn't think of it as of much consequence, as the original decision was conveyed to the Dean of Westminster by some lowly official with a chitty. Whatever one expects from this government it's not a sense of history, and with a Japanese hotel opposite the Houses of
Parliament and a Ferris wheel dwarfing Big Ben, who cares that the shrine of Edward the Confessor has been robbed of its most ancient relic? As it is, the Coronation Chair is left looking like an empty commode. In view of the current state of the monarchy this may seem appropriate and please a lot of people, but not me.

1
December, New York
. To the Brooklyn Museum to see
In the Light of
Italy
, plein-air paintings by Thomas Jones, Valenciennes and the predecessors of Corot. It's a vast building with wide corridors and huge airy galleries, though without much atmosphere and no sense that the building itself might be of interest; the museum just a series of plain rooms within its shell. Take my canvas stool, which is a great talking point with other gallery-goers, mostly elderly and female and wanting the same.

On the way home we stop for some tea at Barnes and Noble on Union Square. All the Barnes and Noble bookshops have lately been transformed, turned into what are virtually free libraries. There are easy chairs in which people are encouraged to read the books on display; tables at which students are sitting, making notes from the books and, upstairs in the café, a huge rack of every conceivable magazine and newspaper which you are encouraged to take to your table to read with your tea, reading all that is required. Nor is it simply patronised by what one might think of as the reading public. A workman in overalls is sitting looking at a book on Chardin, the little black boy in Philip Roth's
Goodbye, Columbus
who came into the library to look at a book on Gauguin now grown up. But it doesn't have to be as worthy as that: the boy at the next table is leafing through a muscle mag. The feeling is overwhelmingly democratic and lifts the spirits. It's said that the experiment has improved business. I hope so, as it's inspiring to see and, as so often in America, one is shamed by a civic sense which, if we ever had it in England, we don't have now. Dutifully readers clear their tables, put the trash in the bin and the magazines back on the racks and behave in a way that is both more civilised and considerate and (this is where we would really fall down) unselfconscious than we could ever manage. God bless America.

2
January
. I'm sent a complimentary (
sic
) copy of Waterstone's Literary Diary which records the birthdays of various contemporary figures from the world of letters. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O'Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.'