Untold Stories (40 page)

10
August
. Appalling scenes on the Portsmouth housing estate which is conducting a witch hunt against suspected paedophiles and the nation is treated to the spectacle of a tattooed mother with a fag dangling from her lips and a baby in her arms proclaiming how concerned she is for her kiddies.

The joy of being a mob, particularly these days, is that it's probably the first time the people on this estate have found common cause on anything; it's ‘the community' they've been told so much about and for the first time in their lives each day seems purposeful and exciting.

11
August
. En route for Petersfield and A.G.'s funeral I turn off the A3 to look at Ockham church and eat my sandwich lunch in the churchyard. It's locked but a rather grand woman who's working in the churchyard opens it up. It's the church of William of Ockham and Ockham's razor (in Latin) is inscribed on mugs for sale at the bookstall. Coming out, I thank the woman and she says I'm lucky because she wouldn't normally be around but they've been having trouble with the myrrh. The church hadn't seemed to be particularly ritualistic so this puzzles me.

‘The myrrh?' I say.

‘Yes'.

‘You mean the incense?'

‘No, no. The
myrrh
. For the grass. It's broken down.'

At Petersfield we go down to the church in a people-carrier. It belongs to Sally, Alec's granddaughter, and probably wouldn't have suited him at all but it seats everybody nicely, and as it doesn't look at all funereal none of the waiting photographers takes a second look. The note of ‘Alec wouldn't like this' keeps recurring and is perhaps the most vivid way in which he is recalled.

The coffin is borne in and on it a cushion with his decorations. When he was given the CH he thought it unlikely that he'd ever get to wear it, having no tails now that would fit him, and that the only time it might be seen would be on his coffin. This is remembered in the nick of time and it's disinterred from the bottom of the wardrobe or wherever and pinned to a cushion which Merula, his widow, had embroidered years ago with a flowing tapestry of Walter, A.G.' s favourite dog. Once when A.G. was appearing in the West End Walter was run over by a milk float and slightly injured. The dog was so loved that this news had to be kept from Alec lest he be unable to take the stage.

The service is simple and being Catholic to me is utterly mysterious, as I never understand how they get the Mass over with quite so quickly, Holy Communion in the Anglican service more of a journey. Nowadays there's the handshake in common which, even though today I know everybody, I still don't find easy and it's quite hard to see how someone as fastidious as A.G. managed it all these years; Merula would have been one of his neighbours so perhaps he always sat on the aisle.

At the cemetery I talk to Michael and Henrietta Gough.

The undertaker retrieves Walter's cushion and the CH from the grave and we go back to the house which, when it was built c.1950, was in the depths of the country. Now it is within 200 yards of the M3, the roar of which was never absent in this last decade of their lives.

14
August
. Listen to the last programme in Charles Wheeler's Radio 4 series on National Service, a discussion with, among others, Neal Ascherson, Michael Mates and Arnold Wesker. Though my own experiences (basic training in the Infantry, then the Joint Services Russian Course) were hardly typical, I find myself more in agreement with Wesker and indeed Michael Mates than I do with Ascherson.

Wesker admits that for all its miseries and boredom he enjoyed himself, as I did, and not merely when I was learning Russian. I enjoyed drill once I'd got used to it, the sense of being part of a group wheeling and counter-wheeling on the square not much different, I imagine, from the joys of the chorus line. Ascherson and also Paul Foot seemed to consider the two years as time wasted but I suspect that part of their impatience can be put down to their having been at public school, Ascherson at Eton, Foot at Shrewsbury. Part of the pleasure I had in National Service was that it represented delayed schooling, and that for the first time in my life I was away from home. No politician would dare suggest it but six months or a year
of National Service nowadays, provided the time was well used, would seem to me to do little harm and have many advantages.

There were many bad moments during my two-year conscription, the worst entirely of my own making. En route for breakfast about a week after I began basic training I went for a pee and in the process dropped my knife, fork and spoon in the communal trough. I then had to retrieve them, rinse them off and go in and use them for breakfast. Still, since some of my fellows went on to be killed in Korea this hardly counts as an ordeal. Best were moments of intense lyrical delight I've seldom experienced since. South Yorkshire is hardly an area of outstanding natural beauty but having finished reassembling my Bren and ordered to take five, a soldier lying in the long grass, I would be enraptured.

A biker delivers a letter from the BBC: ‘Alan Bennett? Can I shake your hand? The trouble is I sold all your plays for a gram of speed about five years ago.'

23
August, L'Espiessac
. Sitting in the shade of the cherry tree outside the
pigeonnier
in a rough, warm wind that snatches at the paper as I write. Over the door is the date 22 mai 1816, a year after Waterloo and the departure of Napoleon, when this farmhouse was supposedly a nunnery.

Packed and waiting for the cab yesterday, I catch a Radio 3 repeat of a 1949 broadcast from the Edinburgh Festival of Kathleen Ferrier singing some Brahms songs. It's preceded by five minutes of her talking about her career, working with Bruno Walter and plans for the future she wasn't going to have. I've never heard her speak before and it's a voice as careful and considered and indeed tragic as many of the
lieder
that she sings. Though there's no trace of the Blackburn telephonist she had been only a few years before, the accent isn't in any way ‘put on' – low, sad and yet full of hope, as if the words themselves were lyrics and deserving of the same care in phrasing and pronunciation. When she sings the voice is at the same time austere and yet rich and with none of that unctuousness that some contraltos have. It's her voice in
The Song of the Earth
and the
Strauss
Four Last Songs
and Brahms's
Alto Rhapsody
that I hear still as their proper tone, with no one else to touch her.

Before she was really famous – it must have been
c
.1947 – she came to Leeds to sing at Brunswick Chapel. Uncle George made Mam and Dad go with him to hear her, and though they weren't big ones for singing, they came back full of this young woman they had heard who turned out to be Kathleen Ferrier. What makes music inviolable still for me, and preserves it from the poisonous flippancies of Classic FM, are scenes like that, a Methodist chapel in the slums of Leeds lit up and packed with people on a winter night in 1947 and the voice of Kathleen Ferrier drifting out over the grimy snow.

27
August, L'Espiessac
. Remember as I labour up and down the pool in the late afternoon the old lady in Gstaad who had always wanted a swimming pool of her own but her husband wouldn't have it. He then died and having dug one hole for him she dug a much bigger hole for herself and when we called one morning in 1971 she was chugging up and down the pool like a little water beetle, never happier in her life.

28
August, L'Espiessac
. Pick out from this holiday bookcase
As They Were
, a book of travel pieces by M. F. K. Fisher, and read ‘About Looking Alone at a Place', an account of a winter visit to Arles in 1971. I am shamed by its exactitude of expression and, though the language is simple, her ability to hit on a phrase. She's like Richard Cobb in finding out the ordinary rhythms of a place, its habits and the flavour of the small lives lived there – waiters (and the
shoes
of the waiters), hotel receptionists, attendants in museums. Born 1908 and now presumably dead. I have never heard of her.

2
September
. In a piece in the
LRB
on Buñuel Michael Wood mentions among ‘a number of startling and now famous images' in
Viridiana
‘a small crucifix that flicks open to become a menacing knife'.

The film came out in 1961 but I didn't see it until sometime in the 1970s after Buñuel's much more popular films like
Belle de Jour
and
The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
. However, on the BBC's
Not So Much a
Programme
in 1965 I played a pipe-smoking vicar with on his desk a crucifix that doubled as a pipe rack – a small blasphemy that provoked a question in Parliament.

The difference between the images is revealing: Buñuel's resonant and bold, Catholic and dangerous, mine Anglican, cosy and not threatening at all. Lindsay Anderson was a great admirer of (and borrower from) Buñuel and in the comparison of the two images he would have found all that was wrong with England.

2
October
. Finish Peter Nichols's
Diaries
, a good read and hard to put down. He's blessed, as Osborne was, with droves of relatives to whom he seems far more attentive and considerate than ever I managed to be to my few. Still, they repay the attention and are a good source of material. I may not be the one to talk but with Nichols the vestibule between Life and Art is quite short and nobody lingers in it long.

Also reading Eamon Duffy's
The Stripping of the Altars
, which is hard going but full of interesting stuff about the ceremonial life of the late medieval church and its systematic dismantling under Edward VI and Elizabeth. I hadn't realised that the Elizabethan Settlement also meant the end of the mystery plays, which were pretty well forgotten by 1580. It shames me that I am more outraged by these events of nearly five hundred years ago (particularly by the iconoclasm) than I am by anything that's currently happening (and to flesh and blood) in Yugoslavia or Sierra Leone.

25
October
. In the obituaries that I saw of Alec Guinness not much mention was made of his wife of sixty years, Merula Salaman, who was treated as if she was just an appendage to him. Now, when she too has died, would have been the time to make amends but death hasn't brought her out of his shadow, with no one giving a proper account of Merula herself as distinct from Lady Guinness. That wasn't a role she particularly wanted to play, especially in the late 1940s when Alec became a film star and felt he had to
lead a film star's life. Even when she was dying she talked with horror of those days, of the number of frocks she was required to have, the amount of changing that went on and the difficulties of dining in gloves.

Brought up as a wild country child in a large eccentric family (which deserves its own chronicler), she was happy as soon as the opportunity occurred to leave the high life to Alec and spend most of her time in the house that her architect brother had designed in Hampshire. Here she was surrounded by dogs, kept goats, had a donkey in the field and painted in a style that was vaguely Russian but which only came into its own when she took up needlework. Her needlework pictures are glowing with colour and intricate in texture, medieval in their richness. It was only in the last ten years or so that she had the confidence to exhibit them, Alec always nervous she would show him up or show herself up. They sold immediately and I bought several only to have Alec thank me as if I were doing it as a favour to him.

This was nothing new. Merula was, for instance, a superb cook and when I first stayed at Kettlebrook would produce delicious meals which Alec would apologise for – behaviour which she took in her stride, knowing it would pass. And when I'd been there two or three times (and always had second and even third helpings) he stopped apologising. The truth was that she made him a nicer, less awkward, more accessible person but even after sixty years of marriage she still found it odd that they got on and that she could cope with his fussing and over-propriety. But her affection for him didn't waver and only a few days before she died, when she scarcely had the strength to hold a pen, she wrote a poem praying that they would soon be reunited and this was read at her funeral.

She had faced death with her usual lack of fuss, writing to me in August: ‘I have taken to my bed hence perculiar [
sic
] writing. I wish Alec were here to read that bit' – her spelling always caused him pain – ‘I think I shall stay in my bed now for the duration. It saves a lot of trouble.'

She made it, as she had wanted, to her eighty-sixth birthday. It was two days before she died and with the dogs strewn across her bed she raised a glass of champagne, saying, ‘Chin, chin.'

28
October
. Cutting across from the M40 to Chipping Norton, we find ourselves passing the road to Rousham. Surprisingly this wet Saturday the gardens are open though apart from a young Japanese couple, who look to be honeymooners, we are the only visitors. We find a summer house by the bowling green, where we eat our sandwiches, then wander round the kitchen garden. The house itself is quite bleak and the garden front, grey and sash-windowed, and altered in the nineteenth century, almost institutional. The gardens are by William Kent but what delights is less the design than the beautiful cambered yew hedges (and hedges inside hedges and doors in walls that open onto hedges). In another kitchen garden is a pigeon house dated 1683, with an espaliered pear growing round it and doves and pigeons still in residence.

14
November
. Alan Tyson has died. Of his work in psychoanalysis and musicology I know nothing and even his jokes and his silliness only by report. But he was good value and known to be. Once in the 1980s he rang the LRB and, passing on the call, someone said: ‘How long before he makes his first pun?' It was in the first sentence. ‘Hello! And what is it this morning,
belles lettres
or
Belgrano
?
'