Untold Stories (45 page)

That Dudley, given the chance, could talk illuminatingly about music was brought home to me in almost the only conversation I had with him about jazz, when he explained the difference, as he saw it, between a good and an average performance. It had to do with the musical beat, which he told me to think of not as a brief and indivisible moment but as an interval with a discernible length, and a beginning, a middle and an end. The art of playing good jazz, he explained, was to try and hit the beat as near as possible to its ending.

To musicians this may well be a truism but I had never come across the notion before, and it linked, as Dudley then linked it, with comedy timing in the theatre, where the same applies and which I did understand and practised, though instinctively.

This conversation would have taken place in New York sometime in 1963 in the apartment which he was then subletting on Washington Square and where he also taught me to add a spoonful of water to the mixture of the scrambled eggs we invariably had for lunch. It was there too that, possibly in order to wean me off Elgar, he played me the long sinuous romantic theme that begins Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. Though I always add the water when scrambling eggs, I have never got much further with Bruckner and the opening of the Seventh is still all I know.

1
June, Yorkshire
. I try out my new slug killer: a cane with a sponge tied to the end with which, dipped in a strong solution of salt and water, I douse the slugs. I'm not sure if it works as this morning there's no trace of any of the dead. This may mean they've crawled home to lick their wounds or
their corpses may have been eaten by the early birds. Another device is a big darning needle fixed to the end of a cane on which I impale the blameless creatures.

11
June
. Make notes for the Tate Britain sound guide, my chosen picture Millais's
Christ in the House of His Parents
(or ‘The Carpenter's Shop', as I think of it). It's one of those paintings – Holman Hunt's
Shadow of
Death
is another – when Jesus's childhood or youth skids to a halt at some rather vulgar prefiguring of what is in store, in this case the boy Jesus snagging his hand on a nail and blood dripping onto his foot. What's always struck me particularly about the picture is the glum boy on the right fetching in a bowl of water. He's John the Baptist but I've always thought of him as like ‘the lad' in my father's butcher's shop who was already working for his living while I was, like Jesus, a namby-pamby figure in a nightdress who had plainly never done a stroke of work in his life. Dickens disliked this Jesus figure, too, apparently, though with less justification as he was always inventing boys like this himself. As with so many Pre-Raphaelite paintings the feeling is one of impending doom with even Joseph a slightly sinister figure.

4
July
. The Home Secretary announces that because of ‘public concern' (which probably means one article in the
Daily Mail
) he has decided to make it known that Dr Shipman will remain in prison for the rest of his life. This is not more than anyone, including Dr Shipman, can have expected but why announce it? Who benefits? All it does is satisfy the desire for revenge of the public (or the public as imagined by the
Daily
Mail
). It seems sheer sadism and not for the first time I wonder if Blunkett would be a more liberal man if he were not blind.

22
July, L'Espiessac
. I did not think my hearing had deteriorated at all but at some relatively refined level it has, as at nights here I can no longer catch the sound of crickets. It is the sound most evocative of the South or any warm climate and on our first night I put down its absence to the
usual suspects – mechanised farming, fertilisers, the decline of nature. But standing at the top of the steps yesterday night, R. asks me if I can hear the crickets and cannot believe that, the night tingling with the sound, I am deaf to it. I strain to hear … and I can catch the bark of a distant dog, a car on the road to Nérac and the dishwasher still going in the kitchen. But crickets, no.

23
July, L'Espiessac
. Hornets are building a nest in a tiny hole in the wall bordering the window frame of the
pigeonnier
where we sleep. And it is a nest, too, with the hornet and/or a colleague bringing pieces of straw which it draws into the hole and presumably incorporates into the fabric of the nest. I have never seen insects do this (except ants possibly), imagining that wasps and such creatures somehow extruded the materials for their nests as bees do for their hives. I have a strong impulse to disrupt the process, even stop up the hole with chewing gum but resist it. Another sunny warm day but with a strong wind that ruffles the lavender (and makes landing for the hornets tricky).

1
August
. Apropos Jeffrey Archer, I am rereading the Lyttelton–Hart-Davis letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat the pistol, therefore are essentially unscrupulous and unreliable.'

30
August
. A commercial for Carte d'Or ice cream I would have been very pleased to have written. A family which includes the aged grandmother is having Sunday dinner. ‘Pass your father the potatoes,' the mother says to the grown-up son. ‘He's not your father,' snaps the grandmother. ‘We never knew who your father was.' There is an awkward silence, then the mother ushers the grandmother from the table saying: ‘Come along, mother, I'll take you upstairs.' On the way out of the room the old lady passes an open piano on which (this is the stroke of genius) she suddenly hits a petulant discord. The scene lasts all of a minute and is worth pages of dialogue. Why it's advertising ice cream I'm not sure.

26
September
. A call from Channel 4 wanting to know if I'd like to be one of the participants in
Celebrity Big Brother
. In view of the status of previous participants I suppose this indicates that in celebrity terms I'm pretty low grade so I don't say no immediately but ask my agent, Ros Chatto, to find out who else they have in mind. They smell a rat, of course, and won't let on, promising only ‘someone quite high up in the music business'. (This turns out to be an ex-member of Take That, who eventually triumphs.)

30
September, Yorkshire
. Glimpsed in Crosshills, en route for Leeds: a young man in a wheelchair with a girl (-friend, possibly) on his knee, giving her a lift – the wheelchair playing the same role as the crossbar of a bike. I've never seen this before and find it cheering.

1
October
. I am reading Geoffrey Moorhouse's book on the Pilgrimage of Grace and have reached the point in October 1536 when Robert Aske and the huge rebel host are at Doncaster waiting to move south, virtually unopposed. It's a campaign that would surely have changed the course of history and might even have deposed Henry VIII, though this was not the rebels' aim. They hesitated, and the chapter in question will presumably explain why. I can scarcely bear to read it and put the book to one side. Meanwhile Bush edges daily closer to war and I can't bear to read about that either.

2
October
. The bin men in Camden come on Mondays and Thursdays and on Mondays too comes the recycling lorry, taking away the weekly hoard of paper and glass. Ludicrously I assumed that these recycling men would (because greener) be a cut above the ordinary bin men. In fact it's the reverse. The traditional crew is jolly, know me by name and call out if they see me in the street. They also close the gate and don't leave any mess. The green men are unsmiling, wanting in any obvious conviviality, shove the crate back any old how and don't close the gate. Green, in Camden anyway, isn't necessarily nice.

15
October
. Insofar as Bush (and therefore Blair) have any strategy within Iraq it is to depress the condition of the people to the point where they rise up against their leader. It's a deplorable policy on humanitarian grounds but it's also historically unsound. Revolutions happen not when people are at their most desperate but when conditions are just beginning to improve. The best way to topple Saddam would be to send Iraq aid.

24
October, Yorkshire
. To Fountains on a day of tearing wind and sudden storms with skies periodically swept to a clear Mediterranean blue. The tower at Fountains never fails to surprise, the last two stages so tall that they stand clear above the top of the valley, and so look like a rather squat parish church surrounded by trees. Avoiding the Visitors' Centre, we go in at the bottom gate where the bus from Ripon first deposited my mother and me
c
.1947. It's half-term and the outer court is full of children and family parties, though never as busy as it must have been in its medieval heyday. In the slype, the passage next to the chapterhouse, we find traces of the original paint. (I am actually rather pleased that I know the word ‘slype' – a slip, I suppose it means, or a short cut.) The passage doubled as sacristy and library and, having been protected from the weather, some of the stone is still painted the original greyish white that once covered most of the masonry. This is overlaid with black decorative lines that impose a pattern of painted blocks irrespective of and unrelated to the stonework underneath. It feels glossy, almost waxy and the thought that this is just as it was at the Dissolution nearly 500 years ago I find absurdly satisfying. As I'm stroking this paint I become aware of a small child cowering in an alcove, playing hide-and-seek, who obviously thinks I am mad.

On the hill south of the main buildings is the Applegarth, where there are two yew trees, unvisited by any tourists but survivors of a group of seven such trees that had long been growing here in the twelfth century when a band of monks from St Mary's at York camped out on this hillside before founding the abbey. That the yews have survived both the building of Fountains and its dissolution and all that has happened since makes
them more objects of wonder than the abbey itself. Since they are not highlighted or on any ‘trail' I suppose my wonder has a touch of snobbery to it, too.

31
October
,
New York
. Upgraded to first on American Airlines, I am early down to Immigration, to be met by a large emerald-green bird, fully feathered and with an orange beak. It flaps its wings and motions me onwards. I take the creature, just discernible as a middle-aged woman, to be a loony and, always nervous at Immigration, remain firmly behind the yellow line. The bird gets extremely agitated, flaps both its wings and indicates that I should proceed through one of the few gates that are manned. I now realise it's Halloween, though the festive spirit doesn't extend to the guy in the booth, who is mean-faced, unwelcoming and possibly more pissed off than he usually is because he has had a whole day in the company of this demented barnyard fowl, which is now clucking up and down the waiting line of jaded travellers, all of them as mystified as I was. Still, compared with others I see later that evening in New York she's a fairly low-level eccentric; there's a man with a pan on his head, another dressed in (or as) a condom, hand in hand with two of the sperms he has presumably frustrated. None of them, though, seems much in party mood, the festivity almost an obligation.

‘Foreigners,' says the cab driver of some other (normally dressed) group. ‘Europeans. Do you know how ya tell? They're
smoking
.'

Promotion to first class gives me my first experience of a pod, the extendable seat which is supposed to make sleep possible. In fact it's about a foot too short for me and my feet hang off the end, the whole contraption not unlike a stationary version of the fairground Waltzer.

‘Would you like hot nuts?' asks the stewardess.

The purpose of this very much flying visit, paid for by Random House, is to do a five-minute ‘segment' on the
Today
show, the book club of which has selected (or had selected for them)
The Lady in the Van
and
The
Clothes They Stood Up In
as their this month's read. It's actually the choice of Helen Fielding, whom I'd imagined utterly metropolitan but
turns out to be from Morley, though now living in Los Angeles presumably on the proceeds of her two bestsellers. After the segment we have tea in the Pierre and talk about Leeds, and I walk down the corridor where forty years ago Dudley Moore and I saw Stravinsky.

I avoid downtown and notice how, in the car to the airport, I don't look back to take in the view of the towers of Manhattan. It's something I'd always done as a kind of farewell every time I came away from New York. Not today. Brooklyn cemetery on the right, Queens on the left, Manhattan maimed so not to be stared at.

5
November
. To the British Library to record an edition of Radio 4's Bookclub in which a panel of readers, chaired by James Naughtie, questions me about my stuff, some of which figures in a little exhibition laid on by the Library, including the original script of
Beyond the Fringe
and another of
Forty Years On
, both now part of the Lord Chamberlain's Office archive. Back in 1960 the reader pencilled a note on the
Beyond the
Fringe
MS that it was ‘full of silly pseudo-intellectual jokes'.
Forty Years
On
maybe deserved a similar comment but as censorship was abolished while it was still waiting to be read it is unmarked. More thrilling by far is Anne Boleyn's copy of Tyndale's English Bible, a compact and handy volume along the fore-edge of which she has written in red ‘Regina Angliae'. I am allowed to hold this Bible, as she must often have held it, and wonder if it's the Bible she had with her in the Tower or on the scaffold.

11
November
. Much talk of republicanism, recalling Brooklyn-born Joan Panzer's remark twenty years ago: ‘England without the Royal Family? Never. It would be like Fire Island without the gays.'