Untold Stories (46 page)

13
November
. Apropos the Queen's Speech, Andrew Marr on
The World
at One
talks of the future saying, ‘If the war with Iraq goes well …', the conditional to do not with the likelihood of war but only with its conduct. No one demurs. But Bush is extraordinary. Seldom can there have been a leader of a modern democratic nation who showed such unfeigned
eagerness and enthusiasm for war. He must be Saddam Hussein's biggest asset.

22
November, New York
. I am reading
Wittgenstein's Poker
, an account of the events leading up to the clash between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper at a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge in 1946. It's fascinating but as with all accounts of philosophy I can never get my mind round the questions at issue – Popper the general, Wittgenstein the particular is how I make sense of it. Both were bullies and in a gender-specific way: I can't imagine two women going head to head like this or being so single- (and so bloody-) minded. I had not known that Wittgenstein's attitude to his wealth (or his ex-wealth) was as ambiguous as it appears to have been, or of the high-level negotiations that bartered much of the Wittgenstein fortune for the lives of his two sisters, who remained in Vienna throughout the war. With both philosophers holding forth to their respective circles and riding roughshod over any opposition, I long for some bold student to stand up and say that this way of teaching philosophy defeats it own purpose and isn't worth the bruised feelings and human diminishment arguing with Wittgenstein and Popper seems to have involved.

It's encouraging, though, to find that Wittgenstein's mature (but coded) thoughts about being in love seem scarcely above my own sixteen-year-old level. One of his last unrequited passions was a medical student, Ben Richards, who is pictured in the book looking remarkably like Ted Hughes – who was almost Wittgenstein's contemporary at Cambridge. Wittgenstein died in 1951; had he survived a year or two to coincide with Hughes it would have been an interesting conjunction. One anachronism (I think) is that the authors imagine Wittgenstein buying tomato sandwiches from Woolworth's. If there was a café in Woolworth's in Cambridge he might well have bought sandwiches to eat on the premises but I don't think in 1946 Woolworth's were doing takeaways. (More reports please.)

23
November, New York
. Back for another ‘segment' on the
Today
show, I stop and talk to a handful of peace protestors who have unfurled their home-made banners around the statue of Lincoln on the north side of Union Square. They are standing in the middle of the farmers' market and are of a muchness with most of the stallholders: worthy, decent, unmetropolitan figures in late middle age, muffled up against the biting wind but not chanting or speechmaking, just a group of twenty or so standing there in silence. I ask a woman if they have come in for much abuse. ‘No. Not here. This is a liberal neighbourhood, you see.' She has a petition which I offer to sign but since I'm not resident there is no point. I say, rather futilely, that many if not most people in England feel the same and wish them luck. Like dissidents seen once in Moscow they make me feel both comfort-loving and inadequate.

3
December
. My old school, Leeds Modern (subsequently Lawnswood) School, is about to be demolished, new premises having been built on the playing fields in front of it. The new school doesn't look much of a building, whereas the old school is a handsome example of its period (
c
.1930). Its demolition illustrates almost to the minute what Brendan Gill, late of the
New Yorker
, christened the ‘Gordon Curve' after the preservationist Douglas Gordon of Baltimore. ‘This posits that a building is at its maximum moment of approbation when it is brand new, that it then goes steadily downhill and at 70 reaches its nadir. If you can get a building past that sticky moment, then the curve begins to go up again very rapidly until at 100 it is back where it was in year one. A 100-year-old building is much more likely to be saved than a 70-year-old one.'

Nowadays presenting itself as sensitive to its surroundings and careful of its inheritance, Leeds has been happily demolishing decent architecture for most of my life. Still, all it will mean now is that in order to avoid passing the scene of the crime I'll not take the Otley road out of Leeds but instead go past Kirkstall Abbey, which Leeds would probably have demolished too had Thomas Cromwell not saved them the trouble.

5
December
. My fears as to my celebrity rating earlier in the year are happily allayed this morning by an invitation to appear on
Through the Keyhole
, Sir David Frost and Paradine Productions' series for BBC1. This is not, the letter assures me, Sir David in interrogatory mode. Gravitas has been laid aside and when he comes through the keyhole in the person of his proxy, Loyd Grossman, it's ‘just a bit of fun and promotion'. Though previous guests have included Eartha Kitt, Gloria Gaynor and Neil Sedaka, I have to say no and write explaining how, as so often happens in our wacky showbiz world, in the same post came another offer, the chance of some temping as a tripe dresser in Hull. Showcase though
Through the
Keyhole
surely is, most reasonable people would, I think, agree that the latter is a more tempting proposition. I send my regards to Sir David and to Mr Grossman, whom I have never met but whose sauces often enliven my lonely dish of spaghetti.

1
January
. A Christmas card from Eric Korn:

10
January
. In George Lyttelton's
Commonplace Book
it's recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree' (a solitary man's expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to
prevent anything like that ever happening again. This is presumably the origin of Larkin's remark that before he died he fully expected to hear ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad' recited by a thousand Girl Guides in the Royal Albert Hall.

12
January
. Read
Macbeth
for maybe the second time in my life (and I don't think I've ever seen it). Much of the language is as opaque as I generally find in Shakespeare but I'm struck by how soon he gets down to business, so that within a scene the play is at full gallop. No messing about with Lady M. either. No sooner does she learn Duncan is going to visit than she decides on the murder. Oddities are Macduff 's abandonment of wife and family in order, seemingly, to save his own skin, though the scene in which his wife is discussing this with Ross is unbearably tense, the audience knowing she is about to be murdered. The ending is as abrupt as the beginning, with not much in the way of a dying fall from Malcolm, who's straight away off to Scone for his coronation. Most relevant bit:

14
January
. When I am occasionally stumped on a grammatical point, having no English grammar, I consult a copy of Kennedy's Latin primer, filched more than thirty years ago from Giggleswick School. It's only today that I notice that some schoolboy half a lifetime ago has painstakingy0 conveted
The Revised Latin Primer
into ‘The Revised Man Eating Primer'. Perhaps it is the same boy who has inscribed across one of the pages: ‘G. H. Williams, Lancs and England'.

22
January
. Watching
Footballers' Wives
, I see among the production credits the name Sue de Beauvoir.

I do hope she's a relation.

1
February, Yorkshire
. Last time we visited Kirkby Stephen we were in Mrs H.'s shop when a clock chimed. I've never wanted a clock and this one was pretty dull, made in the 1950s probably and very plain. But the chime, a full Westminster chime, was so appealing that we talked about it on the way home and later asked Mrs H. to put it on one side. Today we collect it and it looks every bit as dull as we remember, but now on the table behind the living-room door it seems very much at home. And the sound is of such celestial sweetness that when it does chime it's hard not to smile.

9
February
. To Widford in the Windrush valley near Burford for a second look at the church built on the site of a Roman villa, the mosaic floor (now covered over) once the floor of the chancel. There are box pews, aged down to a silvery grey, a three-decker pulpit, Jacobean altar rails and the remains of whitewash-blurred medieval wall-paintings. It's an immensely appealing place, not unlike Lead in Yorkshire or Heath near Ludlow. Good graves on the north side, some for a family called Secker, who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.

The Windrush tumbles through the weir on this mild winter morning, but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen slaughter. It was in 1388 that Richard II's favourite, Robert Vere, led his army floundering along this flooded valley, desperate to escape his baronial pursuers, who eventually caught up and cut most of them down a little upstream at Radcot Bridge.

15
February
. R. and I go down to Leicester Square at noon, the tube as crowded as the rush hour, then walk up Charing Cross Road to where the anti-war march is streaming across Cambridge Circus. There seems no structure to it, ahead of us some SWP banners but marching, or rather
strolling, beside them the Surrey Heath Liberal Democrats. Scattered among the more seasoned marchers are many unlikely figures, two women in front of us in fur hats and bootees looking as if they're just off to the WI. I'm an unlikely figure, too, of course, as the last march I went on was in 1956 and that was an accident: I was standing in Broad Street in Oxford watching the Suez demonstration go by when a friend pulled me in.

Today it's bitterly cold, particularly since the march keeps stopping or is stopped by the police, who seem bored that they've got so little to do, the mood of the march overwhelmingly friendly and domestic and hardly political at all. I'd have quite liked something to march to, even (however inappropriately) ‘Onward Christian Soldiers', but the nearest we get is (to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine') ‘We all live in a terrorist regime', which isn't a chant I feel entirely able to endorse. At Albemarle Street we split off and go and have lunch at Fenwick's, having, I suppose, walked a third of the route.

On the TV news the police estimate the numbers at 750,000, the organisers at two million, the true figure presumably somewhere in between. Whether anyone has ever nailed the police on why they routinely overestimate the numbers for demonstrations they approve of (like the so-called Liberty and Livelihood March) while marking down more dissident movements, I don't know. They would presumably deny it as vigorously as their not infrequent throttling of black suspects.

26
February
. For much of last year the post in Gloucester Crescent was delivered by a delightful French girl, Stephanie Tunc; blonde and pretty, she was chatty, funny and also very efficient. Unique among the French of my acquaintance, she didn't like France one bit and pulled a face if you told her you were going on holiday there. Before Christmas she and her sister took off for South America and this last week the market men in Inverness Street got a postcard from Stephanie in Peru, which they pinned up on one of the stalls.

Then yesterday the new postman told us that having run out of money
in Peru she and her sister had come back from South America to Miami. Sunbathing on the beach they had been run over by a police car, which had then reversed over them. Stephanie was dead and her sister in a critical condition.

‘Add something,' I note as I transcribe this entry. But there is nothing to add. A lovely, lively girl is senselessly dead. That's all.

8
March
. A phrase often in the mouth of Bush and Blair is ‘Our patience is exhausted.' It's a phrase that is seldom used by anyone who had much patience in the first place; Hitler was quite fond of it.

14
March
. To Oxford to vote for the chancellor, though it doesn't seem very long since I did the same for Roy Jenkins. At Bodley I'm overtaken by A. N. Wilson, who's brought his gown in a Sainsbury's bag, though it's part of Roy Jenkins's legacy that gowns are no longer required on such occasions. This doesn't stop many of the voters swishing about in them for the benefit of their families, who are then left at the door of the Divinity Schools while the graduates go in to participate in the mystery.

Not much of a mystery now, though, as in another of Jenkins's reforms there is no ceremony at all and certainly no vice-chancellor enthroned in Convocation waiting to take your voting paper and lift his hat as Patrick Neill tipped his twenty years ago. Now Neill is himself a candidate in what feels more like a local council election, with trestle tables, ushers and the proctors taking the votes. One of Tom Bingham's proposers, I vote for him and no one else, the single transferable vote (another Jenkins inspiration) likely, it's thought, to favour Bingham's chief rival, Chris Patten. At the table I hand in my paper to one of the junior proctors, a weary-looking don who, in what is perhaps a ritual humiliation, demands some evidence of identification. I hand over my Camden bus pass, which he scrutinises as grimly as an Albanian border guard, even checking the likeness. Andrew Wilson sails through unchallenged.