Untold Stories (48 page)

14
August
. Another death: Cedric Price, for many years the partner of Eleanor Bron and an inspirational figure to many architects. He was a fig
ure of eighteenth-century exuberance with views on conservation that were shockingly at variance with received wisdom. Cedric didn't believe in preserving buildings that had outlived their usefulness; he would have made a good character in a modern-day Ibsen play. At Cambridge as an undergraduate he was once in the Rex cinema when the adverts came on, including one for Kellogg's Ricicles. ‘Rice is nice,' went the jingle, ‘but Ricicles are twicicles as nicicles.' Whereupon Cedric boomed out: ‘But testicles are besticles.'

By their jokes ye shall know them.

The elegance of the black building crew up the street is a constant delight. Today one comes down the street in a lemon-coloured shirt, his head wrapped in a bandanna of matching shade and a white dust mask pushed up above his forehead. He is like a wonderfully exotic rhinoceros, but with a grace and self-assurance that wouldn't be out of place on the catwalk.

24
August
. Our GNER train from Leeds stops at Retford, where passengers are bussed down the AI to Grantham, the line between being under repair. It's around seven and the clouds are beginning to break up and the journey is redeemed by a vision on the eastern horizon of the towers of Lincoln Cathedral, caught in the late light of the setting sun. It's the kind of thing that would have immensely excited me as a boy (and quite excites me now). I've driven up and down this road hundreds of times and never seen it before, but that's because in a coach you're hoisted above the hedge and given an artist's prospect of the countryside.

28
August
. T. Blair claims to the Hutton Inquiry that if the BBC had been right and the Iraq dossier had been ‘sexed up' he would have resigned. This is presumably intended to pre-empt any calls for his resignation at the conclusion of the Inquiry, which, whether it reports so or not, has conclusively shown that this is exactly what happened to the Iraq dossier. I suppose ‘sexed up' is a euphemism for ‘hardened up' (‘stiffened up' even), fastidiousness about language not being one of the characteristics
of Blair and Co.; one of the many distasteful aspects of the whole affair is that anyone (Lord Hutton included) engaging with the issues has to do so in the language dictated by Number 10.

14
September
. Finish reading
Toast
, Nigel Slater's memoir of his childhood. It's such an enjoyable book I regret reading it so quickly, bolting it in fact, the metaphor appropriate. Food apart, it's also a very sexy book. The young Nigel must have had some sort of glint in his eye because he's always getting shown a bit of the action until at fourteen he starts spending his evenings hanging round the local lay-by spying on couples having it away. Life finally takes off when he fucks a girl-friend with his best friend watching from the other bed. An idyllic childhood I would have said. The rest is history. Or cookery.

25
September
. To Folkestone to speak at the Saga-sponsored literary festival. We have tea at the seafront hotel and sitting on the balcony in the warm sunshine I reflect on how seldom it is that I see the sea. The tide is in and the waves are breaking only a yard or two from the road and although it's quite busy there is something restorative about sitting here, watching the brown waves edge up the narrow beach. On the horizon to the south is the power station at Dungeness and beyond it, I imagine, Derek Jarman's now much visited cottage, trips to it one of the features of the festival. There are three or four ships motionless on the horizon, putting one in mind of Larkin's ‘To the Sea', though there is no ‘miniature gaiety of seasides' here, just the occasional grim jogger toiling along the front.

Saga itself turns out to be a tall modern block set in a steep park above the sea and alongside the offices an even more modern auditorium up to which several senior citizens are already labouring. The lavishness of the set-up – the vast terrace outside the auditorium above the sea, the spacious park and the many-storeyed office block – combine to make it slightly sinister, as if the ostensible purpose of the organisation, the interests and welfare of old (er) people, is just a front as it would be in a Bond film,
say, a cover for international criminality with a hatch opening in the cliff-side parkland to reveal a hangar humming with the mechanism of some project that will take over the world. And all the thousands of employees are old. As the audience certainly are at my meeting, though very amiable and jolly. At the finish I am presented with a stick of Folkestone rock the size of a barber's pole, sign books for an hour and then get the train back; home by ten-thirty.

30
September
. A memorial service for John Schlesinger. It's in the synagogue opposite Lord's and though it's Liberal Jewish I don't feel it's quite liberal enough for me to tell the bath-house story. Still, there are a lot of laughs in the other speeches, so I do feel able to give John's own account of his investiture with the CBE. John was so aware of his sexuality that he managed to detect a corresponding awareness in the unlikeliest of places. On this occasion HMQ had a momentary difficulty getting the ribbon round his sizeable neck, whereupon she said, ‘Now, Mr Schlesinger, we must try and get this
straight
,' the emphasis according to John very much hers and which he chose to take as both a coded acknowledgement of his situation and a seal of royal approval.

4
October
. To Ely to look at the cathedral, last visited all of twenty-five years ago when the town was still a lost place like Beverley or Cartmel. Nowadays, like so much of East Anglia, it thrives and today is the Harvest Festival. At the west end of the nave is a pen of sheep and a few roosters crowing their heads off and in odd corners all over the cathedral little heaps of baked beans, cling peaches and custard powder, the staples of such occasions, and which, as Clive James noted, will later be distributed among the poor and devout old ladies who contributed them in the first place. A truer symbol of the locality's harvest would, I suppose, be a sheaf of emails or a roll of print-outs, electronics round here more profitable than agriculture.

The sheep attracting most of the visitors, the rest of the cathedral is blessedly quiet and there is much to see. Our favourites are a little
eccentric, with mine the late fifteenth-century cloister arcades outside the south door, bricked up presumably at the Dissolution, and R.' s a fragment of wooden tracery from the prior's study and the framework of a door that once housed the library cupboard for the monks. But there's much more spectacular stuff, even though the methodical iconoclasm of East Anglian puritanism is more in evidence here than in York, say, with even the little fragment of glass preserved and restored in one of the cloister windows having the Virgin's face scratched out. Every statue and saint is headless or faceless, with the mutilations in the Lady Chapel looking so fresh they might have been done by the vandals of today.

The shop is doing a brisk trade in tea towels, table mats and all the merchandise that were I Jesus I'd be overturning. And, as always, no decent postcards, the want of a proper series of black and white reproductions of architectural details such as you find in French cathedrals an indictment of … whom? The cathedral chapter? The dean? Unenterprising photographers? Or just, as Lindsay Anderson would say, ‘England!'

Why the west tower is not one of the wonders of European architecture I don't understand. It's as extraordinary and asymmetrical as Gaudí and a staggering achievement for its time, every bit as astonishing as Pisa, which its arcades recall, though lacking the lean that would put it in the big league and have people gawping (which of course I wouldn't want anyway). ‘Oh, grumble, grumble,' says R.

15
October
. The Earl of Pembroke, Henry Herbert, has died. I met him only once in July 1974 when I had to do a Kilvert recital in the Double Cube room at Wilton. He was charming and easy but it didn't go well for all sorts of reasons, some sad, some comic. The evening was to have been introduced by Cecil Beaton, but earlier that week he had had a stroke and this overshadowed the proceedings. Princess Alexandra was the guest of honour but being Kilvert there was quite a bit about little girls' bottoms and suchlike so HRH put rather a damper on things as royalty often does, or did in those days anyway. I was wearing a new velvet suit and it was only
afterwards I found that my flies had been open throughout. ‘Never mind,' said the lighting assistant. ‘The spot was on your face.'

The story wouldn't be worth telling except that nearly twenty years later when
The Madness of George III
was playing at the National, Henry Herbert wrote to me about the Lady Pembroke who figures in the play. This was a lady of mature years to whom in his derangement George III takes a fancy; she was a woman of some dignity who did not in the least reciprocate his attentions, which were something of a joke at Court. Herbert's letter filled in the family tradition about this ancestor with an anecdote told him by his father:

Twenty years after the Kilvert recital we went back to Wilton to film part of
The Madness of King George
, by which time Richenda Carey, who had played Lady Pembroke on the stage, had had to give way to the less matronly Amanda Donohoe, star of
Castaway
and more what Hollywood thought audiences were entitled to expect in a fancy woman, and one unlikely to be suffering from her historical counterpart's genital hypothermia.

19
October
. Watch the second part of ITV's
Henry VIII
with Ray Win-stone as the much married monarch. It's no better than the first half and as wilfully inaccurate, the Dissolution of the Monasteries presented as if it were some Viking raid, with troops riding down the fleeing monks, hacking them to death as they try to rescue the monastic treasures. It's a far cry from the peaceful retirement on a small pension that was the lot of most of the monks and nuns, with the actual dismantling of the fabric and selling off of the furnishings far more interesting (and far more interesting to watch) than these silly melodramatics.

Aske, the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace (played by Sean Bean), is pictured being hauled up outside Clifford's Tower in York, with the
wicked Duke of Norfolk ordering that he be left to hang for three days, presumably to die of exposure. This is picturesque nonsense. Aske was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered and though there's seldom much to be said for Henry VIII in the clemency department he did at least agree to Aske's request that he be hanged and allowed to die before the rest of the sentence was carried out.
*

In the same programme Thomas Cromwell is pictured being inexpertly despatched by a novice executioner, Cromwell's face contorted in agony as the first two blows fall, his head only cut off by the third. This, too, is fanciful. Certainly there must have been many botched beheadings, but Cromwell's was not one of them, the executioner (whose name is known) taking off his head at a stroke.

In a programme as poor as this it might seem pedantic to be concerned about such details. But there is more than enough savagery in the reign of Henry VIII without adding to it.

4
November
. Passing through Cambridge, we pay a ritual visit to Kettle's Yard. It's a house that never fails to delight and though there are features I don't like, it's a place I could happily live in. The attendants are mostly elderly and many of them seem to have known Jim Ede, whose house it was and who gave it and its art collection to the University in the 1970s.

One particularly sparky old lady recommends a video display running in the big room downstairs. At first it simply seems to be a slightly blurred record of a domestic interior: a kitchen, a sitting room with on the floor some toys including a couple of model planes. Suddenly one of these planes takes off, then another lands and soon the kitchen and dining room have turned into a busy international airport, planes crossing the room, landing on tables, taking off from work surfaces and all in total silence. They negotiate the narrow chasm of a slightly open door, deftly avoid a light fitting or a bowl of fruit and it's so absurd and silly I find myself grin
ning like a child. The artist, whose name I forget to write down, is Japanese and it's the last thing I'd ever have chosen to watch or expected to find in the austere surroundings of a house like this, but it's a delight.

15
November
. Around nine I go out to put some rubbish in the bin to find someone curled up on the doorstep. I say someone because, swathed in an anorak, it's impossible to tell whether it's a man or a woman; he/she doesn't speak and when shaken just moans a little. He/she is surrounded by half a dozen plastic bags, most of them empty and not the carefully transported possessions of the usual bag lady, if it is a lady. So, having talked about it, we eventually ring 999, where the Scotland Yard operator is quite helpful and within ten minutes (on a Saturday night) a squad car comes round with two policemen. They're sensible and firm with what turns out to be a young man. He's filthy, his hands so black he might have been shifting coal, and is no help when they try to get him on his feet, moaning still and saying he has an abscess.

Now an ambulance arrives, and it's this that seems to bring the young man round. He plainly doesn't want to go to hospital and, abandoning whatever possessions he has on our doorstep, vanishes into the night. One of the policemen comes back and explains that, because among the rubbish is a squeezed-out lemon, he is likely to be an addict, the juice used to purify the drugs. He counsels caution when we're clearing up the mess lest there be any needles about and then says, ‘Actually I can do it,' goes to the car for some gloves and tidies everything away himself and in such a sensible, straightforward way it seems genuine goodness.