Untold Stories (77 page)

Having turned down the CBE, I thought that would be the end of honours for me so I was more surprised to be offered a knighthood in the New Year's Honours for 1996. Admittedly it was quite a thin year so there may have been some scraping of the barrel, but I felt more ungracious saying no this time if only because it seemed kind that someone in the prime minister's office still thought it worthwhile to persist.

Again, though, I was mortified not to be able to get a joke out of this
gran rifiuto
. The nearest I got to humour was to think, quite genuinely, that being a knight would be like wearing a suit every day of one's life. This didn't seem quite funny enough, though, so I just said No, thank you. Richard Eyre claims that apropos honours I quoted Virginia Woolf as saying she had been brought up not to accept gifts from strangers. I've no recollection of this or of knowing that Virginia Woolf said anything of the sort. (It's a bit pert for her, I would have thought.) Still, it would have done at a pinch.

Suit, though, has something to do with it as I felt it wouldn't suit me,
or would suit the me I was still trying not to be, though at sixty-one (my age when it was offered) I ought, I felt, to have a firmer grip on my character than I did or do. With writers, much more than actors, there must always be the suspicion that a knighthood means that they have arrived but at the wrong place. Self-regard, though, is boundless and, lest it be thought that this refusal has much to do with modesty, when the list of those who had turned down honours was leaked in the newspapers I cared enough to note (I hope wryly) how obscurely placed I was on the list and that sometimes I wasn't even mentioned at all.

Retrospective though most honours are, arising as they do out of services rendered, it's still hard not to feel that to be given an honour certainly at a higher level is to be in some sense enlisted or even leashed. It's a restraint, even if only in point of good manners: someone who has just been honoured by Downing Street might feel less ready on that score openly to criticise Downing Street. It's nothing so vulgar as being bought off; simply that most people would think it not quite the thing to do. An honour is not just a trinket; it's also a contract.

In my case, though, it would be hypocritical to pretend that I do not sometimes wonder about all these refusals and what lies behind them, and also that I do not have occasional regrets. Writing can be a pretty cheerless business and going through a bad patch I sometimes think it would be a consolation to be a sir … not that it would help. But it's not much of a regret and it passes.

Why I have this recusatory temperament, though, is quite hard to sort out but it must in part have to do with my father. He was naturally modest and reluctant to push himself forward and would never have thought he had anything to push himself forward about. As a child I was something of a show-off, which pained him, so I can see this refusal of honours has to do with atoning for that and is, in part anyway, an attempt to please my dead parent. It's futile, of course; there is no pleasing the dead and he would probably think I was making too much of a fuss anyway and would do better taking them and have done.

Still, I was brought up not to be beholden to anybody; my parents never
liked to be under an obligation or to owe someone a favour, particularly someone outside the family – an attitude not uncommon in their class and circumstances. And this has, I think, been passed on to me, whose class and circumstances are very different.

If not being beholden is part of it and something that I've inherited, my own history plays a part and in particular something that happened in 1954 during my last months of National Service.

I had spent my obligatory two years very happily at the Joint Services School for Linguists, stationed most of the time at Cambridge where we wore civilian clothes, did no drill or military training and, though we enjoyed the status of officer cadets, it wasn't like being in the army at all and we were virtually undergraduates. Sometime in the spring of 1954 we were sent for three days to WOSB, a unit in Hampshire where we went through a series of tests to assess our suitability for a commission. These tests were to do with qualities of leadership, man management and nerve under fire. I had no hopes of passing but much to my surprise (and, I think, largely due to my acting abilities) I did. The next stage, though, involved a longer performance, a fortnight at Mons barracks in Aldershot. Still, it was reckoned to be a pushover and almost impossible to fail. I failed.

Those of us who had fallen at this or the earlier hurdle were then busted to private and spent the last month or so of National Service at the Intelligence Corps depot at Maresfield, the foulest camp I have ever been in and made worse by the fact that plain to view were those ten or so colleagues who had passed both stages and now idled about the camp with their swagger sticks and peaked caps as fully-fledged second lieutenants.

At the time it seemed a joke, this abrupt turnaround a farewell lesson in the absurdities of military service. But in retrospect I can see that it marked, if it did not actually cause, a change in my way of looking at things.

Mons had been a failure and, though I was only twenty, my life up till then had been one of unbroken success. I had passed the eleven plus, always been among the top of the class, done well in all but sport and after
school and higher school certificates had ended up with a scholarship to Oxford. This army test, ludicrous though it was, was my first taste of failure, no less bitter because I knew the object of my ambition was contemptible in every possible way: I think I only wanted to be an officer because the uniform was smarter.

When I joined the army aged eighteen I had been a committed Christian, right-wing, censorious and, so far as I could predict, destined to become an Anglican clergyman. In the army this conventional façade began to break down and in a conventional way; I began to smoke and to swear and occasionally to get drunk. So if this failure at Mons was a turning point, like most turning points it had been in the offing for some time. But a failure it was. I had not got my platoon dry-shod across the flooded stream; the guerrilla attack I led scoured the Hampshire countryside and did not even locate the foe. And it mattered. Even after two years of its insanities I still believed in authority, even the authority of the army. No longer.

When a month or so later I was demobbed and went up to Oxford, something had happened. I had learned authority was not to be trusted. I was an Other Rank and I had better get used to it. Not a second lieutenant and so never a member of the Oxford Union or an actor in OUDS; I did not write for
Isis
or speak at the Labour Club. I led a thoroughly domestic life in my own college and began to fancy myself an outsider (which I wasn't, though it saved me from making an effort). What I was not was a joiner. And so in due course not a CBE and not a knight. An Other Rank.

The greatest honour I have ever been given had nothing to do with the Honours List and thus evaded the strictures of my recusatory temperament and all my misgivings about authority. This was when in 1993 I was appointed a Trustee of the National Gallery. It was entirely unexpected and unlooked for; when I asked, ‘Why me?' I was told that I represented the man in the street.

The position of Trustee carries with it one inestimable privilege, namely permission to go round the gallery out of opening hours. To be made free of the nation's pictures and to be allowed to roam the gallery at will
seems to me a distinction of more substance and worth than any of those doled out in the Honours List, particularly since, though a Trustee serves for five or seven years, the privilege of out-of-hours entry is given for life. Even though I was for all sorts of reasons an indifferent Trustee, nothing I have ever been given has pleased me more.

The last word on honours, though, ought to be a joke. The painter Francis Bacon accepted nothing. He was asked in his seventies why he had not taken a knighthood or the OM and his reply, though camp, as so often with Bacon concealed a good deal of common sense.

‘Oh, I couldn't. So
ageing
!'

‘I remember when you were here last time,' says the nurse as she checks my blood pressure. ‘It doesn't seem like five years.'

‘It does to me,' I say, ‘every minute of it.' I am lying on a trolley in a cubicle in the endoscopy unit of the London Clinic. With my gut scoured clean and awaiting scrutiny and naked except for a hospital gown, I am beginning to look forward to the Valium. The nurse goes out, pulling the curtains closed. Condemned cells have no door, I reflect, just a tastefully patterned curtain and a locker for your valuables.

Actually the curtains have changed since I was last here. Then they were a cheerful flowered print, Laura Ashley perhaps; now, it's a rather sombre design of African violets in blue and grey. Five years ago I glanced at the fabric as I was taken out, thinking that when I was wheeled back after the colonoscopy I would see this same pattern again but by then I would be in the clear and it would all be over and done with, though why it should have been the soft furnishings I fixed on I can't think; tasteful unto death perhaps.

It's a Friday afternoon and the unit is not busy. In the corridor, a few feet away, a doctor is telling some relieved woman that there is nothing amiss.

‘No polyps?' she asks.

‘Not to speak of. Nothing out of the ordinary. You can go home and prune the roses.'

Oh, the lives that doctors wish upon us! But if she has no roses, or gar
den at all, she is still overjoyed as he ushers her out and the corridor falls quiet. Soon it will be my turn.

I have never got used to the sight of blood. On the paper, in the pan, the toothbrush or the handkerchief, however innocent the explanation, it never fails to startle and to mar the day. At different times I have shat blood, coughed blood, spat blood, and of course bled blood; it has happened all my life, but seldom with serious consequences or from significant cause.

Still, the sight of it has generally been shock enough for me to seek medical advice as one is told to do, though, suffering occasionally from piles, to do so on every occasion was hardly practical or fair on the doctor. But I have had regular sigmoidoscopies as a precaution, the doctor looking up my bum with a telescope (‘A touch of cold steel now'). Sometimes I felt that more people had seen the inside of my bum than had seen some productions at the National Theatre.

My first London GP, a saintly man who never made me feel a fool, as doctors sometimes have, was often required to reassure me in this area. I was once lying on the couch while he carried out a manual examination of my back passage.

‘No,' he said patiently, ‘I find nothing that concerns me here. Though of course' (and his finger was still up my bottom) ‘it's always nice to see you.'

So, even though I was bleeding fairly regularly, it was without any particular feeling of alarm that I arranged to see the usual specialist and have one of my periodic sigmoidoscopies. This revealed the piles which would account for the bleeding, but that apart, the examination was reassuring; the specialist could see nothing alarming, though he did ask when I'd last had a colonoscopy.
*
He didn't press the point and whether or not to have one seemed up to me. One reason why one goes to a doctor is to try and make another person responsible for one's life. I wanted him to tell me
what to do but he didn't, and not being at all anxious and feeling reassured by the sigmoidoscopy, I don't know what it was that made me, nevertheless, decide on a more extensive investigation. Luck, I think now, or providence, or maybe there was still a doubt and I was hankering after perfect peace of mind. But in that curtained cubicle in June 1997 I was probably thinking that, as on previous occasions, it was all a fuss over nothing and I was being a bit of a fool.

On this point, at least, I was soon proved wrong. Dr W., the head of the unit, breezily explains the procedure, how I will be given some IV Valium with more if I need it, and that if I choose I can watch the proceedings on a screen while he gives a commentary.

The tube with the camera attached begins its track up my bowel. ‘Very few people come out of here without a smile on their face,' murmurs Dr

W. as he cruises past some unassuming piles. ‘Nothing to worry about there.' The camera pushes on with its proctoscopic odyssey. Suddenly the tone of his commentary falters as he rounds a bend and is brought up short before something huge and craggy. Once it may have been benign; now it's not benign at all. Even before Dr W. explains this, I notice how the two nurses, who are also watching the screen, instantly become more solicitous, one kneeling down and stroking my arm, whispering reassurance before I have entirely realised that reassurance is required.

The culprit is a polyp that has gone undetected, turned malignant and is now firmly attached to the wall of the bowel. It's a situation, I know, in which I am expected to be an adult, and Dr W. invites me to look at the screen and confront the agent of my misery. But openness has its limits and my eyes are firmly shut as he gives me another burst of Valium and edges the camera past the evil monster, even looping the cable round it and giving it a tug to show how rooted it is. And he must be a gardening man because, almost to himself, he says something that chills the heart.

My own gardening skills are limited and the pleasure I get from the garden in Yorkshire has always been mitigated by my almost Manichaean attitude to plants, which I divide into good and evil, with the evil obvi
ously weeds, thistles, dandelions, bindweed and a particularly stubborn resident of our garden, ground elder. I see ground elder as a nineteenth-century evangelist saw sin, something to be rooted out wherever it breaks the surface. The trouble, though, with ground elder is that it doesn't always break the surface, spreading through the soil and strangling the roots of neighbouring plants, and weedkiller and meticulous sifting of the soil notwithstanding, never to be wholly eradicated.

So when, having tugged the polyp to no purpose, he mutters, ‘Ground elder', I know that I am doomed. When I'm dressed he comes to see me off.

‘I imagine you're the sort of person who can cope,' he says. I imagine that, too, though it remains to be seen.

‘It's about the size of the average rock bun. It will wait a week but not a month.'

Still half cut from the Valium, I write a cheque for the
£
800 bill, noting at the desk that the receptionist finds it hard to look at me and that I, in my turn, feel shame that I have somehow failed.

When I came home that afternoon, for all the shock and the reeling anxiety and the collapse of any imaginable future, there was, nevertheless, a feeling, too, that this was what I had been waiting for all my life. Waiting for in my mother's life and my father's and always in my own.

This makes me sound more morbid than I am. It was just that of all the ways any of us might go, cancer has always seemed the likeliest because most often met with. And it was more likely than I then knew.

I had known that there was some family history of bowel cancer as my father's brother had died of it, and I knew, too, that it was something my father feared. It was only later, after I'd been operated on, in fact, that I found that he had reason to fear it because his father had died of bowel cancer too. However, my father seldom talked of it and an aunt, one of whose regular topics of conversation was that ‘cancer was in the family', he thought morbid and self-dramatising. His reticence was understandable, though in the light of what happened to me thirty years later, misplaced. And even in the sixties, when my uncle died, the familial nature of
bowel cancer was not a great deal emphasised and the notion that some forms of cancer might run in families tended to be thought of as hypochondria.

However, this rock bun I was sequestering was not hypochondria and, distraught though I was, I noted that there was some small satisfaction in being able to ring my GP over what was not, as was so often the case, a triviality or an ailment I was imagining. This was real. ‘Steady,' I wrote in my diary. It's what Dad used to say to us children when we were coming down the steps of a tram or waiting to cross the road. ‘Steady!'

My GP recommended that I see John Northover, Senior Surgeon at St Mark's Hospital and head of the colorectal unit of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. Though he was an NHS surgeon and in private practice, living in Camden I was obviously outside his catchment area for the NHS, for which, in any case, there was a waiting list. Even his private list was oversubscribed, and it was only because a vacancy occurred at the last minute that I was able to be operated on within a week, and in the specialist colorectal unit of St Mark's, Northwick Park.

There is no doubt in my mind that it was the skill of John Northover and the expedition of the operation that saved my life or, since I am still in remission, saved it so far, and certainly for five years. At the time, this seemed an unlikely prognosis. Although the cancer was found to be quite compact, and had not yet breached the wall of the bowel, unseen on the scan beforehand a small patch of cancer had begun on the liver, and traces were found in one of the nearby lymph glands.

The outlook did not seem cheerful and Mr Northover gave me, with chemotherapy, a fifty-fifty chance of recovery, odds which I think I knew at the time were probably overstated for my benefit. Still, the operation was uneventful and before and afterwards I remained uncharacteristically cheerful. As indeed did every doctor I came into contact with.

‘He's very positive,' I wrote in my diary. ‘Sometimes one wonders why anyone ever dies of this disease, everybody's always so hopeful.' Still, cheerful or not, I did not at that time, July 1997, expect to last more than a couple of years.

But we managed jokes.

‘All I ask,' said Rupert, my partner, ‘is that you don't follow [the Murdoch-Murdoch] Dennis Potter's example and christen the cancer Rupert.'

Jokes or no jokes, in some ways the diagnosis of a life-threatening disease is easier for the patient to bear than his or her loved ones, who have to stand by and watch it happen. The positive thinking which the conventional wisdom requires of a cancer patient was easier for me (who had at least something to do, even if it was only to undergo surgery). Had I been cast as help or support I would have found it hard to disguise my anxiety. Rupert, on the other hand, seemed never other than cheerful and gave no hint of what he must have been going through, an impeccable performance in a role that is largely unsung, but which must be played out every day in thousands of households, suddenly stricken with mortal illness.

Various entries from my diary:

There were unlooked-for bonuses:

In the few weeks that elapsed between the operation in early July and the beginning of chemotherapy in August, I made some enquiries about alternative therapy. These weren't systematic or unduly conscientious; I had made up my mind to undertake the precautionary chemotherapy and, while I had no intention of signing up for the full range of holistic and dietary therapies that were on offer, I did feel, after talking to my GP, that homeopathy might help. The oncologist, while dubious about the alternative therapies, had no objection to homeopathy and, on the recommendation of the wife of a friend, who had had breast cancer, I made an appointment at a reputable complementary health clinic in Harley Street, simply in order to explain the situation and arrange some homeopathy.

The clinic was plainly busy, the only appointment available at seven in the morning. The doctor who interviewed me told me that he had him
self been a conventional therapist, and so was well placed to assess such claims as were made for conventional cancer treatment and, in particular, chemotherapy. I explained, though, that I'd decided on a course of chemotherapy, and simply wanted it to run in conjunction with some homeopathy, expecting him, in the circumstances, to soft-pedal any understandable misgivings he himself might have about such treatment. Not a bit of it. He proceeded to pour scorn on chemotherapy, the benefits of which he said were unproven, and when I didn't budge, rather sulkily conducted some finger-tip tests, which I took to be to do with the homeopathy, but done in such a perfunctory fashion I'm not sure he thought much of the point of this either. People kept coming in with whom he chatted, and throughout treated the whole business so casually and with such a disregard for my predicament, and presumed agony of mind, that it reminded me of the arrogant and unconcerned conventional doctors one used to come across thirty years ago.