Slowing Down (24 page)

When we’d been planning that show, the director took Spike and me out to lunch. In a fruit bowl on the table was a beautiful green and yellow striped melon. This shifted Spike into his William Blake-ish, idiot-savant gear, another facet I found perfectly resistible. ‘How beautiful that melon is,’ he started. ‘Isn’t it a proof that Goddy exists?’ (‘Goddy’ was Spike’s equivalent of Blake’s ‘Nobodaddy’ or Auden’s use of ‘She’; in his case to enrol God in the ranks of camp belief.)

Less and less as I grow older do I bother to argue with believers unless what they are supporting is really suspect,
like forbidding pessaries or divorce – but that melon somehow got to me.

‘But if we weren’t sitting here,’ I began, ‘or the melon was in another restaurant or on the vine, we wouldn’t see it at all, and couldn’t assert that its beauty, about which the melon itself is completely unaware, proved anything at all.’

Spike conceded, but very grumpily. I don’t think he’d taken in my argument at all. For him ‘Goddy’ was still up there. It didn’t augur well for the evening ahead.

I think a lot of trouble came, despite his own successes, from his jealousy of the worldwide fame of his fellow Goon, Peter Sellers. Actually Sellers himself was a neurotic, but it did nothing for Spike’s own misery.

I can’t resist a groan-making Van Gogh joke.

GAUGUIN: Would you like a drink, Vincent?

VAN GOGH: No thanks, Paul, I’ve got one ear.

At Simpson’s, after our rather heavy, but good lunch, Richard calls for silence to introduce the speaker or speakers. There is a mike, so even I can hear. It’s usually, but not always, a free plug for authors who’ve just had, or are about to have, books published, and an entertainment for us elderly punters. If they are amusing, and Richard takes trouble to establish they can be, we, made tolerant from food and drink, laugh like anything.

When that’s all over, we slowly drift or hobble away.

These lunches are not only held in London, some are in the provinces: Edinburgh during the Festival, for instance
and elsewhere, like Oxford during the book festival, and points north.

But I haven’t been to one of those, too much of an effort for an old creaky, so I stick to the Strand. I have, however, been a speaker there when my naval memoirs
Rum, Bum and Concertina
came out. I was quite rude and got a lot of ribald laughter, but at the end a furious and pompous old citizen came and abused me for telling tales out of Stowe. ‘You’re a disgrace to the school,’ he shouted, red-faced and spitting, ‘and a disgrace to J. F. Roxburgh.’ That was the headmaster, whom, unlike some, I adored. He naturally had faults: he was very snobbish and extremely tactless in his handling of the staff, most of them, in wartime, hauled reluctantly out of retirement. He was also wonderful with the boys, and although he was possibly a repressed homosexual, and was so described by Evelyn Waugh, I don’t think, at Stowe at any rate, he ever laid a well-manicured finger on any of the pupils. His ideal, I would say, was a very beautiful, very clever Lord. I was none of these things, but we got along well enough. He called me ‘Garje’.

Well, as he appeared in the first chapter of my book, I spoke of him affectionately but lightly. That is particularly what infuriated my red-faced contemporary. ‘Insulting J. F.,’ he shouted at me several times. There was no reasoning with him, so I told him to piss off and eventually, still cursing and muttering, he did.

I bet J. F. didn’t give him six on the bare bum. With me he was in a position where, for scholastic political reasons, he had to. After the beating he told me to jump about in the passage outside his ravishing Gothic quarters and, when it stopped hurting, to come in and have a sherry. Typical of
him, but I was lucky I did develop a liking for taking around a bottle of Tio Pepe to the rooms occupied by a dominatrix.

As it happens, I do quite frequently knock back a sherry before we walk or totter in for the excellent
Oldie
luncheon and sparkling speakers put before us by the now admirable, new-born Richard Ingrams.

Simple pleasures, then, all at given intervals, all largely peopled by my own contemporaries. There are other pleasures certainly, events which delight me, sometimes to my surprise – an annual party given by the writer and critic John Gross, to which he invites everybody who has entertained him that year; mixed age groups from the aged George Weidenfeld, my first publisher, to some young and glamorous women, but best of all, auld acquaintances whom I’ve never brought to mind, but am delighted to see again and to join as we swig a cup of kindness yet. Diana goes to that party and so does Venetia, but then so do many I never ordinarily get in touch with largely due to my indolence. And there are other unexpected treats.

But also there are past pleasures which are no longer available. I’ll list them now, certainly regretfully, but in my day I got (and in my memory still do) a great deal of pleasure from them and during a particularly rich period too.

First the theatre. Deafness is my gaoler here. As you have read, when I had my hearing test I could register all the Big Ben notes but nothing over a certain pitch and ski-slope deafness was diagnosed. At first I was delighted with my hearing-aid but gradually I became disillusioned. Cars, lorries and low-flying planes seemed incredibly noisy and, worse, I
could hear men or deep-voiced lesbians better than straight women. Ah, I thought to myself, that’s why I can hear men and butch dykes, but not quiet, well-spoken women – or even noisy ones. Still, I learn to live with it in ordinary life; but I began to find the theatre impossible.

This didn’t happen immediately, I just thought method acting was to blame, but then, as my hearing got worse, I would have had difficulty hearing Sarah Siddons or Bernhardt. Women, you see, always women.

I used to go to the theatre quite often with Venetia and it was with her I finally had to admit defeat. We went to
Les Liaisons dangereuses
. I knew the book well and was really looking forward to seeing it on the stage, especially as all the critics had spoken well of it. Well, the ski-slope defeated me. I could hear the louche but eventually repentant young man more or less perfectly but when the wicked countess was hatching her evil plots – nothing. It was as if it were either a monologue for him or she was appearing on television with the sound off. I had to own up, I’d had the theatre.

So have I never visited a playhouse again? Musicals, if I want to see them, I can just about handle because the book is often so idiotic it doesn’t matter. Then, if I know a play really well, I can follow it from memory.
Macbeth
and
Hamlet
, for example. How right, and in my case useful, was the old lady who’d never been to the theatre before and saw
Hamlet
at her very first visit. Afterwards she said that she hadn’t realized Shakespeare was so full of quotations. Above all, though,
Henry IV, Parts 1
and
2
are no trouble at all because when I was still in the Navy I used to come up to London and go to the New Theatre where the Old Vic company were appearing in repertory and – what seemed to me then
bad luck – it was always the two Henrys which I caught, oh at least four times. Mind you, as the cast for each play starred Ralph Richardson as Falstaff and Laurence Olivier as Hotspur, I was always enchanted.

Having left school far too early, Diana later decided to take an exam in English Literature to prove she could pass, and
Henry IV
was the set Shakespearian play, so I was constantly asking her the sort of questions she might have to answer and we drove over to Stratford to see it. It never seemed boring to me, however
déjà vu
. I’d always had an ambition to play the old drunken ne’er-do-well, but never did and now I couldn’t because I wouldn’t be able to hear my cues and certainly not the prompter.

For a long time after the war I saw everything worth seeing – Ken Tynan’s reviews in the
Observer
were a great help here: the first production of
Look Back in Anger
for a start, and also most productions at the Royal Court, including Nigel Dennis’s
The Making of Moo
, an anti-religious play about the invention of God to keep the natives in one of our colonies quiet. John Osborne himself played the governor, who felt it might be effective to invent some kind of communion – ‘Potato crisps and tomato juice’ was his suggestion. I saw
Waiting for Godot
several times and, taking a contra-Tynan, pro-Brechtian stand, Ionesco at the Arts Theatre and all his plays up to
Rhinoceros
(the least good, I felt) and Arthur Miller and early Pinter and Tennessee Williams, and and and… If there’s a revival of any of these nowadays and I know them well enough I sometimes go to see them with Diana’s and my friend Susannah Clapp, the current theatre critic of the
Observer
.

Finally, if I’m at the cottage I quite often go to the famous
Watermill Theatre, a converted mill. (I love Bagnor, our village, because it has a theatre at one end of the small road facing a little stream, and a pub at the other. No church, but also – the one blot on the landscape – no shop, but it’s no distance to one on my granny-mobile.)

The Watermill has the advantage of being quite small, with very good acoustics and a kind of halter you put round your neck to make it all louder. It’s not perfect but better than my two aids. Besides the theatre often does musicals, and some are so good they tour or transfer. Anyway as a local I feel I should support this admirable and unfunded institution, rather like grandees feel obliged to go to church in the country.

Still the theatre in general is in the past.

So, too, although this may surprise you, is the cinema. Of course, it’s loud enough, but I can’t manage to grasp what they’re booming on about. I can more or less date my escalating deafness from the films I could still hear. They were as recent as
Dirty Harry
or
Desperately Seeking Susan
, but to speak of past films is in itself a boring trap, except when talking to those equally given to nostalgia. Today I don’t even know the names or appearances of recent stars, whereas those glamorous creatures whose framed photographs lined the staircases of the Odeon or the Forum still haunt me. I loved
film noir
, horror movies, comedies, especially if they featured W. C. Fields or Laurel and Hardy. I loved the ‘dainty teas’ they used to provide in the cinema café and even the Wurlitzer organ with its ever-changing coloured lights.

I was for a time the film critic of the
Observer
, after David Astor elevated me from TV, which actually I enjoyed more. It was the beginning of the seventies and so many of the
films I saw, not all but a burgeoning majority, were real bummers. Or was it just me casting an over-golden light on the screens of my youth and the Hollywood gods and goddesses who appeared on them? It’s possible.

Before leaving the one-and-nines, I must emphasize, as no doubt I have already, that my top favourite director, from his first film,
An Andalusian Dog
, right through to his last,
That Obscure Object of Desire
, is, was and ever will be Luis Buñuel: his lack of sentimentality and absence of stylistic tricks, his consistent black humour, his knowledge of human frailty and frustrated love and their effects, his consistent atheism (‘I’m still an atheist, thank God,’ he once told a reporter), his knowledge of the evil bred from poverty, his very being. For his sake I’d face the devil (in which he didn’t believe and nor do I) himself. He went deaf too and drank too much. I worship him and all his works.

I suppose theatre and cinema are my main losses, or at least those I most regret. I can’t walk very far so I don’t walk very far. I need a banister, a wall or an arm to go up or down stairs, I forget more and more, and even when it comes to what I used to be able to do – change a fuse or send a fax – something goes wrong. But these are just the inevitable punishments for having lived a long time and also a hedonistic life. I don’t regret that at all. I feel pretty good. I’ve a rich memory bank to draw on and I don’t care too much what happened yesterday afternoon.

I’ll have a drink now and a fag and then fall up the stairs to bed. I’m going to Brighton tomorrow to attend the unveiling of a statue to its native son, Max Miller – ‘No, listen, listen…’

Envoi

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.

Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;

I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;

It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Walter Savage Landor

I read this poem in an anthology at school. While certainly not great poetry it touched me then and still touches me now. In my case the first line is not completely true – I have striven with a few although not many – but the rest will do. If they so decide (by that time a matter of indifference to me), it would make a suitable conclusion to a memorable bunfight. Perhaps my son Tom, a trained actor after all, could read it. Even so, in itself, it isn’t sufficient to end the book.

There are, for one thing, several people whom I have loved, admired or believe have influenced me and yet are either not or very little in evidence in the text. These do not include those who fulfil all the conditions but who I – or if not I, others – have written about at length elsewhere.

Even so, how to celebrate these figures without printing one of those unread lists found in charity programmes or proceeding at breakneck speed after films or TV documentaries? I have been much exercised by the question but an answer came to me when I was reading a book of early poems by John Betjeman and came across one he called