The Blue Touch Paper

In the summer of 2010, I was approached by the estate of Terence Rattigan to write a companion piece to
The Browning Version
. Traditionally, this well-known one-act play had been presented in a double bill with an inept farce called
Harlequinade
. It would be enlivening, the estate thought, if Rattigan's popular piece about masochism and manipulation could for once be matched with something a little less facetious.

I loved the idea of writing about my time at Lancing College in the 1960s, so that Rattigan's version of his schooldays could sit alongside mine on the same bill. Normally a full-length play might take me a year to write, but on this occasion I finished a one-act play in four weeks. All writers dream of a moment when your subconscious dictates and you are able to act as nothing more than a stenographer. It had happened to me only once before. On some nights, I would wake at three in the morning and scribble in a bedside notebook. My wife would stir and ask me what I was doing. âWriting tomorrow's dialogue,' I would say, before falling asleep.

The result,
South Downs
, was partly fiction. The plot was made up and so were the characters. But the ambience was true to my memory of attendance at an Anglo-Catholic school fifty years previously. The subject, essentially, was the need to fake a confidence you don't feel. It was about the price of pretending you understand when you don't. Everything about the
play seemed to delight me, the cast and the director, Jeremy Herrin. Unusually, it was rehearsed and performed without a moment of strain. Anna Chancellor, who played the crucial part of Belinda Duffield, a West End actress who visits the school and thereby transforms the life of the fourteen-year-old hero, remarked that when she first read
South Downs
, it was as if the play had never been brought into being. It simply was. William Empson, praised for his apparent fluency, once said, âThe careless ease goes in last.' But on this occasion it had gone in at the time.

After so many years of anxious struggle, it was an unusual experience for a dramatist to be handed a play for free. I asked myself why it had happened this time and not before. But I also had to answer letters from many contemporaries, most of whom I had not spoken to or heard from for half a century. They, like me, had spent recent years haunted by everything unresolved from their distant adolescence. I kept thinking of William Faulkner: âThe past is never dead. It's not even past.' Or as my friend Wallace Shawn observed, âThey warn you life's short. They don't warn you it's simultaneous.'

Up till then I had taken it for granted that I had lived through a period of little historical interest. Because I was born in 1947, I had spent most of my life feeling that I had missed the main event. The Second World War had ended before I was born, even though over and again it provided the setting for my imagination. But when I wrote
South Downs
, set in the early 1960s, I realised what an extraordinary distance we had travelled. Its world seemed to me closer than yesterday, but for many of the cast it was unrecognisable. I had to explain to the young actors that I had been born into a country the majority of whose population at least professed to believe in God. They also believed
in their empire, their institutions, their democracy, their public figures and the essential decency of their civilisation. In particular parts of the country, belief in socialism was also deep-rooted and widespread. Sixty years later, those same people, or their descendants, appeared to have lost faith in everything except private virtue. They ascribed positive qualities to their friends but to almost nobody in large enterprises or public life. How on earth could so radical a change have occurred and how could it have gone so little remarked while it happened?

When writing plays, I've preferred to steer clear of direct autobiography. I may have plundered an incident or a remark, but rarely a storyline or a whole character. Writing about, for instance, the privatisation of the railways or the distribution of aid to the poor, I've tended to find inspiration in the external world. It's difference that has stimulated me, not similarity. So when surprised by a desire to record the circumstances of my own life, I felt a novice. I wanted to be expansive, to move where my memory took me, and I felt this could be best achieved not by writing prose, but by talking. A series of conversations over a year with Amy Raphael followed with the aim of discovering why it was so hard for my generation to put the past to bed. Using as a primary source her edited transcripts â to which, with her exceptional taste, knowledge and literary skill, she made an essential contribution â I have fashioned this book. If, as with my education at Lancing, I have already written about a particular time or place, I have felt free to draw lightly on that previous account.

My hope is to show how a lifelong engagement with two disparate art forms â film and theatre â may reflect at the same time on more diverse questions and on more intimate. This book is the story of my apprenticeship. It seeks to tell how a
young man became a dramatist, and to describe the cost and effect of that decision. There are many ways to become a writer and mine is just one. But I suspect certain aspects overlap with the experience of others. I made a series of peculiar choices, but they were in response to common problems.

In an opinion survey, one person in six said what they wanted most before they died was to write a memoir. All of us live lives where we are both large and small: large because of the intense focus of our self-attention â and small because, however fierce our concentration, the universe remains indifferent to us throughout. My life has been no different from anyone else's: both everything and nothing.

London, February 2015

You see, when one's young, one doesn't feel part of it, the human condition; one does things because they are not for good; everything is a rehearsal to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

SYBILLE BEDFORD

She Could Have Done Worse

When I was growing up nothing excited me more than getting lost. Walking bored me when I knew the way. Until I was twenty-one, my home was on the south coast, firstly in a modest flat up a hill in St Leonards, later in a semi-detached in Bexhill. But when we made our annual family trip to my maternal grandmother's in Paisley, my sport was to get on a bus, close my eyes and then get out. I was barely ten and I had no idea where I was. Sometimes I recognised Love Street, the home of the local football club, St Mirren, for whom my uncle Jimmy was a talent scout, but nothing else made sense to me. My grandmother Euphemia was furious when I got back two hours late for tea â in those days ham, lettuce, tomato and pork pie, followed by a lot of biscuits and cakes. This after a lunch of mince and tatties.

When I disappeared, nobody seemed overly concerned. Children vanished from time to time, that's what happened. A lower-middle-class childhood on the south coast of England in the 1950s became a distinctive mixture of freedom and repression. It was because children were encouraged to make their own way home from school that my nine-year-old friend Michael Richford and I encountered our first sex offender on the Downs, right next to the air-raid shelter which no one had bothered to demolish. The spectral predator was moustached, wearing a grey overcoat and a grey scarf. Our refusal to show him our penises did not seem to lessen his pleasure in showing us his. We two
boys hurried home, through the abundant nettles and brambles, up our separate back paths and past the hen-houses that lingered on beneath hedges at the ends of gardens for so many years after the war. Later we were taken by police to line-ups and asked, unsuccessfully, to identify various old men coming out of the Playhouse Cinema after a smoky matinee of
The Dam Busters
. But, in spite of all the dark parental huddles which followed on the incident, I was still allowed at thirteen to go on my own by train to London. Why? At fifteen I was hitch-hiking across England to Stratford in the hope of seeing Vanessa Redgrave in
The Taming of the Shrew
. At seventeen, I left for America. My mother wished me good luck, and no doubt she fretted, but at no point did she try to stop me. I was free. Later I read Nietzsche: âAll truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.'

Over the years I was to convince myself I'd had an unhappy childhood, though I would never have dared say so in public while my parents were alive. Even writing these words causes me a flush of shame. The very over-sensitivity which equips you to be a writer also makes being a writer agony. But in retroÂspect it's extraordinary how much licence my mother allowed to my sister and me. It goes without saying that after the Second World War, when dealing with their children, adults almost never stooped to our level. Down where we were, we looked up at all times. There was none of today's dippy celebration of children as little unfallen gods. We were not pushed self-importantly through the streets in thousand-pound chariots, scooping up croissants and ice creams on the way. Nobody told us we were wonderful. But on the other hand, even in the stifling atmosphere of suburbia, among those rows of silent, russet-bricked houses and identically tended lawns, adorned
with billowing washing lines, strawberry plants, runner beans and raspberry canes, we were granted a level of independence which now seems unimaginable.

Or was that simply because of my mother? Nancy Hare, as she came to be known, had been born Agnes Cockburn Gilmour just a decade into the twentieth century, and brought up as the middle child of three by fiercely puritanical parents who did their best to force upon her a poor opinion of herself. The result, in her mid-twenties, had been a nervous breakdown, precipitated perhaps by the feeling that she was never going to find a husband. She was tall, striking rather than beautiful, with looks which seem typical of their period. Her only escape from what we would now call low self-esteem was her flair for amateur dramatics. She had a good voice and a prized diploma in elocution. The family business was road haulage. Even in my youth, the men stood at lecterns and horses were maintained in stables and sent out on the roads, admittedly as a sort of tribute to past practices, but maintained nevertheless. My grandparents had been the first people in Paisley to own a car, but if that implied prosperity, then letting it show in any way beyond the motor-mechanical would have been frowned on, the subject of ceaseless comment from neighbours never reluctant to pass damning comments on each other. The family religion was judgement.

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