The Blue Touch Paper (42 page)

Our lives dismay us

We know no comfort

We have dreams of leaving

Everyone I know

Soon, Margaret and I would begin new lives. But for now I had done the only thing I knew how. For better or worse, forgive me, I had gone back to work.

Our Child Will Understand

1979 represented a low point for our whole family. When I was once asked by an interviewer if I had suffered for my art, I said yes, a good deal, but not nearly as much as those around me. We all had to get going again from a standing start, and with no momentum. I went off to Linden Gardens in the dingier part of Notting Hill, where, by spending every penny I had, I secured a deposit for a mortgage on a gloomy flat with a leaking skylight and resolved to live alone. On the floor above worked a prostitute who came downstairs one night with a knife between her shoulder blades. A dispute with her pimp. After a year of almost zero productiveness I went off to Australia for three weeks, having agreed to write for the 1982 Adelaide Festival. I calculated that I would force myself to finish a new play. If I failed . . . well, Australia was a long way away. On the trip home, I stopped over with Joe, aged seven, in Mumbai for a week and I was handed my subject. Disgracefully,
A Map of the World
remains to this day one of only a handful of plays in the English-speaking repertory with a leading part for an Indian actor. Roshan Seth played Victor Mehta, first in Adelaide and Sydney, then in London and later in New York. Margaret meanwhile had found a new job as Head of Drama at Central Television, where she commissioned and oversaw some standout television including
Made in Britain
and
Auf Wiedersehen Pet
.

Four years after it was written, Joe Papp gave way to the pressure of his friends and mounted
Plenty
, first off Broadway, and subsequently on, in a production stronger than the first. Papp said he only produced the play because he was so tired of people telling him to. He resented the fact that he had to go abroad to get the political writing he so badly wanted from American dramatists. Kate had by now acted on the feelings of misery England brought out in her and moved to New York to start over. Suddenly, with the Plymouth Theatre neon-lit by a sign reading ‘1983: The Year of Plenty', both of us were enjoying a delirious kind of open-hearted acceptance, unknown in England. As Kate said to me, ‘Even you can't pick a hole in this.' A subsequent film starring Meryl Streep on shining form brought the story to a much larger audience. But it wasn't until I went off to Brighton for four weeks in 1984 with Howard Brenton to write a play about a demented press magnate who is out to destroy everything in his sight that I began to feel some of my shattered confidence returning. One day, walking on the promenade and seeing Michael Heseltine a few feet away heading towards the Conservative Party conference, Howard remarked to me how easy it would be to take a pop at him. There was no visible security. Next day we woke to find the IRA had bombed the Grand Hotel. We rushed to the seafront to see its facade collapsed like a wedding cake. Margaret Thatcher's behaviour that morning, as she organised clothes from Marks and Spencer for her shell-shocked colleagues, was exemplary. As Howard said, ‘She may be a terrible prime minister, but she'd make a great tank commander.'

The production of
Pravda
was exhilarating, and for Howard and me it was our last collaboration. Thanks to a historic performance from Anthony Hopkins, we went out with a bang.
The play's subject matter – the undignified surrender of British journalists to Rupert Murdoch and Robert Maxwell – ensured that the guerrilla skirmishes both Howard and I had frequently engaged in with our skewed dystopian press were transformed by our theatrical declaration of war into outright bloody conflict. But it was too late for the newspapers to do much damage. Somehow my series of conversations with Howard in Brighton had not just resulted in a play. They had also cleared my head to unlock a steady flow of work. In less than ten years I would write
The Bay at Nice, The Secret Rapture, Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges, The Absence of War
and
Skylight
, all at an indecent speed which at one point would have been impossible.

I was particularly influenced by a letter from Philip Roth, who became a good friend in the years he spent living in London. I would often join him for lunch and be amazed that one of America's greatest novelists could be found eating most days in the Notting Hill branch of Spudulike.

Saw Pravda last night. You are lucky to have Mr Hopkins and he is lucky indeed to have you. I remember when I told you about the right-wing ideologues on the West Bank you mentioned the excitement of writing about a monster. Well, it's all there. Your excitement comes through in his incredible performance. I wish you'd write a play with only monsters. You are not a nice boy David and even if you persisting [sic] in pretending to be in Real Life, you should yield to the muses who know better than anyone, and stick to the wicked. I mean this and I'd be delighted to give you old Doc R's prescription any time you want to have a meal . . . Anyway, congratulations for this. I like these monsters you create
.

In 1989 I went to direct
The Secret Rapture
in New York, first at the Public Theater, then on Broadway. Immediately after it transferred to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre my father died in Bexhill Hospital. During his last years he had attempted something which would pass for intimacy. ‘Nobody tells you,' he said more than once, ‘nobody tells you what old age is going to be like. It's bloody awful.' I flew back to the UK after the opening of the play to console my mother, only to find news awaiting me that the play was to close after only ten days of full performances. Wallace Shawn advised me: ‘Broadway has very low standards, but somehow you don't even meet those.' At the weekend I flew back to New York to console the cast and to share sorrows with Joe Papp, who did not yet publicly admit to the cancer from which we all suspected he was suffering. Because he was contemplating the approach of his own mortality, my stillborn production devastated him as much as me. I was mortified to have disappointed him at such a moment. I flew home for my father's funeral in a cramped chapel outside Battle.

By the end of that year, it was clear that my mother was yielding to the Alzheimer's which had already shown itself while my father was alive. Nancy was letting go. We had an unhappy Christmas where I found her fully packed and dressed, sitting on the side of the bed waiting to go home, at 3 a.m., after just eight hours staying in my house. After Dad's death she was well looked after by the Botwrights, her loving neighbours in Newlands Avenue, but after a while they warned us they could no longer vouch for her safety. So we moved her first to a residential home in the Park in Nottingham, near where my sister lived, and afterwards, when the disorientation became more severe, to a nursing home. When we sold her house it seemed pathetically small, the tiny crucible of huge feeling. The
plumber to whom we sold it then arranged his surplus lavatory cisterns in rows in the back garden – a social offence for which he would have been run out of town in the 1950s. The world had changed, but Newlands Avenue had changed faster.

By 1991 Peggy Ramsay had long been prey to the same disease. She had persisted in going in to the office even though she had little idea what was happening, preferring to watch tennis on the television instead. Her identification with John McEnroe was by now complete. She loved him best for his hot temper, and most of all when he lost it. ‘People say he's aggressive, but Caravaggio
killed
his opponent at tennis.' When her secretary locked her in her room, saying she had to read a play – ‘This one's by David, you have to read it' – she was found a couple of hours later fast asleep on the sofa. Her loyal office had rung me in despair, saying that since I was one of only two people she trusted I might be able to persuade her to go into hospital. She loved me, it was up to me to protect her. She was refusing to go on the grounds that no one she knew who had ever gone into a hospital had ever come out. When I went to try and change her mind, she resisted me so fiercely that I said, very well, she could come and live in my house. Peggy leaned on my shoulder as I took her downstairs to the basement which I had prepared for her, but her condition deteriorated so rapidly that soon she was leaning on my shoulder again as I, feeling a traitor, led her into the hospital she dreaded. She'd been right. She died of bronchopneumonia within a few days. A few weeks later I came home at midnight to find twenty-six messages on my answering machine, all from different people, to tell me that Joe Papp had gone. Coming so soon after Peggy, it was unbearable. Caryl Churchill rang me to say, ‘David, everyone who believes in us is dying.'

In the middle of all this, I met Nicole Farhi. I walked into a party following the first night of a play, and across the room I saw a woman whose eyes laughed at me as though she knew me already. She was a fashion designer whose combination of integrity and style defied everything that is usually implied by the word ‘fashion'. She was also the cousin of my old friend Moris Farhi, who had acted in
How Brophy Made Good
. Five years previously I had written a film in which an Englishwoman sits envious and content in the bosom of a French Jewish family in Paris eating
pot au feu
, finding in them a warmth she cannot find in herself. On the eve of my marriage, watching a French Jewish family tuck into the seafood spaghetti, I realised that as so often, I was writing something, then living it. But unlike Gustav Mahler writing music about the death of his children, then having it happen, or Philip Roth giving his hero a heart attack and soon having one himself, my artistic prefiguring was wholly benign.

My mother came down from Nottingham for our wedding, for what was to be her penultimate visit to London. She was so charming and gentle to everyone that the other guests did not notice she was ill. In the coming years, during which my sister Margaret was close to her, it was hard for us to give her a birthday party every February and know that afterwards only Margaret and I would remember it. On one visit in June 1998, I wrote down exactly what Mum said to me, a series of remarks in the form of a Beckett monologue, which nevertheless revealed exactly where her wandering mind was focused.

I'm married to a nice, dear man
.

Go quickly and I'll say nothing and you'll say nothing and our child will understand
.

I get myself so dead I really can't play with these things
.

I can't get a name to give to you
.

Did you have a bad father?

I've got the money but I haven't got the money
.

But on occasions, Nancy could also rage. The most insistent theme of her conversation for many years was her desire to leave Woodthorpe Manor nursing home and go back to live with her mother in Paisley. She had had enough. She wanted to go home. Only Euphemia understood her. When she first began to ask for this, she would apologise afterwards. In the back of the car after a lunch with Margaret and me at which she had asked for little else, she said, ‘I'm sorry but I have to say these things.' Later, however, she ceased to apologise. One day when she was sitting on a bench alone with me in the park, I had said repeatedly that, sadly, I could not take her back to live with her mother because her mother was no longer there. On this occasion Mum turned to me and, very unusually, looked me straight in the eye. ‘Well then damn you. Damn you to hell.'

On 7 November 2001 Mum was given a flu jab. The following day, she was alone in her room when she lay down on her bed and died. She was ninety-one. For her funeral eight days later, Bill Paterson gave me his recording of Robert Burns's poem ‘Ae Fond Kiss', which includes the lines:

I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,

Naething could resist my Nancy
.

In my eulogy, I remembered how deliberately she'd given my sister and me the freedom which she herself had been denied in her upbringing. It was as if she had stepped aside in order that
we might go ahead. Mum wanted us to have something she never had – or feared to have. ‘There is in the narrowness of her expectation something which burnt peculiarly bright, peculiarly pure. In modesty, she found grace. Expecting less than us, she somehow therefore gave more. If the struggle of life is to hold on to what is best in us, Mum won that struggle triumphantly.'

After the wake, Nicole and I drove back to London in silence. The formative events described in this book reached their proper conclusion on a day of streaming winter sunshine on the outskirts of Nottingham. Always expecting trouble round the next corner and absolutely certain I will miss the flight when only ninety minutes early at the airport, I am my mother's son. In my recessiveness and apprehension of the wine waiter's disapproval – ‘And a nice Bordeaux' – am I my father's? How can I tell? To answer that question I would have to have known him, and the chance has gone. Almost a hundred years ago my dad stole walnuts under the spreading tree in Chigwell. Today I walk the hills and imagine new ideas.

Acknowledgements

PLATE SECTION CREDITS

Howard Brenton © Snoo Wilson

Pen and ink drawing © Richard Cork, 1966

Royal Court: the playwrights of the 1971 season ©
Sunday Times

DH with Tennessee Williams, Manhattan, 1978 © Arnold Weissberger

Band and vocals for
Teeth 'n' Smiles
, 1975 © Roger Perry

Fanshen
, the first production © John Haynes/Lebrecht Music & Arts

Bill Paterson, in
Licking Hitler
, 1977 © BBC Photo Library

Kate Nelligan as Susan Traherne in
Plenty
; National Theatre, London, April 1978 © Nobby Clark / ArenaPAL

DH with Kate Nelligan,
Dreams of Leaving
, 1979 © Nobby Clark / ArenaPAL