Untold Stories (44 page)

23
January
. To Sotheby's, where I'm reminded of a lunch given for Alec Guinness in 1989 when I sat next to Lord Charteris, the Provost of Eton and previously the Queen's Private Secretary. Talking of
A Question of
Attribution
, then playing at the National, he remarked: ‘Of course, the question everybody asks is whether the Queen knew and whether Blunt knew the Queen knew. The truth of the matter is they
both
knew – but, of course, that's not to be said.'

At the time I remember thinking this was sensationally indiscreet (and it would certainly have made the newspapers). Now it's tame stuff. But thinking about Charteris, who was a funny man, one realises that it's much harder if you have a sense of humour not to be indiscreet; the temptation to hang discretion and make jokes or be witty is too great. Secrets are best kept by those with no sense of humour.

2
February
. A letter from a reader comparing her experiences of evacuation with mine. She was sent to Grantham and says that Alderman
Roberts, Mrs Thatcher's father, was thought to be in the black market and that Maggie used to hang out of her bedroom window and spit on the other children.

12
February
. A shoddy programme about the conviction of Jonathan King for offences against young men dating back twenty-five years and more. While it features some of the police involved, it manages not to ask the pertinent question: if these fifteen-year-old boys had been fifteen-year-old girls and romping round in Rolls-Royces even more famous than those of Jonathan King, the Beatles' say, or the Rolling Stones', would the police have been quite so zealous in trawling for the supposed victims from a quarter of a century ago? King does himself no favours but I prefer his defiance and want of remorse to the odiously caring voice of the man who presents the programme. As it is, a succession of sad middle-aged men are encouraged to blame their failure in life on these ancient wanks, a service for which the state will now reward them far more munificently than King ever did.

16
February
. Man on a mobile opposite takes a piss by the wall, talking throughout. I wonder whether he tells the person he is talking to that he's currently having a piss and, if it's a woman, if this is some sort of come-on.

28
February
. Spike Milligan dies and the nation's laughter-makers queue up to testify to what it was that made his talents unique, how irreplaceable is his inspired lunacy, and how they personally have benefited from his instructive anarchy. All of which is, I suppose, true, though comedians are never reluctant to provide such posthumous attestations of one another's genius. It happened when Peter Cook died and with the same maudlin affection. ‘Dear Cooky'. ‘Dear Spike'. The necessary element of suffering, the cost always sought for in the deaths of comics, and which in Peter's case came with the drink, is here supplied by mental illness (‘No less than 12 nervous breakdowns', ‘the price he had to pay').

There is no doubt that Milligan was very funny and inspired, particu
larly in the
Q5
TV programmes he did in the 1970s, though his verbal dexterities I found less engaging and with unfortunate effects on some of his disciples, e.g. John Lennon's
In His Own Write
. The disciples were always the problem,
The Goon Show
was very funny, the people who liked it (and knew it by heart) less so.

16
March
. In the afternoon to the new British Galleries at the V&A, particularly to look at one of the surviving copes from the set of vestments given to Westminster Abbey by Henry VII. Anthony Symondson has written about its subsequent history in a piece in the
Catholic Herald
and how, via a seventeenth-century second-hand dealer in London and the Catholic college at St Omer, the cope eventually ended up at Stonyhurst. The vestments were designed apparently by Torrigiano, though this is not said on the label nor is a link made with the bust of Henry VII, also by Torrigiano, in a neighbouring showcase. Even the most limited imagination would find this cope evocative, though; worn presumably at Henry VII's funeral and possibly, too, at the coronation of Henry VIII, it then went with the young King to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Smuggled out to Flanders in the seventeenth century, whence it eventually came back to Stonyhurst, it must have been seen if not worn by Gerard Manley Hopkins, who taught there.

Apropos Henry VII, what happened between 1485 and 1500? How did bold Harry Tudor of Bosworth Field turn into the crabbed penny-pinching accountant that is his usual representation?

24
March
. A film beginning with a man being shepherded through a darkened hall; glimpses of paintings, a shaft of light on a plaster ceiling, the gleam of armour but so dark (lines of light around the shutters) that it's hard to see anyone's face. A distant murmur of sound. Odd muttered directions. ‘Steady, a step here,' the man steered round sheeted furniture and up uncarpeted stairs. Then the group comes to a stop. Someone knocks on the shutter and it is thrown open, light floods in, there is the sudden roar of the crowd. Charles I steps out onto the scaffold.

30
March
. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday's
Independent
by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley's line on himself: namely, that he was only brought into
Beyond the Fringe
as a musical afterthought. In fact he came as the acknowledged star of the Oxford cabaret circuit, and right through the run of
Beyond the Fringe
remained the darling of the audience. Cheerful, extrovert and on his own musical ground very sure of himself, he only started to play up the melancholy and portray himself as a tortured clown, a line journalists are always happy to encourage, after he'd teamed up with Peter and subsequently gone into analysis or psychotherapy.

Obviously Dudley did get sadder as he got older and coping with Peter's drunkenness can have been no joke. But portraying himself as shy, put-upon and intimidated by Jonathan, Peter and to a lesser extent myself was a construction that came later. On and off the stage during
Beyond the
Fringe
he was sunny, social and effortlessly successful. A sad clown he wasn't.

5
April
. I persevere with Sebald but the contrivance of it, particularly his un-peopling of the landscape, never fails to irritate. ‘It was already afternoon, six in the evening when I reached the outskirts of Lowestoft. Not a living soul was about in the long street.' In Southwold ‘everybody who had been out for an evening stroll was gone. I felt as if I were in a deserted theatre.' Maybe East Anglia is like this (or more like it than West Yorkshire, say) but Sebald seems to stage-manage both the landscape and the weather to suit his (seldom cheerful) mood. Kafka has been invoked in this connection, but Kafka dealt with the world as he found it and didn't dress it up (or down) to suit him.

‘The heights of epiphanic beauty normally only encountered in the likes of Proust' is another comparison, and equally unwarranted because there is no one more grounded in the everything that is the case than Proust. Once noticed, Sebald's technique seems almost comic. ‘Never yet on my many visits … have I found anyone about.' The fact is, in Sebald
nobody is ever about. This may be poetic but it seems to me a short cut to significance.

6
April, Yorkshire
. The new organic shop in the village continues to do well, the walk down the lane to the Nissen hut always a pleasure even in the bitterest weather. There are sheep in the adjoining field, the occasional bull and (despite the bypass) a lovely feeling of open country. The shop has fresh-picked salad with more to be gathered while you wait, three or four kinds of apple plus sprouts on the stalk that look so sculpted and swag-like they could have inspired Grinling Gibbons. Today there are one or two customers in the shop. Everyone speaks, a little too readily for me sometimes, this friendliness engendered by the nature of the enterprise. It's a kind of
camaraderie biologique
. In the same way, halted on my bike at traffic lights I will occasionally chat to another cyclist, cycling a similar undertaking with a creed and an agenda and its own
esprit de corps de
vélos
.

9
April
. The Queen Mother interred.

Scene: Windsor. A vault. A dusty coffin. A flagstone in the roof is drawn back and a new coffin is slowly lowered down beside it. The flagstone is replaced and there is silence. Voice from old coffin: ‘Y-y-y-you've t-t-taken y-y-your t-t-time.'

5
May, Yorkshire
. Michael Bryant has died, who I'd known was ill but had never enquired after, from superstition largely, hoping he would pull through. Sardonic, sceptical, tough, he was not an easy man to praise and so much a staple of National Theatre productions and so consistently good that when it came to honours, national or theatrical, he was overlooked. True, he got the CBE in 1988, but not the knighthood he deserved because he was too unshowy. As a young actor (e.g. with Judi Dench in John Hopkins's
Talking to a Stranger
) I thought him dull but he got better and better, though it would have been hard to say so to his face. Not – emphatically not – a university actor like Jacobi or McKellen, he used to call me (not to my face) ‘College' Bennett. His was a non-commissioned life and,
of course, a straight one. The list of roles he took on and the productions he was part of are a history of the Old Vic and the National Theatre over the last forty years and the quality and sheer volume of his work bestowed on him a mantle of wisdom and experience no one else at the NT could touch.

25
May
. Thinking about Dudley M. since his death, I'm struck by how little was said at the time of his musical abilities. In particular his talents as a jazz pianist. This would have come as no surprise to him as his success as a comedian and subsequently as a movie star put his musical accomplishment in the shade; jazz became marginal.

Something of a prodigy when young but with no specialist musical background, Dudley landed what I imagine was a strongly contested organ scholarship at Magdalen. He was a working-class boy but there was no trace of it in his voice or indeed of any class at all, though the fact that his parents had kitted him out with three Christian names may indicate their ambitions for him. This was a time, with boys anyway, when two initials were the standard, boys equipped with three more likely to be from a public school or one of the grander grammar schools. But he was D. S. J. Moore and without it being the least bit ‘put on' there was nothing in his voice to betray that he was from Dagenham. This may well have helped at Magdalen, which was at that time socially quite smart as well as being academically grand, and though in later life he tended to represent his time at Oxford as uneasy and not altogether happy, he was popular and gregarious, taking part in college and university drama productions as both actor and musician.

Modest and unassuming, he was immensely appealing and, of course, always very funny but with regard to his area of expertise never very forthcoming. Presumably he talked to fellow musicians about jazz and its techniques but it was not a subject that came up much when he teamed up with the rest of us in
Beyond the Fringe
. We all professed to like jazz, though it was not as modish as it had been for the generation of Larkin and Amis a few years before. Jazz was no longer the anthem of youth and
disaffection. Now there was Elvis, Bill Haley and even our own Cliff Richard. Still, we would go along to hear Dudley play, particularly when Peter Cook's The Establishment opened in New York, where Dudley alternated at the piano with Teddy (‘Fly Me to the Moon') Wilson. But knowing nothing of its history or development and never having listened to it much, I was baffled and bored by jazz, while Jonathan Miller's experience of it didn't stretch much beyond undergraduate hops where it served as a background to his vigorous though uncoordinated attempts to jive.

Perhaps because he was the youngest of the four of us, Peter's lack of interest in jazz was the most obvious, though he would later have heard a good deal more of Dudley's playing than Jonathan or I did. When in old clips of
Not Only … But Also
Dudley is seen playing or parodying jazz as the play-out at the finish, Peter will sometimes be standing by the piano with a sophisticated smile, clicking his fingers to what he hopes may be the beat. This was both a pose and a piss-take but it came closer to the reality than Peter would perhaps have liked to admit. Despite their long working relationship, he continued to know nothing of jazz and, like the condescending figure at the piano, always slightly disparaged it. His music was pop not jazz; he would have liked to have been a pop singer and fancied himself as such, hence his truly dreadful imitation of Elvis Presley.

None of which is of much interest except to make plain that whatever the public's appreciation of his musical talent, Dudley was nevertheless corralled for four years with three other performers who didn't share his enthusiasm and then for ten or a dozen years more with Peter, who regarded his music as at best an interlude between the comedy. So when later in life with that slightly aggrieved air with which he discussed his early career Dudley complained of being unappreciated by his colleagues in
Beyond the Fringe
, this was partly what it was about. He was a very funny instinctive comedian but he was not a writer and, no good at one sort of language, he found that music, the language he was good at, was largely discounted. And when on chat shows and interviews he gave his
always defensive account of himself, complaining of the inferior status he had been accorded, particularly by Peter, music was at the heart of it.

Of course, words and music are not the only languages and at this time, when we were all in our twenties, what ranked him above the rest of us and indeed anyone I've ever come across since, was his sexual success. This, unlike his musical accomplishment, was the subject of constant discussion and enquiry and it was a topic on which, while not boastful, Dudley was always frank, informative and very funny.