Untold Stories (51 page)

Now it's the ‘Internationale' and I get down from the golf cart and stand, a little self-consciously, astonished how many of this mild, unmilitant gathering raise their right arm in a clenched fist as they sing: a young man in front with a baby on one arm raises the other, and old husbands and wives clasp hands and raise arms together, and two boys, like Julian Bell and John Cornford, who've been lying out on the lawn get to their feet and sing – and moreover know the words.

30
July
. In the week that Paul Foot is buried the Court of Appeal orders that the Hickeys, acquitted after being wrongly imprisoned for eighteen years for the murder of Carl Bridgewater, and for whose innocence Foot campaigned, must now effectively pay board and lodging for the years they have spent in gaol. It's the kind of joke the SS would have played on a prisoner lucky enough to be released from a concentration camp, presenting him at the gates with the bill. We ought to know the name of the
official who dreamed up this little wheeze so as to watch out for him in a forthcoming Honours List. As it is we can only be grateful that Nelson Mandela wasn't imprisoned in England or he would have been bankrupted on his release.
*

12
August
. While it ought to be a pleasant place to shop, Marylebone High Street is spoiled by the people who shop there, who are often pushy and heedless so single-minded are they about getting just what they want. As a result it's a pretty graceless place and it's noticeable today even in the hushed precincts of Daunt's bookshop, where a man is talking on his mobile about some euros and so loudly it's embarrassing. Villandry, which is on the other edge of Marylebone, has some of the same rich, pushy atmosphere, though diluted by the number of office workers who now use it.

Biking back I stop for a pee at the London Clinic, where half a dozen hoods are hanging about the door. And that is what they are, not chauffeurs, not (certainly not) concerned relations, but bodyguards and hoods, possibly Russian, with dark glasses and grim unsmiling faces. I go past them, cycle clips always a passport, though even so I half expect someone to want to go through my bag. Having had a pee I come away slightly cheered, if only to have managed something free at the most expensive hospital in London. But I am in a bad temper and biking through Regent's Park with cars coming uncomfortably close I start writing letters in my head as to why there is no provision for cyclists in the park, no cycle lanes in the Inner or Outer Circle, no designated cycle path through the park, nothing, only a vigilant police force ready to fine any biker they can catch. Why? Is this the case in all the royal parks or in all the parks in London? Dogs shit here. People fuck here. They even play football and put on plays. But no cycling.

16
August
. The best films on TV are often in the middle of the day and at lunch time. Today it's
The Stars Look Down
(1939) with Michael Redgrave, which I would have seen in 1940 in one of Armley's half a dozen picture houses. Like
How Green Was My Valley
(1941) and Emlyn Williams's
The Corn is Green
(1945), it's the story of a working-class boy bettering himself through education and outgrowing his roots. They were none of them great films but they should figure in any account of the origins of the Welfare State as powerful myth-makers, particularly in our household where their message was taken for gospel, the value of education as a means of rising above one's circumstances never questioned. So, trailing back from the Picturedrome in that first year of the war, we thought Michael Redgrave and Roddy McDowall were real heroes in whose footsteps my parents hoped my brother and I would one day tread.

7
September
. Watch a documentary about Wodehouse, geared to the publication of the new McCrum biography. Though there's some private newsreel footage there's nothing that hasn't been in previous programmes nor does it come to any different conclusions – namely, that Wodehouse was an innocent, unworldly figure who behaved foolishly over the famous broadcasts but no more than that. This was the verdict of an official inquiry which, had it been published at the time (
c
.1949), would have cleared his name and he would have been rehabilitated much earlier than he was. Or so the programme claims.

I'm not so sure. His famous innocence must have been pretty impregnable not to know by 1940 that there was more to Nazi Germany than a lot of bores dressing up in uniform and going round saluting one another. Did his wife, the notoriously canny Ethel, not read the papers either? Their unawareness doesn't hold up even as the programme proclaims it, since it shows the Wodehouses making attempts to get away from their home in Le Touquet but turning back because of the number of refugees on the road, the columns dive-bombed by Stukas. Did the Wodehouses witness this or is it just stock programme padding? If they did it must have come home even to them that this was serious stuff.

I start off, though, at a disadvantage in that, inspired though his language is, I can never take more than ten pages of the novels at a time, their relentless flippancy wearing and tedious. I am put off, too, by the Wodehouse fans, particularly since they're pretty much identical with the cricketing tendency. Waugh is entitled to call Wodehouse a genius but even with Waugh there's some feeling of self-congratulation at being the one to point it out. Nor does it help that Muggeridge was such a fan and the general chappishness of it all.

No, I'm not an impartial judge, though in the actual business of recording broadcasts for American listeners and then finding that they've been broadcast to England Wodehouse seems scarcely culpable at all. Newspapers pull that sort of trick all the time.

16
September
. Some of my irritation with the Commons pro-hunting protestors is antiquarian: that these callow young men should have been the first to invade the floor of the House of Commons since Charles I seems vandalism not so much of the Commons itself as of tradition, the more so because it's in aid of such an ignoble cause. Though I feel much the same about another vandal, Lord Falconer, and the scrambled abolition of the office of Lord Chancellor.

About the sport itself Nancy Mitford, no opponent of hunting, was both perceptive and unsentimental:

The most sensible approach would have been to ban stag hunting and hare coursing as soon as Labour got into power. Both are barbarous and
indefensible, except if you're Clarissa Dickson Wright, who presumably feels her casserole threatened. But what a feast of humbug it is in every department. ‘We do what we like. We always have and always will. That's democracy.'

20
September
. I am having my lunch outside the front door (salad of lettuce, beetroot, tomato and brown bread spread with olive paste) when Jonathan Miller passes en route for rehearsals at Covent Garden. He asks me what I'm reading. It's actually re-rereading, and telling him he would hate every page I show him James Lees-Milne's
Through Wood and Dale
. I ask him what he is reading and he shows me
The Origins of the Final
Solution
. Both are unsuitable books and, as I say to him, we would each of us derive more benefit if I were reading his book and he mine. My book is cosy, comforting and I know everything in it; his book is just as familiar and, though hardly cosy, is consoling, too, both of us happiest reading what we know already.

11
October
. Stephen Page (Faber) and Andrew Franklin (Profile Books) come round to take delivery of the MS of
Untold Stories
, a collection of diaries and other memoirs which they are to publish jointly next September. It's in a big box file with some of the stuff in manuscript and the rest as printed in the
LRB
. Opening the box, Andrew remarks that it's a long time since he's seen one of these, manuscripts nowadays generally coming in the form of a floppy disk. For my part I hope they don't notice the smear of jam on the box, the odd grease spot and even the faint odour of old milk, a consequence of the manuscript being put regularly in the fridge for safekeeping whenever we go away. I used to keep my manuscripts in boxes on the floor of the kitchen but about twenty years or so ago I had a burst boiler which flooded the kitchen and ruined half of them. I told Miss Shepherd, then living in her van, of this disaster. ‘Oh dear,' she said mustering what she could in the way of fellow-feeling. ‘What a waste of water.'

16
October
. Three former Nat West bankers in court over charges to do
with the collapse of Enron and due to be extradited for trial in Texas. This doesn't get much coverage in the papers, with none at all in the
Independent
and in the
Guardian
confined to the business pages. Nor, I imagine, will they receive much sympathy generally, bankers, whether innocent or guilty, not having much appeal. But that we now have regulations that allow the United States to bundle away whomsoever it chooses for trial in America without needing to show any cause at all or even set out the evidence seems a monstrous erosion of civil liberties and one that has passed into law virtually unnoticed. That such a procedure, designed to expedite action against supposed terrorists, should straight away be used against defendants who are not terrorists at all points up its dangers. The legislation is, of course, not reciprocal, British courts having no such rights in the United States.

20
October
. Memorial services apart, it's quite seldom that I see other writers, authorship not a particularly convivial profession. This does mean, though, that it still retains some of the glamour with which I invested it when I was young.

When I first got a room in college at Oxford it was on the staircase where a Professor Dawkins was in residence. Now old and crippled, as a young man he had known and been duped by Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, the author of
Hadrian VII
, a book which in 1955 I had just read. I knew even then that it would be inappropriate (‘not cool' I think would be today's term) to mention this to Professor Dawkins when I overtook him labouring up the stairs but I regarded him with awe.

Nevill Coghill was a Fellow of Exeter and he was dining in one night with a guest when I happened to be sitting low down on the scholars' table and so quite near the dons. I could hear every word of a (fairly one-sided) conversation the guest, a man with a harsh, quacking voice, was having with Nevill. It was Auden, still fairly smooth-faced, though already in carpet slippers and in Oxford to deliver his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry.

These literary connections will seem commonplace today but I was still
young enough then not quite to believe that authors inhabited the same world as ordinary mortals, still less secondary school boys from Leeds, and so in this respect I did find Oxford immensely glamorous. Around this time I got talking to an Old Exonian, Joel Sayre, who had known Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald – as of course it was perfectly possible to have done in terms of time, Fitzgerald only having died fifteen or so years before. But it was worlds apart, not years, and I couldn't believe that the world of the author of
The Great
Gatsby
could conceivably overlap with mine. And though I'm more sophisticated now some of this wonder happily remains, a persistent pleasure in life, even at seventy the feeling that one is still a small boy seeing giants.

21
October
. This evening to Camden Town Hall for a meeting of the planning committee which will decide whether the new Kentish Town Health Centre gets the go-ahead. My doctor, Roy Macgregor, whose vision it is and who has spent the last ten years getting the scheme to this point, feels it may now fall at the last fence. Certainly he's at the end of his tether, though the public gallery is full of staff and patients like me, all of whom wish the scheme well. It's a crowded agenda and though the meeting starts at seven we don't reach the Health Centre project until after half past nine, the previous proceedings of mind-numbing tedium, leaving one both wondering why these councillors choose this as a way of occupying their time and grateful that they do. Eventually a planning officer presents our scheme but it's virtually inaudible; the opposition to it, chiefly from some local residents, is articulate and straightforward, so that though Roy makes a good and passionate speech it seems we shall lose. But when eventually at twenty past ten the vote is taken, against all expectations the building is accepted and we come out jubilant.

At one point I nearly blot my copybook when a councillor claims that the model is an inaccurate representation of the development because the trees are shown as too tall. ‘But trees
grow
, haven't you heard?' I mutter far too loudly, wondering how Repton or Capability Brown would have fared before Camden Planning Committee. ‘When will the trees reach
this height, Mr Brown? In fifty years' time? That's an optimistic perspective surely?'

25
October
. Due to go to Venice and Bologna for a week's holiday I damage an Achilles tendon which makes walking difficult and Venice impossible. Instead we take a slow and stopping journey northwards, calling first at Burford in Oxfordshire to look at the church. I must have been before but have no recollection of it, particularly the unexpected Romanesque core of the building which from its Perpendicular exterior seems like a typical fifteenth-century wool church.