Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (30 page)

I got 26. My subsequent scores were 22, 3, 26, 41, 30, 11, 26, 45, 15, 6 (a bad bounce-out), 22, 26 (featuring two treble ones), 45, 7, 22, 63 (helped by, of all things, a treble 14), and 26, which put me on a finish. 167: treble 20, treble 19, bull. I threw 26. Then 9, 30, 17, 24, 43, 0, 0, 9 . . . Twenty minutes later I tearfully skewered the double i. So, a distinction of a kind: the 180-darter.

I motor out to North London's Enfield for lunch with Keith Deller. Shock winner of the 1983 World Championship, Keith was for a while the great white hope of darts: young and apple-cheeked, a breath of fresh air. But then Keith showed that in darts it is hard to do your ageing one year at a time. By 1984, he looked like a darts player.

It would have suited my preconceptions if I had found Keith half-drunk in some roadhouse, smothered in tattoos and darts magazines. On the contrary: Keith and his pretty wife, Kim, awaited me over their Perriers in the ante-room of a pleasant businessman's restaurant. There was talk of the gym, and countryside rambles with dog Sheba. No alcohol and no nicotine. It was I who felt like the true darter of the company, with my drink, my roll-ups, my North Circular pallor.

Keith is genial, straightforward, considerate, clear-eyed. He is also charmingly uxorious, constantly deferring to Kim, who, for her part, is fully abreast of Keith's darting hopes and fears. In a conversation that often went like this -

'143?'

'Treble 20, treble 17, double 16.'

'127?'

Treble 20, treble 17, double 8.'

— Kim Deller was in no sense left out. 'I like double 10, don't I, love?' Keith would say. Or again: 'Treble 14 - it's one of my favourite trebles, isn't it, Kim?' Courteous, clean-living, an ambassador for his sport. The only thing that might upset Keith, you felt, was if you had forgetfully sworn in front of his wife. Tomorrow would see the start of the Winmau World Masters. For Keith this spelt an early night after a sandwich and a spot of TV. You can't live the old life now, he suggested, not in the modern game. The standards are too high.

So
that's
the thing that will eventually clean up darts:
darts.

To Kensington's Rainbow Room, for the Winmau. A Parliament of Darts, a vast arena entirely devoted to darts, darts, darts. At the central tables, darts families — darts dynasties - have gathered for the day (darts kids in darts shirts charm tenners from darts grannies). Darts accessories are on sale, and darts literature. And darters are darting, in dozens of booths around the hall.

Here, darts cuts through the barriers of age, sex, race and creed. Big names mingle with small, and many a Lars and Sven and Costas rubs shoulders with the Eric Bristows, the Mike Gregorys, the Davie Whitcombs. The stars
do
look relatively slim, but this is partly because the fans look relatively fat. Reassuring, in a way, to see that the human butter mountain is not exclusively a British physical type. Among the cries of 'Unlucky', 'Good darts' and (the supreme accolade) 'Darts', one also hears
pintlager, gooddarts, unloeucky
and
scotchverybig
in Belgian, Dutch and a variety of Nordic tongues.

I team up with my boy Keith and hobnob with him and not-so-big Big Cliff. Keith has a bye in the first round ('he didn't turn up') but is soon tackling a black Netherlander called Ellis. I watch anxiously as Keith does the biz. We hardly have time for a lager shandy before Keith is back at the oché, up against an eighteen-year-old beanpole called Kurt. Keith throws well but Kurt (moustachioed, unsmiling) throws 'superb', smacking in the ton-forties. I stand in the little pocket of howling body-heat saying, 'Go on, Keith,' and, 'Darts, Keith.' Six minutes later Keith sits slumped on the scorer's desk, rubbing his eyes, his Winmau challenge over for another year.

Gutted for Keith, I return to the bar and hobnob with Bob. Bob is having an ambassadorial pint with his latest scalp, a nervous young lad from the North. Bob is generous in victory. After a discreet pause I go to Keith and comfort him. He is statesmanlike in defeat. We agree that the lad threw good darts.

'He was a maniac,' I said. 'But Keith — what happened? You had a dart to finish him.'

Keith shrugged. 'Bad darts,' he explained.

The next day I saw Bob go on to win it, beating Lowie in the final. The explanation for that?
Good
darts. Or, more simply,
darts.

I had bashfully taken my darts pouch along when I went to interview Bob Anderson. We didn't play, but I made him give me some tips. I had also hoped to learn something at the feet of Keith Deller. Back in the kitchen I addressed the dartboard with a new stance and a new action. I threw five consecutive 26s. Then I threw the darts to the floor and had a smoke and a drink instead.

All sports are eventually confining, and there is no cave deeper or darker than darts. During my visit there I felt no hostility, remarkably enough, but I constantly felt the symptoms of asphyxiation. Can darts progress? Its limitations, surely, are set by the game, not by the players. What draws me and many others to the sport and the spectacle, I think, is a liking for human variety, specifically a drastically primitive activity in a drastically modern setting. I don't want to see sporting ambassadors. I want to see the usual arrow-shower. Darts is going upmarket. But where to? My suspicion is that it may have to come right back down again.

Observer, 1988

JOHN BRAINE

In
1975
the
New Statesman
ran a series called 'The Defectors': profiles of more or less distinguished figures who had abandoned the left and embraced the right. My father was included in the series; so were several forgotten politicians, and several half-forgotten politicians like Alun Chalfont and Woodrow Wyatt. Such pieces were unsigned and usually written by the staff. I got John Braine. In my time at the
New Statesman
I also got Esther Rantzen ('Household Faces') and Sir Peter Parker ('Captains of Industry'). John Braine earns inclusion here on the grounds of his eccentricity — and his pathos (see
Postscript).

'They're a bit liberal, are the Monday Club — but they're basically sound.' Few defectors of recent years can have crossed the floor with quite the outrageous swagger of John Braine. One-time charter member of the Committee of 100, Labour Party proselytiser, apologist for the USSR and (so it's said) darling of the working-class
literati,
Braine is now established as the most wild-eyed and querulous champion of the literary Right, a more colourful turncoat by far than either Conquest, Osborne or Amis. Although any study of what one might call Braine's political 'thought' quickly reveals it as a shambles of folly and recklessness, a rehearsal of his views is well worth undertaking: he shows us, with exuberance and candour, how to get both ideologies wrong.

Success came late and suddenly to Braine, and this may account for the thoroughness with which it changed him. The son of a sewage-works superintendent - origins which Braine these days describes as 'petit bourgeois' — he was born in Bradford in 1922 and educated there at St Bede's Grammar. He now sees himself, and some of his literary
confreres,
as flowers of the grammar school system, whose imminent passing he greatly regrets. After a period of uncertain employment the teenage Braine became in 1940 an assistant at the public library in nearby Bingley, where he worked, with a spell in the forces, until 1951. That year he came to London to try his luck as a freelance journalist. He published a few articles in papers like
Lilliput, Tribune
and the
New Statesman
(intriguing pieces to look back on, these, with their fierce class-hatred and almost lyrical Leftiness — 'empty shops . . . their boarded windows blind with failure', etc.); but ill-health struck again, and Braine was invalided out of London just as he had been invalided out of the navy ten years earlier. In hospital, and back at Bingley, the dream that was to become
Room at the Top
took shape. Within months of its publication in 1957, Braine was in a position to give up his job and turn to writing — and polemicising — full time.

The extraordinary impact of
Room at the Top
is getting no easier to explain. One wonders what sort of shape the late Fifties imagination must have been in to get itself captured by such a modest and unsophisticated book. Its reception, at any rate, succeeded in putting it about that John Braine's views were worth listening to, and a period of exultant self-advertisement in the media had begun. With that indifference to contradiction which was always to serve him well, Braine presented himself as an unspoilt Northerner, bluff, honest and definitively working class, while at the same time gloating impetuously about his new-found wealth. 'I always travel first-class. I always stay at a good hotel,' he told interviewers in 1958, confessing, more frankly, to Robert Pitman: 'What I want to do is drive through Bradford in a Rolls-Royce with two naked women on either side of me covered in jewels.' Braine saw the film version of
Room at the Top
several nights running, and wept every time.

Perhaps the most rollicking chapter of Braine's public career came a couple of years later, after a visit to the Soviet Union in 1960. Still based at Bingley, Braine went East in a typically two-tier capacity: to be a guest of Alexei Surkov and the society of Soviet authors, and also to blow as much of the frozen Russian royalties of
Room at the Top
as he could on a quick package tour. In March of that year he had contributed a 'peace message' to the
Daily Worker
('My Golden Dream -To Finish With War'): 'It's absurd', he had said, 'to regard the Soviet Union as our enemy ... I have no fear of the Soviet Union, neither am I frightened of communism' - which so impressed staff-writer Monty Meth that he urged Braine to write a best-seller which would 'rally thousands more to the cause'. Braine did what he could, anyway, with an open letter to Surkov in
Tribune
that December. It is fascinating to see here the note of painless credulity which Braine was later to revile in others: praising the USSR's cultural awareness and 'genuine idealism', Braine wrote, 'Of course, I don't know anything about the forbidden areas - rocket bases, and so on. I presume they exist in your country as they certainly do in mine.' And when John Wain, who had also paid the USSR a visit, suggested in the
Observer
that Soviet publishers were not given an entirely free hand by the state, Braine cleared the matter up. 'Rubbish,' he explained. 'Russian publishers choose books on merit.' Their only criterion, he reported, was 'whether the public will want to read them'.

Braine being Braine, though, there were many less considered disclosures in the popular press. 'Russia is the place to make money, if you're a writer,' he said; the food, too, was 'infinitely superior to ours', the shops 'full of stuff for him to spend his Moscow roubles on. In the same piece the interviewer teased Braine about his poor film-rights deal for the money-spinning
Room at the Top
(only £5,000). 'It's just agony,' Braine admitted. 'Night after night I twist and turn in misery thinking of it.' Money was, as always, never far from Braine's thoughts at this time. The film rights of his second novel,
The Vodi,
for which he had forecast a deal of 'perhaps £100,000', were not taken up. Possibly as a result of this, Braine agreed to write a sequel to his first best-seller; the rights of
Life at the Top
were duly sold for about £45,000, implanting in the novelist a deep and enduring hatred of income tax.

Meanwhile, of course, Braine was involved in campaigning for CND, a commitment that appeared to do little for his argumentative sobriety. For a while he gamely toured the country making speeches, but disillusion soon claimed him. As early as 1961 he resigned, apparently 'convinced', that the organisation would be made illegal within a year. What Braine took to be the futility of CND membership further embattled his sense of the political realities: 'I can see little difference between Khrushchev, Kennedy, De Gaulle, Macmillan, Adenauer ...' 'They're all mad,' he decided, later amending the verdict to 'they're all filthy homicidal maniacs'. Clearly, if you've resigned yourself to ineffectiveness, it ceases to matter what you say.

Braine's heart, at least, was still in the right place at this stage, though the about-turn wasn't far in the distance. In 1960 he had affirmed in the
Daily Worker
that the 'main hope for peace lies with the Labour and trade union movement', and four years later he was prepared to elaborate the point in an election piece for the
Sunday Citizen.
It was to be his last statement as a socialist.

Having been born and bred in the industrial North, there's never been any choice for me politically, It's always been socialism or nothing. And by nothing I mean complete political apathy, a complete and savage concentration upon my own material advancement.

Prophetic words, some might say. In retrospect, Braine adduces two main causes of his disaffection from the Left — a liking for capitalism as it was revealed to him by a tour of the US, and the 'we are all guilty' response to the Moors Murders; but only something basic to Braine's psychology could explain the helter-skelter that his political thinking subsequently became. It was heralded — or confirmed — by his removal from Bingley to the Surrey stockbroker belt, a personal defection that he had always loudly resisted. He could never leave the North, he told the
Daily Express
in 1958, because the South was dirty, expensive and people wouldn't recognise him in the streets. Smartening up his motives for the
Daily Worker,
he had said that he would regard it 'as a kind of betrayal to live cut off from the working class'.

In 1966 the move happened - as did much else. The same year he was volunteering the information that 'when pacifists go on about the wickedness of war, I feel I want to go out and kill somebody'. The following year he joined the West Byfleet and Pyrford Conservative Association, and a year later said his 'Goodbye to the Left' in no uncertain fashion with a Monday Club pamphlet, electioneering in the press meanwhile for the Tories' 1970 campaign; unless the Conservatives won, he argued with his usual prescience, it would be the last election we'd see this century. Around this time, too, he denounced the 'absolutely consistent left-wing bias' of the BBC, called Kennedy 'the worst president the US ever had' and Luther King 'a trouble-maker and a very stupid man', welcomed the Pope's encyclical on contraception, observed that African freedom fighters were 'not fit to live', agitated for the restoration of hanging (it was 'squeamish and heartless' to resist it), and championed corporal punishment —