Cathy Come Home E-Book

Jeremy Sandford

• Herausgeber: Marion Boyars
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1976

Beschreibung

Sandford's 'Cathy Come Home' details the issue of homelessness and the life of a young woman in 1960s London as she moves from her own home, to council accomodation, and finally emergency accomodation for the homeless before being evicted and her children taken into care. It is a harrowing and emotive screenplay of the '60s television docu-drama which caused social upheaval upon its transmission and caused the homeless charity 'Shelter' to be formed. Although often distressing to read, I cannot recommend this book highly enough as it truly will change the way you look at the issue. Perhaps the most tragic thing of all is the preface to the re-printed edition which discusses how the issue of homelessness is now worse today than it was when Sandford decided to document it with this amazing play.

Leseprobe

CATHY COME HOME

Jeremy Sandford

Contents

Title Page

Preface by Derek Paget

Introduction

Credits

Screenplay: Cathy Come Home

Notes to the 1976 edition

Bibliography

Copyright

Preface to Cathy Come Home

CathyComeHome:‘Essential Television’

CathyComeHome is possibly the most important British television play ever written. In 1971, five years after its first broadcast on BBC1, television critic Edward Lucie-Smith commented, ‘If you want to defend the medium to its detractors, mention CathyComeHome.’1 More recently, John Corner noted how widely it had been accepted as ‘a piece of “essential television”’.2 The edition you are now reading is part-evidence of the importance of Jeremy Sandford’s play. Because television is often considered an ephemeral medium, it is rare for a television play to be published, let alone reprinted over four decades. It is unusual for a television play even to be repeated, and CathyComeHome was shown four times on terrestrial channels between 1966 and 1993.

To transcend its historical period is remarkable enough, but it has achieved even more. Its story of a family’s downward spiral into poverty and homelessness has become emblematic, with the figure of Cathy herself a potent symbol. Newspaper leader writers and television commentators can still refer to the ‘Cathys’ in society when they want to draw attention to the continuing problem of the homeless. The charity ‘Shelter’ (whose very foundation in the 1960s was enhanced by the play) used stills from the film, confident that the public would know both Cathy and what she represented. They have also screened the film frequently in consciousness-raising campaigns over the years. CathyComeHome occasioned active contemporary debate about the post-war housing problem, and it has continued to be a focus for this subject. That it did not trigger major long-term change (as Jeremy Sandford himself ruefully acknowledged when the play was first published in 1976) is hardly the fault of its writer and creative team.

The reasons for CathyComeHome’s success are several. In the mid-1960s a new radical spirit in society was causing people to take a hard look at the achievements and failures of the ‘Welfare State’ created in the UK after the Second World War. Television had become important enough to be involved in this questioning. The film and its contemporary reception show that television as a medium had become a major factor in the way society analyzed itself. The people who made the film were part of this wave of radical ideas. The kernel of the team comprised the writer himself, Jeremy Sandford, the director Ken Loach and the producer Tony Garnett. Behind them stood the influential figure of Sydney Newman, executive producer of the programme strand (‘The Wednesday Play’) within which CathyComeHome was first aired. Nor should one forget two talented principal actors, Carol White and Ray Brooks. All of them went on to carve out successful careers. The rest of the cast was made up by ‘found actors’ on location and by highly able British ‘character actors’ of the period. Some of the latter became famous: Gabrielle Hamilton, the Welfare Officer who sends Grandad (Wally Patch) to the old people’s home, was the Neighbours character Mrs Mangel in the 1980s, and Geoffrey Palmer (the Property Agent who educates Cathy and Reg about mortgages) gained fame opposite Judi Dench in the BBC sitcom AsTimeGoesBy (1992–2002). Finally, the gifted camera operator Tony Imie contrived that look of raw authenticity upon which the film’s documentary claim depended.

Television and Society in the1960s

After the Second World War television did not become a truly mass medium immediately. Improvements in the technologies of production, transmission and reception, and increased competition, began to change things, especially following the arrival of commercial television (ITV) in 1955. By 1966 British television had reached a key point in its development. Although there was no colour until 1970, the television service now had reach (with the whole of the UK covered by transmitters); grasp (in terms of the audience numbers possible for individual programmes); and the beginnings of choice (from 1964 – when BBC2 began transmission – there were three channels). Huge audiences had become the norm, particularly for BBC1 and ITV peak-time transmissions. On the days following important programmes, the nation would engage in active discussion about the previous evening’s viewing. Newspapers, more influential then than now, would pick up on controversy and fuel discussion further. Television had become a major opinion-former in society; serious television drama could broach important subjects and initiate wider social debate. It did this more often then than it can do now that multi-channel choice has fragmented the audience.

Sydney Newman introduced a policy he called ‘agitational contemporaneity’ for his flagship ‘Wednesday Play’ series (1964–69). He wanted television drama to be less theatrical and more socially relevant; he wanted plays that stirred things up and provoked debate. Through people like him, television drama in the 1960s caught up with that revolution in theatre, film and literature that is often dated from the 1956 production of John Osborne’s play LookBackinAnger at London’s Royal Court Theatre. The most controversial of the plays for which Newman was responsible broke out of the stilted methods of the multi-camera studio, where television drama had flourished in the 1950s. His teams began to film on location, aiming for more realism, and they tackled more and more ‘difficult’ subjects. They were influenced by documentary styles based on new camera and microphone technologies which provided an alternative to the cumbersome electronic cameras of the studio. The sharper images of the film cameras contrasted with the rather smeary images of the TV studio and produced a more life-like effect suitable for the new subject matter.

Lightweight, hand-held, synch-sound 16mm film equipment had become available in the early 1960s, offering unprecedented levels of immediacy. An increasingly sophisticated audience (among them the first generation to grow up with television) were increasingly able to feel they could be at the heart of the action (whether that action was actual – as in news and documentary – or rehearsed – as in drama). Loach and Garnett particularly seized the opportunity to import into their fictions the raw edge of reality so much a part of the documentary films of contemporary Americans like Richard Leacock and Frederick Wiseman. The wish to take film cameras where they had never gone before (into areas of life ‘on the edge’ socially) was the thrust of some very important drama as well as documentary. It gave rise to a new form, ‘documentary drama’, which was linked to the radical politics attacking the old British class system and which became very controversial.

The CreativeTeam

The three key members of the CathyComeHome production team made their reputations through this film, and Loach and Garnett in particular continue to be influential figures. Loach has become an international film director with a deserved reputation for films that break the boundaries between fact and fiction. Like his early television documentary dramas, all his subsequent work bears trademark features: radical social criticism, focused through ‘underdog’ protagonists; filming techniques that place a premium on immediacy; and underplayed acting styles that seem improvised. His overall aim (shared by Sandford and Garnett) was to give a voice to those who are often denied it because of their lowly social position. Tony Garnett continues to produce challenging (and popular) TV drama like BBC2’s ThisLife series (1996–98). Jeremy Sandford went on to write another award-winning and much-repeated documentary drama, EdnatheInebriateWoman (1971; also published by Marion Boyars).

In 1966, Garnett saw his job very simply: it was to make sure that plays he knew to be controversial (because critical of the status quo) made it on to the screen. The worry was that the BBC’s innate conservatism would cause interference. If executives thought programmes would offend audiences (with the grounds of ‘taste’ and ‘balance’ often the excuse for decisions that were actually political) they would alter or even withdraw them. UptheJunction (written by Sandford’s then-wife Nell Dunn) had already caused problems for Loach and Garnett in 1965, but their biggest fear was an outright ban. This had happened to Peter Watkins’ anti-nuclear film TheWarGame in 1965 (it was twenty years before the BBC eventually screened it). Garnett and Sandford agreed that senior executives would initially be told that CathyComeHome was a ‘love story’ (which, in a sense, it is). Garnett then tried to protect Loach from interference during filming, making sure that rushes were unavailable, and generally thwarting pre-transmission enquiries. Once the play was scheduled and advertised in the RadioTimes, it was very difficult to withdraw. Cathy was made and seen, all agree, despite not because of the BBC hierarchy.3 As Garnett acknowledges today, Newman himself (in a far more exposed position within the BBC) was sympathetic to the point of collusion.

The first screening of CathyComeHome provoked massive newspaper coverage, and fierce parliamentary debate. Garnett even had to arrange for a special Westminster screening in December 1966 for the then Housing Minister and his senior civil servants (in those pre-video-recording days they had missed the transmission). He noted to his bosses at the BBC that the watching government officials did not dispute the facts as presented in CathyComeHome.4 That they did not do so was a tribute to Jeremy Sandford. As a campaigning journalist, writer and broadcaster, he had acquired a reputation for hard-hitting research. He often lived amongst the people who were the subjects of his articles, and he was committed to bettering their lot. Ted Kotcheff, director of EdnatheInebriateWoman, compared him to the nineteenth-century writer and campaigner Henry Mayhew, whose LondonLabourandtheLondonPoor had made an earlier generation more aware of the poverty in their midst. There were, of course, many in the contemporary audience who wanted to dispute the facts as presented in CathyComeHome; there was none, however, able to make any charge of inaccuracy stick either then or now.5

The Dramatic Structure of thePlay

One contemporary charge was that Cathy as a character was unbelievable. She was too ‘attractive’, some claimed, for an individual so mired in poverty. She also had so much bad luck – no one could possibly have so many unfortunate blows from fate, it was argued. The first charge probably says more about those making it (though it should be noted that Carol White did have a very contemporary ‘look’). As to the second charge, Sandford has never denied that Cathy was a composite character, based on several women whom he had met. She was specifically designed to represent quintessential features of personality and situation (several of his real life models are pictured in his novelization of CathyComeHome, published by Pan Books in 1967). Critics also alleged that her partner Reg (Ray Brooks) was unbelievably feckless, conveniently ignoring similar arguments about the compositing of characters. Such accusations hardly negate the issues Cathy and Reg’s story raises. Furthermore, they ignore the essential properties of the film as drama. Some exaggeration (for the purpose of concentration) is exactly what the job of a drama is. Drama aims to intensify and encourage the empathy without which emotional understanding cannot take place.

Today, Sandford observes wryly that his play does not conform to received wisdom about TV drama. This says that narratives should have defined conflicts, and that there should be ‘story arcs’ to carry these conflicts. Viewers should be able to trace the trajectories of characters over (for example) a one-hour slot via the tried-and-tested model of a three-act structure. Such a structure fits conveniently with advertising breaks (and can be reduced or extended according to the length of the ‘slot’ filled by the programme). Characters should ‘develop’ within and around this structure, even if the ending of the piece is open rather than closed. British TV has ‘story editors’ for its dramas, who are there to help dramatists achieve these ends, and Sandford believes his play would be rejected today (in its own time it took some while before anyone had the courage to produce it).

Cathy does not ‘develop’ as a character in conventional dramatic terms – nor is her story one of ‘arcs’. She stays more or less the same, and if there were a graph for her progress it would always go downwards. She has no single, identifiable antagonist either. The nearest she comes to this is a generalized ‘Official’ who could be made up from those she encounters on her journey. These are the ‘faceless men’ Reg draws attention to when they are evicted from the slum house (p. 68). Such a vague antagonist Cathy is never able to understand, let alone deal with, so the ‘conflict’ is always somehow unequal and unfair. CathyComeHome is not complimentary to officialdom: public servants are mostly seen as unsympathetic in the face of human misery (and this group was understandably very hostile to the play in 1966).

But Cathy’s lack of development has its positive aspects. She tries always to make the best of what her life brings, being (for example) sunnily optimistic on the question of children. ‘Funny how a baby makes a place quite different,’ she says in voiceover at one point. ‘Well, there’s goodbye to freedom. I don’t mind though’ (p. 44). She responds mildly to the implied criticism that she should not have had so many children. ‘Some would say it was wrong to have another kiddy when you’re overcrowded as it is,’ she remarks, ‘but I don’t think so. I think kiddies are God’s gift…’ (p. 52). In the same speech she makes the statement of belief that is most central to her view of the world and which she defends most stubbornly. ‘Love,’ she says (pp. 52–3), ‘is more important to a child than what they call nice surroundings. I know cos I lived in what they call a respectable home and I didn’t have it.’ It is Cathy’s tragedy that this naïve belief in the power of love cannot save her or her children from the consequences of the family’s inexorable descent into poverty.

Cathy and Reg descend first through the layers of the ‘housing market’, then through the ‘options’ of alternative housing, lastly through a system ironically designed as a Welfare State safety net. At each step they encounter progressively worse levels of existence. Finally, the little family that has been her life and her dream is fragmented totally, and she is left alone on a bench on a London station platform while closing captions remind us of some salient social facts behind her personal story. The closeness of this invented story to a definable social knowledge (about people and systems) is what makes CathyComeHome a documentary drama. The audience is constantly reminded (through images, locations, ‘wildtrack’ voiceover) of the social realities underpinning the dramatic situation. ‘Documentary fragments on the soundtrack,’ as John Caughie remarks, ‘interrupt the emotional pull of the dramatic narrative.’6CathyComeHome is simultaneously story and report7; Cathy is both main dramatic protagonist and principal documentary interviewee, her story is at once personal and general. Contrasting conceptual elements – story and report, documentary and drama – provide a sharp cutting edge in terms of social criticism. It is this quality which ensures that CathyComeHome will be debated for as long as mixtures of drama and factual material are found problematical. What it emphatically possesses, even seen thirty years after its first transmission, is what Tony Garnett calls ‘life in the frame’: a level of authenticity conferred by a style of fiction film-making which appears to be documentary, but which taps into the emotions of drama.

Sandford claims that dramatically the structure of CathyComeHome is deliberately similar to the sixteenth-century morality play Everyman. In this play the character Everyman stands (as the name suggests) for every human being at the moment of their death. The play rehearsed orthodox contemporary religious doctrine in order to ‘teach’ its audience about this profound subject. From the opening of the play, Everyman cannot go back to better times, cannot resist Death, can only go downwards to his grave. Sandford wanted Cathy to be similarly representative: an ‘Everywoman’ for her times – at least, an Everywoman with the ordinary ambitions his character expresses for love and family. Cathy is a character designed to be realistic in a particular sense, that of illustrating some of the more unfortunate social realities of the times. The inexorable logic of society decreed that the housing market was only for the economically-abled, and that society’s failsafe systems were doomed to fail the economically-disabled. It could be argued that this is no less true today. Cathy’s descent in Sandford’s play has the inevitability of tragedy; it cannot stop until she has ‘died’ socially. It is in that state that we see her finally.

Cathyand the‘GoldenAge’of Television

Some commentators take the nostalgic view that in the 1960s television was the best it has ever been. This is wishful thinking,8 but it is certainly true that CathyComeHome was a film whose time was right. It gave due prominence to a social problem, attacked the public conscience very effectively and was part of a select but proud roster of important television dramas. It registered at the time, and continues to register, on both the documentary and the drama scales. Modern students are ready enough to transpose the supposedly dated factual material into their own times, for there is still a housing problem in the UK. A modern audience still responds to Cathy’s human dilemma on the level of the representative ‘Everywoman’ example she provides. This is why, after all, the film continued to be useful to ‘Shelter’ long after the particular facts within it became out of date.

The creative interdependence CathyComeHome achieves between the two elements of documentary and drama is probably no longer possible. The concentration of public attention the film achieved over a significant period is also probably no longer possible. In a view shared by both Ken Loach and Tony Garnett, Jeremy Sandford believes it was not so much part of Television’s ‘Golden Age’ as part of an unrecoverable ‘Age of Innocence’ – where there was more faith in facts, in television, and in politics.

Derek Paget, 2003

Endnotes

1 George W. Brandt (ed.) (1981), BritishTelevisionDrama, Cambridge University Press (see Martin Banham, Chapter 8, ‘Jeremy Sandford’, p. 197).

2 John Corner (1996), TheArtofRecord:ACriticalIntroductiontoDocumentary, Manchester University Press (see Chapter 5 ‘Cathy Come Home’, p. 90).

3 George McKnight (ed.) (1997), AgentofChallengeandDefiance:TheFilmsofKenLoach, Flicks Books (see Julian Petley’s chapter ‘Factual fictions and fictional fallacies: Ken Loach’s documentary dramas’); Derek Paget (1998), NoOtherWaytoTellIt:Dramadoc/docudramaonTelevision, Manchester University Press (material on CathyComeHome, plus discussion of the problematic terms used to categorize similar plays and films).

4 Derek Paget (1999), ‘CathyComeHome and “Accuracy” in British Television Drama’, in NewTheatreQuarterly, Volume XV, Part 1, pp. 75–90 (this article refutes Irene Shubik’s claims – made in her 1975 book PlayforToday:TheEvolutionofTelevisionDrama – that there were factual inaccuracies in CathyComeHome).

5 Paget op.cit.

6 John Caughie (2000), TelevisionDrama:Realism,ModernismandBritishCulture, Oxford University Press (see Chapter 4, where CathyComeHome is analyzed).

7 Corner op.cit.

8 Jonathan Bignell, Stephen Lacy and Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh (2000), BritishTelevisionDrama:Past,PresentandFuture, Palgrave (see especially Chapter 4, Shaun Sutton’s reflections on ‘Sydney Newman and the “Golden Age”’).

Further Reading

Glen Creeber (ed.) (2001), The TelevisionGenreBook, British Film Institute (as well as much of general interest, John Corner writes briefly on CathyComeHome in a section on ‘drama-documentary’).

Graham Fuller (ed.) (1998), LoachonLoach, Faber (reprinted interviews on his work with Ken Loach, the director of CathyComeHome).

Andrew Goodwin and Paul Kerr (eds.) (1983), BFIDossier19:Drama-documentary, British Film Institute (includes a reprint of part of an interview with Jeremy Sandford first published in TheatreQuarterly in 1973).

Alan Rosenthal (1988), TheNewDocumentaryinAction, University of California Press (contains an interview with Jeremy Sandford).

INTRODUCTION

(adaptedfromatape-recordedinterviewwithAlanRosenthal)

In the early sixties I was living in Battersea in a poor district and one day a neighbour of mine was evicted. The family’s furniture was thrown out into the street, and they disappeared, apparently without trace. They had nowhere to go, and I wondered what had become of them. A few nights later a friend came to tell me that this neighbour had arrived in a place which was more disgusting and more frightful than one could possibly imagine.

These were the days before anyone outside bureaucratic circles had ever heard such phrases as ‘Part III Accommodation’ or ‘Emergency Housing for the Homeless’, and ‘Homeless Family’ had not become part of the jargon of sociologists and newspaper men. What I found when I went to visit my former neighbour both angered and saddened me. It was a scene of horror, all the worse for the fact that no one knew about it.

Hundreds of families were stacked into an old workhouse. Mothers and children separated from their husbands and fathers, occupying a single room each or, in some cases, four or five or more families all shoved into the same room. The toilet facilities were completely inadequate and dysentery was rife. Ambulances called every day, and more than once a day. There was a feeling of complete demoralisation. Husbands were allowed to visit their wives and children only for a couple of hours each night. In the afternoon, even when it was raining, mothers and children were forced out into the streets. They weren’t allowed to remain indoors. The reason given for this was that they were meant to be finding accommodation; this was impossible. Obviously, they would hardly be here in these horrible conditions if they hadn’t tried to the end of their ability to find accommodation elsewhere. Feeding was communal and some of the mothers, fearing that their children would catch dysentery, forbade their children to eat. Ultimately hunger would prevail. They would eat—and become diseased. It was rare to find a mother here who had not once had her child down with dysentery. For the privilege of living here here these families paid quite a high rent, a fact which further aggravated their difficulties. Since the husband’s wages were being used up in this way, and also in travel coming to see their families, there was no money to pay for outside accommodation, even if they were able to find it. The situation was then, as it still is: for a man at the lower end of the wage bracket in the big industrial centres, it was very hard indeed to find accommodation at a price that he could afford. At that time there were a few thousand British people in this situation. The heartbreak of mothers and children unwillingly separated from their husbands and fathers was a terrible thing to see. Added to the heartbreak of disease and the shame of being in these places was a further humiliation. On arrival, all families were made to sign a document in which they stated that they clearly understood that the accommodation was only ‘Emergency Accommodation’. They were only there on sufferance—they must make constant attempts to find other housing and if they had not done this by the end of three months, they would be turned out even from the Home for the Homeless. In practice, this rule was not followed. The numbers of homeless packed into these old workhouses continued to rise, many staying past the three month limit. Families were still there after a year or even two years, but at the end of the line there still came the moment when homeless families were told—‘You can’t stay here any longer’. At this point, the mother, knowing what lay ahead, would become frantic. Often by now the husbands, ashamed, humiliated, and unable to cope with the situation, would have abandoned their families anyway. This is no slur on the husbands, but it is a slur on the situation which society had provided for them. The frantic women would redouble their efforts to find accommodation, but in their demoralised state, they were in no fit condition of mind to find it, even if it were available. Then a brutal letter would arrive to inform them that they must vacate their quarters in the Home for the Homeless. I remember being with one such mother when she received this letter. She was living in an almost incredible building, in which thirty homeless families were housed in a vast chamber, along the sides of which were stable-like stalls with wooden walls about five feet high, and only flimsy curtains across the front. There was no roof. This is where these families ate, slept, lived—one in each stall. She knew what the letter meant. She knew that when she was evicted the children would be taken away from her and put into care. I learned at this time it was happening to something like twenty-one children per week in the London area alone. I felt that conditions so vile should immediately be brought to the attention of the public. To my surprise, when I asked whether any of them had approached any newspaper, I was told that a large number had in fact written letters, but these had been ignored or sent back with polite but evasive replies. At this time, ‘the Homeless’ were not news. My immediate reaction was to ask whether I might do a programme on BBC Sound Radio about these homeless Families. I did it with a neighbour of mine, Heather Sutton, who had first brought my attention to this situation. It consisted of recordings made of those who actually were homeless, which we interspersed with what struck me as the somewhat bland and heartless explanations of those who had the job of looking after them. These recordings were made in Part III Accommodation, with the knowledge of the LCC. They permitted us to record in what I suppose was the best of all the accommodation in which homeless families were being kept.

The reason they didn’t allow us to go to the worst places—the Reception Centres—was that they said the homeless would be in too distraught a state of mind to be able to give an objective picture. The accommodation in the place they allowed us to go, Durham Buildings, was unpleasant, but not nearly so nasty as that at Newington Lodge, the place I had originally visited. However, all the families in Durham Buildings had passed through Newington Lodge, and the experience had scarred them. They seemed unable to forget it, and even while talking of the present, they spoke of the experiences they had had there in the past. Even in Durham Buildings they still felt insecure. The men here were allowed back with their families, but a sense of shame lingered. There was hostility from local shopkeepers. One man said: ‘I was a prisoner of war and I spent five years behind the wire fighting for this country, and I still feel I’m a prisoner. I’ve never had a place of my own where I could do what I like’.

We went to Newington Lodge, and made some recordings there, illegally, and also to the place with the stable-like stalls. Here the pressure, indeed sheer bloody-mindedness of the staff, seemed to have created a different picture. People were terrified of talking to us for fear that the authorities might hear about it, and this would tell against them, and they would be evicted. As a result of some articles in the local paper, so they claimed, three women and their children had been thrown out because it was thought that they’d spoken to the man who wrote the articles. The fear of these pathetic people was a horrible thing to see. Realising that we were an embarrassment to them, we didn’t choose to stay too long.

One girl at Newington Lodge became my friend. She thought the conditions there must be exposed and was willing to risk being thrown out in the interests of others.

The reaction to the radio programme HomelessFamilies was absolutely nil. I had the impression, as so often when working for radio, of shouting something important down a deep well. I returned to Newington Lodge later with the Observer cameraman, Donald McCullin and, although photographs were forbidden in the building by the LCC, we were able to take some photographs with the help of our friend. Suddenly, the word flashed along the corridor. ‘The Warden is coming’, and we hid under the bed. Later the police were called and we were charged with being in illegal possession of our own cameras and tape recorder. We were taken to the local police station, where we were kept for much of the night before being able to establish the real nature of our quest. I imagine that this was a put-up job demonstrating that our police force are sometimes forgetful of their duty to be impartial and make the mistake of siding (rather too much) with those who run these institutions.

I wrote Cathy the same way I do most of my writing. I filled a hard-backed spring binder with bits of quarto paper which had the headings of the various sections of the film on them, such as caravan, slum, luxury flat, mother in law, courting, the first Home for the Homeless the second Home for the Homeless. Then I worked from a very large number of newspaper clippings that I had accumulated through the years, transcripts of tape recordings, actual tape recordings, notes of people I had met, and places I had been to—picking them out at random, seeing if they fitted what I wanted to do or not. Most of them I rejected, but those which seemed to fit, I included, sometimes in altered form, sometimes almost verbatim. This went on for a couple of months.

Having written a large number of little scenes like this for each section I juggled them around in the best order, and then I had it typed.

The story went through my typist two or three times after that. Each time I worked through it, trying to see it with objective eyes, excluding some scenes, altering the position of others, amplifying, writing a few new scenes out of my head and adding new touches to Cathy’s character or things that occurred to me as I went along—the general drudge which I expect many writers go through, working on and on at a script until it is right.

I did all this over a period of three or four months. I often work at an office or some small room away from home, and at this time I had a delightful, very small attic room, high up at the back of a pleasant house in Oakley Street, Chelsea. I was able to scatter papers everywhere in deep piles like snow and, I was going to say, enjoy myself. But in fact writing Cathy was a very gruelling experience and, although I had a feeling of immense satisfaction and fulfilment, I often finished the day feeling more dead than alive, since I had never tackled so large or serious a subject before.

I had thought there would be buyers for Cathy but there were none. I had a first-rate director wanting to do it, and, I thought, a powerful script, but there were no buyers.

So, for a year and a half I worked at other things, periodically pushing Cathy in all sorts of directions. In the end, I became so doubtful of anybody buying it, that I decided to write it as a book, so that it could have a life after all.