Diaries 1969-1977 E-Book

Peter Nichols

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The playwright Peter Nichols has been a compulsive diarist all his life. He writes for himself alone, responding to an urge to record the daily doings, private and professional, of his family, his fellows - and himself. The resulting diaries are candid, insightful, and often as shockingly funny as his plays. This selection, republished to mark the playwright's 90th birthday, covers the extraordinarily fruitful period between his first real hit, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, to the stirrings of his masterpiece, Passion Play. As the seventies dawn, Peter Nichols is watching Joe Egg being filmed - and hating it. His next play, The National Health, is doing good box office for Olivier's National Theatre - but Olivier is hating it. And Forget-Me-Not Lane is shortly to open at the new Greenwich Theatre amid much anxiety. And then there are three small children (and a fourth in long-term hospital) to cope with, an extended family and the renovation of a tumbledown barn in rural France. What emerges is one of the most revealing and hilarious accounts of a writer's life, and how – whatever success comes along – everyday life will keep getting in the way. As Nichols attempts to negotiate the world he has found himself in – a world populated by the likes of Albert Finney, Kenneth Tynan, Stephen Sondheim, Michael Frayn and John Osborne – he finds that he is never free from having to entertain his in-laws or cope with children vomiting in the back seat. Nichols' Diaries are a brilliantly funny, acerbic study of theatrical life, a warts-and-all portrait of parenthood, and a fascinating companion to that remarkable decade, the Seventies. 'Sometimes he says terrible things that strike home to one's heart' Michael Frayn

Leseprobe

Peter Nichols

Diaries

1969–1977

London

NICK HERN BOOKS

www.nickhernbooks.demon.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

1968

1969

1970

1971

1972

1973

1974

1975

Illustrations

By the Same Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

Introduction

Only Americans do introductions well, confidently shouting, ‘Philip de Sousa Bolenczewiecz, I don’t think you’ve met Marylou Felicia von Winterhalter.’ And they can do this even without staring at the label pinned to your jacket. For them togetherness is all; for the English it’s to be avoided.

I’m doing the native routine even now, avoiding the task with facetiousness and a meandering sidelong approach that suggests I’m somehow ashamed, that I don’t want you to meet this selection from the diary I’ve kept on-and-off since my eighteenth year. In fact, there’s been so much ‘off’ that, strictly speaking, it’s not a diary at all, at times almost a memoir, not only because of the periods when it was let lapse altogether but for the irregular years before I began writing (as now) every next-morning about the day-before. So, in many of the forty or so volumes, events were recollected after a gap of weeks and may be as much a work of fiction as my plays or my alleged autobiography, Feeling You’re Behind (Weidenfeld, 1984). This was a memoir of my first forty years as boy, man, aircraftsman, actor, teacher, husband, father and playwright, a Life cobbled together from memory, photographs, hearsay, my semi-fictional comedies and the journals. Only for the last twenty have these deserved that name, that’s to say: being written on a daily basis, almost like a morning exercise or pianist’s scales, recording not just the big events but the everyday trivia and casual encounters that comprise the true diary. Boswell told Johnson he was afraid he put into his journals too many little incidents.

‘There is nothing, Sir,’ was the expected put-down, ‘too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.’

The originals of mine are now in the British Library’s Theatre Archive, though their access is limited till after my death, or that of my wife, whichever’s the later. This is more to avoid hurt feelings than a fear of litigation. There are, unfortunately, few scandals or juicy revelations.

From 1945 to 1948 they’re in the form of letters home from India, Singapore, Malaya and Hong Kong, written to describe my national service years to my parents in Bristol. They’re on scraps of notepaper, airmail forms, in pads and blocks of lined notepaper, mostly undated, but with chapter-numbers and fancy travelogue headings like ‘Delhi, Utopia of India’ or ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow’. From my release in 1948 to the start of a brief acting career in the early fifties, there are only occasional entries. Then a rough record begins again, now typed on loose sheets with two fingers (still my style in the year 2000). From ’71 to ’76, I used those day-by-day diaries sold by stationers, done in longhand. The longest lapse means there are only scraps and fragments from ’76 till ’83, when the page-a-days resume and run till ’93. Since then I’ve kept them daily, religiously, using a series of word processors of increasing complexity and obtuseness. Much of my energy goes into shouting at their refusal to think for themselves instead of slavishly obeying my manual mistakes. So fiendish yet so fundamentally dim! But the advantages of the PC for a diarist are clear: the previous day can be scanned and altered, omitted events added later, mistakes corrected and on occasion shameful opinions deleted. This makes the entries more readable and detailed but even less reliable. Pen-and-ink has to stand. These electronic images can be erased without trace so easily that, at this stage in their evolution, huge screeds are lost at the touch of a wrong key. On one occasion twenty-five pages vanished in the works of a borrowed machine no-one knew how to cajole.

The processor changes diaries forever. Their authors can censor their own lives. I try not to make many restrospective emendations after a couple of days have elapsed, not looking again for a long time, perhaps years. On the other hand, published diaries are always edited, plums pulled from the pudding, ‘life’ so arranged and altered that they become an even greater lie than photographs. Both have to be interpreted to surrender their truths.

The present selection covers about ten years, taking up where the Memoir left off in New York in 1968. Our immediate family – I the father, Thelma the mother, two daughters Louise and Catherine, one son Dan, and Barbara, a German au pair – had gone there for the Broadway opening of my play A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, which had begun in Glasgow’s Citizens’ Theatre. Albert Finney and his producing partner Michael Medwin saw it and brought it to London. It was now, for the third time, successfully launched (on Broadway) by our close friend the director Michael Blakemore, with Albert replacing Joe Melia in the lead. Albert’s name – and he was then a Great Store – was causing queues around the block. We waited awhile for Storedom to come to us too and, when it didn’t, went visiting family and friends farther west in Illinois and Wisconsin.

Our voyage from England had been in the depth of a bitter winter on an ocean liner that had seen better days, plodding across a stormy Atlantic. Our first US visit over, we flew home from Chicago in a few hours and tried to resettle to the old life in Bristol.

Not for long. The royalties from Albert’s three-month run meant we could afford to move to London to enjoy the Storedom we were still sure was waiting for us somewhere. We bought a detached (by a few feet) villa in Blackheath and, leaving the children in Bristol with the au pair, camped out on a sleeping-bag in one of the enormous empty rooms. That is where, in 1968, this selection starts. It ends at the point where I began to live more and set down less. This wasn’t a conscious decision to avoid or hide from unbearable memories, as in Larkin’s poem ‘Forget What Did’. Life just became busier and for some time I lost the inexplicable habit of wanting to put it all down.

Most people have hobbies. Sad to say, this is mine. I’ve even asked to take it on my desert island along with the eight records.

A familiar hurdle in naturalistic playwriting is introducing – say – members of a family to an audience of strangers. To get over the necessary facts, there’s usually a stretch known as The Exposition, where people who know each other perfectly well can sound as though they’re all suffering amnesia as they explain to each other who their spouses or parents or children are, where they live and what jobs they do. Opening scenes try to tell The Story So Far without appearing to, a problem TV solves by saying ‘Previously’ and showing a few clips from last week’s episode. A series also gains by the main characters being already familiar.

I’ve found a similar sort of difficulty cropping up with this volume and, rather than burden the text with notes, have added explanations that weren’t in the original diary. When more’s needed, or when I remember more than I noted at the time or consider a bit of hindsight would help, a modern commentary is shown in smaller, square-bracketed type and indented paragraphs.

I hope the contribution of my family is obvious from the diary itself. Even so, all my writing is made possible by Thelma, who has shared my life for forty years and without whom it would hardly be bearable.

Our adult children have had to watch distorted versions of their lives being acted on stage and screen and weren’t even consulted in the matter. Their good natures must be due mostly to their mother. As the grandchildren grow, they may find explanations here but must be careful not to believe everything they read.

There was no obvious way to explain our long affinity with Charles Wood and my brother Geoffrey. Their wives Valerie and Mary were at Colston’s Girls School in Bristol in the ’40s with Thelma. The motto was ‘Go and do thou likewise,’ which they took to heart, Val and Thelma by marrying playwrights, Mary by becoming my sister-in-law. We’re still good friends and relations.

Nick Hern looked into these pages long before there was any thought of making them public. He encouraged me to think they would interest others and has kept rekindling the fire when it was nearly out. So any blame is partly his.

July 2000

May

The garden burgeoned like a floral mile, roses and lupins, sage and peonies and weeds choking the beds between. I borrowed a mower and cut the grass. The house was at first depressing, hardly worth the cheque I’d written the previous week for Eleven Thousand One Hundred and Twenty Two Pounds Only, completing the total of £12,250. It’s redbrick with a pitch roof and bay windows, circa 1890, the sort one associates with H.G. Wells or the one Thomas Hardy built himself when he’d made some money. Badly thought out and so deep that the rooms on the ground floor are pitch dark where they meet halfway back. They don’t build them like that any more. But it’s big and solid and there are large gardens front and back, a playground for our two daughters and son after the cramped yard in Bristol.

Barbara brought them up by train. Odd how you could sometimes kill them after a week of no-one else – say, half-term or in a Manhattan hotel room – but, parted from them for a day, you’re usually glad to see them again. They stood on the platform so shiny and gay and their faces were such pictures of happiness to see us!

[While work was done on the awkward house, making the rear room into a spacious kitchen and adding a bathroom to our bedroom floor, we stayed on in Bristol, not making the move until August. During these months, I talked to several people about the film of Joe Egg, met Robert Shaw in the Ritz and at Shepperton where Harold Pinter laughed forcefully at rushes of The Birthday Party.

I entertained Albert Finney and William Friedkin (The French Connection) in Bristol and lunched in Soho with executives from Columbia pictures and Sidney Lumet (Twelve Angry Men, Network) who talked mostly of oysters and wondered why in Hadrian the Seventh a Protestant craved to be Pope. A Jew he said he could understand. ‘It’s a good job, near the mountains for the wife and kids, a big town house. But for a goy?’ For several very different reasons, nothing came of any of this.]

July

The weeks fly and I am a day off forty-one. Last night my latest play was the opening drama of Yorkshire Television. As I feared, it came over as an anthology of domestic trivia. I’d written it to order last year to fill a slot in a series under the umbrella heading The Sex War. Any such war finished for me in a truce some years ago and now there’s only a long peace relieved by daily skirmishes. Due to my stage success, this was now seen as a creditable catch for the producer, so it went out with undeserved fuss and flourish.

The press was the best I’ve had for a TV play, far more highly praised than the BBC’s expensive futuristic satire, shown at the same hour. The week’s good reviews ended with young Stoppard in The Observer: ‘Though nothing much “happens” in his plays, I can’t think of many things more dramatic than the thought of ten million people sitting safe around their sets and discovering that someone has got them right between the eyes.’

Who could resist such a honeyed tongue?

August

Took passports to Petty France where I found Joe Melia ahead of me in the queue, off to Spain to appear in a film. We hadn’t met since he’d refused to go to New York with the rest of the Joe Egg cast. A slight smell lingers around this episode but Joe the radical had certainly not been keen to meet all the Fascists he expected in that right-wing city.

‘Is it all for Spain in this queue?’ I asked the waiting people, ‘all Fascists here?’

We afterwards walked and drank beer, and he insisted again that he’d never maligned Albert Finney in public and had indeed killed all press implication that he’d been dropped from the cast for Broadway.

‘And the fact is, if I’d gone with it instead, you’d never have had your sell-out run and couldn’t have bought a house in Blackheath. So mine’s another pint, cheers!’

Mum and friend Jean came to stay, en route from a cut-price holiday in Cattolica, loaded with nasty toys for the children which broke almost at once. Dan cried ‘I don’t want this!’ and Catherine pulled the voice from the belly of her crying doll. For herself Mum had bought dainty shoes, trinkets and a toy grand piano that played a Neapolitan song when the lid was lifted. Coming home in the car from the coach station, they seemed cheerful. Mum blew smoke in our faces at seven a.m., but we’d expected that and held our breath. As the days passed, her self-pity became uncontrollable. How can I condemn her when we’re so alike? Life’s not easy, even for us, the privileged, and those with our temperament must get on the winning side or we’ll waste time lamenting our lot. Luckily I can use that feeling for my work, writing it out. Poor Mum just becomes a burden, a little girl who hasn’t had her fair share of dolly mixtures.

September

Neither Thelma nor I much wanted to leave the kids in this house of mounting female excitement but our chance had come for a week on our own, the first ever. Louise cried as we drove off; the others waved happily. When they pointed this out to her, they told us later, she said, ‘But they’re too young to understand that Mummy and Daddy are going for a long time.’

A week for them can look like forever.

At Hanover we came down out of the clouds to follow flight corridors across East Germany to the isolated city of Berlin. As at no other airport I know, landings are made right into the urban centre. Buildings rise all around as you wait for touch-down. Sheep crop the grass, inured to the roaring engines. At passport control, an official tipped the wink to a photographer who started taking our pictures. Another first. No-one in New York gave us the celebrity treatment. In fact, we were mostly ignored and the general view was that Blakemore and Nichols were pseudonyms for Finney, who had also written and directed the play he was starring in.

His snaps taken, the photographer helped us with our luggage to the barrier where, he told us, Mrs Beyer of Schiller Theater would soon be meeting us. Mrs Beyer turned out to be thin on top and with a luxuriant beard and an injured finger encased in plaster, an apt introduction to the man who was to be our host for the week, dramaturg Werner Beyer, eager, smiling, respectful but stubborn. Thelma baptised him Noddy in recognition of this tireless reassuring gesture.

At our hotel beside the Schlosspark-Theater, a sort of annexe of the Schiller, we were met by Boleslaw Barlog, the general intendant or Big Cheese of the whole outfit. More photos, capturing us before a poster advertising Ein Tag im Sterben von Joe Egg. With a plethora of bows and handshakes, Herr Barlog assured us of his best intentions and hoped to see us next day at the eleven o’clock rehearsal.

In due course, Noddy let us sit in his posh secondhand Citroen with the adjustable suspension. ‘Can you feel it going up and down?’ he asked as we sat in the car park waiting to move. Eventually he took us to see Kurfurstendamm (‘only Berliners must call it Ku’damm,’ he warned us), Brandenburg Gate, Congress Hall, National Gallery, Phil-harmonie and Reichstag. In an hour, more impressive modern architecture than you’d find in the whole of London. But then, we realised, West Berlin is nearly all modern; the rest was destroyed. Mies van der Rohe’s gallery was opened only three days before in time for the Festwochen, of which my little play is one of the events. The boulevards are as in the nineteenth century, designed – like those in Paris – by Baron Haussmann, broad and with generous promenades for pedestrians.

We walked up to the Wall, ugly and offensive, with barbed wire, in fact only one of several such walls that are hidden by the first. Noddy was unmoved by our sympathy that his city’s so severed. He showed the nearby memorial to the Russian dead, guarded within the Western sector by Russian troops. Sometimes, he said, during anti-Soviet demos, these poor squaddies were far too easy a target for attack, so to avoid an international incident the British have built a camp alongside and stationed a detachment there to guard the Russians who are supposed to be our enemies.

The rehearsal was encouraging, though the worst errors weren’t obvious at first: one, that the child’s played by an adult actress and two, we couldn’t see any affection in the way the parents handled her. The woman doing Joe has made a great effort imitating the physical distortions of a spastic child, a spectacle so repulsive that Herr Barlog has turned her wheelchair to face upstage. All this helps to create an atmosphere not so much homely as horrific. I thought of UFA and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The achievement of Mike’s production was to show the mundane exchanges and routines that constitute life with such a daughter.

Useless to complain. They’d been in rehearsal for months and no criticism was expected or wanted. My visit was a public formality.

For Noddy and his wife Inke, the enemy’s not Russia or the DDR but Axel Springer, reactionary press baron whose glass tower stands against the Wall as a symbolic up-you to the East. The uncles and oldies on all sides are the villains, if they’re old in spirit. Werner had refused the application of some students to hire the theatre for a birthday party for one of their professors who’s a spokesman for Nazi views.

We walked by the waters of the Wannsee and he pointed out Goering’s villa.

‘These people are not important. They can live quietly with their dogs and keep their country houses. But they shan’t be heard. I told these students we could hurt their professor if we wanted but we don’t want. They said How you could? And I said we could print in a programme for a Jewish play what this man said in 1933. Then they went to see Mister Barlog and of course he too throw them out.’

It seemed Barlog succeeded to his post because, when jobs came to be allotted after the war, he was the only eligible applicant who hadn’t been a Nazi.

In Werner’s lovely car, we floated to Charlottenburg Schloss, a cool baroque palace with formal ornamental gardens behind and lawns which no-one ever trampled. I suggested to Inke that it must have been one of the few old buildings left in Berlin.

‘Oh, this is a reconstruction, built about 1948,’ she told me, ‘the original was gutted by fire-bombs.’

A jet airliner rose suddenly into the sky behind the classical marble statuary, carved in the last twenty years. The tearing rasp of its engines savaged the serenity of the park.

‘Isn’t that beautiful!’ said Inke, meaning the aircraft. It wasn’t the first or last example of a Berliner’s gratitude for their lifeline.

I was shown first to the local press and TV film units and shared an interview with another visitor, the author of Catch 22, Joseph Heller who, despite his name, had no German either. I was somewhat awed by him but he was easy company, though not much better than I at keeping the talk rolling. The reporters were shy, Barlog explained, of asking questions and betraying the limits of their English.

Heller’s only play was the other production on offer for the Festwochen, staged in the Schiller’s main house. We Bombed in New Haven had become Wir bombardieren Regensburg. Behind us at the preview sat a young actor Max Unterzaucher, who pissed on it mercilessly. In the row in front sat Heller, muttering explanations over his shoulder to help us follow the action. We felt as Berliners must, trying to keep peace between two extremes. Max played the eponymous Kaspar in Peter Handke’s monodrama in a club theatre on Ku’damm. It wasn’t so much about the famous wolf-boy as the power of words to define the limits of our minds. Max and his wife and the producers of that event came for drinks at the Beyers’. All the things we’d hoped of New York were, to our surprise, happening here: intelligent people, decent company, generous entertainment and a respectful interest in us. Of course, they hadn’t yet seen my play.

On Sunday morning at eleven I was called downstairs to the theatre where a full invited house was already watching the first act. During the social comedy of the second, which seemed to me to be getting its proper laughs, Barlog turned and put his face close to mine, his vile breath flooding my nostrils as he whispered:

‘Next time, you write a comedy.’

Werner worked himself into a state about whether I should wear what-he-called ‘a dinner chucket’ to the mayoral opening of the festival that evening, at which I was to be the honoured guest. Perhaps, he thought, wearing a mere lounge suit would be construed as insolence. I said alright, it would have to be as I hadn’t brought a dinner chucket.

‘No,’ Inke told her husband, ‘as honoured guest and author of the play at Schlosspark he must make a scandal.’

‘No, not that either,’ I said. ‘If they won’t let us in. we come away without drawing attention. Not really very likely they will though, is it?’

‘Ah, these occasions are absurd, a subject for farce,’ said Werner, nodding and jumping from foot to foot.

‘But why are you, a Communist, a radical, so bothered about wearing the right clothes for a mayoral beanfeast?’

‘We must know our enemy,’ and he tapped the side of his nose with the plaster finger.

He measured himself against me. ‘I am about the same size but shorter in the arms and wider in the bellows. I shall go to the wardrobe of Schiller Theater and find a right-size dinner-chucket. A shirt, a tie and cummerbund. You say cummerbund?’

‘Well, not often.’

But after a stroll with Inke to watch the dancing and ice-skating at Europa Centre, we came home to find he’d changed his strategy.

‘If they don’t let you in, I announce that the honoured author-guest is standing outside because of bourgeois follies.’

‘So I’ll go in my lounge suit?’

Evidently no spare chuckets in the Schiller’s wardrobe.

The reception was at the Philharmonie. Werner found a place in the car park and was about to kill the engine when he cried ‘No, wait! This is for the doctor only’ and reversed to another. I stepped off in the dark across the lawn towards the main entrance.

‘No, wait!’ he called again, then, ‘Ah, you are English so yes, you walk on the grass. Very well so shall I and we shall say it is the English way.’

The glass doors leading into the foyers were firmly closed against us. Werner pushed them all without any luck, not for a moment letting the smile die on his face. Some guests who were leaving early opened the door and we slipped in unnoticed.

‘This was lucky,’ he admitted and led us towards a gathering of several hundred people at the far end. By no means all were in dinner chuckets so a scandal was averted. After about ten minutes, we found some glasses on a table and busied ourselves with them like extras in a film left to improvise our own business.

‘This might be a party for the workers of TWA,’ Werner said.

‘You don’t know anyone?’

‘No-one. That’s the mayor over there but he doesn’t know me.’

He did finally meet an elderly critic. Everyone in authority in the city was elderly, if not old. Through Werner, he warned us that my play would offend many people, then saw someone and made his escape. We were alone again. We helped ourselves to more drinks from a passing tray.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ said a voice behind me. I turned as a camera was raised towards me. By now almost used to this, I assumed a photogenic smile. ‘Would you mind standing out of the way while I photograph Mister Bernstein?’

The maestro of the New York Phil, the real guest of honour, moved forward to meet the mayor, arms outstretched, cape flowing, a pint-sized Dracula.

[The first of several Bernstein semi-encounters over the next few decades till we finally did meet him in 1990 shortly before his death.]

It was easier getting out than in.

At the restaurant where they took us to eat, we saw, at a distant table, Heller dining with some of his actors. We felt we should say hullo.

‘Hey, however d’you find me?’ he said, assuming this was the end of a long search for us.

‘How did it go?’ asked Thelma.

‘They seemed to like the actors but when I went on they booed me. I thought the show was fine and wanted to ask what the hell was the matter with it but I don’t have any German.’

The next day, Monday, our last in the city, began with shopping and finished with the opening of my play. Max, the actor who played Kaspar in Handke’s play, is Austrian, a foreigner, so can go into East Berlin. Werner and Inke, being Berliners, can’t. First we bought flowers for the actresses then Max drove us in his battered Deux Chevaux to Checkpoint Charlie, a location familiar from Cold War films.

Max told the glowering borderguards that the newspaper I carried had been bought that morning to read a notice of Heller’s play and also carried a photo from mine. The soldier pored over the print as if over a bit of hard-core porn and finally tore out the actors’ picture and gave it to me. Thelma and I, unaccustomed to these rituals, found ourselves acting truculent, quarrelling with each other and producing all the wrong things. The torn piece of newsprint kept coming out, to Max’s annoyance. We declared and counted out our currency, made lists of our passport numbers, home addresses, professions, Christ knows what, for all of which no pens were provided. Twenty yards from the US sector, the place was as tatty as wartime England, all cream paint and handwritten signs, prefab huts and ill-fitting uniforms. At another window we changed the obligatory five marks into the currency of the DDR. No books are allowed in but Thelma had brought along for light reading, in her smart Bergdorf-Goodman-5th-Avenue handbag, a paperback of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station. This brought no approving smile to the likenesses of Marx and Lenin staring from the walls. The woman flipped through and handed it back. Outside, another soldier went over the car, examining every bag and sweet-paper, poking about under the seats and scrutinising the underside with a mirror on a stick.

Quieter streets, hardly any cars and the few pedestrians staring curiously at us as we drove past the drab buildings. Max parked in Unter den Linden, far more easily than on Ku’damm. Shop-windows were full of porcelain for visitors to buy with their marks. The traditional stuff was pretty but anything modern was in a style not far from Woolworth’s. Max was as depressed as we were by the absence of a modern manner. At the end, a confluence of empty boulevards became a group of public buildings that fronted a great square which Max seemed to be telling us was used for parrots. Well, after all, there was a train-station called Zoo in West Berlin so perhaps . . .

‘You know – soldiers, bands and rockets.’

It was their Red Square, of course, used for shows of military strength, May Day parades.

He showed us The Berliner Ensemble, on Museum Island, explaining that the Deutsches Theater is now the one that counts. Brecht’s is as much of a joke here as the Schiller is in the other half, both establishment symbols, like almost everything else in this city, like the city itself, which has no real power even as a capital. All real authority has passed to Bonn, Munich, Frankfurt and Stuttgart.

‘It’s hard to make contact with the people here. So much fear on both sides.’

Time was getting on and it began to rain. We walked back and found the Deux Chevaux being examined by two young men.

‘They don’t see many French cars,’ Max said and started a conversation with the strangers who, without explaining, got into the back seat and sat beside Thelma. Some children came up and asked for chocolate, cigarettes and gum, as we had of GI’s in wartime England. Max drove about the streets, talking to the young men in German so that I grasped only a few proper names – Tito, Cernik, Dubcek. He finally dropped them in a side-street where they shook hands sadly and went off.

‘Interesting,’ Max said. ‘They’re students. They don’t agree with the regime, especially what happened in Prague. They wanted us to know.’

At the cream-coloured prefabs at Checkpoint Charlie, my newspaper photo was again scrutinised by the shy young soldiers. One examined my passport, staring at me and my mug-shot till I thought I should burst into inappropriate laughter. Was this the idea? Within minutes we were in the artificial bustle of Ku’damm.

[The play’s opening went well. Laughter until the entrance of the child, then a respectful silence. At the end, strong applause and some cheers as the actors lined up. Berlin still held to a practice long abandoned in England, that the author should appear on first nights to share the credit. My orders were to get backstage in time for the fifth or so curtain. I was there in the wings but miscounted and Mister Barlog had to grab my jacket and pull me back when I was halfway on. He finally let me walk forward into the lights. There was a pause as they tried to decide who this myopic stranger could be, then a chorus of boos. So my play was as bad as Heller’s? Like him, I lacked the German to ask who the hell they thought had won the war for Chrissake. The catcall was soon countermanded by stronger applause but not soon enough for me.

It was later explained, by Max I think, that this was all part of a protest movement. All English-language plays were catcalled on principle to promote the production of homegrown drama. The endemic secrecy of the place prevented anyone from warning us.]

Next morning some last-minute shopping for the children. No toy soldiers, Action Men, guardsmen, rockets or guns allowed. The military urge is discouraged and about time too, though playing with toy soldiers does not a warrior make. I did as a kid and was a pacifist at eighteen, as soon as the war ended. We were late at Werner’s place and he was hopping from foot to foot. Over lunch, he gave us his translations of the first reviews, all good.

‘Now we just go to Schiller Theater where Mr Bessing will want to say goodbye.’

‘Will there be time before our plane leaves?’

We found Mr Bessing in the canteen. He was as unknown to us as we to him but as Werner’s immediate boss had to be sure our minder was doing his job. He now drove to Tempelhof at high speed for a departure time I read as 3.40. He was taking things even more hectically than usual and we had to run to keep up as he arrived at check-out, where the girl telephoned and said they’d hold the plane.

‘Again we are lucky,’ he said, ‘but it is close.’

‘Close? Three-forty?’

‘Three o’clock. It is about to leave.’

‘No, look, in your own writing.’

‘That’s not four, it’s aitch for hundred. Fifteen hundred hours.’

He danced from foot to foot, waved the hand with the plaster finger, shouting best greetings as we juggled with passports and scampered across the airstrip with our hand baggage. The doors were closed behind us. Minutes later we looked down on what Günter Grass calls ‘the city closest to the realities of the age’.

Werner had thrust an envelope into my hand before we left his flat. Two shots of me and Heller talking and one of our arrival a week ago: Thelma and I trying to live up to expectations and Werner behind us, poised springheeled as though about to take off, exultant to have bagged us. On the envelope he’d written: ‘to use whenever they doubt their Berlin adventure could have been reality’.

[During the next two months, I revised the first draft of the new stage play for Olivier and Tynan, based on the old television script The End Beds that had been rejected by every producer in the land, now retitled The National Health. Our new friends among the neighbours at Blackheath include John Grigg, who had disclaimed his Lord Altrincham handle to run for Parliament, and Michael Frayn, whose funny pieces we’d long enjoyed.]

I told Michael I’d been asked to appear on Any Questions? and wondered whether he had.

‘Oh, don’t tell that story,’ said Gill his wife, covering face with hands, almost as embarrassed as himself.

‘Well,’ he began at once, ‘they asked me, yes, and I said alright, just once, no more, I’m not going on every week, understand that. I think they must have because they’ve never asked me since. We were all eating and drinking in this pub in Devizes or somewhere – Boothby, Marghanita Laski – having a pretty good time by and large, when the producer came and told us first that President Kennedy had been shot at, not yet that he was dead. It sobered us a bit and we all turned to discussing him. The second bulletin said he’d been killed and of course we were all very shocked. We really were. But, you know, not enough to stop us eating and drinking. That wouldn’t have helped anyone. We decided we shouldn’t go on air and talk about the morality of mini-skirts or whatever it was and Boothby was delegated to phone the Controller, who said all scheduled broadcasts were being cancelled anyway, so we just went in front of the audience and made short speeches of regret.’

‘You were awful,’ Gill said, raising her face for a moment.

‘I was terrible. I managed to say we’d all wanted Adlai Stevenson but were very sorry just the same . . . Oh God! . . . But Boothby was terribly moving. He broke down when it came to his turn. He said it wasn’t just the death of a fine statesman and charismatic leader but – for him – the death of a friend. And we were all horrified. I mean, we’d been drinking and discussing Kennedy as a public figure and all the time Bob knew him as a friend. Tears were pouring down his cheeks. I went up as soon as we’d done and told him how sorry I was and it turned out they’d been once together on a TV show in America! Christ, what a bloody cheek!’

Life’s changed a good deal for us recently. In the spring of last year we had to borrow £500 from Peggy and £250 from Charles Wood. This week I’ve turned down three film offers and heard that my share of the US tour of Egg is $2,000 a week. My new play’s gone off to Tynan, who was eager to read it. But when I urged Peggy to send him Egg, she said he was far too busy. Charles, who was in favour for a few years, is out again. The military craze is over, John Lennon’s given up wearing nineteenth-century uniforms and the Yanks have dropped Swinging London, in which by some strange process Charles got himself included. Our new accountant assesses our annual income as £24,000. I also employ a solicitor to look after the children’s trust, lawyers to argue my film contracts, a mother’s help, part-time gardener, daily woman, window-cleaner and team of builders.

Uncle Bert and Aunt Hattie came for Sunday dinner. Heather, our new help, drove me through the Blackwall Tunnel to Stratford-atte-Bowe to fetch them. We were minutes late arriving and they had coffee ready on a tray.

‘We’d given you up for lost,’ she snapped, ‘I thought our reply hadn’t reached you because Bert hadn’t put Blackheath on it.’

In the car, she told me she’d only been through the tunnel once when she was a girl, on an outing to Margate and on that occasion she’d been sick. We crossed fingers and the charm worked.

‘Look at the flats, Harriet,’ Bert kept saying. They couldn’t leave the subject of blocks of flats going up everywhere. Are they contemplating having to move from the jerry-built house they’ve lived in for eighty years? Perhaps the council has threatened eviction. Once at our house, they oo-er’ed and laughed at the sights. Eighty-seven-years-old Hattie climbed to the top to see everything. The number of bathrooms shocked her. At home, they only have an outside lav and hip-bath in front of the open fire. She’s lived her long life in a state of nervous alarm yet survives all her brothers and sisters – my father Dick, Bea, Robb, Florrie and others I never knew. Only Bert remains.

Dinner at the Griggs; other guests the Sieffs (directors of M&S) and the Roses, international journalists. Sieff had seen Manon at The Garden last night and thought it dreary, the music nothing like as good as Puccini and even he never wrote a tune as good as ‘Tea For Two’.

The table was candelit.

‘Hullo!’ said Sieff, ‘has the electricity failed?’

Mrs Rose is an ex-actress now working in a rough school in Paddington. She looked too young to have given up the stage in 1942. She was in fact fifty-one at midnight, when we all drank her health.

I talked to her of India, saying I was perhaps lucky to have been there during the worst of post-war austerity at home. She said she’d liked that, it simplified life, eliminated all the many choices you must make these days.

‘I used to just put down my ration book and say ‘Give me what I’m due’. I liked the egalitarian aspect. You weren’t nearly so aware of privilege. Britain’s gone back in that way, rather than forward. Perhaps I’m basically a Puritan.’

I responded warmly to all this. Coming home from the East in ’48, I never found austerity a trial. It wasn’t abundance we craved but to be let do the work we’d chosen, without much thought of personal ambition. Certainly ‘success’ in the modern sense had little to do with it.

As Thelma and I undressed later, I passed this on.

‘Yes, Patsy went on about being a Puritan too. It’s all very well for them. Mrs Rose had on one of the world’s most expensive perfumes. Easy for Patsy too, dealing with shopgirls, when most people know she’s really Lady Altrincham and she’s got such a posh voice. I wonder what she’d think of the simple life if she had my voice to do it with. And Mrs Rose’s dress didn’t come from M&S and when her husband’s finished his report on race relations, they’re off for a working holiday in Indonesia. If that’s the simple life, I’m a Puritan too.’

She went on to say how proud she was of me.

‘What for?’

‘Being so unabashed.’

‘What about?’

‘The way you followed the women out after the meal.’

‘Followed them out?’

‘It was obvious the men were staying behind for smokes and dirty stories so we went to sit in the living-room and when I turned round you were following us, with all these bewildered cigar-smoking men after you.’

‘Christ, yes, of course. Grigg asked me if I wanted a pee after I’d refused a cigar. I’ve never been to a dinner where that happened. I should have known from novels.’

‘Hullo, dear, Peggy here. Tynan’s just rung. Likes the play very much and thinks it fuller and richer than Joe Egg. He’s passed it to Sir Laurence, who of course is the laziest bastard in the world when it comes to reading anything so let’s hope he gets round to it before Christmas.’

Relieved and at the same time embarrassed to think of this faulty play, of which I am so sick, being staged with all the attendant fuss at the National Theatre. I must next write an attractive comedy about People Like Us and resist all ghoulishness.

Walking to Charing Cross down Lower Regent Street, after shopping for clothes, we were nearly knocked down by a nasty little scarlet sports car coming from Panton Street and flashing its lights to tell us to jump back out of its way. Having avoided injury, as it passed I thumped the bodywork with the cardboard carrier containing my new coat. The driver stopped and jumped out, a small bald man with large aggressive glasses.

‘D’you know there’s such a thing in this country as a law of property?’ he bawled.

‘Also one against killing people.’

‘I’ve been driving for forty years and never ever knocked anyone down, you silly cunt!’

‘Then you’ve met with some fast-moving pedestrians.’

He was already halfway back to his car, which was now blocking the street. He charged off in his puerile vehicle, boiling with anger, honking and flashing lights at every crossing, the epitome of the man who sees himself as a safe driver.

Charles and Val Wood came with their children Katrina and John on Christmas Eve and we all went to a matinée of Sean Kenny’s spectacular Gulliver’s Travels. Kenny was near us on the aisle, making notes for future improvements. Catherine, who had as usual talked all through the show, now fell forward, cried and shouted, ‘I want to go home!’ I wish I’d been able to see the note Kenny made at this point.

Charles got down to serious boozing in the evening. It snowed in time to sprinkle the garden. From time to time we watched the Apollo 8’s orbit of the moon. Cameras were trained on the earth and the astronauts told us how it looked.

‘Time for supper, everyone,’ said Val, coming from the kitchen.

‘That’s the earth we’re watching!’ Charles told her. ‘I want to keep my eyes on it in case it blows up.’

‘If it does,’ she said, ‘I shall watch it on the late news.’

Blakemore rang. Tynan does like the play but Sir Larynx Delivery thinks it only so-so and has no strong feelings either way. This somewhat dampened our festive spirits, though not too much, as Joe Egg has done the trick for me. Though I’d like another success, I’m not as hungry as I was. Charles’s H, or Monologues at Front of Burning Cities is in rehearsal at the Old Vic. His optimism’s tempered by four failures, at least with the public.

Boxing Night had us wondering why their young actor friend who’d come for drinks was such a success with women and where we go wrong. Val told of this bloke’s enviable promiscuity and the way (on location in Turkey for the shooting of Charles’s script of The Charge of the Light Brigade) he’d come down every morning and kissed the hand of whichever girl he’d slept with the night before. Thelma said I might do better if I hadn’t such bad wind and Val mentioned Charles’s habit of cleaning out his ears so that she can hear the wax move. Also they both agreed that our slippers weren’t very alluring.

Thel and I sat at home on New Year’s Eve while Heather, our mother’s help, joined the gaiety in Trafalgar Square.

‘Everyone was kissing everyone,’ she told us next day in her native Bristol accent. ‘It was smashing. I was kissed by hundreds of people. One little Pakistani kept coming back for more. I said, “Here, just a minute, you’ve had more than one already”.’

She talks of kissing as though it were giving each other sweets and I’m none too sure she knows if there’s anything to follow. She seems very innocent for twenty-five.

We were saying how much more was made of New Year in Bristol when suddenly a great discord filled the air and we realised the Thames was alive with horns and hooters. We went into the garden and the windows of flats and houses were open all around, our neighbours shouting good wishes. The noise didn’t die away for half an hour.

January

Working on my new play one morning, I saw a caterer’s van deliver boxes and furniture to the Griggs’. The mother’s-help grapevine reported a party for twenty people. That evening police cars and motorbike outriders blocked the street to escort Mrs Gandhi, here for The Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference.

‘She usually comes to dinner while she’s here,’ Patsy told Thelma, ‘but I’d no idea they were going to put on such an embarrassing show. And that’s all it was, because nobody checked those enormous back gardens. The obvious route if anyone meant business.’

Clearing up the minibus today, I was accosted by a man of about sixty, dirty cloth cap, red nose, watery eyes behind NHS glasses, clear strong voice with an accent like my father’s.

‘You a landlord, guvnor? Own a house? Tell you why, you can give me a tip. I’m round the corner, one of those old houses, damp on the walls, shocking. I’m starving. I’ve had no dinner. But the owner’s a nice coloured fellow, very decent man. Well, they’re pulling them down. Condemned. They said, “You’ll have to get out”. I said, “I paid my rent for furnished accommodation, you’ll have to find me somewhere else. I’m entitled.” I went to the police, three stripes up, he said, “You’ll have to go, mate.” I said, “Sergeant? I was a sergeant before you was out of nappies – Royal Artillery – eff right, eff right, pick ’em up there, form fours, dressing by the right.” I said, “The Law? Don’t talk to me, you don’t know the law.” I walked out. Now the council says I’ll have to go, the rent tribunal says I can stay. So who do you believe? Who can you believe? This other fellow in our place, they said, “We’ll put you down The Centre” and like a fool he went. Workhouse style, down Peckham. He should have let his wife and kids go in The Centre but stayed where he was . . . This lot on the top floor used to go in the landlord’s place at night and thieve his stuff. And suspicion fell on me because I’m a rough-looking man. But I lead a quiet life, breed canaries. How I met the landlord, I saw him painting his windows. He said, “You’ve been watching me a long time.” I said, “Yes, I have and you’re letting that paint dribble down the pane. Tell you what,” I said, “You go inside, put a kiddle on, I got some tea in my pocket.” When he come back, I’d done three. I done the whole place for him. His mates come in and said, “You had the builders?” He said, “Only a rough-looking man.” They said, “Well, he knows his job.” They call me Blackie. Or Yankee. I been to America. Been everywhere. I know the coloured people well. Understand them. Here’s the form they give me at the council.’