CHAWTON
At a fairly low point financially, I remember sitting at a wedding next to a woman whose husband had just had a pay-off from his merchant bank of £127 million. Though I’d met her on a number of occasions and liked her, I knew only that her husband was rich – no more than that - till she told me the figure at some point. We had been allocated places and, arriving earlier than the other folk on the table, she noticed that there was another guest in between us. ‘Do you know this person?’ she said to me. I didn’t. Nor did she - so she switched the names round and we sat next to one another throughout. ‘Did you come by train?’ I asked. ‘No, private plane.’
On my immediate left was someone who would end up, a few years later, in cabinet. Opposite was the Director of the National Theatre. On an adjoining table was a future Prime Minister. Now, not since I was fourteen and announced I wanted to be an M.P. (to the slight amusement of one of my masters at school) have I had conventional ambitions and money’s not a motivating factor with me, but you do occasionally think, ‘Blimey. I’ve missed the boat.’ I was offered a lift back to London in the private plane, which I wouldn’t have minded, except that I would have had to come back by train for my new £7k Ford Ka.
The Director of the National Theatre came over to sit next to me as things loosened up at the end of the reception. I’d done a fair bit of work for him with a number of young writers. We talked about them – several of whom would later have main stage plays at the National. We didn’t talk about my own work: I’d written three performed stage plays, two at the Royal Court. I know how to be professionally pushy but I’ve never really believed in myself as a stage writer, never wanted it badly enough. ‘No reason why you can’t write for the West End,’ people used to say when I was living in London and seeing a lot of theatre. Technically I was capable, but my answer was always ‘No.’ Yes, it would be quite nice to see your name in lights, but what you might call intrinsic motivation was lacking. One of the young writers I looked after at the National had her own West End hit a little after that high powered wedding (where the bride cried at one point – because of the strain of it? It took place in a castle). My writer friend also had had an lachrymose reaction to her starry West End hit, confessing to me, during its run, that she had been deeply depressed, as if she didn’t deserve her success. I’m glad to say she’s overcome those feelings: she’s quietly, erratically, brilliant and there have been other hits. At one point during our meal – she’s Catholic born – she looked at me and said, ‘You’re a priest.’ I think she meant a bit more than I was letting her talk – confess - her unhappiness. I’m not other regarding enough to be a priest – my sympathy for most folk has its limits – and my faith in a divinity is wavering, to say the least. She didn’t know this but I was seeing a lot of my priest-friend Eric James at the time, who was pushing me in that direction. When it became obvious he would be disappointed he said one day, ‘Well, maybe you have a ministry of writing.’ Which will do me.
The wedding and the Charlotte Street meal with my young writer friend came towards the end of a dismal period for me - though (unexpected reactions again) I wasn’t feeling anywhere near as glum as circumstances might suggest. I was enjoying my writing. The activity was its own reward. What had dropped away at that time were any lingering conventional ambitions.
In my teenage years I’d wanted to be Head Boy at school quite badly and very much like and recognise that description of Tom Buchanan in ‘The Great Gatsby,’ whose high point was some irrecoverable football game during his Princeton years. Being Head Boy, I discovered, wasn’t anywhere near as interesting at the getting there. An early lesson learnt. I also – badly - wanted to get to Cambridge and worked (over) hard to secure a place: I may never again have studied as intensively as at A level time. So there we are, at seventeen/eighteen, job(s) done. And after that? I didn’t pay undivided attention to my University studies. I have a Professor friend, absolute top of her field, who told me ruefully that she would get up at 5 in the morning to work her way to her Double First. I didn’t even attend lectures – not one - my last year at Cambridge. This wasn’t laziness, just a preference for private study, an early instinct of the eventual pattern of my life. I didn’t realise that by not attending lectures, or even - when I could get away with it - supervisions I was passing up the opportunity to anticipate the exam questions, set by those self-same lecturers and supervisors. I spent my third, final, year, reading very widely, ‘researching’ one or two subjects in depth (Jane Austen principally) and left a few too many gaps. I had vaguely hoped for an academic future after graduation (not knowing what else to do and ignoring proffered career interviews) and - though surprised - wasn’t unduly cast down when, my final degree not being good enough, I didn’t go on to pursue my projected thesis on the great Jane. I read my submission recently - it was professionally printed – and barely understood a word. It seems just that: all words. Still looks good, though. It had cost a bob or two: I’d taken my handwritten manuscript to a typist, who worked in some dusty Victorian upstairs room of Chesterfield Market Hall and who also bound it. I had a successful interview as a result at UC London, about which I remember nothing apart from its being the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated. I was going through the motions, really. I hadn’t wanted to stay on in Cambridge and wonder, as the years have gone by, if I actually enjoyed my time in a University I so much wanted attend. I met several now lifetime friends, enjoyed acting - and the opportunity to study. But barely went back (till recently) and wasn’t always comfortable when there. This was partly to with class. I directed an outdoor production of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ in my last year. It’s a difficult play but it worked with a terrific cast (including my later Professor pal as Paulina). The President of the College subsequently invited me to call in the President’s Lodging to be congratulated. I never rang his doorbell (they were Tudor lodgings: the bell was on a black chain). Though I now know the President was a working class boy made good he was a Cambridge grandee and I was feeling chippy.
I still resent chucking twelve quid down the drain by joining the Cambridge Union but recognised instantly that politics (or at least the Union) wasn’t for me. At my first debate, the visiting speaker was the young (was he ever young?) Douglas Hogg. He had come over from Oxford, where he had been President of the Union, and – posh pipsqueak - talked too much about ‘my father’: Quintin. Nobody on our street was called Quintin. One of the minor pleasures of life lately is that the prat Hogg is for ever tainted with his M.P’s expenses claim for a duck house in his moat (didn’t stop him entering the House of Lords, though). I also didn’t shed a tear that Hogg’s daughter got the push from the Bank of England recently for not revealing her links with her merchant banker brother. I wouldn’t have known what a merchant bank was back in ’68 (when retail branch managers seemed important figures to me). I met enough public school types at Cambridge to realise I was, in most cases, at least their intellectual equal. I don’t envy them but resent – perhaps even more as the years go by – their (generally) smooth progress through life. But we grammar school pupils were meant to shake all that up.
I had a girlfriend (St Paul’s Girls) who once said she had never met anyone like me. Nor me her. She lived in Camden Square (about the most desirable address in the capital I noticed in one survey) and I remember asking her, ‘Is that in the centre of London?’ To my surprise she wept when reading the Times one morning, having just spotted that her father had been knighted: she hadn’t been told. A friend of hers, whom I was to become good pals with, I first heard speaking Russian down the phone on that Newnham College corridor. ‘Yours is a funny name,’ I said. She was Jewish. I hadn’t worked out what Jewishness meant before. Another girl was the Clarks shoes ‘heiress’. All seemed to play the piano rather well and had travelled widely. Because I had a sort of actor-y superficial confidence I fitted in well enough. My mother, however, was anxious that I would bring home my Camden Square girlfriend: our lavatory wasn’t out the back but in the porch and that bothered my mum. As it turned out we jacked in our relationship that summer by a polite exchange of letters (I was quietly on my way in a different direction). So it would give a false impression to say I wandered round Cambridge somehow cowed, in awe. But I don’t see the place in ‘Brideshead’ terms. I feel like I negotiated it, clearly coping better than the triathlete, Alistair Brownlee. I read recently that this nice Northern guy/national hero gave up Cambridge after a term (Girton College, reading Medicine), hating the place, before returning back home to Leeds and a sports degree. It amuses me, and probably him, that his mother was furious he’d chucked up his chances of being a doctor.
My own mother had had a little operation during my own first term and I called back home for a weekend, She was so pleased to see me she cried when I entered the ward. I knew how much she missed me, and me her - but only for a few weeks. One of my male friends, later a successful TV exec and film maker, told me that he had felt so miserable his first few weeks in Cambridge he had gone to the Arts Cinema every afternoon, sitting on his own. Though homesick (I’d never left home before) I fairly rapidly got into the swing of things to the extent that at Christmas I couldn’t wait to get back in January to college and new friends.
Having changed subjects at the start of my second term – it was part of my eagerness to get back - I was required to put in an extra Summer Vac term, four weeks in July and August when Cambridge was quiet (this was before colleges made money by hosting conferences). I had a room in college for the first time (it had been digs in the first year) and loved it. Virginia Woolf writes of the joy of ‘A Room of One’s Own’ but, of course, this needn’t be in a Cambridge quad. Back home in Chesterfield, I’d simultaneously moved into a new bigger bedroom – a bit unfurnished and darker than my child’s bedroom. I remember, vividly, reading George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ that summer, sitting by the only window. Our house in Chesterfield was a semi and we had new neighbours, a young-ish couple with two small children. I’d play lengthy improvised games of badminton with them over the hedge at the back of our house. If I look back at that time (‘When were you happiest?’) it’s not punting on the Cam but those evenings scuffing up our back lawn. Blue suburban skies.
Part of the magic was I’d started an affair back home – necessarily intermittent – with a (married) guy ten years older than me. It was a time when my sort was pitied, at best. No one knew because what we were doing was criminal. He was taking the most risk and I was under-age even after the law was changed. In a house move recently I sorted through a drawer full of old correspondence and see the amount of notes he sent me over those five or six years – keen, persistent. Otherwise he was happily married and I probably saved him from riskier gay activities. And he remained married, along with a boyfriend who succeeded me. He saw me through the years until I had the confidence to come out. I remember walking back from a Part One English exam - the Summer of Love, 1967 - through sunlit courts where every study window was open, ‘Sergeant Pepper’ playing on the record decks. ‘Love is all around’ as the mopheads sang (a bit repetitively) to the planet, dressed in kaftans, girlfriends draped round the studio, but I don’t remember too many songs about same sex attraction, apart from appropriations like ‘Mad about the Boy’ and – used movingly against the visuals in the film of ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ - ‘My Funny Valentine.’ But there’s a kind of sensibility you pick up on. How did I know, some years later, that Elton’s ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ expressed gay misery? (it wasn’t just Elt’s sequins). Or that Joan Armatrading’s ‘Love and Affection’ (which I used in a television film) had a tinge of something other than the inevitable boy-girl? And that Joe Jackson’s ‘Is she really going out with him?’ might be more than it seemed at first…
I had a couple of crushes at University. One was on a fellow Cambridge thesp, a star actor, who, according to rumour, had been bedded by Germaine Greer. We were in a play (including Greer, doing her PhD, older than us) which had a short tour away from Cambridge. I wanted the love object too much to have handled the strain of his (and her) company in a tour. Near fifty years later our paths crossed – he has a wild shock of grey hair, once brown, long and Beatle-y - and we exchanged polite e mails. I remember, during the production, rescuing Germaine’s cat. She had locked herself out of her City Centre first floor flat, the mog inside. This tall, confident woman had an endearing fear of heights, so it was the kid from Piccadilly Road (cherry tree at the top of the garden and woods behind) who volunteered to climb in. She wore a mini skirt and I have a mental image of my trotting beside her. With a brilliant woman like that (she could quote Dante) along with the young, preternaturally assured David Hare in our crack cast – the play was ‘Spring Awakening’ - I’m not surprised that I balked at that tour. David had written a knowledgeable article on the play’s author, Wedekind, for Cambridge ‘Varsity.’ I knew who Ibsen and Chekhov were, had never heard of Wedekind, highlighted my own (small) part in the play, and was glad I passed muster.
I couldn’t handle (or not up close) that variety of Cambridge aristocracy, knew I was out of my depth and – scared - went home, and worked in the toy department of the Co-op that summer. It’s the only McJob I’ve ever done and I hated it. My boss told me off for having my arms folded my first morning at work. My mother went off on holiday on her own and my affair hotted up for the week of her absence (we got to use a bed for once). Between two worlds, Cambridge and Chesterfield, (jumped up toy department managers excepted) I happy back home, knew who I was, liked life with my mum and my kind-a boyfriend, whom she didn’t like much. I wonder if she knew what was going on? (or ‘going off’ as we used to say up North). By my third year I’d had enough of Cambridge and, voting with my feet, chose to sneak off back home to study for the best part of a month before my exams,. I remember saying goodbye to a little group of friends on my last day at University. They included a Girtonian I see on Monday next, who helped the latest play by providing me with extracts from her 17 year old diary. It’s cheerfully up and down and variable in moods. I wish I’d known she was as daft as me as an adolescent: she always seemed very confident at Cambridge, a girl who knew where she was going – towards a career in journalism. I sent off a number of (handwritten) letters that summer, rather half-heartedly, applying for this and that, including an application to the Managing Editor of Penguin books, who replied encouragingly, asking me to London for an interview. What I really wanted was to write, without having the confidence to write, let alone publish anything, in the Cambridge magazines (in which Clive James, another Australian, was a regular contributor). It seems, now, like an act of hubris. But dug in. No ‘Creative Writing’ courses then (I’m still sniffy about them). I sent off for a booklet at some point: ‘How to Write for TV.’ I started teaching, temporarily at first I thought, before it became enjoyably all embracing. Then, after a year or two, one weekend I turned out a short story - by hand on foolscap paper - called ‘Susan was a Fat Girl.’ I read it a few years ago and realised it’s a metaphor for my feelings about being ‘outside,’ she fancying a boy she’ll never attract. It was a good example of writing about what you knew, set in a town like Chesterfield. And a lot of my characters, for many years, were disguised homosexuals, living up North, though I was never too glum, I hope, about queers or the North. I knew the writer Jonathan Harvey quite well in the early Nineties. He came to stay at my flat in Chiswick, while his play ‘Beautiful Thing’ opened at the Bush. I’d read it in manuscript: a joyous celebration of gayness set in the Liverpool he loves. He was a generation after me, less cautious. But we write from our own experience, what’s shaped us. I couldn’t have written it, and remember Jonathan, in the middle of his heady early success, falling badly for one of his (sadly straight) lead actors.
But I was gaining in confidence, living at home, happy teaching, beginning to write in my spare time while my mum sat and knitted, before wondering – eventually - if she could have the telly on. She didn’t find my ambition peculiar, probably had more faith in my abilities than I had: ‘You’re very determined.’ I once skived a week off work, feigning illness, to get an early play finished. She went along with that: liked me round the house. It would be years before I learned to type and even longer before I stopped doing the initial donkey work in an armchair. Occasionally I would be asked to stand up and take a break from my attempts on the summits, while my mother (whose jumpers were more likely to be finished than my plays) checked my chest and arm measurements. When politicians talk of ‘hard working families’ I think of her knitting and purling, and me scribbling away. My ex-girlfriend was at the Courtauld by then; my best friend had headed straight to Fleet Street and then on to New York as America correspondent; my lonely cinema going pal, after a year at film school, was working in television. I think what a quiet life mine was, but – with the pulls and tugs of ‘I ought to be doing something more adventurous’ - it set the course of a life. Even during the alarms and excursions of some of my later years, moving around, living in France, I settle domestically and I write. My ideal week is one in which I have no engagements at all, going to the shops or for a walk the big event. No disturbances: writing space. I type this in a house overlooking the heath – Blackheath. I have been here, quietly, for two weeks. Yesterday I had a lunch in town. I go in for a meal with the neighbours tonight. That’s about it.
There were a number of plays that didn’t make it, but then one worked: set almost entirely in the Chesterfield living room where it had been written. Eventually I would move away from home, give up the day job, and have a go at becoming a professional, living on my own by then. I’d left home a couple of years before my mother died. She had a heart attack on holiday – a week at the end of September in the Isle of Wight. One small consolation was that she’d seen that first play of mine on television. She was proud of me, wanted me to succeed. I remember that first autumn and winter after her death, sitting by the fire, grieving, with the thought: who I had to do it for? I think there’s no doubt that part of my motivation at that time was to please her. And - to preserve her approval - I had never mentioned my sexuality. Colm Toibin said recently that he and his mother, also, had never talked of his gayness, but she had once asked his sister: ‘Is he happy?’ Later, somebody said to me, ‘Oh. I think your mother would have wanted to be happy, more than anything, whatever you were.’ I couldn’t see that while she was alive.
She set me up as a writer, leaving me two and a half thousand, the same as my dad had left her. Money for a rainy day, she called it, not to be eaten into. I would use it as ballast to get going full time as a playwright. It took a few years: I did a couple of night schools and became an examiner to keep some cash coming in. But by the time I came to London I was on a roll. A certain amount of success is necessary for the next decent job to come in. And – it’s not ignoble - most of us want to prove ourselves, to make a mark. But, as with doing it for your parent, ‘succeeding’ isn’t enough. What matters is process rather than result. I discovered that, finally, when the momentum stopped. I was lost for a time, berating myself for not being confident or bold or clever enough, beating myself up wondering if my homosexuality and lingering feelings of inferiority were to blame. Or a small town mind set? ‘You can take the boy away from the small town, but you can’t take the small town out of the boy.’
Shortly after I arrived in London, I saw Caryl Churchill’s masterpiece, ‘Top Girls,’ at the Royal Court. I had just taken over from Caryl as Young Writers’ Tutor. In the final knock out scene of the play a career woman goes back to her East Anglian sister - and I asked Caryl was that where she came from? No, she said, ‘I come from nowhere, really’ – evacuated to Canada during the war. I talked a bit about my settled background. ‘I envy you,’ she said. And I can’t forget (though may slightly mangle it) James Baldwin’s response to David Frost’s question: ‘You’re black, you’re Jewish, you’re homosexual.’ ‘Yes, they’ve been the making of me as a writer.’
Being homosexual is not such a big deal now, though even this week we have Tim Farron twatting on about his Christianity and gay sex. Tim, Jesus didn’t say a fucking word about sex. The famous (beautifully written) woman taken in adultery passage in St. John is a late add on to the Gospels, fourth century. And the marriage at Cana was a gay wedding (- I made that last bit up). Can I recommend, Tim, that you watch that American porn classic ‘These Bases are Loaded’ from those newly liberated pre-Aids days where more men than in your Parliamentary party pound one another liberally, defiantly, I feel, of ‘moralists’ like you? Gayness goes beyond sex, of course, and feeling an outsider has almost certainly helped, not hindered me. I look at most things with a sense of irony, humour, even playfulness. Am probably a perpetual adolescent who, while generally ‘well behaved,’ has only a limited respect for authority. I couldn’t remotely work in an office – or a toyshop - though, interestingly, my fellow worker at the Co-op that long lost summer was a lad I’d known carnally at school a few years before. (He had an enormous dick, Tim – they vary in size, you know). We spent many dreary hours among the shelves in the quiet toy department warehouse without ever getting back to our old ways. He’d grown out of it: it was a phase. I knew it wasn’t with me and had considered going to see a psychiatrist to help cure me. My married boyfriend quietly dissuaded me. You needed to be resilient to be a woofa at that time. And - though I’ve become what’s known as class-less - coming from an outside stall in class terms didn’t harm me much either and probably made me even more determined.
I no longer feel the need to prove myself to anyone – except to myself. I still give myself short shrift when on a downer, still niggle a bit (I wouldn’t be writing this otherwise) about not doing as well as I sometimes think I could have. But as Federer said yesterday after two sublime sets and then recovering to win from 3-0 down in the third set tie breaker: ‘You can always do better in a match.’ All you can do is ensure each play is as good as you can make it. And serious illness (and recovery) is a ‘healthy’ corrective to most perceived difficulties or failings. It’s been a quiet life, which I’ve loved, tapping away in whatever room – generally comfortable, sometimes even my own – I happen to be in. You stumble towards what you want to do, the life you want to lead – that’s ‘right’ for you. (Other lives are available, of course).
In the Pantheon of great British writers, after Shakespeare, it’s Jane Austen for me every time. The world never had the benefit of my ground breaking, ‘Character and Symbol in Jane Austen’ thesis. It’s the two hundredth anniversary of her death today, aged 41 – only half way through a life. I was interested, even back then, in how she wrote, as much as, critically, what she wrote. It’s what the thesis should have been about. There were a couple of early epistolary novels, various bits and pieces unfinished (‘Juvenilia’), including some promising stuff. A possible husband died. Another moved away – his family concerned about the preservation of his fortune: Jane (many siblings, the daughter of a country vicar) would have brought sod all to the match. Her father, on retirement, moved the family to Bath, a fashionable, bustling city she hated. There is some indication that she had a period of depression. But the move back to Hampshire after her father’s death and a settled existence with her widowed mother and sister (a friend Martha Lloyd joined them) in a little house in Chawton, near Alton, provided her with the peace and security to allow her to revise those earlier unpublished novels into the ‘Pride and Prej.’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’ we know. Then it’s on to the new stuff - staggering: ‘Mansfield Park,’ ‘Emma’ and ‘Persuasion’. Every now and again during those Chawton years she would go away to her brother Edward’s estate near Canterbury (he had been adopted by rich childless parents, the Knights). There were more visits to London and her banker brother Henry than we usually credit her with: she liked a taste of society, loved plays. But it was home in Chawton where most of the writing was done. No room of her own, but with the capable Cassandra taking the brunt of managing the house, she wrote with a board on her knee, sometimes at a desk. There was a daily walk into Alton or the 15 minutes to the great house, also owned by Edward, who had provided them with a permanent home. There were occasional visitors. Her favourite niece tells us that, among company, she would smile to herself, get up and scribble something down. I do sometimes wonder about Jane’s sexuality – but as one of my old pals (see ‘The Wili Si’) once said, ‘You think everybody’s gay.’ There’s much evidence, in the novels, of strong female attachments, and Emma’s relationship with the gullible Harriet has more than a smack of lesbianism. I won’t pursue that – another thesis bites the dust – but there she is: the writer quietly, steadily at work, single, but secure. Outside the traffic rumbles to and from Winchester and London. Her mother, a keen gardener, is outside. Cassandra and Martha are on a visit to Alton and will pick up the mutton. ‘I’ll get Frank Churchill to pay a surprising visit to London,’ Jane thinks, ‘on the pretence of having a haircut …but really to meet Jane Fairfax. It’s the kind of impulsive thing he’d do, and that Emma will forgive him for.’ Her pen scratches: ‘Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.’ She likes that and writes on for a time before the donkey cart is heard turning into the yard, Cassandra and Martha with the mutton.
Quiet days in Chawton produced a handful of the greatest novels in the English language – though I wish she’d not packed Mary Crawford into exile at the end of ‘Mansfield Park’ (as moralistically as Tim Farron). I would like ‘Mansfield’ to go on for ever, ramifying, not curtailed by plot. I’ll never write anything one tenth as good as the least of her novels. But I know those quiet rooms, that absorption. Am grateful.
July 2017
At a fairly low point financially, I remember sitting at a wedding next to a woman whose husband had just had a pay-off from his merchant bank of £127 million. Though I’d met her on a number of occasions and liked her, I knew only that her husband was rich – no more than that - till she told me the figure at some point. We had been allocated places and, arriving earlier than the other folk on the table, she noticed that there was another guest in between us. ‘Do you know this person?’ she said to me. I didn’t. Nor did she - so she switched the names round and we sat next to one another throughout. ‘Did you come by train?’ I asked. ‘No, private plane.’
On my immediate left was someone who would end up, a few years later, in cabinet. Opposite was the Director of the National Theatre. On an adjoining table was a future Prime Minister. Now, not since I was fourteen and announced I wanted to be an M.P. (to the slight amusement of one of my masters at school) have I had conventional ambitions and money’s not a motivating factor with me, but you do occasionally think, ‘Blimey. I’ve missed the boat.’ I was offered a lift back to London in the private plane, which I wouldn’t have minded, except that I would have had to come back by train for my new £7k Ford Ka.
The Director of the National Theatre came over to sit next to me as things loosened up at the end of the reception. I’d done a fair bit of work for him with a number of young writers. We talked about them – several of whom would later have main stage plays at the National. We didn’t talk about my own work: I’d written three performed stage plays, two at the Royal Court. I know how to be professionally pushy but I’ve never really believed in myself as a stage writer, never wanted it badly enough. ‘No reason why you can’t write for the West End,’ people used to say when I was living in London and seeing a lot of theatre. Technically I was capable, but my answer was always ‘No.’ Yes, it would be quite nice to see your name in lights, but what you might call intrinsic motivation was lacking. One of the young writers I looked after at the National had her own West End hit a little after that high powered wedding (where the bride cried at one point – because of the strain of it? It took place in a castle). My writer friend also had had an lachrymose reaction to her starry West End hit, confessing to me, during its run, that she had been deeply depressed, as if she didn’t deserve her success. I’m glad to say she’s overcome those feelings: she’s quietly, erratically, brilliant and there have been other hits. At one point during our meal – she’s Catholic born – she looked at me and said, ‘You’re a priest.’ I think she meant a bit more than I was letting her talk – confess - her unhappiness. I’m not other regarding enough to be a priest – my sympathy for most folk has its limits – and my faith in a divinity is wavering, to say the least. She didn’t know this but I was seeing a lot of my priest-friend Eric James at the time, who was pushing me in that direction. When it became obvious he would be disappointed he said one day, ‘Well, maybe you have a ministry of writing.’ Which will do me.
The wedding and the Charlotte Street meal with my young writer friend came towards the end of a dismal period for me - though (unexpected reactions again) I wasn’t feeling anywhere near as glum as circumstances might suggest. I was enjoying my writing. The activity was its own reward. What had dropped away at that time were any lingering conventional ambitions.
In my teenage years I’d wanted to be Head Boy at school quite badly and very much like and recognise that description of Tom Buchanan in ‘The Great Gatsby,’ whose high point was some irrecoverable football game during his Princeton years. Being Head Boy, I discovered, wasn’t anywhere near as interesting at the getting there. An early lesson learnt. I also – badly - wanted to get to Cambridge and worked (over) hard to secure a place: I may never again have studied as intensively as at A level time. So there we are, at seventeen/eighteen, job(s) done. And after that? I didn’t pay undivided attention to my University studies. I have a Professor friend, absolute top of her field, who told me ruefully that she would get up at 5 in the morning to work her way to her Double First. I didn’t even attend lectures – not one - my last year at Cambridge. This wasn’t laziness, just a preference for private study, an early instinct of the eventual pattern of my life. I didn’t realise that by not attending lectures, or even - when I could get away with it - supervisions I was passing up the opportunity to anticipate the exam questions, set by those self-same lecturers and supervisors. I spent my third, final, year, reading very widely, ‘researching’ one or two subjects in depth (Jane Austen principally) and left a few too many gaps. I had vaguely hoped for an academic future after graduation (not knowing what else to do and ignoring proffered career interviews) and - though surprised - wasn’t unduly cast down when, my final degree not being good enough, I didn’t go on to pursue my projected thesis on the great Jane. I read my submission recently - it was professionally printed – and barely understood a word. It seems just that: all words. Still looks good, though. It had cost a bob or two: I’d taken my handwritten manuscript to a typist, who worked in some dusty Victorian upstairs room of Chesterfield Market Hall and who also bound it. I had a successful interview as a result at UC London, about which I remember nothing apart from its being the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated. I was going through the motions, really. I hadn’t wanted to stay on in Cambridge and wonder, as the years have gone by, if I actually enjoyed my time in a University I so much wanted attend. I met several now lifetime friends, enjoyed acting - and the opportunity to study. But barely went back (till recently) and wasn’t always comfortable when there. This was partly to with class. I directed an outdoor production of ‘The Winter’s Tale’ in my last year. It’s a difficult play but it worked with a terrific cast (including my later Professor pal as Paulina). The President of the College subsequently invited me to call in the President’s Lodging to be congratulated. I never rang his doorbell (they were Tudor lodgings: the bell was on a black chain). Though I now know the President was a working class boy made good he was a Cambridge grandee and I was feeling chippy.
I still resent chucking twelve quid down the drain by joining the Cambridge Union but recognised instantly that politics (or at least the Union) wasn’t for me. At my first debate, the visiting speaker was the young (was he ever young?) Douglas Hogg. He had come over from Oxford, where he had been President of the Union, and – posh pipsqueak - talked too much about ‘my father’: Quintin. Nobody on our street was called Quintin. One of the minor pleasures of life lately is that the prat Hogg is for ever tainted with his M.P’s expenses claim for a duck house in his moat (didn’t stop him entering the House of Lords, though). I also didn’t shed a tear that Hogg’s daughter got the push from the Bank of England recently for not revealing her links with her merchant banker brother. I wouldn’t have known what a merchant bank was back in ’68 (when retail branch managers seemed important figures to me). I met enough public school types at Cambridge to realise I was, in most cases, at least their intellectual equal. I don’t envy them but resent – perhaps even more as the years go by – their (generally) smooth progress through life. But we grammar school pupils were meant to shake all that up.
I had a girlfriend (St Paul’s Girls) who once said she had never met anyone like me. Nor me her. She lived in Camden Square (about the most desirable address in the capital I noticed in one survey) and I remember asking her, ‘Is that in the centre of London?’ To my surprise she wept when reading the Times one morning, having just spotted that her father had been knighted: she hadn’t been told. A friend of hers, whom I was to become good pals with, I first heard speaking Russian down the phone on that Newnham College corridor. ‘Yours is a funny name,’ I said. She was Jewish. I hadn’t worked out what Jewishness meant before. Another girl was the Clarks shoes ‘heiress’. All seemed to play the piano rather well and had travelled widely. Because I had a sort of actor-y superficial confidence I fitted in well enough. My mother, however, was anxious that I would bring home my Camden Square girlfriend: our lavatory wasn’t out the back but in the porch and that bothered my mum. As it turned out we jacked in our relationship that summer by a polite exchange of letters (I was quietly on my way in a different direction). So it would give a false impression to say I wandered round Cambridge somehow cowed, in awe. But I don’t see the place in ‘Brideshead’ terms. I feel like I negotiated it, clearly coping better than the triathlete, Alistair Brownlee. I read recently that this nice Northern guy/national hero gave up Cambridge after a term (Girton College, reading Medicine), hating the place, before returning back home to Leeds and a sports degree. It amuses me, and probably him, that his mother was furious he’d chucked up his chances of being a doctor.
My own mother had had a little operation during my own first term and I called back home for a weekend, She was so pleased to see me she cried when I entered the ward. I knew how much she missed me, and me her - but only for a few weeks. One of my male friends, later a successful TV exec and film maker, told me that he had felt so miserable his first few weeks in Cambridge he had gone to the Arts Cinema every afternoon, sitting on his own. Though homesick (I’d never left home before) I fairly rapidly got into the swing of things to the extent that at Christmas I couldn’t wait to get back in January to college and new friends.
Having changed subjects at the start of my second term – it was part of my eagerness to get back - I was required to put in an extra Summer Vac term, four weeks in July and August when Cambridge was quiet (this was before colleges made money by hosting conferences). I had a room in college for the first time (it had been digs in the first year) and loved it. Virginia Woolf writes of the joy of ‘A Room of One’s Own’ but, of course, this needn’t be in a Cambridge quad. Back home in Chesterfield, I’d simultaneously moved into a new bigger bedroom – a bit unfurnished and darker than my child’s bedroom. I remember, vividly, reading George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ that summer, sitting by the only window. Our house in Chesterfield was a semi and we had new neighbours, a young-ish couple with two small children. I’d play lengthy improvised games of badminton with them over the hedge at the back of our house. If I look back at that time (‘When were you happiest?’) it’s not punting on the Cam but those evenings scuffing up our back lawn. Blue suburban skies.
Part of the magic was I’d started an affair back home – necessarily intermittent – with a (married) guy ten years older than me. It was a time when my sort was pitied, at best. No one knew because what we were doing was criminal. He was taking the most risk and I was under-age even after the law was changed. In a house move recently I sorted through a drawer full of old correspondence and see the amount of notes he sent me over those five or six years – keen, persistent. Otherwise he was happily married and I probably saved him from riskier gay activities. And he remained married, along with a boyfriend who succeeded me. He saw me through the years until I had the confidence to come out. I remember walking back from a Part One English exam - the Summer of Love, 1967 - through sunlit courts where every study window was open, ‘Sergeant Pepper’ playing on the record decks. ‘Love is all around’ as the mopheads sang (a bit repetitively) to the planet, dressed in kaftans, girlfriends draped round the studio, but I don’t remember too many songs about same sex attraction, apart from appropriations like ‘Mad about the Boy’ and – used movingly against the visuals in the film of ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ - ‘My Funny Valentine.’ But there’s a kind of sensibility you pick up on. How did I know, some years later, that Elton’s ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ expressed gay misery? (it wasn’t just Elt’s sequins). Or that Joan Armatrading’s ‘Love and Affection’ (which I used in a television film) had a tinge of something other than the inevitable boy-girl? And that Joe Jackson’s ‘Is she really going out with him?’ might be more than it seemed at first…
I had a couple of crushes at University. One was on a fellow Cambridge thesp, a star actor, who, according to rumour, had been bedded by Germaine Greer. We were in a play (including Greer, doing her PhD, older than us) which had a short tour away from Cambridge. I wanted the love object too much to have handled the strain of his (and her) company in a tour. Near fifty years later our paths crossed – he has a wild shock of grey hair, once brown, long and Beatle-y - and we exchanged polite e mails. I remember, during the production, rescuing Germaine’s cat. She had locked herself out of her City Centre first floor flat, the mog inside. This tall, confident woman had an endearing fear of heights, so it was the kid from Piccadilly Road (cherry tree at the top of the garden and woods behind) who volunteered to climb in. She wore a mini skirt and I have a mental image of my trotting beside her. With a brilliant woman like that (she could quote Dante) along with the young, preternaturally assured David Hare in our crack cast – the play was ‘Spring Awakening’ - I’m not surprised that I balked at that tour. David had written a knowledgeable article on the play’s author, Wedekind, for Cambridge ‘Varsity.’ I knew who Ibsen and Chekhov were, had never heard of Wedekind, highlighted my own (small) part in the play, and was glad I passed muster.
I couldn’t handle (or not up close) that variety of Cambridge aristocracy, knew I was out of my depth and – scared - went home, and worked in the toy department of the Co-op that summer. It’s the only McJob I’ve ever done and I hated it. My boss told me off for having my arms folded my first morning at work. My mother went off on holiday on her own and my affair hotted up for the week of her absence (we got to use a bed for once). Between two worlds, Cambridge and Chesterfield, (jumped up toy department managers excepted) I happy back home, knew who I was, liked life with my mum and my kind-a boyfriend, whom she didn’t like much. I wonder if she knew what was going on? (or ‘going off’ as we used to say up North). By my third year I’d had enough of Cambridge and, voting with my feet, chose to sneak off back home to study for the best part of a month before my exams,. I remember saying goodbye to a little group of friends on my last day at University. They included a Girtonian I see on Monday next, who helped the latest play by providing me with extracts from her 17 year old diary. It’s cheerfully up and down and variable in moods. I wish I’d known she was as daft as me as an adolescent: she always seemed very confident at Cambridge, a girl who knew where she was going – towards a career in journalism. I sent off a number of (handwritten) letters that summer, rather half-heartedly, applying for this and that, including an application to the Managing Editor of Penguin books, who replied encouragingly, asking me to London for an interview. What I really wanted was to write, without having the confidence to write, let alone publish anything, in the Cambridge magazines (in which Clive James, another Australian, was a regular contributor). It seems, now, like an act of hubris. But dug in. No ‘Creative Writing’ courses then (I’m still sniffy about them). I sent off for a booklet at some point: ‘How to Write for TV.’ I started teaching, temporarily at first I thought, before it became enjoyably all embracing. Then, after a year or two, one weekend I turned out a short story - by hand on foolscap paper - called ‘Susan was a Fat Girl.’ I read it a few years ago and realised it’s a metaphor for my feelings about being ‘outside,’ she fancying a boy she’ll never attract. It was a good example of writing about what you knew, set in a town like Chesterfield. And a lot of my characters, for many years, were disguised homosexuals, living up North, though I was never too glum, I hope, about queers or the North. I knew the writer Jonathan Harvey quite well in the early Nineties. He came to stay at my flat in Chiswick, while his play ‘Beautiful Thing’ opened at the Bush. I’d read it in manuscript: a joyous celebration of gayness set in the Liverpool he loves. He was a generation after me, less cautious. But we write from our own experience, what’s shaped us. I couldn’t have written it, and remember Jonathan, in the middle of his heady early success, falling badly for one of his (sadly straight) lead actors.
But I was gaining in confidence, living at home, happy teaching, beginning to write in my spare time while my mum sat and knitted, before wondering – eventually - if she could have the telly on. She didn’t find my ambition peculiar, probably had more faith in my abilities than I had: ‘You’re very determined.’ I once skived a week off work, feigning illness, to get an early play finished. She went along with that: liked me round the house. It would be years before I learned to type and even longer before I stopped doing the initial donkey work in an armchair. Occasionally I would be asked to stand up and take a break from my attempts on the summits, while my mother (whose jumpers were more likely to be finished than my plays) checked my chest and arm measurements. When politicians talk of ‘hard working families’ I think of her knitting and purling, and me scribbling away. My ex-girlfriend was at the Courtauld by then; my best friend had headed straight to Fleet Street and then on to New York as America correspondent; my lonely cinema going pal, after a year at film school, was working in television. I think what a quiet life mine was, but – with the pulls and tugs of ‘I ought to be doing something more adventurous’ - it set the course of a life. Even during the alarms and excursions of some of my later years, moving around, living in France, I settle domestically and I write. My ideal week is one in which I have no engagements at all, going to the shops or for a walk the big event. No disturbances: writing space. I type this in a house overlooking the heath – Blackheath. I have been here, quietly, for two weeks. Yesterday I had a lunch in town. I go in for a meal with the neighbours tonight. That’s about it.
There were a number of plays that didn’t make it, but then one worked: set almost entirely in the Chesterfield living room where it had been written. Eventually I would move away from home, give up the day job, and have a go at becoming a professional, living on my own by then. I’d left home a couple of years before my mother died. She had a heart attack on holiday – a week at the end of September in the Isle of Wight. One small consolation was that she’d seen that first play of mine on television. She was proud of me, wanted me to succeed. I remember that first autumn and winter after her death, sitting by the fire, grieving, with the thought: who I had to do it for? I think there’s no doubt that part of my motivation at that time was to please her. And - to preserve her approval - I had never mentioned my sexuality. Colm Toibin said recently that he and his mother, also, had never talked of his gayness, but she had once asked his sister: ‘Is he happy?’ Later, somebody said to me, ‘Oh. I think your mother would have wanted to be happy, more than anything, whatever you were.’ I couldn’t see that while she was alive.
She set me up as a writer, leaving me two and a half thousand, the same as my dad had left her. Money for a rainy day, she called it, not to be eaten into. I would use it as ballast to get going full time as a playwright. It took a few years: I did a couple of night schools and became an examiner to keep some cash coming in. But by the time I came to London I was on a roll. A certain amount of success is necessary for the next decent job to come in. And – it’s not ignoble - most of us want to prove ourselves, to make a mark. But, as with doing it for your parent, ‘succeeding’ isn’t enough. What matters is process rather than result. I discovered that, finally, when the momentum stopped. I was lost for a time, berating myself for not being confident or bold or clever enough, beating myself up wondering if my homosexuality and lingering feelings of inferiority were to blame. Or a small town mind set? ‘You can take the boy away from the small town, but you can’t take the small town out of the boy.’
Shortly after I arrived in London, I saw Caryl Churchill’s masterpiece, ‘Top Girls,’ at the Royal Court. I had just taken over from Caryl as Young Writers’ Tutor. In the final knock out scene of the play a career woman goes back to her East Anglian sister - and I asked Caryl was that where she came from? No, she said, ‘I come from nowhere, really’ – evacuated to Canada during the war. I talked a bit about my settled background. ‘I envy you,’ she said. And I can’t forget (though may slightly mangle it) James Baldwin’s response to David Frost’s question: ‘You’re black, you’re Jewish, you’re homosexual.’ ‘Yes, they’ve been the making of me as a writer.’
Being homosexual is not such a big deal now, though even this week we have Tim Farron twatting on about his Christianity and gay sex. Tim, Jesus didn’t say a fucking word about sex. The famous (beautifully written) woman taken in adultery passage in St. John is a late add on to the Gospels, fourth century. And the marriage at Cana was a gay wedding (- I made that last bit up). Can I recommend, Tim, that you watch that American porn classic ‘These Bases are Loaded’ from those newly liberated pre-Aids days where more men than in your Parliamentary party pound one another liberally, defiantly, I feel, of ‘moralists’ like you? Gayness goes beyond sex, of course, and feeling an outsider has almost certainly helped, not hindered me. I look at most things with a sense of irony, humour, even playfulness. Am probably a perpetual adolescent who, while generally ‘well behaved,’ has only a limited respect for authority. I couldn’t remotely work in an office – or a toyshop - though, interestingly, my fellow worker at the Co-op that long lost summer was a lad I’d known carnally at school a few years before. (He had an enormous dick, Tim – they vary in size, you know). We spent many dreary hours among the shelves in the quiet toy department warehouse without ever getting back to our old ways. He’d grown out of it: it was a phase. I knew it wasn’t with me and had considered going to see a psychiatrist to help cure me. My married boyfriend quietly dissuaded me. You needed to be resilient to be a woofa at that time. And - though I’ve become what’s known as class-less - coming from an outside stall in class terms didn’t harm me much either and probably made me even more determined.
I no longer feel the need to prove myself to anyone – except to myself. I still give myself short shrift when on a downer, still niggle a bit (I wouldn’t be writing this otherwise) about not doing as well as I sometimes think I could have. But as Federer said yesterday after two sublime sets and then recovering to win from 3-0 down in the third set tie breaker: ‘You can always do better in a match.’ All you can do is ensure each play is as good as you can make it. And serious illness (and recovery) is a ‘healthy’ corrective to most perceived difficulties or failings. It’s been a quiet life, which I’ve loved, tapping away in whatever room – generally comfortable, sometimes even my own – I happen to be in. You stumble towards what you want to do, the life you want to lead – that’s ‘right’ for you. (Other lives are available, of course).
In the Pantheon of great British writers, after Shakespeare, it’s Jane Austen for me every time. The world never had the benefit of my ground breaking, ‘Character and Symbol in Jane Austen’ thesis. It’s the two hundredth anniversary of her death today, aged 41 – only half way through a life. I was interested, even back then, in how she wrote, as much as, critically, what she wrote. It’s what the thesis should have been about. There were a couple of early epistolary novels, various bits and pieces unfinished (‘Juvenilia’), including some promising stuff. A possible husband died. Another moved away – his family concerned about the preservation of his fortune: Jane (many siblings, the daughter of a country vicar) would have brought sod all to the match. Her father, on retirement, moved the family to Bath, a fashionable, bustling city she hated. There is some indication that she had a period of depression. But the move back to Hampshire after her father’s death and a settled existence with her widowed mother and sister (a friend Martha Lloyd joined them) in a little house in Chawton, near Alton, provided her with the peace and security to allow her to revise those earlier unpublished novels into the ‘Pride and Prej.’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility’ we know. Then it’s on to the new stuff - staggering: ‘Mansfield Park,’ ‘Emma’ and ‘Persuasion’. Every now and again during those Chawton years she would go away to her brother Edward’s estate near Canterbury (he had been adopted by rich childless parents, the Knights). There were more visits to London and her banker brother Henry than we usually credit her with: she liked a taste of society, loved plays. But it was home in Chawton where most of the writing was done. No room of her own, but with the capable Cassandra taking the brunt of managing the house, she wrote with a board on her knee, sometimes at a desk. There was a daily walk into Alton or the 15 minutes to the great house, also owned by Edward, who had provided them with a permanent home. There were occasional visitors. Her favourite niece tells us that, among company, she would smile to herself, get up and scribble something down. I do sometimes wonder about Jane’s sexuality – but as one of my old pals (see ‘The Wili Si’) once said, ‘You think everybody’s gay.’ There’s much evidence, in the novels, of strong female attachments, and Emma’s relationship with the gullible Harriet has more than a smack of lesbianism. I won’t pursue that – another thesis bites the dust – but there she is: the writer quietly, steadily at work, single, but secure. Outside the traffic rumbles to and from Winchester and London. Her mother, a keen gardener, is outside. Cassandra and Martha are on a visit to Alton and will pick up the mutton. ‘I’ll get Frank Churchill to pay a surprising visit to London,’ Jane thinks, ‘on the pretence of having a haircut …but really to meet Jane Fairfax. It’s the kind of impulsive thing he’d do, and that Emma will forgive him for.’ Her pen scratches: ‘Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.’ She likes that and writes on for a time before the donkey cart is heard turning into the yard, Cassandra and Martha with the mutton.
Quiet days in Chawton produced a handful of the greatest novels in the English language – though I wish she’d not packed Mary Crawford into exile at the end of ‘Mansfield Park’ (as moralistically as Tim Farron). I would like ‘Mansfield’ to go on for ever, ramifying, not curtailed by plot. I’ll never write anything one tenth as good as the least of her novels. But I know those quiet rooms, that absorption. Am grateful.
July 2017
