Not your average do-gooder
Angel Voices
I used to write at a friend’s house in Summer Bridge, in the Nidd Valley in North Yorkshire, and was on my way up there one Spring – some snow on the tops still (Spring comes late there) – when, in Wetherby, where I had stopped for a coffee, I saw out of the corner of my eye an object shoot across the road. It was a woman’s handbag, and had presumably come from out of the car which was heading away from me, before turning the corner out of sight. It was a main road, and the contents had spilled, so I had to dodge the traffic a bit to collect up its contents. The dramatist in me wondered how the handbag had found itself onto the road – was the woman being driven off by someone and had thrown the handbag out of the car window as a sign she was in difficulties? A kidnap? In Wetherby? It’s not New York. I was puzzled. I turned up with the handbag at the local police station, a one man affair (see David Hare’s contrasting version of a Wetherby policeman in ‘The Beatific Vision’). From behind his counter an endearing and very Yorkshire sounding Sergeant provided an immediate and convincing answer to the mystery of the handbag and its scattered contents. ‘You’re right next to the B.P. garage there. She’ll have put the handbag on top of the car, forgotten it, and then driven off.’ He knew the woman (small place Wetherby), and wanted me to watch him as he itemised the contents, writing them down methodically. There were some sanitary towels: ‘I think we’ll draw a line under these,’ he said, omitting them from the list. Astonishingly, there was a glossy pamphlet with my name and Hanif Kureishi’s face in it (see ‘Almost Famous’). We were about to do a week’s tutorial session at the Arvon Foundation for writers, and the woman was presumably considering attending. (As it turned out, she was a poet and went another week with other writers.) She rang me in Summer Bridge (the policeman had wanted a contact number). ‘I asked the policeman’ – whom she named – ‘what you were like. I was interested and he said, “Well, not your average do-gooder.”’
It’s an epithet I would like on my tombstone. But any consideration of its appropriateness can wait till after another tale of the cottage at Summer Bridge and the phone there. In London – me in Chiswick, they in Ealing - I had been in contact with the Kinnocks before I set off. Steve, their son, wasn’t getting on with ‘Measure for Measure’ which he was doing for A Level. Did I have any thoughts? I had a couple of books on Shakespeare’s ‘Problem Plays’ and hopped in the car to take them round. It was approaching the ’87 election and I had also been asked to chip in with Neil’s speech writing (he gave one big speech a night), mainly warm up jokes which he liked to start with (this ‘speciality’ I think sums up my political nous). I was in good company, with Stephen Fry and Ben Elton, if memory serves, and know Neil used some of my stuff, because I saw one clip on the TV news, a joke I had phoned in that afternoon. Instant fame - very satisfying. (His jokes were better than the Lady’s but he still lost the Election). To jump ahead a little: after the Election on Thursday I went round for a cheerful wake that Saturday ( at big posh Chinese) and, as I walked in their door, Neil quoted my best line, which either referred to the Lady as if a Coronation Street character (Annie Walker?), or was a play on Veni, Vidi, Vici (she had been somewhere – Rome?) both bon mots I have now completely forgotten. These would have gone down the line from Summer Bridge where I had been in that hustings period. I was staying there to finish a script and Neil’s office had my phone number – for the hoped for speech material.The morning I had left for Yorkshire I noticed the right hand wing mirror had been removed from my car. How mean, I thought - and why just take the one? I now wonder – but I am prone to dramatizing – that whoever removed it (the car was in a side street next to my flat) might have been interrupted in the process. I had the wing mirror fixed at a stop-over in Derbyshire on my way up, got to Summer Bridge in Spring sunshine and unpacked. The phone was on the wall in the downstairs kitchen. It rang. I picked up and a voice said, ‘Stephen?’ ‘Yes…’ The phone was instantly put down. It wasn’t a voice I knew. No one but Neil’s office (and the owners of the house, my friends) had the number and I rang the Leader of the Opposition’s office - ‘no, nobody had tried to be in touch’. Was someone keeping an eye on me during that trip? Summer Bridge is close to the (huge golf balls) Menwith Hill tracking station. Its terms of reference are complicated and I conclude the Americans run it: it’s both a missile tracking station and listening post. We know a great deal more about electronic eavesdropping these days. This was the Cold War still, Neil was still CND supporting - though would drop his opposition to nuclear weapons immediately after the Election. He told me at that Chinese meal Saturday night gathering that his pacifism was a major bugbear on the doorsteps. I sat on the knowledge of his turn around for many months - didn’t approve, as it happened, but that’s real-politik. So who phoned me? And why? To ascertain where I was? What of the missing wing mirror? If you were to install a tracking device that would be a good place to fit it… I like to think my name might be an appendage to a list somewhere at Fort Meade, Virginia. And I am now more inclined to regard Jason Bourne films as documentaries. I am probably exaggerating my ‘importance’ but, even at the time we knew the Security Services tracked and listened in to any number of harmless anti-Thatcherites (for Thatcher read ‘the State’) My friend Julia Langdon, a journalist, and friend of Neil’s, once was about to put her phone down after a call when she heard the whole conversation repeated from a recording back down the phone. Good that they fuck up. My paranoia wasn’t helped later in the Yorkshire visit by my coming across a small bus load of military personnel – a mix of uniforms – American? parked in an obscure by-lane about fifty yards from my house. But the Nidd kept on rippling just down from the cottage, I worked on my play – ‘Angel Voices’ (about choirboys at Blackpool) – and kept coming up with useable (if unmemorable) one liners for Neil.
‘Not your Average Do-Gooder’. ‘Not your average’ because at that time I was wearing John Lennon style glasses, wore a very short (Steve McQueen prisoner) haircut, and a coat over my jeans I’d got for £8 from Oxfam. Glenys said, ‘Somebody could have died in it, Steve.’ These days, having stopped trying (see the essay ‘Bad Company’), I’m indistinguishable from the respectable grey haired worthies of the posher bits of Yorkshire. In my old home town of Tickhill, a Georgian town that escaped the pit, near Doncaster, the old folk are so nice you – ‘Good Morning! Good Morning!’ you wonder if there has been some Stepfordisation. But that’s the (bad) dramatist in me again.
But ‘Do Gooder’??
Someone said about one of my plays, ‘It’s like good deed in a bad world.’ I think that’s about as close as I get. I’m a pretty solitary (- parents died young - no siblings- ) homosexual. I once gave a talk at the BBC to would be writers – the accountants and secretaries and car park attendants which a bureaucracy like that employs, and showed extracts from three of my films for the Beeb, all different genres, and made - separately - over a period of about seven years. I don’t know what my audience took way from the talk that winter’s night in White City but I had the sudden realisation that I had been harping on with the same underlying theme (it came as a surprise to me) whether the films were about choirboys (‘Angel Voices’), angry Liverpool misfits (‘Gaskin’) or lads who dress up as policemen (‘Coppers’). All described someone outside society, looking in, half wanting to join, but not doing so. That’s the position of the writer I suppose, and the angle Glenys Kinnock picked up on with the photo/collage she once made of me (she’s a former Junior School Teacher, adept with these ‘here’s one I made earlier’ creations ). I write of her perception in ‘Court Jester’ and of my admiration for those who jump in and get their hands dirty, ‘doing good’. But I, instead, watch, observe – and pick up the odd mysterious handbag from time to time.
It’s an epithet I would like on my tombstone. But any consideration of its appropriateness can wait till after another tale of the cottage at Summer Bridge and the phone there. In London – me in Chiswick, they in Ealing - I had been in contact with the Kinnocks before I set off. Steve, their son, wasn’t getting on with ‘Measure for Measure’ which he was doing for A Level. Did I have any thoughts? I had a couple of books on Shakespeare’s ‘Problem Plays’ and hopped in the car to take them round. It was approaching the ’87 election and I had also been asked to chip in with Neil’s speech writing (he gave one big speech a night), mainly warm up jokes which he liked to start with (this ‘speciality’ I think sums up my political nous). I was in good company, with Stephen Fry and Ben Elton, if memory serves, and know Neil used some of my stuff, because I saw one clip on the TV news, a joke I had phoned in that afternoon. Instant fame - very satisfying. (His jokes were better than the Lady’s but he still lost the Election). To jump ahead a little: after the Election on Thursday I went round for a cheerful wake that Saturday ( at big posh Chinese) and, as I walked in their door, Neil quoted my best line, which either referred to the Lady as if a Coronation Street character (Annie Walker?), or was a play on Veni, Vidi, Vici (she had been somewhere – Rome?) both bon mots I have now completely forgotten. These would have gone down the line from Summer Bridge where I had been in that hustings period. I was staying there to finish a script and Neil’s office had my phone number – for the hoped for speech material.The morning I had left for Yorkshire I noticed the right hand wing mirror had been removed from my car. How mean, I thought - and why just take the one? I now wonder – but I am prone to dramatizing – that whoever removed it (the car was in a side street next to my flat) might have been interrupted in the process. I had the wing mirror fixed at a stop-over in Derbyshire on my way up, got to Summer Bridge in Spring sunshine and unpacked. The phone was on the wall in the downstairs kitchen. It rang. I picked up and a voice said, ‘Stephen?’ ‘Yes…’ The phone was instantly put down. It wasn’t a voice I knew. No one but Neil’s office (and the owners of the house, my friends) had the number and I rang the Leader of the Opposition’s office - ‘no, nobody had tried to be in touch’. Was someone keeping an eye on me during that trip? Summer Bridge is close to the (huge golf balls) Menwith Hill tracking station. Its terms of reference are complicated and I conclude the Americans run it: it’s both a missile tracking station and listening post. We know a great deal more about electronic eavesdropping these days. This was the Cold War still, Neil was still CND supporting - though would drop his opposition to nuclear weapons immediately after the Election. He told me at that Chinese meal Saturday night gathering that his pacifism was a major bugbear on the doorsteps. I sat on the knowledge of his turn around for many months - didn’t approve, as it happened, but that’s real-politik. So who phoned me? And why? To ascertain where I was? What of the missing wing mirror? If you were to install a tracking device that would be a good place to fit it… I like to think my name might be an appendage to a list somewhere at Fort Meade, Virginia. And I am now more inclined to regard Jason Bourne films as documentaries. I am probably exaggerating my ‘importance’ but, even at the time we knew the Security Services tracked and listened in to any number of harmless anti-Thatcherites (for Thatcher read ‘the State’) My friend Julia Langdon, a journalist, and friend of Neil’s, once was about to put her phone down after a call when she heard the whole conversation repeated from a recording back down the phone. Good that they fuck up. My paranoia wasn’t helped later in the Yorkshire visit by my coming across a small bus load of military personnel – a mix of uniforms – American? parked in an obscure by-lane about fifty yards from my house. But the Nidd kept on rippling just down from the cottage, I worked on my play – ‘Angel Voices’ (about choirboys at Blackpool) – and kept coming up with useable (if unmemorable) one liners for Neil.
‘Not your Average Do-Gooder’. ‘Not your average’ because at that time I was wearing John Lennon style glasses, wore a very short (Steve McQueen prisoner) haircut, and a coat over my jeans I’d got for £8 from Oxfam. Glenys said, ‘Somebody could have died in it, Steve.’ These days, having stopped trying (see the essay ‘Bad Company’), I’m indistinguishable from the respectable grey haired worthies of the posher bits of Yorkshire. In my old home town of Tickhill, a Georgian town that escaped the pit, near Doncaster, the old folk are so nice you – ‘Good Morning! Good Morning!’ you wonder if there has been some Stepfordisation. But that’s the (bad) dramatist in me again.
But ‘Do Gooder’??
Someone said about one of my plays, ‘It’s like good deed in a bad world.’ I think that’s about as close as I get. I’m a pretty solitary (- parents died young - no siblings- ) homosexual. I once gave a talk at the BBC to would be writers – the accountants and secretaries and car park attendants which a bureaucracy like that employs, and showed extracts from three of my films for the Beeb, all different genres, and made - separately - over a period of about seven years. I don’t know what my audience took way from the talk that winter’s night in White City but I had the sudden realisation that I had been harping on with the same underlying theme (it came as a surprise to me) whether the films were about choirboys (‘Angel Voices’), angry Liverpool misfits (‘Gaskin’) or lads who dress up as policemen (‘Coppers’). All described someone outside society, looking in, half wanting to join, but not doing so. That’s the position of the writer I suppose, and the angle Glenys Kinnock picked up on with the photo/collage she once made of me (she’s a former Junior School Teacher, adept with these ‘here’s one I made earlier’ creations ). I write of her perception in ‘Court Jester’ and of my admiration for those who jump in and get their hands dirty, ‘doing good’. But I, instead, watch, observe – and pick up the odd mysterious handbag from time to time.