FINE YOUNG MEN
I’m glad people go away in August. I don’t – peak time for the house sitter. Neighbours are also away, back gardens are quiet, the odd apple thumps down onto the lawn: autumn round the corner. The last week of August folk start coming back from holidays with tales of 35 degree roastings, colossal passport queues and general airport mayhem. But I mustn’t get smug. I’m watching Goodwood on TV at the moment, and wouldn’t really want to be doing anything else, rationalising (it’s a vague anxiety) that so long as it’s not some Far Eastern Women’s Golf tournament (no offence to women, golf or the Far East) I’m not yet in my dotage. I do, I realise, spend three or four evenings a year, sometimes till the early hours, following the last round of the golfing Majors, am particularly fond of the Masters in early spring – white moonscape bunkers and Georgia greenery anticipating summer ahead. I used to play golf, which surprises most of my friends, and once had a hole in one. I’d be about sixteen. It was a short hole – the 8th. You teed off from way above the green. I might even have been chatting as I thwacked my three wood (I didn’t own a driver). When we got down to the green there was no sign of my ball. And there it was, with pin still in the hole. Many golfers go through a lifetime waiting for that moment. No skill was involved, unlike, say, those astonishing shots the greatest pull off under pressure. I won’t forget, a week or two ago, the most recent example in the Open at Royal Birkdale, and most particularly what followed: Jordan Spieth’s gesture in directing his caddy to retrieve the ball he’d just holed ‘nervelessly’ from 40 yards. It was the last round: Spieth had just lost the lead after a near disaster on the previous hole, the 13th, in an all too similar situation to his balls up (golf technical-ese) of the finish of the Masters two years previously. He turned to the next tee after that stupendous putt, with a cool, determined glance at his opponent and an instinctive casually imperious sweep of the hand towards his caddy. Spieth is 24, a pretty boy, quite slight, which added to the effect – no Trump bombast or posturing. If his body language wasn’t for real you’d call it great acting. He was going to win from that point and knew it. The commentator, Peter Allis, whom I always imagine with a gin in his hand, described him as ‘this fine young man’…an epithet I very much doubt he’d apply to some of the gay men, both fictional and real, I’ve also been watching these midsummer dog days.
You would have knocked me down with a feather if you’d said to me as recently as ten years ago that the BBC would host an extensive – celebratory! - series of programmes called ‘Queer Britannia.’ Old Ma Whitehouse, with her cruel spectacles, is gone but I imagine (hope) there are any number of Daily Mail readers who are seething while mowing their lawns or creosoting the fence. Good for the Beeb, though had mixed feelings when I saw a dramatization of Peter Wildebloode’s ‘Against the Law’ was to be the first offering. I’d tried to get ‘Against the Law’ onto the screen twenty five years ago. It’s a short, powerful tract about a (nice irony) Daily Mail journalist’s trial and imprisonment in 1954 for homosexual ‘offences.’ A young - gay - producer had brought me the project. There was an initially promising meeting with the then Head of BBC TV Films, (pervert alert) himself gay. But there was still great cautiousness in the very early Nineties about anything that might frighten the horses, or (Clause 28) Mrs Thatcher. As far as I remember, one of the Montagu family (Lord Montagu was Wildebloode’s co-defendant) didn’t want to rake over the coals, and the project was dropped. But there, the other night, was Daniel Mays as Wildebloode turning over obligingly in bed – eagerly, nervously - for his first fuck. It was more explicit than we could have managed back then. This was an encounter the early middle aged Mays/Wildebloode had clearly longed for. Mays made it moving: not just titillating or routine screen sex. The ubiquity of porn, ‘Beautiful Thing’, Tom Hanks in ‘Philadelphia’ and ‘Queer as Folk’ have altered the landscape since the days we submitted ‘Against the Law.’ And I never succeeded in pushing through a play or film that dealt with homosexuality full on, though interviewed at various points gays in the military (deserters) and gay policemen. The gay Fuzz - a dozen or so officers known to one another - held regular dinners, kind of support group, in an Earl’s Court hotel, very civilised affairs, though I remember the reply of one rather beautiful sergeant when I asked what he most liked about policing: ‘I like kicking doors in.’ He was out (most weren’t) to his colleagues. ‘What makes you think I might fancy you?’ he said to any fellow officer who gave him hassle. I’m sorry I never got ‘The Boys in Pink and Blue’ away but wasn’t clever or persistent enough. And I wasn’t that disappointed, I seem to remember, when the Wildebloode project bit the dust – the story isn’t essentially dramatic. It’s an account of events, shocking and sad, but where we mostly know what to think. The recent dramatization (by Brian Fillis) obviated that by interspersing the drama with first hand testimonies, thereby broadening it out, a bit like a Greek chorus, universalising Wildebloode’s experience. One old guy, encouraged by the police to shop his partner to secure a more lenient sentence for himself, found out later that his lover had committed suicide as a result.
But ‘issue’ plays – I’ve had various let’s have lunch together suggestions from directors about, amongst other subjects, anorexia, the Bhopal disaster, and the ban on strikes at GHCQ - aren’t really my forte. With a tinge of regret (and twenty five years too late) I’m glad to say last week’s ‘Against the Law’ was a better piece that I would ever have made it. Mine would have been more cerebral: I don’t like to wear my heart on my sleeve, while accepting that’s what most audiences want. And there’s also something about a direct approach to a subject I balk at. Resenting being manipulated in a drama, my tendency is always (fuck it) to the oblique.
I’m even getting a bit jaded – never thought I’d say this - with men tumbling into bed on TV at the moment It’s not just Daniel Mays getting his kecks off. There was the actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen the following week in ‘Man in an Orange Shirt’ stretched out - his chest hair resembling a map of Russia - next to his lover, along with much heavy snogging. Come on, lads, let’s go for the full Monty. More or less mainstream film has got there – Mark Rylance now regretting (twenty years on) getting aroused for camera in Patrice Chereau’s ‘Intimacy.’ And novels have been giving us the business at least since Lady C. In my attempts at fiction I’ve tried writing sex scenes (in drama you need only the briefest indication: it’s then up to the director and actors). Despite years of first hand research into the subject, I am no good at recreating the experience in steamy, throbbing paragraphs. Some years ago - another project that bit the dust – I wanted to adapt Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘The Spell’ for TV. It’s my favourite novel of his, set in the mid Nineties and precisely catching a Gay London I knew well. In the middle of the novel, its central character, a buttoned up civil servant, takes E for the first time. Hollinghurst recreates the magical experience – musically orchestrated - over four pages. ‘The research must have been tricky..’ I said to Hollinghurst when we met. There was a small smile. He’s a mixture of diffidence and great authority, donnish, and I enjoyed catching him recently as part of a documentary in the ‘Queer Britannia’ series, talking about his novels and in particular his thrillingly explicit sex scenes where you know precisely, what bits are going where and what it felt like. These can upset people. My friend Nina Bawden (a woman of a certain age though no prude) once told me, vehemently, that she thought his ‘The Folding Star’ pornographic. More surprisingly, Germaine Greer chipped in on TV with in an attack on the same novel’s climactic sex scene between its protagonist/narrator, a man not unlike Hollinghurst, and a 17 year old. A touch embarrassedly in his recent interview, Hollinghurst refused, after some delicate hesitation, to read one of his man-on-man passages out, while throwing in the info that some of his most devoted fans are middle aged women. It reminded me of seeing a very respectable matronly type (Daily Mail reader?) on a train reading his Booker Prize winning ‘Line of Beauty.’ I wondered if she’d got to the lavishly described bit about drugged up anal sex.
But let’s calm down a little. I’m also fond of naked racehorses. Years ago my dad said to my mum, ‘You take the lad on holiday.’ He was proposing to stop at home. It puzzled me at the time, and didn’t please my mum, but she and the lad, aged 9, went off to Bridlington on the train. We missed my dad from the outset, heading the wrong way to begin with – south/wrong platform - having to get off at Derby to take a train back the thirty miles to where we started our journey. It would be this time of year, the first week of August. A few days later my Aunty Nelly joined us (my mother’s cousin, in fact). The two women slept in a double bed together. I was in a child’s bed in the at the same room and would listen to these middle aged women talking in bed, who, thinking I was asleep, scattered their conversation with ‘shit’ and ‘bugger’ (though never worse words than that), gostering (as we used to say) with barely subdued laughter. I regularly think of that seaside boarding house bedroom, those women talking, free of their husbands (Nelly was a publican’s wife) - a bit like a mucky version of some duo in ‘Coronation Street’ before the fact. A few years later the writer, Tony Warren, the creator of ‘The Street,’ would put a galaxy of strong working class women on screen. He’d been surrounded and brought up by them as a kid. He was gay (of course): adored them. I’ve barely been more star struck than when sitting next to Annie Walker (Doris Speed) in the Granada TV canteen. Nelly had something of Doris/Annie about her. Her husband was the red faced Sam, a little bulbous man, who used to covertly put the peel of an orange in his mouth, cut to resemble teeth, then leeringly grin close up at me, pulling out the orange false teeth to make me scream with delight. My mother later told me that Nelly had never seen Sam naked, nor he her. As they had a daughter this must have involved careful choreography with bedside lights, pyjamas and nightdresses. Or maybe they did it fully clothed like the working classes till comparatively recently. Thank God for central heating. She also later told me that the reason my dad sent us off on holiday our own that year was to watch Goodwood on our new black and white Pye telly.
When I’m not watching gay men or Goodwood (or meditating on whether my mother and Nelly made me a homosexual) I’m fiddling round with a couple of old, unfinished novels. Some of the characters (George, Dandy, Jess) have been around in my brain - and in various versions on the page - for years. I enjoy going back to them from time to time, like old friends. They sometimes have evolved a bit since my last dusting them off. An episode from what’s a modest mass of material might get dropped or assumes a new importance. It’s possible that these unfinished novels have become a kind of private garden, locked away - though I do let people see odd chapters every now and again. There is polite interest and encouragement, though not quite enough unhesitating praise (sadly) for me to confidently speed on. We are not talking about ‘Sons and Lovers’ here. I hope I’m a good writer but know I am certainly not a great one. And my feeling is that there are plenty of novels out there. The advantage of an unfinished novel is that it still has possibilities: the same configuration of characters and setting but different ‘outcomes’ (as people say). Shall we go for that plot twist or not etc? I’m cheered by some of what I read in those old files. But most writers know all too well that there’s always a gulf between the ideal version of the work in your head and the more-or-less satisfactory finished product, so I’m probably delaying disappointment. There is, of course - at a pinch - Philip Roth’s more drastic routine. He’d look at what he’d written – great chunks of it – discarding everything but a line of two that had the ring of truth or sparked what he really wanted to write.
I met three young would-be writers last week – University friends of Harry Cole, (whose eldest brother is featured in ‘Pass It On.’) All have just graduated and Harry wanted me to talk to his pals about writing, how I got going and so on. We meet at a pub in the East End, sitting outside, where one of them began after a time, to my surprise, to take notes. I suggested a couple of essays on this site explaining that I’m trying to figure out and assess this writing life, who I am, what I was, what got done, what didn’t and why – a writer coming to an end, gathering the threads. I’m moved by the fact that these ‘fine young men’ are just getting going, and wish, momentarily, I could start again, knowing what I now know - and no doubt making different mistakes. Harry texts me later, to thank me (’colossal thanks’!) for my ‘wisdom’ (the boy will go far..) but that line of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men’ instantly marches into mind. Eliot was writing at the start of the Second War, maybe thinking, among others, of those responsible for the slaughter of the First…which has also been on my mind more than a bit over these (tranquil) first weeks of August.
Living in Folkestone (as I did) you couldn’t avoid the conflict. The Harbour area, where I lived was connected to the town by the Road of Remembrance. I lived for a time in the arty quarter of Folkestone where a young neighbour of mine made, with a group of assistants, hundreds of poppies she attached to the Road’s railings. It’s down that steeply sloping road that the men lined up for embarkation on the troop ships. At the top of it was the old Hotel Bristol, just across the road. It’s the setting of my latest radio play where Samuel Beckett fetches up for a couple of weeks, I have him writing a letter, which I made up, speculating that the lads could probably hear the sound of the guns from over the Channel if the wind was in the right direction.
It’s been the centenary this August of the start of the battle that became known as Passchendaele, given the full BBC treatment. I find I actively dislike what I see of the ceremony in Ypres, not least Kate Middleton, dressed to the nines. Someone said of her that she’s always turned out as if to a posh christening and her expensive brand of blandness – topped with a pert hat – seems inappropriate for the occasion. Smoothly professional actors, mouthing ‘moving’ poetry don’t help either, even naughty national treasure Helen Mirren, whom I last saw preening in a moisturiser advert. (‘You deserve it’).
I visited Ypres on a Saturday in May 2002, remembering the day, particularly, for catching the news on the way back that a former (unnamed) BBC World Service executive had been killed in a train crash at Potters Bar. On our way back into France, we’d put the radio on, cheerful again – the Menin Gate leaves you very sober - for the 6 o’clock news and the late season (crucial) football results. Straight away, I had the strong feeling – fear - that the executive might be Austen Kark, my friend Nina Bawden’s husband. An hour later, back at the house I use in Northern France, a phone call confirmed that Austen was dead and that Nina, with him, had just about survived. Somebody, knowing our connection, had given a journalist my French number, and I found myself talking about her and Austen for the following morning’s paper. Fifteen years later, I’ve been writing about these events in fictional form, amalgamating a novel about someone like Nina with Nina’s own last unfinished novel. It’s been a real good stab at novel writing, tricky but very involving. It’s taken months and I’ve loved doing it for all its difficulties. I’ve got to a stage – de-mob happy - where I’m not hungry for results, just very glad to be writing. Writing is not neuro surgery. Nobody might die if you fail. Just ‘fail better’ next time, as Sam Beckett said. The novel, if it gets finished, will take a time: it’s shelved for a bit, and then I’ll look at it again. But know I don’t dislike it (as we used to say up North), though it may be a candidate for the Philip Roth treatment. It’s called - Nina’s title – ‘The House Sitter,’
The would-be writers outside the pub in the East End the other night asked me how long a play took me to write. The answer - as with ‘Answered Prayers,’ the play I’m most proud of - is no more than a month or six weeks. I’d had the (story) outline of the first half for about a year before I worked out what might happen in the second half. It’s set at the end of the First War, where a rather solitary religious sets up a monastery in the disused stables of a remote, burnt out country house. I called him Walter; he’s East End born, practical, and does a great deal of the building work himself. It was based, like a lot of my stuff, on a real character, William Sirr, and real events. I had him, finally, installing a bell – which was the key to unlocking the second half of the play. When he rings the Angelus the first time a young guy walks out of the nearby woods. We’ll learn he’s an army deserter. ‘Where were you?’ asks Walter. ‘Passchendaele’ says the former soldier, adding a line or two more. It’s all we need to know. Dramas are economical, fiction writing ain’t…. I’m working on it.
The area of France where I regularly stay (see ‘The House in France’) is in the Pas de Calais. There are still Nazi gun emplacements on the nearby beaches, some bright spark painting ‘café’ under the open aperture of one. The local tourist board has converted the roof of another into a look out and - during a sudden Channel storm – I once sheltered in yet another of a whole run of these great concrete bunkers, powerful physical evidence of war. They were posts that would be abandoned or captured as the Allies – arriving on the even longer beaches two hundred miles to the west – swept through. My dad was in the lee of this mighty invasion on his way into Germany, where he would remain with the Allied War commission till ’49, clearing up, re-organising. Some of his unit had been killed along the way by snipers in Holland or Belgium. From my reading, I know he must have seen his share of horrors in post-war Germany at that time – starvation, homelessness – and I can’t ask him about any of this. Small wonder, therefore, that in the mid Fifties he liked to stop at home, Goodwood on the telly. Near twenty years after his sending us off to Bridlington, I remember, an early August afternoon in France, listening to Goodwood’s highlight Sussex Stakes, ear close to the crackly commentary from a portable radio on a beach at Le Touquet (that same stretch of Northern France - now packaged as the ‘Cote d’Opale’ - just over from England). Vincent O’Brien’s crack miler, Thatch, beat the One Thousand Guineas winner Jacinth. I was on holiday with my widowed mum – a warmer and more chic venue than Bridlington; it was ten years after dad’s death. I’ve written elsewhere of how I preserve my dad (‘Festivals’ and 'Derby Day') in my liking for the gee-gees. Apart from the war (and maybe because of it) Albert, my dad, never went much beyond Yarmouth and Brid. His idea of a good time was a pint of bitter. He once said – one of the few things I recall him mentioning about the war - that the best meal he’d had was fried bacon and egg, after a long stretch of dried rations. And I think of my world (at least my occasional world) of ‘continental’ holidays, flat French beaches you lie on - not land on - swish London restaurants and thrillingly hedonistic night clubs. I saw a young friend of mine recently – he’s forty now and a father - who says to me, teasingly, ‘The E’s are good again, Steve,’ referring to a party where he’d been taking a break from fatherhood.
Six hundred thousand mainly young men were slaughtered at Passchendaele, the battle that started in August a hundred years ago. ‘Only the monstrous anger of the guns..’; ‘Gas! Gas! Quick boys – an ecstasy (that word again) of fumbling, fitting the clumsy helmets just in time.’ I get an inkling of what war is like from the poetry. Wilfred Owen (arty, bit pretentious, mother dominated, homosexual) actively avoided the army till 1916, and was killed the last week of hostilities. I think how he’d scarcely got going emotionally, sexually – we infer from some lesser known poems that there were one or two casual (late night East End) encounters, and that was probably it. Just before being shipped across the Channel for the last time he went a swim on the beach just outside where I lived in Folkestone. He wrote of that late summer dip, noting some handsome, naked young ‘Poseidon’ alongside him in the sea. I can’t comprehend the mass extinctions at Passchendaele, but can just about grasp that moment - a young man momentarily desiring another before he heads out to war. On my seventieth birthday this year – a Biblical span of experience behind me – I visited the war cemetery at Etaples. It’s different from most of those cemeteries in that it houses the dead from the hospitals in the area - so the headstones are named and dated: the three or four who died from their wounds on May 29th, say, next to the ones on the 30th and so on, the name of their regiment, their ages: fine young men, who – unlike me – never had a chance of realising their potential or, indeed, as I do now, reflect on it. A line from what I thought was the Prayer Book comes rattling round my brain: ‘And so we waste wisely our days.’ A quick check with Google reveals it’s by Thomas Dekker, a playwright contemporary of Shakespeare, versatile, prolific, but now only remembered, if at all, for his one hit, ‘The Shoemaker’s Holiday’. ‘To greet the day with reverence for the opportunity it contains. To approach my work with a clear mind…. The joy that comes with work well done. This is how I desire to waste wisely my days.’ I’m interested, for obvious reasons, in minor playwrights and once wrote a play (‘The Pattern of Painful Adventures’) about another of those lesser lights, John Marston, of ‘Malcontent’ fame. Put in its fuller worthy context that memorably packed little phrase of Dekker’s ‘wasting wisely my days’ turns out to be more cheerful than I’d imagined. There’s more from the passage, which I’ve cut, about greeting each day with a smile and so on. But I like the ambiguity of ‘wasting wisely.’ It just about gets my current feelings about all those opportunities taken and lost, a happily long-ish life of scribbling.
August 2017
I’m glad people go away in August. I don’t – peak time for the house sitter. Neighbours are also away, back gardens are quiet, the odd apple thumps down onto the lawn: autumn round the corner. The last week of August folk start coming back from holidays with tales of 35 degree roastings, colossal passport queues and general airport mayhem. But I mustn’t get smug. I’m watching Goodwood on TV at the moment, and wouldn’t really want to be doing anything else, rationalising (it’s a vague anxiety) that so long as it’s not some Far Eastern Women’s Golf tournament (no offence to women, golf or the Far East) I’m not yet in my dotage. I do, I realise, spend three or four evenings a year, sometimes till the early hours, following the last round of the golfing Majors, am particularly fond of the Masters in early spring – white moonscape bunkers and Georgia greenery anticipating summer ahead. I used to play golf, which surprises most of my friends, and once had a hole in one. I’d be about sixteen. It was a short hole – the 8th. You teed off from way above the green. I might even have been chatting as I thwacked my three wood (I didn’t own a driver). When we got down to the green there was no sign of my ball. And there it was, with pin still in the hole. Many golfers go through a lifetime waiting for that moment. No skill was involved, unlike, say, those astonishing shots the greatest pull off under pressure. I won’t forget, a week or two ago, the most recent example in the Open at Royal Birkdale, and most particularly what followed: Jordan Spieth’s gesture in directing his caddy to retrieve the ball he’d just holed ‘nervelessly’ from 40 yards. It was the last round: Spieth had just lost the lead after a near disaster on the previous hole, the 13th, in an all too similar situation to his balls up (golf technical-ese) of the finish of the Masters two years previously. He turned to the next tee after that stupendous putt, with a cool, determined glance at his opponent and an instinctive casually imperious sweep of the hand towards his caddy. Spieth is 24, a pretty boy, quite slight, which added to the effect – no Trump bombast or posturing. If his body language wasn’t for real you’d call it great acting. He was going to win from that point and knew it. The commentator, Peter Allis, whom I always imagine with a gin in his hand, described him as ‘this fine young man’…an epithet I very much doubt he’d apply to some of the gay men, both fictional and real, I’ve also been watching these midsummer dog days.
You would have knocked me down with a feather if you’d said to me as recently as ten years ago that the BBC would host an extensive – celebratory! - series of programmes called ‘Queer Britannia.’ Old Ma Whitehouse, with her cruel spectacles, is gone but I imagine (hope) there are any number of Daily Mail readers who are seething while mowing their lawns or creosoting the fence. Good for the Beeb, though had mixed feelings when I saw a dramatization of Peter Wildebloode’s ‘Against the Law’ was to be the first offering. I’d tried to get ‘Against the Law’ onto the screen twenty five years ago. It’s a short, powerful tract about a (nice irony) Daily Mail journalist’s trial and imprisonment in 1954 for homosexual ‘offences.’ A young - gay - producer had brought me the project. There was an initially promising meeting with the then Head of BBC TV Films, (pervert alert) himself gay. But there was still great cautiousness in the very early Nineties about anything that might frighten the horses, or (Clause 28) Mrs Thatcher. As far as I remember, one of the Montagu family (Lord Montagu was Wildebloode’s co-defendant) didn’t want to rake over the coals, and the project was dropped. But there, the other night, was Daniel Mays as Wildebloode turning over obligingly in bed – eagerly, nervously - for his first fuck. It was more explicit than we could have managed back then. This was an encounter the early middle aged Mays/Wildebloode had clearly longed for. Mays made it moving: not just titillating or routine screen sex. The ubiquity of porn, ‘Beautiful Thing’, Tom Hanks in ‘Philadelphia’ and ‘Queer as Folk’ have altered the landscape since the days we submitted ‘Against the Law.’ And I never succeeded in pushing through a play or film that dealt with homosexuality full on, though interviewed at various points gays in the military (deserters) and gay policemen. The gay Fuzz - a dozen or so officers known to one another - held regular dinners, kind of support group, in an Earl’s Court hotel, very civilised affairs, though I remember the reply of one rather beautiful sergeant when I asked what he most liked about policing: ‘I like kicking doors in.’ He was out (most weren’t) to his colleagues. ‘What makes you think I might fancy you?’ he said to any fellow officer who gave him hassle. I’m sorry I never got ‘The Boys in Pink and Blue’ away but wasn’t clever or persistent enough. And I wasn’t that disappointed, I seem to remember, when the Wildebloode project bit the dust – the story isn’t essentially dramatic. It’s an account of events, shocking and sad, but where we mostly know what to think. The recent dramatization (by Brian Fillis) obviated that by interspersing the drama with first hand testimonies, thereby broadening it out, a bit like a Greek chorus, universalising Wildebloode’s experience. One old guy, encouraged by the police to shop his partner to secure a more lenient sentence for himself, found out later that his lover had committed suicide as a result.
But ‘issue’ plays – I’ve had various let’s have lunch together suggestions from directors about, amongst other subjects, anorexia, the Bhopal disaster, and the ban on strikes at GHCQ - aren’t really my forte. With a tinge of regret (and twenty five years too late) I’m glad to say last week’s ‘Against the Law’ was a better piece that I would ever have made it. Mine would have been more cerebral: I don’t like to wear my heart on my sleeve, while accepting that’s what most audiences want. And there’s also something about a direct approach to a subject I balk at. Resenting being manipulated in a drama, my tendency is always (fuck it) to the oblique.
I’m even getting a bit jaded – never thought I’d say this - with men tumbling into bed on TV at the moment It’s not just Daniel Mays getting his kecks off. There was the actor Oliver Jackson-Cohen the following week in ‘Man in an Orange Shirt’ stretched out - his chest hair resembling a map of Russia - next to his lover, along with much heavy snogging. Come on, lads, let’s go for the full Monty. More or less mainstream film has got there – Mark Rylance now regretting (twenty years on) getting aroused for camera in Patrice Chereau’s ‘Intimacy.’ And novels have been giving us the business at least since Lady C. In my attempts at fiction I’ve tried writing sex scenes (in drama you need only the briefest indication: it’s then up to the director and actors). Despite years of first hand research into the subject, I am no good at recreating the experience in steamy, throbbing paragraphs. Some years ago - another project that bit the dust – I wanted to adapt Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘The Spell’ for TV. It’s my favourite novel of his, set in the mid Nineties and precisely catching a Gay London I knew well. In the middle of the novel, its central character, a buttoned up civil servant, takes E for the first time. Hollinghurst recreates the magical experience – musically orchestrated - over four pages. ‘The research must have been tricky..’ I said to Hollinghurst when we met. There was a small smile. He’s a mixture of diffidence and great authority, donnish, and I enjoyed catching him recently as part of a documentary in the ‘Queer Britannia’ series, talking about his novels and in particular his thrillingly explicit sex scenes where you know precisely, what bits are going where and what it felt like. These can upset people. My friend Nina Bawden (a woman of a certain age though no prude) once told me, vehemently, that she thought his ‘The Folding Star’ pornographic. More surprisingly, Germaine Greer chipped in on TV with in an attack on the same novel’s climactic sex scene between its protagonist/narrator, a man not unlike Hollinghurst, and a 17 year old. A touch embarrassedly in his recent interview, Hollinghurst refused, after some delicate hesitation, to read one of his man-on-man passages out, while throwing in the info that some of his most devoted fans are middle aged women. It reminded me of seeing a very respectable matronly type (Daily Mail reader?) on a train reading his Booker Prize winning ‘Line of Beauty.’ I wondered if she’d got to the lavishly described bit about drugged up anal sex.
But let’s calm down a little. I’m also fond of naked racehorses. Years ago my dad said to my mum, ‘You take the lad on holiday.’ He was proposing to stop at home. It puzzled me at the time, and didn’t please my mum, but she and the lad, aged 9, went off to Bridlington on the train. We missed my dad from the outset, heading the wrong way to begin with – south/wrong platform - having to get off at Derby to take a train back the thirty miles to where we started our journey. It would be this time of year, the first week of August. A few days later my Aunty Nelly joined us (my mother’s cousin, in fact). The two women slept in a double bed together. I was in a child’s bed in the at the same room and would listen to these middle aged women talking in bed, who, thinking I was asleep, scattered their conversation with ‘shit’ and ‘bugger’ (though never worse words than that), gostering (as we used to say) with barely subdued laughter. I regularly think of that seaside boarding house bedroom, those women talking, free of their husbands (Nelly was a publican’s wife) - a bit like a mucky version of some duo in ‘Coronation Street’ before the fact. A few years later the writer, Tony Warren, the creator of ‘The Street,’ would put a galaxy of strong working class women on screen. He’d been surrounded and brought up by them as a kid. He was gay (of course): adored them. I’ve barely been more star struck than when sitting next to Annie Walker (Doris Speed) in the Granada TV canteen. Nelly had something of Doris/Annie about her. Her husband was the red faced Sam, a little bulbous man, who used to covertly put the peel of an orange in his mouth, cut to resemble teeth, then leeringly grin close up at me, pulling out the orange false teeth to make me scream with delight. My mother later told me that Nelly had never seen Sam naked, nor he her. As they had a daughter this must have involved careful choreography with bedside lights, pyjamas and nightdresses. Or maybe they did it fully clothed like the working classes till comparatively recently. Thank God for central heating. She also later told me that the reason my dad sent us off on holiday our own that year was to watch Goodwood on our new black and white Pye telly.
When I’m not watching gay men or Goodwood (or meditating on whether my mother and Nelly made me a homosexual) I’m fiddling round with a couple of old, unfinished novels. Some of the characters (George, Dandy, Jess) have been around in my brain - and in various versions on the page - for years. I enjoy going back to them from time to time, like old friends. They sometimes have evolved a bit since my last dusting them off. An episode from what’s a modest mass of material might get dropped or assumes a new importance. It’s possible that these unfinished novels have become a kind of private garden, locked away - though I do let people see odd chapters every now and again. There is polite interest and encouragement, though not quite enough unhesitating praise (sadly) for me to confidently speed on. We are not talking about ‘Sons and Lovers’ here. I hope I’m a good writer but know I am certainly not a great one. And my feeling is that there are plenty of novels out there. The advantage of an unfinished novel is that it still has possibilities: the same configuration of characters and setting but different ‘outcomes’ (as people say). Shall we go for that plot twist or not etc? I’m cheered by some of what I read in those old files. But most writers know all too well that there’s always a gulf between the ideal version of the work in your head and the more-or-less satisfactory finished product, so I’m probably delaying disappointment. There is, of course - at a pinch - Philip Roth’s more drastic routine. He’d look at what he’d written – great chunks of it – discarding everything but a line of two that had the ring of truth or sparked what he really wanted to write.
I met three young would-be writers last week – University friends of Harry Cole, (whose eldest brother is featured in ‘Pass It On.’) All have just graduated and Harry wanted me to talk to his pals about writing, how I got going and so on. We meet at a pub in the East End, sitting outside, where one of them began after a time, to my surprise, to take notes. I suggested a couple of essays on this site explaining that I’m trying to figure out and assess this writing life, who I am, what I was, what got done, what didn’t and why – a writer coming to an end, gathering the threads. I’m moved by the fact that these ‘fine young men’ are just getting going, and wish, momentarily, I could start again, knowing what I now know - and no doubt making different mistakes. Harry texts me later, to thank me (’colossal thanks’!) for my ‘wisdom’ (the boy will go far..) but that line of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men’ instantly marches into mind. Eliot was writing at the start of the Second War, maybe thinking, among others, of those responsible for the slaughter of the First…which has also been on my mind more than a bit over these (tranquil) first weeks of August.
Living in Folkestone (as I did) you couldn’t avoid the conflict. The Harbour area, where I lived was connected to the town by the Road of Remembrance. I lived for a time in the arty quarter of Folkestone where a young neighbour of mine made, with a group of assistants, hundreds of poppies she attached to the Road’s railings. It’s down that steeply sloping road that the men lined up for embarkation on the troop ships. At the top of it was the old Hotel Bristol, just across the road. It’s the setting of my latest radio play where Samuel Beckett fetches up for a couple of weeks, I have him writing a letter, which I made up, speculating that the lads could probably hear the sound of the guns from over the Channel if the wind was in the right direction.
It’s been the centenary this August of the start of the battle that became known as Passchendaele, given the full BBC treatment. I find I actively dislike what I see of the ceremony in Ypres, not least Kate Middleton, dressed to the nines. Someone said of her that she’s always turned out as if to a posh christening and her expensive brand of blandness – topped with a pert hat – seems inappropriate for the occasion. Smoothly professional actors, mouthing ‘moving’ poetry don’t help either, even naughty national treasure Helen Mirren, whom I last saw preening in a moisturiser advert. (‘You deserve it’).
I visited Ypres on a Saturday in May 2002, remembering the day, particularly, for catching the news on the way back that a former (unnamed) BBC World Service executive had been killed in a train crash at Potters Bar. On our way back into France, we’d put the radio on, cheerful again – the Menin Gate leaves you very sober - for the 6 o’clock news and the late season (crucial) football results. Straight away, I had the strong feeling – fear - that the executive might be Austen Kark, my friend Nina Bawden’s husband. An hour later, back at the house I use in Northern France, a phone call confirmed that Austen was dead and that Nina, with him, had just about survived. Somebody, knowing our connection, had given a journalist my French number, and I found myself talking about her and Austen for the following morning’s paper. Fifteen years later, I’ve been writing about these events in fictional form, amalgamating a novel about someone like Nina with Nina’s own last unfinished novel. It’s been a real good stab at novel writing, tricky but very involving. It’s taken months and I’ve loved doing it for all its difficulties. I’ve got to a stage – de-mob happy - where I’m not hungry for results, just very glad to be writing. Writing is not neuro surgery. Nobody might die if you fail. Just ‘fail better’ next time, as Sam Beckett said. The novel, if it gets finished, will take a time: it’s shelved for a bit, and then I’ll look at it again. But know I don’t dislike it (as we used to say up North), though it may be a candidate for the Philip Roth treatment. It’s called - Nina’s title – ‘The House Sitter,’
The would-be writers outside the pub in the East End the other night asked me how long a play took me to write. The answer - as with ‘Answered Prayers,’ the play I’m most proud of - is no more than a month or six weeks. I’d had the (story) outline of the first half for about a year before I worked out what might happen in the second half. It’s set at the end of the First War, where a rather solitary religious sets up a monastery in the disused stables of a remote, burnt out country house. I called him Walter; he’s East End born, practical, and does a great deal of the building work himself. It was based, like a lot of my stuff, on a real character, William Sirr, and real events. I had him, finally, installing a bell – which was the key to unlocking the second half of the play. When he rings the Angelus the first time a young guy walks out of the nearby woods. We’ll learn he’s an army deserter. ‘Where were you?’ asks Walter. ‘Passchendaele’ says the former soldier, adding a line or two more. It’s all we need to know. Dramas are economical, fiction writing ain’t…. I’m working on it.
The area of France where I regularly stay (see ‘The House in France’) is in the Pas de Calais. There are still Nazi gun emplacements on the nearby beaches, some bright spark painting ‘café’ under the open aperture of one. The local tourist board has converted the roof of another into a look out and - during a sudden Channel storm – I once sheltered in yet another of a whole run of these great concrete bunkers, powerful physical evidence of war. They were posts that would be abandoned or captured as the Allies – arriving on the even longer beaches two hundred miles to the west – swept through. My dad was in the lee of this mighty invasion on his way into Germany, where he would remain with the Allied War commission till ’49, clearing up, re-organising. Some of his unit had been killed along the way by snipers in Holland or Belgium. From my reading, I know he must have seen his share of horrors in post-war Germany at that time – starvation, homelessness – and I can’t ask him about any of this. Small wonder, therefore, that in the mid Fifties he liked to stop at home, Goodwood on the telly. Near twenty years after his sending us off to Bridlington, I remember, an early August afternoon in France, listening to Goodwood’s highlight Sussex Stakes, ear close to the crackly commentary from a portable radio on a beach at Le Touquet (that same stretch of Northern France - now packaged as the ‘Cote d’Opale’ - just over from England). Vincent O’Brien’s crack miler, Thatch, beat the One Thousand Guineas winner Jacinth. I was on holiday with my widowed mum – a warmer and more chic venue than Bridlington; it was ten years after dad’s death. I’ve written elsewhere of how I preserve my dad (‘Festivals’ and 'Derby Day') in my liking for the gee-gees. Apart from the war (and maybe because of it) Albert, my dad, never went much beyond Yarmouth and Brid. His idea of a good time was a pint of bitter. He once said – one of the few things I recall him mentioning about the war - that the best meal he’d had was fried bacon and egg, after a long stretch of dried rations. And I think of my world (at least my occasional world) of ‘continental’ holidays, flat French beaches you lie on - not land on - swish London restaurants and thrillingly hedonistic night clubs. I saw a young friend of mine recently – he’s forty now and a father - who says to me, teasingly, ‘The E’s are good again, Steve,’ referring to a party where he’d been taking a break from fatherhood.
Six hundred thousand mainly young men were slaughtered at Passchendaele, the battle that started in August a hundred years ago. ‘Only the monstrous anger of the guns..’; ‘Gas! Gas! Quick boys – an ecstasy (that word again) of fumbling, fitting the clumsy helmets just in time.’ I get an inkling of what war is like from the poetry. Wilfred Owen (arty, bit pretentious, mother dominated, homosexual) actively avoided the army till 1916, and was killed the last week of hostilities. I think how he’d scarcely got going emotionally, sexually – we infer from some lesser known poems that there were one or two casual (late night East End) encounters, and that was probably it. Just before being shipped across the Channel for the last time he went a swim on the beach just outside where I lived in Folkestone. He wrote of that late summer dip, noting some handsome, naked young ‘Poseidon’ alongside him in the sea. I can’t comprehend the mass extinctions at Passchendaele, but can just about grasp that moment - a young man momentarily desiring another before he heads out to war. On my seventieth birthday this year – a Biblical span of experience behind me – I visited the war cemetery at Etaples. It’s different from most of those cemeteries in that it houses the dead from the hospitals in the area - so the headstones are named and dated: the three or four who died from their wounds on May 29th, say, next to the ones on the 30th and so on, the name of their regiment, their ages: fine young men, who – unlike me – never had a chance of realising their potential or, indeed, as I do now, reflect on it. A line from what I thought was the Prayer Book comes rattling round my brain: ‘And so we waste wisely our days.’ A quick check with Google reveals it’s by Thomas Dekker, a playwright contemporary of Shakespeare, versatile, prolific, but now only remembered, if at all, for his one hit, ‘The Shoemaker’s Holiday’. ‘To greet the day with reverence for the opportunity it contains. To approach my work with a clear mind…. The joy that comes with work well done. This is how I desire to waste wisely my days.’ I’m interested, for obvious reasons, in minor playwrights and once wrote a play (‘The Pattern of Painful Adventures’) about another of those lesser lights, John Marston, of ‘Malcontent’ fame. Put in its fuller worthy context that memorably packed little phrase of Dekker’s ‘wasting wisely my days’ turns out to be more cheerful than I’d imagined. There’s more from the passage, which I’ve cut, about greeting each day with a smile and so on. But I like the ambiguity of ‘wasting wisely.’ It just about gets my current feelings about all those opportunities taken and lost, a happily long-ish life of scribbling.
August 2017