Letters to Verges/1
In 2009 I had an email from someone I remembered from school but hadn’t clapped eyes on in over 40 years. What I remembered him for was his Verges in the final school production I took part in, ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’ Though I was Benedick, his - as one of Shakespeare’s great sidekicks - was the stand out performance; John Sincler, for whom the part was probably written, would have approved. Sincler himself was long and skinny, a contrast to the Chesterfield Grammar School Verges, short and comfortable looking. I still occasionally call him Verges, I notice, in what follows. We didn’t re-meet for some time after his initial approach and I’m pleased to say the correspondence became the basis of what has proved a late flowering friendship. Keith - his real name - had succeeded me after a couple of years as Head Boy at school, followed me to Cambridge and, indeed, taken over my old digs – though I don’t remember him at all as an undergraduate: there was a two year age difference and by the time he arrived at Queens’ I’d rather moved on from school, or felt I had. (‘Sophisticated, God I’m sophisticated,’ as Daisy Buchanan says, excoriating herself, in ‘Gatsby.’) But in my sixties – 62 when these e-mails began - I was clearly aching to get back to school and the town as I remember it. ‘Getting back to the garden,’ as the great Joni Mitchell has it.
Keith, now retired, had been a journalist, married, had three sons (and one grandson). He’d seen a film of mine on television (‘Angel Voices’), had recently read an article about me in ‘The Guardian,’ then met a contemporary of mine whom I was still in touch with, and wrote – out of the blue – to say hello. It was the summer of 2009. I think the fact that he’s a journalist, latterly a speech writer for University honorary degrees ceremonies (thereby adept at winkling out biographical details of the recipients) stimulated what became, on my part, a kind of apologia pro vita sua (with jokes and some filth: we were schoolboys still). After 40 years my e mails to him – letters, in effect - became part diary, part notes about my current writing, and, above all, a form of ‘accounting’ for what I’d been up to since school and university. He prompted me and I enjoyed that. They were unusual circumstances – that forty year gap - a sympathetic, indeed curious correspondent, and this new-ish near instant form of communication. The fact that he’s pretty self-effacing (a more humble Verges to my more showy, specious Benedick) also helped push the revelations along. And there was the contrast in our lives: Verges the married man, bringing up three kids; me, for a long time nomadic - ‘of no fixed abode,’ as newspapers might call it (though I prefer the more Jack Kerouak ‘on the road’), unattached, gay.
In 2009 I hadn’t given up the itinerant life (see ‘House Sitting’), but had recently acquired a base - a flat in Folkestone. Sod’s Law: having only just put down a few tentative roots, I had just been offered a well-paid (by my lights) two day a week posting as Writer in Residence at Leeds University and was beginning to work out how I could square the geographical circle. It was a busy and enjoyable period: after years of drought I’d found a niche in radio with biographical plays. I tell him something of the writing and genus of the plays, which seemed to be of interest to him as a writer in a different field. He was having a go at short stories himself; a stray (otherwise unexplained) reference to Alice Munro creeps in early. Later it’s William Trevor and the writer Elizabeth Taylor. The journalist (and happily married man) also got me going - though I need little excuse - on what our old History teacher described, on reading some of my essays, as ‘the gay stuff.’ I liked offering a grandad a bit of smut. But it goes beyond that, I think. At school, back in the Sixties, I’d learnt secrecy about my instincts. This lasted way beyond school. Maybe you’re never ‘cured,’ but society had changed in those forty years. We were now acceptable - or nearly so - and I welcomed the opportunity to open up. I may even have found something of the confessor in this ‘listener,’ whom I wasn’t to meet for months.
It’s only lately I’ve realised that these e mails were the raw material - impressionist, fast - that fed in to the essays on this site. The correspondence pre-dates them and, in this four month chunk, bears a surprising resemblance to the plays I was writing at that time where I take a segment – a year or two maybe - of a life, illuminating (you hope) the whole person. Most of the folk I’ve dramatised lately are notable, though not all. We were that 11+ generation, post-War Grammar School boys - not Bloomsbury: a different class, different memories and experiences. I listen a lot to the World Service, other much less fortunate folks’ lives and am all too aware that we were relatively privileged, taking a great deal for granted with our Grammar School education. But there’s an edge. We’re both still a bit chippy in class terms – and for a long time I felt somewhat isolated (as it seemed) in a fiercely hetero world, my type ridiculed at best. What I wanted to do with my body, at least with someone else, was illegal till I was twenty one. I’m happy to say I made up for lost time and note some of that along the way.
I have censored next to nothing (apart from the odd cruel remark or too revealing passage about the living), have untangled obscure or particularly clotted phrases. I’ve moved round one or two e mails to assist the narrative, and every now and again I’ve ‘nailed’ or developed an anecdote, amplified it - some further memories, particularly of people, piling in - but there’s no elaborate polishing. Most is first draft and I’ve gone with the flow. It’s all e-mail-y: rapid fire stuff, slam bang onto the page, take it or leave it.
Italics indicate an explanatory interpolation; (…..) indicates minor cuts.
Most of the e mails have titles, occasionally ribald: ‘Affairs of the Bum’ deep into our correspondence - where all semblance of modesty seems to have deserted me - might appeal to those (what’s the phrase?) time poor. …. Evangelical Christians should stick to Enid Blyton.
I’ll cut in to the e mails after the opening bread and butter introductions and politesse.
4 June, 2009
…Your summarising skills means I got a clear idea of the last forty years. What are the sons up to? No kids – being gay, it never seemed possible, though one or two of my younger gay friends are breaking that mould. But no (or few) regrets – I think. I have a number of sons and daughters of friends I’m close to in that bachelor-uncle way. One of them, aged 20, recently said to me, ‘Oh, Steve, I’ve had an E.’ I said, ‘What, just now?’ I was parking the car outside her parents’ house. And she said, ‘No, at Glastonbury.’ And, though the anecdote is inadequate, I have a different relationship with the kids from what they have with their parents.
I’m no longer homeless – have a largish flat in Folkestone with sea views - though still enjoy other people’s houses. The house sitting may be a calling. The current Literary Manager of the National Theatre, when reminded of me recently (I’ve not written a stage play in years) apparently said, ‘Oh, yes, the house sitter’ – not, you note, ‘brilliant writer’ or ‘lost talent.’ I’m currently typing from a pile in Blackheath with wide views out front over the Heath and a massive garden at the back. I’ve been coming here for several years and wrote one of the plays you can find on the website here: ‘Adulteries of a Provincial Wife’. The moving around suits the work. When I lived in Chiswick – a big mansion flat, well-appointed (all that) – I got bored and stale. Wanted to shake myself up. Work wasn’t going well. There were moments when, after I sold the flat, I thought this is not sensible, certainly not very ‘Chesterfield’ – but that was the point. I can remember cycling – freewheeling round a corner of a favourite stretch of countryside in France, mid-afternoon, mid-week, in late September - and thinking of everyone else at work back in England. I’ve spent probably a quarter of my time since I sold the flat in France: there was an element of retreat about it. The previous Literary Manager of the National, whom I knew pretty well, rang me up shortly after I de-camped across the Channel to see how I was – a bit puzzled. I was blithe with him, but was in few doubts – I felt I’d had it as a writer, or at least as the kind of writer I’d been. But the new work finally came through, taking a considerable time, through which there had been no guarantee of success. And in the meantime I’d come to enjoy my new – insecure - way of life. Enlivening.
A critical friend said to me yesterday, ‘You re-invented yourself as a writer.’ There were financial sacrifices in that but I’d reached a dead end a dozen years ago: knew it. ‘There’s nothing worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck you whole life up’ (which I nicked from somewhere) became my maxim at that time. I suppose it’s the same with people who kick over the traces in a marriage. This last Sunday I met up with a banker pal, who let me use his basement for a time – I’ve always felt my life a bit flighty or eccentric compared with his (he in turn liked the relative glamour of mine). He’s unhappy in current banking conditions, thinking of becoming a school teacher, quizzed me about my time in the classroom. We saw what happened to the banks: no security anywhere. I take no pleasure in this. He asked me over the dinner table how I was getting on, and I said, ‘Well, it’s tempting fate but I feel on top of my game.’ And if you do listen to one of the plays, go for ‘Answered Prayers’ which was the start of a strong run at the BBC for me. That said, I’ve been reading Alice Munro stories – belatedly - lately. Her ‘top of the game’ is a mountain range above mine.
I’m just about to start two years at Leeds Trinity, north of the city in Horsforth, as a two day a week Writer in Residence. It means I’m subsidised and can spend time not on immediately productive work. I’ve a couple of novels on the go, but I expect I’ll be distracted with a radio play or two. I love the medium. I had a brief stage career, three plays, and looked after a number of rather brilliant writers at the National Theatre in the Nineties. I think I knew quietly, ‘tutoring’ them as a more experienced writer, that most were going to outpace me (Martin McDonagh, in particular, was already beyond me, and, after a time, I gave up trying to tell him anything, the bastard). Had a timely measure of my limitations, in short. I’m going with one of them to see another’s play on Sunday. She, the one whose play - or playlet - it is, utterly dedicated, once said to me: ‘It’s our turn now.’ She was right: it was. I’d had a good run but had lost drive and direction. Playwrights, and not just playwrights, do run out of steam. I tried to get going again, in a kind of long retreat, doing what I’d set out to do at first as a novelist but found my way forward, finally, in radio – not sexy, but it suited me. I’m used to concision/have some ability with dialogue and can write pretty much what I want in radio, quietly, no pressure. It’s short story writing, in effect. Alice Monro sometimes berates herself for not writing novels; ‘I’ll write a proper book next time.’ And none of this, laughingly, matters.
It’s Derby Day on Saturday, my equivalent of your Sunderland watching. What do they call it - ‘The Stadium of Shite’? Do you join in rousing choruses of ‘Posh Spice takes it up the arse’ ?? An old pupil, ex-professional footballer, from my school teaching days, is now a teacher. I got a couple of plays out of him over the years. This lad, now a very well preserved fifty odd, found himself after a charity match in the showers with Roy Keane, a hero of his. My pal passed on this info knowing it would tantalise me. I replied, ‘I bet, J, yours is bigger.’ ‘It is, Steve’, he said, ‘actually….’ You see, this is what Head Boys come to in time.
6 June 2009
EXPECTATIONS
..3 boys can’t always have been easy. I find it hard to imagine young Verges the father of a small tribe. I don’t really ‘do’ families, apart from unhappy ones. My Forster play – it’s called ‘A Dose of Fame’ about the ‘bachelor’/ gay Forster (wish I’d known at school what I now know about Forster) has him living at home in a small village with his mother - though doesn’t include, sadly, a scene where our novelist hero waits anxiously at the front door (as happened) for some ointment arriving from his more worldly homo pal Ackerley. The ointment was for Forster’s recently contracted, initially puzzling, crabs. When I had the same complaint after rather too good a time in the late 70s and was living in a small town in South Yorkshire, I pottered along to the doctor, not my regular but, to my relief, a locum on that day. He said, a bit cheekily, ‘Where did you get these from then?’ And I said, with a smile that said something else, ‘Oh, I think a towel.’
I tried to sell three – 3 - plays about Forster to the Head of Radio 4 Drama, one of which would have included the crabs episode above. There was also some wonderful shenanigans between Forster and Ackerley and various soldiers and sailors in Dover just before the War. As I put these (to me) enticing ideas to him, the Head of Drama, probably a liberal man, said, ‘I don’t think we can do.. you know.. cottaging on Radio 4 in the afternoons, Stephen.’ I’ll bung you the finished play under separate cover. You remember the objective correlative theory of T.S.Eliot? Though this is Forster in 1910 at the time of Howards End it very much expresses my own experience and feelings as a youngish gay man, coming out.
My feeling about Keano is that he’s borderline certifiable. I noticed a Guardian columnist the other day saying that he should have been imprisoned for the attack on a (was it?) Man. City player, which resulted in a career ending injury. I couldn’t live with that. On a less censorious note, I had a gay mate who was a sports reporter with access to dressing rooms in South London. He still waxes lyrical about the young Dennis Wise’s assets. In racing coverage cameras go into the jocks’ changing room. Clare Balding was once confronted on Arc de Triomphe day with a naked Jonny Murtagh – a television treat. I’ve since suggested to one or two people in television that visits to the changing room and showers might add to the enjoyment of footie coverage. This would not just be nudity. Gerard Pique had a tale recently about Keano raging round the Man U dressing room driven berserk by a vibrating mobile – Pique’s – which stopped before Keano found the culprit. Bring on the docu-cameras. Who needs dramatists?
Something in my last e mail made me ponder – I write impressionistic and fast. For many years I wanted to succeed as a writer, wanting to please and impress. This is a Grammar School ethos, allied with the usual parental expectations/love/pressure. There came a point in mid-life – a prolonged period of depression – grey, grey, grey - where those injunctions didn’t work for me anymore. Hard work and a blameless life does not a writer make. I felt I needed to be ‘bad’ not ‘good’ – letting off that steam of expectation and finding another way to proceed that still hopefully involved writing. It’s what a number of my middle years were about.
The following accompanies the play sent the same day about Forster ‘A Dose of Fame’ (available to listen to at the end of this web site). ….Most is what’s available from documentary materials. I try not to make anything up if I can help it. So – his food stains, ill-fitting suit, the sound of Roger Fry’s voice - are taken from biographical info. The mention of green beans is a small example of where I do elaborate. We can have no, or little, idea of what conversations took place – sometimes we can guess the subject, but there’s the all-important tone: the way these people spoke. Early on in his first novel, ‘Where Angels Fear To Tread’ there’s an episode where a couple of Forster Surrey types are planting peas. The house I’m currently staying in has a regular crop of runner beans. I thought, ‘Ooh, I can use those runner beans’ (as that bit of the play is set in July when they are abundant) - and include some verbatim dialogue from the Forster novel about peas, switch it to beans: it’s authentic/out of copyright, no one will notice. My director, who knows about gardening, said that he thought my dialogue wasn’t correct and that peas were easier than beans or vice versa (I still don’t remember; you’ll hear the little passage) and the dialogue was altered to his specifications. I said, ‘I’ll blame you if this isn’t right.’ But the main point of the scrap of dialogue, as well as getting the tone spot on, is to allow time in the scene for Forster to read a letter his mother has brought out to him, and to show him, characteristically, mother smothered. Peas – or beans - fill the gap, and thereby serve a number of purposes.
I’ve been thinking about my own mum. I was in Chesterfield recently to see my (second) cousin. She’s ailing. She got out the photographs. There are a couple of pics of my mother I hadn’t seen before – Wartime or late Thirties - both with my Auntie Florrie, my godmother, looking for all the world like a lesbian in a suit. Florrie died, childless, after an unhappy marriage and there’s no one much to remember her. I’m in that godparent role myself these days and hold the flame for we unattached types. One of the novels I’m fiddling with has a godmother – childless – at its centre. Though my fictional character is a woman and actress, she may be a bit too close to me, and maybe I’m better at inhabiting ‘real’ historical characters, where the stubborn facts of their life are a given but, of course, you introduce elements of yourself – hopeless homo yearnings in the case of Forster.
Another of my cousin’s photographs was of a group of four young people (before teenagers were invented). My cousin didn’t know who they were. I did. They’re my grandparents on my mother’s side who ‘had’ to get married with their daughter, my mum, Elsie, on the way. This is what served as their wedding photo, four of them – smart/poor - sitting on hard chairs outside a terraced house window – bride, bridegroom, and presumably best man and bridesmaid. Jack, my grandfather, cleared off a couple of years later, leaving my mother to be brought up by what we’ve learnt to call a lone parent. I was told he’d got married again bigamously but ‘Never try to find out’, my mother once warned me. I haven’t. ‘Oh, I would give him what for if he ever came to the door,’ she said, which made me nervous about those rare knocks on the door you’d get in Chesterfield on Sunday afternoons in the Fifties when people visited before they had cars and started dodging about all over the place. (Those Sunday visitors that you kept the tin of salmon and salad cream in the pantry for…..).
My cousins took me to a pub that does meals in mid-Derbyshire, run by a couple of gay guys: ‘You’ll like this place,’ she said. This is progress… I came out over thirty years ago but not to my small group of Chesterfield relatives who used terms like ‘wooftas’ etc. Times and conditions change. They now know and still seem quite proud of me. When I finally told my other second cousin (it’s our mothers, all of an age, who were cousins) I made sure he’d got his hearing aid in. I wasn’t going to go through the palaver again. He stared at me as if I was some kind of prize specimen: ‘Well, I never imagined it,’ he said - not displeased, ‘a homosexual in the family.’ He’s four times married. And a mother of a friend of mine, who’d worked with mine in a factory during the War and knew my dad, said, ‘And fancy, his father a Police Inspector.’
Looking forward to two years up North and hope to meet you – again - before too long.
15 June. HITCH
Keith is a cinema-phile – Alfred Hitchcock had cropped up.
…Twenty years ago, I went on the ‘Vertigo’ tour in San Francisco. Nothing organised. I just knew where to look for the key locations. This is a result of my mother taking me to the Regal, Chesterfield, in 57/58. (It was probably around then that she also made me a homosexual). I went to see ‘Vertigo’ the first afternoon of its re-release. (the film had been out of circulation for over twenty years) Christopher Hampton, the playwright, sat behind me in the 2 pm Notting Hill Gate Cinema – this is how writers spend their days, Keith. There were a number of sequences from the film I remembered from when I was 10. I don’t think I can have taken in the plot reveal in the middle and my mother explained what happened to me down Hollis Lane on the way home. I’d imagined – or wanted - the film to be about reincarnation, about which I had some notions, being a bit precocious – not to say odd - aged 10. A year or so later I had one of the best evenings (late afternoon, in fact) I’ve ever had. I came up the road from the Grammar School to see ‘North by North West’ at the Odeon. I remember it as autumn. The three of us waited for the manager, who would let us in for free - my dad was Police Inspector in charge of Chesterfield Town Centre (this - so far as I know – was his only perk, apart from a consignment of pickled onions, piccalilli and so on which arrived at Christmas from the local ‘Spire’ factory who produced the stuff). I was a bit embarrassed about waiting for the manager (my dad wasn’t) and would have hung round, looking at forthcoming attractions advertised on the stairs – Dirk Bogarde, another woofta (unknown to me) in something, maybe. There were are: my dad, my mum and me, aged 12, second year at the Grammar School togged up in uniform and new long trousers – it was downhill from then on…
The only other film pilgrimage I’ve done was in Tremolat in the Dordogne, tracing Stephane Audran in ‘Le Boucher’ (Chabrol influenced, of course, by Hitchcock). Accidentally, I found myself up on that bluff above the town, which provides the opening shot of the film and the famous image of the dead woman’s hand dripping blood onto the child’s sandwich. I walked down the street where Audran comes away with the butcher from the wedding, a fabulously long tracking shot, Audran with a Gauloise dangling from her lips. Found out that the school above which she lives in the film is really a Mairie. It was my most itinerant period - glorious September weather, me wandering round tracing what’s, after all, an unreality…. But it’s probably my favourite French film, seen many times - with a partial nod to the young Huppert’s ‘The Lacemaker’ (seen only once) set partly in Paris and I, think, the Channel coast. She’s a hairdresser hopelessly in thrall to a Sorbonne style student. What I thoroughly approve about ‘The Lacemaker’ is its plot. The tag line might be: ‘Girl falls in love for the first time. It destroys her.’
Having – deliberately - no internet access at home, I sometimes replied after a gap, when next in front of a home computer. Keith had been on a walking tour in Devon.
1st July 2009
AMBULARE
Just arrived back in tropical London and to e-mail after a couple of days up North looking for somewhere to live in the autumn. Good visit and may have found a temporary solution, particularly as I’m not inclined to jettison the Folkestone place.
There’s a Latin phrase that I’m not going to get right: ‘Ambulare pro Deo’ which, I think, roughly translates as ‘walking is good for the soul’. Bruce Chatwin (who died of AIDS but put it about that his illness was caused by eating a centuries old Chinese egg) was keen on that phrase and me too. I read a great many biographies and Chatwin’s (much praised) was one of the few where I liked the subject much less at the end than when I started - to such a degree that, after finishing it, I dumped the hardback book at Oxfam.
Apart from the obvious business of eating and drinking I couldn’t exist without walking and reading. I’ve reached the stage where I can’t take these things entirely for granted. Some years ago I had a stage play turned down by the RSC. It was a bitter pill, particularly as they said at one stage they were going to do it (I’m now very glad they didn’t: it was overblown, like a lot of my work at that time, trying too hard). The ‘Dear John’ letter arrived when I was staying at a cottage on the coast in Kent, one of the writer’s retreats I’ve inhabited over the years, roses over the door etc. It was a wonderful May day and I walked out of the cottage to clear my head. I had a fashionable pair of Rockport boots on. No map, just walked. I hit the Saxon Shore Way and curled round the seven or eight miles to Faversham, intending to round-trip return, but continued walking all the way to Canterbury. I went wrong at one point and had to retrace my steps for four miles. I’d paused for lunch on the way, eating a sandwich on a bench outside a pub scarcely changed from the Thirties, along with a half pint. I suppose I could have thrown myself on the altar at Canterbury but was too knackered and headed for the station to catch a stopping train home. The walk across the fields from the little station at Teynham was painful: I was seizing up by then. Had a bath and then the judge who owned the cottage popped round. He and his wife were helpful and kind, knew I was having a hard time as a writer. ‘What did you do today?’ he said. I told him. He’d been at court in Canterbury. ‘Wish I could have done that,’ he said. ‘It’s just like Laurie Lee, “As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning”.’ I’d never read it but was beginning to enjoy this ‘footloose’ way of life. I’d managed to walk my disappointment out of my system.
Devon I only know from a Christmas week when a group of us – gay men, including the now well-known Evan Davis – took a cottage in the mid Nineties. I was a bit infatuated with Evan at the time (I wasn’t the only one), realised it was hopeless but had a good time nonetheless. We were on the North coast, huge beaches and Tintagel just over the border. One of the features of these all male Christmases was that we gave presents not exceeding in value £5. Evan bought me a biography of Fred West, the mass murderer. ‘Up your street, Stephen,’ he said, which fairly characterised my rather glum writing at that time (see above: RSC). My agent said to me, very casually, once: ‘If only you could write the way you talk,’ I couldn’t then. That’s what’s come back.
I’m reading T.E. Lawrence ‘Seven Pillars’ and his letters at the moment. He walked, as an undergraduate round the Levant and Holy Land. Got beaten up at one point. But it’s that upper class confidence flays me. Like Paddy Leigh Fermor setting off to walk across Europe and stopping off in various castles of folk vaguely known to him, letters of introduction to counts and so on. Glad to report that Lawrence got blisters in his instep at one point – and contracted malaria etc. Beats our efforts. My idea of a good walk was up Crow Lane at the back of where were lived, past Crewe Cottage and on to Tapton, then back over the canal via Brimington. And very nice, too.
I’ve just welcomed Roddick’s victory – not just that he’s fanciable, half man/half elf, but he’s had a hard time by his standards these last five or six years. Must have felt he was on his way out. Moving to see him so grateful to still be at the top table.
I also had TVs at the various houses I stayed at. Only had a radio at home - so I liked to be somewhere better equipped the second week of Wimbledon time.
5 July. ELVES
Not a bad week of sport. Sea the Stars in the Eclipse, on his way to stardom after winning the Guineas and Derby. He’s tops at all distances between a mile and a mile and a half – a rarity.
I hadn’t thought of Evan (whom Keith had once met) in the half elf category. I did, Keith, I’m afraid, once take a fancy to one of the hobbits - though not enough to want to see another of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies, or indeed to watch any episode of ‘Lost’ in which the loved one (forgotten his name) later turned up. I saw the first ‘Lord of the Rings’ at a little cinema in Fakenham, Norfolk. I had about five consecutive years at the turn of the century where I spent the latter part of winter at a friend’s (my old TV producer) cottage – pretty rural. Fakenham is the nearest town. I was looking forward to the movie, January nights stretching just a bit long after a while with just the radio and a fire. Sean Bean (whose first screen appearance was in a TV play of mine) took so long dying that I missed the last drink at the very welcoming looking market place pubs. Ian McKellen I’ve never been able to take as reverently as others do. I’ve met him a couple of times and like a lot of actors he’s not especially interesting (I’ve preferred the company of journalists over the years – more stimulating than actors). I’ve also come across him at various gay niteries, when like me, he was on the lookout (I won’t say ‘prowl’). But he’s knocking out these heavyweight performances (though I can do without Gandalf) and been the – belated – cheerleader for gays, invited to Downing Street, putting the case for legislation, that rather dogged quality he has in private serving him – and us – well.
I sometimes think how it would have been if it had turned out trumps with (journalist) Evan. More highs – and lows – than my current way of life. He had a very handsome younger boyfriend, whom he left back in London for these Christmas outings, reasoning out loud that maybe the lad – a Brazilian of great beauty - would be out of place with us lot. I came across him some years later, after his relationship with Evan was over. He was at the Royal Opera House, looked very stylish, and with a queen-y, stylish crowd: ‘I miss the excitement of being with Evan,’ he said to me. I knew all too well what he meant…. I don’t think I could cope, day to day, with someone as interesting as Evan, should I have even been in the running, of course…
Keith had spent some of his early working life in Norfolk. Wanted more info
8 July
NORFOLK
The village is called West Raynham, part of the (Turnip) Townshend estate. Its main claim to fame is that recently the Queen popped in – casual visit/headscarf - from Sandringham to hear the new bells in the church. The chief bell ringer was thrilled with this, as well he might, but there’s a bit too much forelock touching in that area for me to be really comfortable. Churches all over the shop. There’s a lovely neglected church at East Raynham, just as you turn off that road between Swaffham and Fakenham. It’s easy to miss the turn and the church is near immediately on the right. I remember a January walk, light snow on the ground, and coming across some deer. There’s a house next to the church, also neglected, that would serve as the setting for ‘The Turn of the Screw’ – this is a half dozen years ago and is now, no doubt, done up to incomers’ requirements. A number of places round there would do nicely in a ghost story. My young neighbour in West Raynham, Gary, a greenkeeper, believed in ghosts, he told me. His old family gamekeeper’s cottage had had one that he’d seen. I remember evenings with the light fading at the back of the cottage, which was otherwise a bit dark, watching the days gradually lengthen (ten past five/quarter past five and so on) as I cooked in the back kitchen. I remember I was doing a Tesco’s stir fry when news of Mandelson’s second resignation from the Cabinet came in on the radio, political upsets (assassinations even) always enjoyable news for the solitary.
I settled into an enjoyable routine – important for morale - working in the mornings and late afternoon at the kitchen table, and, weather permitting, taking the car to go walks on Holkham Bay after lunch. It’s where Gwynneth walked in the last shot of ‘Shakespeare in Love.’ (My favourite Press caption is about Paltrow’s Oscar win: ‘Gwynneth Winneth.’) Very little of my work at that time ever saw the light of day – attempts at novel writing – but I was keeping at it. And the radio plays were just coming through like January snowdrops. A couple in the village (the bell ringer and his wife) always asked me in for a meal on my visits. I had a period of thinking I would like to settle in Norfolk but the bell ringer’s wife (good title for a novel) said how depressed she got in mid-winter until the first snowdrops started pushing through. I’d leave in late February or early March when, on one of my many bike rides (there was an old bike in the outhouse), I would begin to feel the sun on my back. No phone, poor mobile coverage, no e mail. I’d take piles of books and began the habit – still persists – of going to bed to listen to the Ten O’Clock News on radio. I’d had a fifteen years of the high life in London (‘Farewell the plumed troupe’), and sometimes would get a voice-mail from someone: ‘Where are you? Why aren’t you here?’ I wanted something different – and probably wanted to be someone different. I was living on the cheap, paying no rent, only electricity bills to my TV producer landlady and on each visit getting a load of coal in: buying time with the writing. And I need solitude for writing – don’t know any other way. It probably part explains the house sitting. You keep moving on, setting up your stall somewhere, laptop on the table, a few trips out to places new (but not too distractingly exciting), occasional social engagements – the bell ringer and his wife or the judge in Kent. I’d done my bombing round London, burnt my bridges.
In 2009 I hadn’t given up the itinerant life (see ‘House Sitting’), but had recently acquired a base - a flat in Folkestone. Sod’s Law: having only just put down a few tentative roots, I had just been offered a well-paid (by my lights) two day a week posting as Writer in Residence at Leeds University and was beginning to work out how I could square the geographical circle. It was a busy and enjoyable period: after years of drought I’d found a niche in radio with biographical plays. I tell him something of the writing and genus of the plays, which seemed to be of interest to him as a writer in a different field. He was having a go at short stories himself; a stray (otherwise unexplained) reference to Alice Munro creeps in early. Later it’s William Trevor and the writer Elizabeth Taylor. The journalist (and happily married man) also got me going - though I need little excuse - on what our old History teacher described, on reading some of my essays, as ‘the gay stuff.’ I liked offering a grandad a bit of smut. But it goes beyond that, I think. At school, back in the Sixties, I’d learnt secrecy about my instincts. This lasted way beyond school. Maybe you’re never ‘cured,’ but society had changed in those forty years. We were now acceptable - or nearly so - and I welcomed the opportunity to open up. I may even have found something of the confessor in this ‘listener,’ whom I wasn’t to meet for months.
It’s only lately I’ve realised that these e mails were the raw material - impressionist, fast - that fed in to the essays on this site. The correspondence pre-dates them and, in this four month chunk, bears a surprising resemblance to the plays I was writing at that time where I take a segment – a year or two maybe - of a life, illuminating (you hope) the whole person. Most of the folk I’ve dramatised lately are notable, though not all. We were that 11+ generation, post-War Grammar School boys - not Bloomsbury: a different class, different memories and experiences. I listen a lot to the World Service, other much less fortunate folks’ lives and am all too aware that we were relatively privileged, taking a great deal for granted with our Grammar School education. But there’s an edge. We’re both still a bit chippy in class terms – and for a long time I felt somewhat isolated (as it seemed) in a fiercely hetero world, my type ridiculed at best. What I wanted to do with my body, at least with someone else, was illegal till I was twenty one. I’m happy to say I made up for lost time and note some of that along the way.
I have censored next to nothing (apart from the odd cruel remark or too revealing passage about the living), have untangled obscure or particularly clotted phrases. I’ve moved round one or two e mails to assist the narrative, and every now and again I’ve ‘nailed’ or developed an anecdote, amplified it - some further memories, particularly of people, piling in - but there’s no elaborate polishing. Most is first draft and I’ve gone with the flow. It’s all e-mail-y: rapid fire stuff, slam bang onto the page, take it or leave it.
Italics indicate an explanatory interpolation; (…..) indicates minor cuts.
Most of the e mails have titles, occasionally ribald: ‘Affairs of the Bum’ deep into our correspondence - where all semblance of modesty seems to have deserted me - might appeal to those (what’s the phrase?) time poor. …. Evangelical Christians should stick to Enid Blyton.
I’ll cut in to the e mails after the opening bread and butter introductions and politesse.
4 June, 2009
…Your summarising skills means I got a clear idea of the last forty years. What are the sons up to? No kids – being gay, it never seemed possible, though one or two of my younger gay friends are breaking that mould. But no (or few) regrets – I think. I have a number of sons and daughters of friends I’m close to in that bachelor-uncle way. One of them, aged 20, recently said to me, ‘Oh, Steve, I’ve had an E.’ I said, ‘What, just now?’ I was parking the car outside her parents’ house. And she said, ‘No, at Glastonbury.’ And, though the anecdote is inadequate, I have a different relationship with the kids from what they have with their parents.
I’m no longer homeless – have a largish flat in Folkestone with sea views - though still enjoy other people’s houses. The house sitting may be a calling. The current Literary Manager of the National Theatre, when reminded of me recently (I’ve not written a stage play in years) apparently said, ‘Oh, yes, the house sitter’ – not, you note, ‘brilliant writer’ or ‘lost talent.’ I’m currently typing from a pile in Blackheath with wide views out front over the Heath and a massive garden at the back. I’ve been coming here for several years and wrote one of the plays you can find on the website here: ‘Adulteries of a Provincial Wife’. The moving around suits the work. When I lived in Chiswick – a big mansion flat, well-appointed (all that) – I got bored and stale. Wanted to shake myself up. Work wasn’t going well. There were moments when, after I sold the flat, I thought this is not sensible, certainly not very ‘Chesterfield’ – but that was the point. I can remember cycling – freewheeling round a corner of a favourite stretch of countryside in France, mid-afternoon, mid-week, in late September - and thinking of everyone else at work back in England. I’ve spent probably a quarter of my time since I sold the flat in France: there was an element of retreat about it. The previous Literary Manager of the National, whom I knew pretty well, rang me up shortly after I de-camped across the Channel to see how I was – a bit puzzled. I was blithe with him, but was in few doubts – I felt I’d had it as a writer, or at least as the kind of writer I’d been. But the new work finally came through, taking a considerable time, through which there had been no guarantee of success. And in the meantime I’d come to enjoy my new – insecure - way of life. Enlivening.
A critical friend said to me yesterday, ‘You re-invented yourself as a writer.’ There were financial sacrifices in that but I’d reached a dead end a dozen years ago: knew it. ‘There’s nothing worth doing unless it has the potential to fuck you whole life up’ (which I nicked from somewhere) became my maxim at that time. I suppose it’s the same with people who kick over the traces in a marriage. This last Sunday I met up with a banker pal, who let me use his basement for a time – I’ve always felt my life a bit flighty or eccentric compared with his (he in turn liked the relative glamour of mine). He’s unhappy in current banking conditions, thinking of becoming a school teacher, quizzed me about my time in the classroom. We saw what happened to the banks: no security anywhere. I take no pleasure in this. He asked me over the dinner table how I was getting on, and I said, ‘Well, it’s tempting fate but I feel on top of my game.’ And if you do listen to one of the plays, go for ‘Answered Prayers’ which was the start of a strong run at the BBC for me. That said, I’ve been reading Alice Munro stories – belatedly - lately. Her ‘top of the game’ is a mountain range above mine.
I’m just about to start two years at Leeds Trinity, north of the city in Horsforth, as a two day a week Writer in Residence. It means I’m subsidised and can spend time not on immediately productive work. I’ve a couple of novels on the go, but I expect I’ll be distracted with a radio play or two. I love the medium. I had a brief stage career, three plays, and looked after a number of rather brilliant writers at the National Theatre in the Nineties. I think I knew quietly, ‘tutoring’ them as a more experienced writer, that most were going to outpace me (Martin McDonagh, in particular, was already beyond me, and, after a time, I gave up trying to tell him anything, the bastard). Had a timely measure of my limitations, in short. I’m going with one of them to see another’s play on Sunday. She, the one whose play - or playlet - it is, utterly dedicated, once said to me: ‘It’s our turn now.’ She was right: it was. I’d had a good run but had lost drive and direction. Playwrights, and not just playwrights, do run out of steam. I tried to get going again, in a kind of long retreat, doing what I’d set out to do at first as a novelist but found my way forward, finally, in radio – not sexy, but it suited me. I’m used to concision/have some ability with dialogue and can write pretty much what I want in radio, quietly, no pressure. It’s short story writing, in effect. Alice Monro sometimes berates herself for not writing novels; ‘I’ll write a proper book next time.’ And none of this, laughingly, matters.
It’s Derby Day on Saturday, my equivalent of your Sunderland watching. What do they call it - ‘The Stadium of Shite’? Do you join in rousing choruses of ‘Posh Spice takes it up the arse’ ?? An old pupil, ex-professional footballer, from my school teaching days, is now a teacher. I got a couple of plays out of him over the years. This lad, now a very well preserved fifty odd, found himself after a charity match in the showers with Roy Keane, a hero of his. My pal passed on this info knowing it would tantalise me. I replied, ‘I bet, J, yours is bigger.’ ‘It is, Steve’, he said, ‘actually….’ You see, this is what Head Boys come to in time.
6 June 2009
EXPECTATIONS
..3 boys can’t always have been easy. I find it hard to imagine young Verges the father of a small tribe. I don’t really ‘do’ families, apart from unhappy ones. My Forster play – it’s called ‘A Dose of Fame’ about the ‘bachelor’/ gay Forster (wish I’d known at school what I now know about Forster) has him living at home in a small village with his mother - though doesn’t include, sadly, a scene where our novelist hero waits anxiously at the front door (as happened) for some ointment arriving from his more worldly homo pal Ackerley. The ointment was for Forster’s recently contracted, initially puzzling, crabs. When I had the same complaint after rather too good a time in the late 70s and was living in a small town in South Yorkshire, I pottered along to the doctor, not my regular but, to my relief, a locum on that day. He said, a bit cheekily, ‘Where did you get these from then?’ And I said, with a smile that said something else, ‘Oh, I think a towel.’
I tried to sell three – 3 - plays about Forster to the Head of Radio 4 Drama, one of which would have included the crabs episode above. There was also some wonderful shenanigans between Forster and Ackerley and various soldiers and sailors in Dover just before the War. As I put these (to me) enticing ideas to him, the Head of Drama, probably a liberal man, said, ‘I don’t think we can do.. you know.. cottaging on Radio 4 in the afternoons, Stephen.’ I’ll bung you the finished play under separate cover. You remember the objective correlative theory of T.S.Eliot? Though this is Forster in 1910 at the time of Howards End it very much expresses my own experience and feelings as a youngish gay man, coming out.
My feeling about Keano is that he’s borderline certifiable. I noticed a Guardian columnist the other day saying that he should have been imprisoned for the attack on a (was it?) Man. City player, which resulted in a career ending injury. I couldn’t live with that. On a less censorious note, I had a gay mate who was a sports reporter with access to dressing rooms in South London. He still waxes lyrical about the young Dennis Wise’s assets. In racing coverage cameras go into the jocks’ changing room. Clare Balding was once confronted on Arc de Triomphe day with a naked Jonny Murtagh – a television treat. I’ve since suggested to one or two people in television that visits to the changing room and showers might add to the enjoyment of footie coverage. This would not just be nudity. Gerard Pique had a tale recently about Keano raging round the Man U dressing room driven berserk by a vibrating mobile – Pique’s – which stopped before Keano found the culprit. Bring on the docu-cameras. Who needs dramatists?
Something in my last e mail made me ponder – I write impressionistic and fast. For many years I wanted to succeed as a writer, wanting to please and impress. This is a Grammar School ethos, allied with the usual parental expectations/love/pressure. There came a point in mid-life – a prolonged period of depression – grey, grey, grey - where those injunctions didn’t work for me anymore. Hard work and a blameless life does not a writer make. I felt I needed to be ‘bad’ not ‘good’ – letting off that steam of expectation and finding another way to proceed that still hopefully involved writing. It’s what a number of my middle years were about.
The following accompanies the play sent the same day about Forster ‘A Dose of Fame’ (available to listen to at the end of this web site). ….Most is what’s available from documentary materials. I try not to make anything up if I can help it. So – his food stains, ill-fitting suit, the sound of Roger Fry’s voice - are taken from biographical info. The mention of green beans is a small example of where I do elaborate. We can have no, or little, idea of what conversations took place – sometimes we can guess the subject, but there’s the all-important tone: the way these people spoke. Early on in his first novel, ‘Where Angels Fear To Tread’ there’s an episode where a couple of Forster Surrey types are planting peas. The house I’m currently staying in has a regular crop of runner beans. I thought, ‘Ooh, I can use those runner beans’ (as that bit of the play is set in July when they are abundant) - and include some verbatim dialogue from the Forster novel about peas, switch it to beans: it’s authentic/out of copyright, no one will notice. My director, who knows about gardening, said that he thought my dialogue wasn’t correct and that peas were easier than beans or vice versa (I still don’t remember; you’ll hear the little passage) and the dialogue was altered to his specifications. I said, ‘I’ll blame you if this isn’t right.’ But the main point of the scrap of dialogue, as well as getting the tone spot on, is to allow time in the scene for Forster to read a letter his mother has brought out to him, and to show him, characteristically, mother smothered. Peas – or beans - fill the gap, and thereby serve a number of purposes.
I’ve been thinking about my own mum. I was in Chesterfield recently to see my (second) cousin. She’s ailing. She got out the photographs. There are a couple of pics of my mother I hadn’t seen before – Wartime or late Thirties - both with my Auntie Florrie, my godmother, looking for all the world like a lesbian in a suit. Florrie died, childless, after an unhappy marriage and there’s no one much to remember her. I’m in that godparent role myself these days and hold the flame for we unattached types. One of the novels I’m fiddling with has a godmother – childless – at its centre. Though my fictional character is a woman and actress, she may be a bit too close to me, and maybe I’m better at inhabiting ‘real’ historical characters, where the stubborn facts of their life are a given but, of course, you introduce elements of yourself – hopeless homo yearnings in the case of Forster.
Another of my cousin’s photographs was of a group of four young people (before teenagers were invented). My cousin didn’t know who they were. I did. They’re my grandparents on my mother’s side who ‘had’ to get married with their daughter, my mum, Elsie, on the way. This is what served as their wedding photo, four of them – smart/poor - sitting on hard chairs outside a terraced house window – bride, bridegroom, and presumably best man and bridesmaid. Jack, my grandfather, cleared off a couple of years later, leaving my mother to be brought up by what we’ve learnt to call a lone parent. I was told he’d got married again bigamously but ‘Never try to find out’, my mother once warned me. I haven’t. ‘Oh, I would give him what for if he ever came to the door,’ she said, which made me nervous about those rare knocks on the door you’d get in Chesterfield on Sunday afternoons in the Fifties when people visited before they had cars and started dodging about all over the place. (Those Sunday visitors that you kept the tin of salmon and salad cream in the pantry for…..).
My cousins took me to a pub that does meals in mid-Derbyshire, run by a couple of gay guys: ‘You’ll like this place,’ she said. This is progress… I came out over thirty years ago but not to my small group of Chesterfield relatives who used terms like ‘wooftas’ etc. Times and conditions change. They now know and still seem quite proud of me. When I finally told my other second cousin (it’s our mothers, all of an age, who were cousins) I made sure he’d got his hearing aid in. I wasn’t going to go through the palaver again. He stared at me as if I was some kind of prize specimen: ‘Well, I never imagined it,’ he said - not displeased, ‘a homosexual in the family.’ He’s four times married. And a mother of a friend of mine, who’d worked with mine in a factory during the War and knew my dad, said, ‘And fancy, his father a Police Inspector.’
Looking forward to two years up North and hope to meet you – again - before too long.
15 June. HITCH
Keith is a cinema-phile – Alfred Hitchcock had cropped up.
…Twenty years ago, I went on the ‘Vertigo’ tour in San Francisco. Nothing organised. I just knew where to look for the key locations. This is a result of my mother taking me to the Regal, Chesterfield, in 57/58. (It was probably around then that she also made me a homosexual). I went to see ‘Vertigo’ the first afternoon of its re-release. (the film had been out of circulation for over twenty years) Christopher Hampton, the playwright, sat behind me in the 2 pm Notting Hill Gate Cinema – this is how writers spend their days, Keith. There were a number of sequences from the film I remembered from when I was 10. I don’t think I can have taken in the plot reveal in the middle and my mother explained what happened to me down Hollis Lane on the way home. I’d imagined – or wanted - the film to be about reincarnation, about which I had some notions, being a bit precocious – not to say odd - aged 10. A year or so later I had one of the best evenings (late afternoon, in fact) I’ve ever had. I came up the road from the Grammar School to see ‘North by North West’ at the Odeon. I remember it as autumn. The three of us waited for the manager, who would let us in for free - my dad was Police Inspector in charge of Chesterfield Town Centre (this - so far as I know – was his only perk, apart from a consignment of pickled onions, piccalilli and so on which arrived at Christmas from the local ‘Spire’ factory who produced the stuff). I was a bit embarrassed about waiting for the manager (my dad wasn’t) and would have hung round, looking at forthcoming attractions advertised on the stairs – Dirk Bogarde, another woofta (unknown to me) in something, maybe. There were are: my dad, my mum and me, aged 12, second year at the Grammar School togged up in uniform and new long trousers – it was downhill from then on…
The only other film pilgrimage I’ve done was in Tremolat in the Dordogne, tracing Stephane Audran in ‘Le Boucher’ (Chabrol influenced, of course, by Hitchcock). Accidentally, I found myself up on that bluff above the town, which provides the opening shot of the film and the famous image of the dead woman’s hand dripping blood onto the child’s sandwich. I walked down the street where Audran comes away with the butcher from the wedding, a fabulously long tracking shot, Audran with a Gauloise dangling from her lips. Found out that the school above which she lives in the film is really a Mairie. It was my most itinerant period - glorious September weather, me wandering round tracing what’s, after all, an unreality…. But it’s probably my favourite French film, seen many times - with a partial nod to the young Huppert’s ‘The Lacemaker’ (seen only once) set partly in Paris and I, think, the Channel coast. She’s a hairdresser hopelessly in thrall to a Sorbonne style student. What I thoroughly approve about ‘The Lacemaker’ is its plot. The tag line might be: ‘Girl falls in love for the first time. It destroys her.’
Having – deliberately - no internet access at home, I sometimes replied after a gap, when next in front of a home computer. Keith had been on a walking tour in Devon.
1st July 2009
AMBULARE
Just arrived back in tropical London and to e-mail after a couple of days up North looking for somewhere to live in the autumn. Good visit and may have found a temporary solution, particularly as I’m not inclined to jettison the Folkestone place.
There’s a Latin phrase that I’m not going to get right: ‘Ambulare pro Deo’ which, I think, roughly translates as ‘walking is good for the soul’. Bruce Chatwin (who died of AIDS but put it about that his illness was caused by eating a centuries old Chinese egg) was keen on that phrase and me too. I read a great many biographies and Chatwin’s (much praised) was one of the few where I liked the subject much less at the end than when I started - to such a degree that, after finishing it, I dumped the hardback book at Oxfam.
Apart from the obvious business of eating and drinking I couldn’t exist without walking and reading. I’ve reached the stage where I can’t take these things entirely for granted. Some years ago I had a stage play turned down by the RSC. It was a bitter pill, particularly as they said at one stage they were going to do it (I’m now very glad they didn’t: it was overblown, like a lot of my work at that time, trying too hard). The ‘Dear John’ letter arrived when I was staying at a cottage on the coast in Kent, one of the writer’s retreats I’ve inhabited over the years, roses over the door etc. It was a wonderful May day and I walked out of the cottage to clear my head. I had a fashionable pair of Rockport boots on. No map, just walked. I hit the Saxon Shore Way and curled round the seven or eight miles to Faversham, intending to round-trip return, but continued walking all the way to Canterbury. I went wrong at one point and had to retrace my steps for four miles. I’d paused for lunch on the way, eating a sandwich on a bench outside a pub scarcely changed from the Thirties, along with a half pint. I suppose I could have thrown myself on the altar at Canterbury but was too knackered and headed for the station to catch a stopping train home. The walk across the fields from the little station at Teynham was painful: I was seizing up by then. Had a bath and then the judge who owned the cottage popped round. He and his wife were helpful and kind, knew I was having a hard time as a writer. ‘What did you do today?’ he said. I told him. He’d been at court in Canterbury. ‘Wish I could have done that,’ he said. ‘It’s just like Laurie Lee, “As I Walked out One Midsummer Morning”.’ I’d never read it but was beginning to enjoy this ‘footloose’ way of life. I’d managed to walk my disappointment out of my system.
Devon I only know from a Christmas week when a group of us – gay men, including the now well-known Evan Davis – took a cottage in the mid Nineties. I was a bit infatuated with Evan at the time (I wasn’t the only one), realised it was hopeless but had a good time nonetheless. We were on the North coast, huge beaches and Tintagel just over the border. One of the features of these all male Christmases was that we gave presents not exceeding in value £5. Evan bought me a biography of Fred West, the mass murderer. ‘Up your street, Stephen,’ he said, which fairly characterised my rather glum writing at that time (see above: RSC). My agent said to me, very casually, once: ‘If only you could write the way you talk,’ I couldn’t then. That’s what’s come back.
I’m reading T.E. Lawrence ‘Seven Pillars’ and his letters at the moment. He walked, as an undergraduate round the Levant and Holy Land. Got beaten up at one point. But it’s that upper class confidence flays me. Like Paddy Leigh Fermor setting off to walk across Europe and stopping off in various castles of folk vaguely known to him, letters of introduction to counts and so on. Glad to report that Lawrence got blisters in his instep at one point – and contracted malaria etc. Beats our efforts. My idea of a good walk was up Crow Lane at the back of where were lived, past Crewe Cottage and on to Tapton, then back over the canal via Brimington. And very nice, too.
I’ve just welcomed Roddick’s victory – not just that he’s fanciable, half man/half elf, but he’s had a hard time by his standards these last five or six years. Must have felt he was on his way out. Moving to see him so grateful to still be at the top table.
I also had TVs at the various houses I stayed at. Only had a radio at home - so I liked to be somewhere better equipped the second week of Wimbledon time.
5 July. ELVES
Not a bad week of sport. Sea the Stars in the Eclipse, on his way to stardom after winning the Guineas and Derby. He’s tops at all distances between a mile and a mile and a half – a rarity.
I hadn’t thought of Evan (whom Keith had once met) in the half elf category. I did, Keith, I’m afraid, once take a fancy to one of the hobbits - though not enough to want to see another of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ movies, or indeed to watch any episode of ‘Lost’ in which the loved one (forgotten his name) later turned up. I saw the first ‘Lord of the Rings’ at a little cinema in Fakenham, Norfolk. I had about five consecutive years at the turn of the century where I spent the latter part of winter at a friend’s (my old TV producer) cottage – pretty rural. Fakenham is the nearest town. I was looking forward to the movie, January nights stretching just a bit long after a while with just the radio and a fire. Sean Bean (whose first screen appearance was in a TV play of mine) took so long dying that I missed the last drink at the very welcoming looking market place pubs. Ian McKellen I’ve never been able to take as reverently as others do. I’ve met him a couple of times and like a lot of actors he’s not especially interesting (I’ve preferred the company of journalists over the years – more stimulating than actors). I’ve also come across him at various gay niteries, when like me, he was on the lookout (I won’t say ‘prowl’). But he’s knocking out these heavyweight performances (though I can do without Gandalf) and been the – belated – cheerleader for gays, invited to Downing Street, putting the case for legislation, that rather dogged quality he has in private serving him – and us – well.
I sometimes think how it would have been if it had turned out trumps with (journalist) Evan. More highs – and lows – than my current way of life. He had a very handsome younger boyfriend, whom he left back in London for these Christmas outings, reasoning out loud that maybe the lad – a Brazilian of great beauty - would be out of place with us lot. I came across him some years later, after his relationship with Evan was over. He was at the Royal Opera House, looked very stylish, and with a queen-y, stylish crowd: ‘I miss the excitement of being with Evan,’ he said to me. I knew all too well what he meant…. I don’t think I could cope, day to day, with someone as interesting as Evan, should I have even been in the running, of course…
Keith had spent some of his early working life in Norfolk. Wanted more info
8 July
NORFOLK
The village is called West Raynham, part of the (Turnip) Townshend estate. Its main claim to fame is that recently the Queen popped in – casual visit/headscarf - from Sandringham to hear the new bells in the church. The chief bell ringer was thrilled with this, as well he might, but there’s a bit too much forelock touching in that area for me to be really comfortable. Churches all over the shop. There’s a lovely neglected church at East Raynham, just as you turn off that road between Swaffham and Fakenham. It’s easy to miss the turn and the church is near immediately on the right. I remember a January walk, light snow on the ground, and coming across some deer. There’s a house next to the church, also neglected, that would serve as the setting for ‘The Turn of the Screw’ – this is a half dozen years ago and is now, no doubt, done up to incomers’ requirements. A number of places round there would do nicely in a ghost story. My young neighbour in West Raynham, Gary, a greenkeeper, believed in ghosts, he told me. His old family gamekeeper’s cottage had had one that he’d seen. I remember evenings with the light fading at the back of the cottage, which was otherwise a bit dark, watching the days gradually lengthen (ten past five/quarter past five and so on) as I cooked in the back kitchen. I remember I was doing a Tesco’s stir fry when news of Mandelson’s second resignation from the Cabinet came in on the radio, political upsets (assassinations even) always enjoyable news for the solitary.
I settled into an enjoyable routine – important for morale - working in the mornings and late afternoon at the kitchen table, and, weather permitting, taking the car to go walks on Holkham Bay after lunch. It’s where Gwynneth walked in the last shot of ‘Shakespeare in Love.’ (My favourite Press caption is about Paltrow’s Oscar win: ‘Gwynneth Winneth.’) Very little of my work at that time ever saw the light of day – attempts at novel writing – but I was keeping at it. And the radio plays were just coming through like January snowdrops. A couple in the village (the bell ringer and his wife) always asked me in for a meal on my visits. I had a period of thinking I would like to settle in Norfolk but the bell ringer’s wife (good title for a novel) said how depressed she got in mid-winter until the first snowdrops started pushing through. I’d leave in late February or early March when, on one of my many bike rides (there was an old bike in the outhouse), I would begin to feel the sun on my back. No phone, poor mobile coverage, no e mail. I’d take piles of books and began the habit – still persists – of going to bed to listen to the Ten O’Clock News on radio. I’d had a fifteen years of the high life in London (‘Farewell the plumed troupe’), and sometimes would get a voice-mail from someone: ‘Where are you? Why aren’t you here?’ I wanted something different – and probably wanted to be someone different. I was living on the cheap, paying no rent, only electricity bills to my TV producer landlady and on each visit getting a load of coal in: buying time with the writing. And I need solitude for writing – don’t know any other way. It probably part explains the house sitting. You keep moving on, setting up your stall somewhere, laptop on the table, a few trips out to places new (but not too distractingly exciting), occasional social engagements – the bell ringer and his wife or the judge in Kent. I’d done my bombing round London, burnt my bridges.