White Wine in Paper Cups
I referred to the Eighties in the previous essay as a ‘brilliant’ period, well aware who the Prime Minister was. It’s arguable (they would admit it) that She (the capital letter seems appropriate) was the making of a raft of left wing writers, including Hanif. Neil Kinnock makes a brief appearance in that essay, cursing, I notice. The first word I heard Blair say (in the flesh) was ‘fuck’ and it may be that politicians need what my dad called pit language to establish their working class credentials. And manliness? I’ve just been watching a rare, rather good, near exclusively female film with Juliet Binoche and Kristen Stewart, the un-memorably named ‘Clouds of Sils Maria,’ and they clearly enjoy f’ing and blinding – what the men do, ‘ballsy,’ I suppose. I once had some young friends staying with me who wanted to watch the DVD of Scorcese’s ‘The Departed.’ I’d seen it and went in the next room where all I heard though the wall was ‘fuck’ and its variants. Sometimes you think Mary Whitehouse might have had a point. I used the word once, back in the Sixties, in the presence of my mother – when, driving, she nearly ran into the back of a lorry. At the next traffic lights, she said, ‘You used that word’ – and, indeed, have enjoyed insisting, against objections, on its retention in various BBC plays, so can’t be righteous. Once it was taboo, now, as David Hare says, it’s the only way you can get on a bus. It’s what people now say casually; it can, of course, be emphatic or fond.
‘Fond’ was the key word in a memorable phrase one of Kinnock’s closest advisers once used to describe him to me. ‘The fond foolishness of the man,’ she said. I think I know what she meant. He – and Glenys – were an important part of my life for ten years or so, and, though I’ve tried, have never succeeded in writing about him (or them). After he stopped being Labour Leader, they agreed that it was Glenys’ turn now, and she became an MEP, and Government Minister. I remember sitting with her at an outside table near Square Ambiorix in Brussels, and she quizzing me on my lack of confidence at that time (the mid Nineties). ‘Didn’t you have a mid-life crisis?’ I asked. ‘Nothing that HRT and standing for the European Parliament couldn’t cure,’ she said. It was on that same visit to Brussels, when Neil was Commissioner, that he said – he was just out of my view in the kitchen making a cup of tea, ‘I don’t know anyone who believes in socialism any more – apart from Arthur Scargill.’ Blair was leader by then, and rang Neil at nights. ‘What does he ask you?’ I wondered. ‘He wants to talk about what it’s like,’ meaning the loneliness of being a Leader. Incidentally, in Brussels Neil lived at a house previously occupied by Boris Johnson, so the British papers couldn’t accuse him of ‘gravy training.’ He was up against that kind of scrutiny all his career.
I’d first come across the name of Neil Kinnock, apart from in the papers, though my friend Simon Hoggart, who used to stay where I was then living in South Yorkshire when Simon was covering Elections (and making his name) for the Guardian (this would have been 1974). He said, ‘There’s a young MP called Neil Kinnock. You’d get on well with him.’ I met him four years later. My friend (and Simon’s) Peter Cole and his then wife, Julia, who was a Parliamentary correspondent, had organised a canal holiday that started in the unpromising surrounds of Dewsbury Canal Basin. The aim was to get up into the Pennines, lots of locks and spectacular views. I drove up in my little MG Midget, where the party was already assembled, was in good odour straight away with Glenys (she had heard one of my radio plays while ironing in South Wales) and was a bit nervous of him. He was noisy, tended to run things, not really my type, I thought. Also on board were the Kinnocks’ great friends, Norman Willis and Maureen and family. Norman was later to be General Secretary of the TUC. The Kinnock and Willis kids were there, and a young MP, now sadly dead, called John Tilley, a friend of Julia’s, along with Julia’s cousin, Alyson Corner. Now, I incline to the solitary, and was a bit doubtful about all this company, but the weather was idyllic – it was May – and despite a near disaster very early on – we all took to the bottle and disregarded a sign saying ‘Weir,’ necessitating some fast action on behalf of Peter Cole at the tiller. The course of future Labour Party politics were decided during those five minutes. Somewhere near Ferrybridge (in what could have been a grim setback) we learnt that ‘Kippax’ the main junction to the Pennines, ‘was closed.’ We managed to get past the lockkeeper at the end of this stretch of industrial canal (where it became river again), and swung out into what felt like open sea, turning back up the Ouse, with its narrow banks (I have a photo of myself swimming next to the boat to help push it off the sides), and becoming, in time, as we liked to say, the first narrow boat to come up the Ouse since the Vikings. People cheered us in York. It was a memorable trip in a number of other ways. Peter and Julia’s marriage was coming apart (I describe one of the consequences of that in ‘The Hermit’s Tale’ in the earlier 2009 -13 Essays) and I was ‘coming out’ as gay, to the surprise (among others) of my best friend Peter, poor lad. I recently gave him a book on Kim Philby and his best friend, unaware his friend was a ‘mole’. You learn that Philby kind of deceit as a closeted gay. Alyson, I think, at the time had a yen for me, and it seemed important to be honest. Later she married Simon Hoggart, much the better bet, though he – in his cups – would lament for some years, ‘My wife prefers you to me.’ He died, after a four year illness, last year, and I wish – when my time comes – that I have someone as loving and assiduous as Alyson by my side. But you pays your money..
The Kinnocks were unaware of these undercurrents, so to speak. And by the time I met them again (I was living up North) Julia was living alone and there were the four of us round her dinner table on Christmas Eve. They were aware by then that I was gay, however. An argument developed between me and Neil, ‘Well I hope my son doesn’t turn out gay.’ This was 1978. I resolved never to see him again, but, washing up, he threw that experienced politician’s arm round me and said, ‘You’ll forgive me my prejudices.’ Julia told me that on the following day – we had been playing football on Ham Common – he had said to her, ‘He’s no more gay than I am.’ Which raises an interesting prospect. In future years I would sit round a table with him at Joe Allen’s, with Ian McKellen, Michael Cashman (the actor and M.E.P.) and Antony Sher, he listening to their advocacy of getting gay rights into the Labour Party Manifesto. Maybe because of my gayness, I chaperoned Glenys from time to time, and we once went to the pictures together. ‘I’ve never been out with another man apart from my husband,’ she said. The film was, I remember ‘Come Back to Five and Nine, Jimmy Dean,’ not one of Altman’s best. I also went with her to a Bruce Springsteen concert at Wembley, my job to keep the wine bottle under the seats and fill the paper cups so the photographers couldn’t tell what we were drinking. Afterwards, high on Springsteen – and white wine – we met up with Neil. ‘Springsteen’s a winner and I’m not,’ he said – but that’s the probably the subject for a later essay.
22/8/2015
‘Fond’ was the key word in a memorable phrase one of Kinnock’s closest advisers once used to describe him to me. ‘The fond foolishness of the man,’ she said. I think I know what she meant. He – and Glenys – were an important part of my life for ten years or so, and, though I’ve tried, have never succeeded in writing about him (or them). After he stopped being Labour Leader, they agreed that it was Glenys’ turn now, and she became an MEP, and Government Minister. I remember sitting with her at an outside table near Square Ambiorix in Brussels, and she quizzing me on my lack of confidence at that time (the mid Nineties). ‘Didn’t you have a mid-life crisis?’ I asked. ‘Nothing that HRT and standing for the European Parliament couldn’t cure,’ she said. It was on that same visit to Brussels, when Neil was Commissioner, that he said – he was just out of my view in the kitchen making a cup of tea, ‘I don’t know anyone who believes in socialism any more – apart from Arthur Scargill.’ Blair was leader by then, and rang Neil at nights. ‘What does he ask you?’ I wondered. ‘He wants to talk about what it’s like,’ meaning the loneliness of being a Leader. Incidentally, in Brussels Neil lived at a house previously occupied by Boris Johnson, so the British papers couldn’t accuse him of ‘gravy training.’ He was up against that kind of scrutiny all his career.
I’d first come across the name of Neil Kinnock, apart from in the papers, though my friend Simon Hoggart, who used to stay where I was then living in South Yorkshire when Simon was covering Elections (and making his name) for the Guardian (this would have been 1974). He said, ‘There’s a young MP called Neil Kinnock. You’d get on well with him.’ I met him four years later. My friend (and Simon’s) Peter Cole and his then wife, Julia, who was a Parliamentary correspondent, had organised a canal holiday that started in the unpromising surrounds of Dewsbury Canal Basin. The aim was to get up into the Pennines, lots of locks and spectacular views. I drove up in my little MG Midget, where the party was already assembled, was in good odour straight away with Glenys (she had heard one of my radio plays while ironing in South Wales) and was a bit nervous of him. He was noisy, tended to run things, not really my type, I thought. Also on board were the Kinnocks’ great friends, Norman Willis and Maureen and family. Norman was later to be General Secretary of the TUC. The Kinnock and Willis kids were there, and a young MP, now sadly dead, called John Tilley, a friend of Julia’s, along with Julia’s cousin, Alyson Corner. Now, I incline to the solitary, and was a bit doubtful about all this company, but the weather was idyllic – it was May – and despite a near disaster very early on – we all took to the bottle and disregarded a sign saying ‘Weir,’ necessitating some fast action on behalf of Peter Cole at the tiller. The course of future Labour Party politics were decided during those five minutes. Somewhere near Ferrybridge (in what could have been a grim setback) we learnt that ‘Kippax’ the main junction to the Pennines, ‘was closed.’ We managed to get past the lockkeeper at the end of this stretch of industrial canal (where it became river again), and swung out into what felt like open sea, turning back up the Ouse, with its narrow banks (I have a photo of myself swimming next to the boat to help push it off the sides), and becoming, in time, as we liked to say, the first narrow boat to come up the Ouse since the Vikings. People cheered us in York. It was a memorable trip in a number of other ways. Peter and Julia’s marriage was coming apart (I describe one of the consequences of that in ‘The Hermit’s Tale’ in the earlier 2009 -13 Essays) and I was ‘coming out’ as gay, to the surprise (among others) of my best friend Peter, poor lad. I recently gave him a book on Kim Philby and his best friend, unaware his friend was a ‘mole’. You learn that Philby kind of deceit as a closeted gay. Alyson, I think, at the time had a yen for me, and it seemed important to be honest. Later she married Simon Hoggart, much the better bet, though he – in his cups – would lament for some years, ‘My wife prefers you to me.’ He died, after a four year illness, last year, and I wish – when my time comes – that I have someone as loving and assiduous as Alyson by my side. But you pays your money..
The Kinnocks were unaware of these undercurrents, so to speak. And by the time I met them again (I was living up North) Julia was living alone and there were the four of us round her dinner table on Christmas Eve. They were aware by then that I was gay, however. An argument developed between me and Neil, ‘Well I hope my son doesn’t turn out gay.’ This was 1978. I resolved never to see him again, but, washing up, he threw that experienced politician’s arm round me and said, ‘You’ll forgive me my prejudices.’ Julia told me that on the following day – we had been playing football on Ham Common – he had said to her, ‘He’s no more gay than I am.’ Which raises an interesting prospect. In future years I would sit round a table with him at Joe Allen’s, with Ian McKellen, Michael Cashman (the actor and M.E.P.) and Antony Sher, he listening to their advocacy of getting gay rights into the Labour Party Manifesto. Maybe because of my gayness, I chaperoned Glenys from time to time, and we once went to the pictures together. ‘I’ve never been out with another man apart from my husband,’ she said. The film was, I remember ‘Come Back to Five and Nine, Jimmy Dean,’ not one of Altman’s best. I also went with her to a Bruce Springsteen concert at Wembley, my job to keep the wine bottle under the seats and fill the paper cups so the photographers couldn’t tell what we were drinking. Afterwards, high on Springsteen – and white wine – we met up with Neil. ‘Springsteen’s a winner and I’m not,’ he said – but that’s the probably the subject for a later essay.
22/8/2015