‘Perhaps, my Lord,’ was the advocate's reply, ‘that's because there's nothing in between.’
When the judge, further goaded, said, ‘Why do you think I'm sitting here, Mr Smith?’ the answer was, ‘It's not for me to inquire into the inscrutable ways of providence.’
Birkenhead was highly skilled at turning a fuss to his advantage. Having failed to be elected as a member of the Reform Club, he habitually, when passing its doors, called in to use its lavatory. After many anxious meetings, the committee decided it was time to make a fuss and a fuss, of a surprisingly gentle sort, was made by the secretary. He met the peer on his way out of the Gents. ‘Lord Birkenhead,’ he fussed politely, ‘I've been asked to remind you that this is a members' club.’
‘Oh, really?’ His Lordship did his best to sound interested. ‘Is it that as well?’
Unless you have Birkenhead's gift for repartee it's unwise to lose your temper in court. You may, of course, make a considerable fuss, and even pretend extreme anger, but to lose it in reality would be extremely dangerous. In real life the ability to make a fuss has been secretly curtailed by the intolerance of children. In my childhood we listened patiently when our fathers bellowed protests against waiters who invariably interrupted their best stories just before the punch line by asking, ‘Who's having the fish?’
Now if you go into a shop and interrupt the conversation behind the counter by asking for a little help in choosing the lingerie, your children will flee from you, hide behind the coats, pretend you're not related or even set off for home. It's a battle you can't win, so it's better to keep quiet, or reserve your fussing for worthier issues, such as the destruction of the presumption of innocence or other matters in which the children may allow you to fuss.
Dickens – not, as I have said, perfect in his attention to family values – could make a magnificent and effective fuss when the occasion demanded it. He wrote Nicholas Nickleby and put an end to ghastly Yorkshire schools. He derided and scorned the law's unbearable delays, the Poor Law and the hopeless inefficiency of government bureaucracy. He discovered that there were more than 100,000 London children who had no education, even at a ‘ragged school’. And the ragged schools he visited were very ragged indeed, filled with children living by thieving and prostitution, filthy, illiterate and ‘with all the deadly sins let loose’. He was moved to give a lecture, or write a pamphlet, on the desperate plight of children who slept in doorways, under bridges and in saw-pits. Happily he didn't write a pamphlet but produced A Christmas Carol, in which what he called the ‘doomed children’ appear as Ignorance and Want, sheltering under the cloak of the Spirit of Christmas Present.
So fuss as much as you like about poverty, overcrowded prisons, locked-up children and social injustice, or even the abolition of outdoor sex, but lay off the waiter.
It's not that young people can't make fusses for themselves. In fact they have taken the place of the middle-aged, middle-class man in protesting at the unfairness of life, the disgusting ostentation of their parents' car or their mother's consumption of cigarettes. Sometimes their fusses can be well phrased and effective.
We were travelling to Australia for a family Christmas in the sun when Emily's then boyfriend, a talented actor, joined the plane at Singapore and, although booked in steerage, joined my daughter in club class, sharing her seat and starting to snog her enthusiastically. Sitting next to them, it was my turn to pretend that I was no relation, until the steward arrived and told the lover that he was embarrassing those seated in club class and would he kindly return to the tourists.
At this he stood up and, projecting in a way that might have been heard throughout the plane, declaimed, ‘Very well. But, everyone, look at this! This is what they did to Romeo and Juliet.’
24. Giving Money to Beggars
You should, I think, provided you have any of it at all, give money to beggars.
Begging is, after all, an ancient and honourable profession. Indian priests depended entirely on the contents of their begging bowls, monks and wandering friars begged for Jesus. Giving money to beggars produces a minor sense of generosity and well-being in the giver and some immediate satisfaction in the recipient. Such pleasant transactions are anathemas to those New Puritans who now rule us, and may survive to rule over you, the heirs to this testament. As in the grim reign of Oliver Cromwell, begging is to be made a criminal offence (in the days of the Great Protector, actors were subject to the same law). So the street sleepers, the unhappy children who have left home after a domestic row, the confused ageing women sleeping under newspapers, all of whom put their hands out to you as you pass from the theatre to the restaurant, will be given criminal convictions and moved, at huge public expense, from the nests they have made in doorways and under arches to Her Majesty's Prisons.
I spent some time talking to the street sleepers in an area of London between Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Embankment. They included middle-aged men who couldn't cope with filling in forms, paying rent and taxes, applying for jobs they didn't get or queuing up for public assistance. There was also a man who had been the manager of a supermarket with a car, holidays on the Costa Brava and a wife he loved very much who left him to go off with a soldier. After a period of misery he met an Italian girl at evening classes. They got married but she and their baby were run down and killed on a pedestrian crossing. This was too much for him. He locked up his house, posted his key back through the letter box and went to live on the streets.
The dedicated street sleepers, the respectable beggars who are no longer young, don't want to move into hostels where they might be attacked by young tearaways and have the few possessions they wander around with all day stolen. They don't go entirely without food. Four-wheel drives from the Home Counties come, often accompanied by a vicar intent on good works, and soup is ladled out. Late at night they get the leftover sandwiches from Marks & Spencer in bin liners. By this time they have become quite choosy, throwing out the BLTs in a search for the prawn and mayo. Except on the coldest nights, street-sleeping suits them so well that an elderly lady who had been taken into hospital begged to be rescued by her friends. They called at the hospital and managed, looking, I suppose, like porters, to trundle her out of the building in her bed and push her down to her preferred sleeping place – under the arches of an office block not far from the river.
These arches provide the four-star accommodation. Underneath them it's dry and out of the wind, and the regulars have their places reserved with their trannies and paperbacks, their blankets and old newspapers, all ready for the night. Do they beg? Well, of course they do. If you can get a place at the end of Hungerford Bridge you can make thirty pounds on a good day. Not many of them get this prime spot. It may go to the younger generation, who sleep where the heat comes up from the kitchens behind the Strand Palace Hotel.
Are they aggressive? I have to say that I haven't met an aggressive beggar in London. In New York, crossing 58th Street from the Plaza Oyster Bar to the Wyndham Hotel, I came up against a huge black man in a long, dark overcoat who said, in deep and threatening tones, ‘Give me fifty dollars!’ I managed to ask him if he would be content with thirty-five and, rather to my surprise, he said, ‘All right, give me thirty-five dollars!’ And so the deal was done.
Before we dismiss all those asking for our loose change as criminals, we should consider whether we're not all beggars. Every morning a shoal of letters and faxes arrives at my home begging for money for dozens of different causes, from the provision of deaf aids in African villages to funding a Conceptual Arts Centre in East Anglia. Many of the requests are persuasive and the causes worthy and they come with shiny brochures, well-designed graphics and forms asking for sums of money beyond the wildest dreams of anyone sitting in front of a saucer on the end of Hungerford Bridge.
The great and the good give lunches, or evenings with champagne and canapés, on the terrace of the House of Lords, at which they can beg from each other and solicit money for each other's favourite
charities. I have gone begging for the Royal Court Theatre, the Howard League for Penal Reform, various other theatres and institutions, with my hand shamelessly held out to tycoons, managers of trust funds and government representatives. Like the street sleepers on the Embankment, I have tried to shame total strangers into parting with their loose change.
We don't beg only for money. We beg for love, doing our best to look needy and anxious to please. The world of advertising is devoted to begging people to spend money on things they may not really need. Politicians, those who seek to imprison far more honest and straightforward beggars, beg shamelessly for votes in exchange for promises they are never going to keep.
So what should be done about beggars? The confused and, perhaps, abused young who have left home after a quarrel clearly need looking after. But the older practitioners who have mismanaged their lives, or even prefer the freedom of the streets, should be left to exercise a profession more honourable than that of many bankers, share pushers or sellers of pension schemes. They will need your help from time to time in their efforts, which should be warmly welcomed by the New Labour government, to transfer the business of welfare to the private sector.
25. Eating Out
I have already advised you to avoid restaurants which offer multiple choices, twelve starters, fifteen main courses, all sorts of puddings, described on shiny paper in a menu bound in scarlet with gold tassels. As with the choices offered nowadays on television, these are likely to provide no more than a wide selection of rubbish.
There are other basic rules, such as avoiding any restaurant where the name of the chef is known to the public; still worse if he – it always seems to be a ‘he’ – appears on television. Also run a mile from any eatery where the waiter starts to lecture you on the food. Conversation, in some highly expensive joints I have visited, has ground to a halt during the cheese course while Damon or Jasper, our waiter for the evening, gives a lengthy talk on the history of the Caerphilly, or describes the exact amount of fermentation undergone by the chèvre from the valley of the Loire. All you need to do while you're eating cheese is to get on with the argument, or the reconciliation, the friendship or the remotely possible consummation you came out for.
Worse even than lectures about the cheese are instructions on how to eat. I have been in a Florida restaurant where we were fitted up with bibs like so many middle-aged babies and talked down through the crab. The language was that used to land aeroplanes in distress and the same calm, reassuring voice was adopted by the waiter: ‘Grasp the claw firmly in the left hand and crack the hard shell of the claw with the instrument provided. A sharp pressure should produce a crack which will enable you to scoop out the crab flesh. This you can dip into either the French mayonnaise or the Thousand Island Sauce.’
Food in France, Italy or China is based on peasant cooking and has been handed down from grandmothers to mothers and daughters, who stick to traditional dishes. Supermarkets, fast-food outlets and the American cultural invasion have diminished our home cooking and most of our restaurants have lost all contact with the food we used to think of as traditionally English. Boiled mutton and caper sauce, baked jam roll, even steak and kidney pudding seem as remote as bowler hats or cherrywood pipes. Dominating star chefs have broken with the past and we are no longer the land of roast duck and apple sauce, roast lamb and mint sauce (a delicacy which always puzzled the French), but the country of rocket and sun-dried tomatoes, monkfish artfully arranged with pink sauce, a single peeled prawn and a sprig of dill, or a little castle made of venison doused in redcurrant coulis, which has also been used to draw patterns on the side of the plate.
Traditional English cooking could also be found in pubs but with one or two notable exceptions they, too, have surrendered to Caesar salad, pesto risotto and New Zealand Sauvignon. So, to find cooking which is still hanging on to its roots, you'd better go to France or, if you take my advice, to Italy.
‘I have prepared my peace,’ Yeats wrote, ‘with learned Italian things.’ Italian things, not necessarily learned, must be part of any sensible last will and testament. The English need Italy as gardens need the sun. It can teach us how to live with our history, to find drama in everyday life and lighten our national tendency to gloom. It was always so. From the nineteenth century our greatest writers, from Byron to Browning to D. H. Lawrence, fled to Italy, and all tourists there were known as ‘Inglese’, regardless of their country of origin. So a Florentine hotelier was heard to say, ‘I've got ten Inglese in tonight, four are French, four German and two Russian.’ Harold Acton, wholly dedicated to Italy, told me that Pen Browning, the Brownings' son, was ‘extremely interested in fornication’ and so the bars and restaurants around Florence are peopled by direct descendants of the Barretts of Wimpole Street.
Every Italian city had not only its own history but also its own masterpiece in the cathedral, its own food, its own wine and often its own language. The Neapolitan dialect is incomprehensible to the pure-speaking Florentine. You wouldn't expect to eat spaghetti with clams in Bologna or wild boar pâté in Naples. If you want a town where the present and the past are still vividly alive, go to Siena. It's divided into parishes, which compete in the extraordinary horse-race round the scallop-shell-shaped piazza twice a year. The Palio, which celebrates a victory over rival Florence, takes only a few minutes but the preparations and the processions are unforgettable. The horses spend the previous night in local churches, to which they are led by men singing, and if they manure the marble floors it's a sign of luck. The long procession before the race, with parishioners in medieval costume throwing twirling flags into the air as high as the houses, unwinds slowly. Knights in armour, with their visors down, ride by to celebrate the parishes that no longer exist. Finally the Palio itself, a huge silver dish, is driven round on a cart drawn by white oxen. The secret ambition of all the parishes is not to win (winning entails a great deal of expense) but to have their enemy come second – a true humiliation.
The Palio has more importance than even the beauty of the event in Europe's most perfect city centre. Loyalty to your parish is so great that women giving birth in a hospital outside their home area take a little tray of earth from their home parish to put under the bed. And the parishes organize events, football matches, parties and dinners for young and old, rich and poor, all the year round. The system works so well that there is little juvenile crime in Siena. It should certainly be tried in Birmingham, preferably with a colourful horse-race round the Bull Ring.
Italian communists, who are about as far to the left as English Liberals, have done well in the preservation of Siena; but I must warn you about a deterioration in the Communist Party. One of the greatest pleasures you can look forward to in the summer is the outdoor opera in front of the cathedral in San Gimignano, the city of tall towers and Ghirlandaio. The former communist mayor wore Armani suits, drove a Mercedes, had a most elegant wife and always got us front-row seats at the opera, and occasional champagne. Sadly he has retired, and the present communist mayor wears trousers that might have come from Marks & Spencer and drives something like a Fiat Uno. He failed to provide us with champagne or front-row seats, so we detected a decline in the standards of Italian communism. Nothing has deteriorated, however, in the joy of watching the dusk turn to darkness and the moon rising as Rigoletto's tragedy unfolds, or hearing Tosca sung to an accompaniment of wailing car alarms in the neighbouring streets.
There is no deterioration either in the restaurant I'll leave to you. You must cross the Piazza del Campo in Siena and find a narrow street at the side of the Palazzo Pubblico. A little way up this street is Le Logge. You can sit outside it next to the façade of a Renaissance church, opposite the houses where the young are shouting down from bedroom windows and the old are sitting in chairs outside the front doors to enjoy the endless drama of the streets. As the motor bicycles whip by, a music student on holiday plays the flute and wandering refugees try to sell you erotic cigarette lighters. Or you can eat inside in an
elegant nineteenth-century room which looks like the Café Momus in La Bohème. You can eat malfatti, a sort of pasta rarely met elsewhere, and drink the wine Gianni and Laura, who own the place, produce on their vineyards near Montalcino.
We are often in Italy with Ann Mallalieu and her husband, Tim Cassell, both lawyers but, whereas she is a Labour member of the House of Lords, he is full of charm and way to the right, not only of Genghis Khan but of Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. Some years ago Ann was defending a number of gay sadomasochists who, although harmless to others, found pleasure in nailing each other's genitalia to wooden boards in the privacy of an airport hotel. It was Tim asking his wife, as barristers will, ‘When's your penis torture beginning, darling?’ that caused a great many heads to turn as we sat having our pre-dinner drinks in the Piazza del Campo.
Gianni invited us all to lunch in a house near to their vineyard. We sat down at a long table under the vines with all their friends, relations and waiters. After a good many bottles of wine, our hosts began to sing, quietly at first and then with growing fervour, ‘Ciao, bella, oh! Ciao, bella, oh ciao bella, oh ciao, ciao, ciao.’ Our friend Tim joined in lustily, smiling and happy until I told him that what he was singing was a song of the communist resistance, at which point he stopped singing with an expression almost as pained as though he had been nailed up in some airport hotel.
26. The Pursuit of Happiness
It's as hard for a writer to describe happiness as it is to create a totally good character. Most of Shakespeare's comedies and many of his tragedies end with the re-establishment of a normal, peaceful and happy existence. But that's a state he carefully avoids writing about because it wouldn't be particularly good theatre. When happiness breaks out on the stage it is time to ring down the curtain. Henry James spoke for many writers when he referred to the ‘bread sauce of the happy ending’. If happiness doesn't make good theatre, is it something to be actively pursued in life?
Where There's a Will Page 12