Life in Fuengirola had been a liberation. I worked harder and better than I ever had before. I did not have to be anything I did not want to be; nor was I aware of what my contemporaries and supposed rivals were doing. My idea of being a writer has never had anything to do with social or careerist ambition; revenge is the sharpest spur. I wanted only to write the books I wanted to write and have them published. I might be a prig (no ignoble condition), but I was never calculating; I had no wish to please, although I am always pleased to do so. I took my chances, perhaps too many, but I never schemed to obtain them; nor did I belong to any artistic or political group. Larry Potter’s favourite character was Steppenwolf and I understood why, even though I have never much admired Hermann Hesse. Kipling’s lonely cat is more my style.
In early May, we loaded the Ford Anglia with all our belongings and set off for Gibraltar, slowly; PLD 75 had developed a tendency to boil if I drove at more than 25 miles an hour. We decided that Beetle should fly home from Gibraltar with Paul. I would drive our lame and rusting motor back to England, where we could now afford to change it for something better. Beetle hoped that my parents would allow her to have her summer baby at 12 Balliol House. My mother suggested a good nursing home in Wimbledon.
I cannot remember having any thought or emotion as I trundled northwards. Is there really such a thing as the stream of consciousness? Alone, I neither dreaded England nor looked forward to it. My slow, loaded progress attracted no hitch-hikers. As I drove the long, straight road between the pine forests of Les Landes, the fumes from the car contributed to a blinding headache. I had to pull in and lie down in a dry ditch, where I slept almost literally like the dead for nearly three hours. That evening, at a restaurant in Vendôme where the Michelin Guide promised a generous meal for less than a pound, a large gentleman sat at an adjacent table, a white poodle on a chair next to him, a napkin as its supplementary collar.
I stayed a night or two in Paris and loitered, as usual, at the stacked tables at the Librairie La Hune. Scanning the Impressionists at the Jeu de Paume, I bumped into Julian Jebb and a party of friends, including Gillian Tindall. Julian had performed a number of mine in Brian Marber’s Footlights show: ‘Willie, Willie Somerset Maugham / You’re at the top of the literary form / You’ll be going on fine / Till you’re ninety-nine / Willie, Willie, Somerset Maugham’. Julian was good casting for the Old Party; he was prematurely aged, small, clever and homosexual.
I expected it to be a relief to have congenial company in Paris. I resumed, with reluctant readiness, a more English persona than I had inhabited in Andalucia. I am not sure whether Julian was, as they used to say, a ‘Roman’, but la Tindall (an expert in French matters) certainly was. She was good-looking, fair and not amused by my patter. Years later, a novel of Ms Tindall’s came to me for review. I did not much admire it, for spelt-out, objective reasons. She wrote me a letter accusing me of personal animus because she had not fancied me when we met in Paris. I had not been aware that I was a candidate for her favours. I have never met her again, though I have admired some of her non-fiction, and have said so in print.
Back in England, luck took the ladylike form of Dudy Nimmo’s Newnham friend Anne Moore, who owned a furnished cottage in East Bergholt, Suffolk, and was looking for a tenant. Her tall, cadaverous husband Richard had been a lank-haired Liberal committeeman in the Cambridge Union. He now worked at the News Chronicle. When, to check some detail about our tenancy, I called the paper and asked to be put through to him, he picked up the phone and said, ‘Leaders’. Beetle, Paul and I moved into the Old Mill House, East Bergholt, soon after my return to London, where my first move had been to trade in PLD 75, for whatever Beetle’s cousin Geoffrey was genial enough to give us. We acquired a new, spacious, grey Standard Ensign with red upholstery.
I sent a freshly typed copy of The Roper House to Betty Judkins at Jan van Loewen’s office. When I went to see her, she told me that, in the unlikely event that the play even got into rehearsal, it would be only a day or two before it was found to be unperformable. I took one more look at the polka-dotted tart still on patrol on the far side of Shaftesbury Avenue and left the office for good. I never showed The Roper House to anyone else. Fifteen years later, Stephen Taylor and his long-suffering, overweight wife became characters in the third of my television series The Glittering Prizes. Eric Porter, not the least critical of actors, did not have any problem saying my lines.
The Limits of Love was due to be published in mid-June. Richard Gregson’s confidence and range as an agent had grown in our absence. He arranged for me to meet Wolf Mankowitz, who was looking for a writer to adapt a novel entitled Memoirs of a Cross-Eyed Man into a vehicle for Peter Sellers, whose life and appearance had been transformed by being cast opposite Sophia Loren in The Millionairess. Pudgy, pasty-faced, bespectacled Peter, for whom Roy Speer had said the radio might have been made because no audience would ever choose to look at him, fell so thumpingly in love with Sophia that he had willed and dieted himself into being handsome. Vocal versatility was transmuted into facial refinement and tailored elegance. He wore slick glasses and went to Dougie Hayward for his suits (‘clobber’ as Leslie Bricusse would say).
Mankowitz too had been an East End boy. Clever enough to get into Cambridge, he was quick to become a follower of Frank Leavis. In his single precocious contribution to Scrutiny, he followed the Downing party line in lambasting the incoherent vatic verbosity of Dylan Thomas (had Richard Burton known of this disparagement of Welsh genius, his diaries might have been less admiring of Wolf’s ‘poetic’ strain). If the graduate Mankowitz ever considered an academic career, he lacked patience for its small increments. Like the scholarly George Engel, Wolf had the intelligence to make himself the master of a somewhat abstruse subject, Wedgwood china, on which he wrote what remains the standard monograph.
In 1953, he had published A Kid for Two Farthings, a brief, pseudo-folkloric novella in which he revisited Spitalfields and turned the Jewish East End into London’s version of Sholem Aleichem’s Pale of Settlement. By the time I went to his office, above his Wedgwood store in Piccadilly arcade, Wolf had revised his accent backwards. It chimed with that of a rough, tough, street-wise businessman. Who would guess that the other side of his coin carried the image of a Downing man of letters? Wolf had the mimic’s contempt for one-track minds and singular ambitions. My unmitigated accent led him to say that he wasn’t buying any bloody Cambridge crap. Desert-booted feet on the desk, he played with an oversized matchbox which he slid open to reveal rubber-banded rolls of £5 notes. He was seeing a lot of people who were likely to be better qualified to do this script for Peter than I was, but he would let me know. I had the feeling that I had been summoned in order to witness how a clever Cantab East Ender, with a few bob, could work both sides of the street and still have time to write a showbiz A-Z for the Evening Standard. What we had in common emphasised the difference between us. Boasting of his photographer son’s rampant sexuality, he spoke of him being ‘stalky’, a locution I have never heard elsewhere.
The Old Mill House had been built by John Constable’s father. It was a grey stuccoed cottage down a hedged lane, a few hundred yards outside East Bergholt, near the Manningtree Road. Our only neighbours, in a cottage further down the lane, were Tom and Molly Cheale. Now a gamekeeper for the local land- and orchard-owning Eely family, Tom had survived being a prisoner of war after the capture of Singapore. He never complained and he never ate rice. I worked in a glassed first-floor conservatory, overlooking the lawn, which I had promised Anne Moore that I would keep mown. The vegetable patch outside the red-tiled kitchen was thick with asparagus and red-buttoned with raspberries.
Beetle was determined to have her new baby at home. Nurse Bray was a seasoned midwife, recommended by Dr MacBride, who would be available if needed. I made my last flannelled appearance on a cricket field, playing for East Bergholt. I made seven not out and bowled a couple of loose overs. I even persuaded Beetle that we should be better integrated i
f she went to a meeting of the local Women’s Institute. She did so just once. Mrs Jenkins and Mrs Smith came for two hours twice a week and Miss Ireland when asked, to do the ironing. Miss Ireland, who was scarcely five feet tall, drove a large old Morris eight. On its way up the lane, it appeared to be empty. As it got closer, Miss Ireland’s eyes could be seen looking out from under the brim of the big steering wheel, her hands higher than the top of her head.
East Bergholt had two famous living inhabitants: Randolph Churchill, who lorded at Stour House, a large pink Regency building facing out over the rolling pasture down to the river for which it was named, and Paul Jennings, who lived with his wife and six children adjacent to the Franciscan priory. Jennings was the weekly author of the Oddly Enough column in The Observer. His whimsical wit was collected in a Penguin entitled Jenguin Pennings. Another collection had been called Oddly Bodlikins. When I went into the village shop-cum-post office, I was glad to see packets of typing paper on one of the shelves. The shopkeeper was sorry but they were reserved for Mr Churchill. He had an undeniable need of instant supplies. When I dared to say that, in a democracy, shops should not withhold goods on display, I prevailed, just.
Randolph had a purple temper and was no respecter of the lower orders. When he called at one of the local garages for petrol, he lowered the window as little as possible and thrust a suitable bank note through it. The garageman, Arnold Handley, who became a friend of ours, was a red-haired ex-Communist ex-schoolteacher. When he brought the change, in coins, he posted them back through the crack in the window so that they fell all over the floor. Churchill said that he need not expect to enjoy his custom again. Arnold said, ‘You got the point then.’
Randolph was not only a regular journalist but also in charge of the many volumes of his father’s biography. He supervised and depended on a series of, so to speak, galley slaves who were quartered in the partitioned dormitory floor of Stour. Daylight reached them through Georgian windows which were rarely centred in the walls of their gimcrack accommodation. Some of the bedrooms had only a share of a window to themselves. Martin Gilbert, who later achieved fame as a historian, especially of the Holocaust, was one of Randolph’s most reliable, and relied upon, assistants. When Randolph died, Gilbert ceased to be a ghost and became the accredited author of the last six volumes.
Martin told me, years later, that we must have been neighbours in East Bergholt at much the same time. He was, in effect, Randolph’s social secretary as well as amanuensis. When overtures were made, by the producer Jack Le Vien, for an American TV series of Winston’s life, Randolph determined to entertain him in style. Having summoned his oriental cook (his English ones had all left within a week), he demanded that, for once in his life, he produce something edible for their distinguished guest. The cook rose to the challenge by packing his bags and walking out. Randolph asked Martin to book dinner at the best local hostelry. There happened to be an excellent restaurant in nearby Stratford St Mary.
Jack Le Vien arrived and was primed with champagne before the three of them repaired to Le Talbooth. The thatched Tudor building pleased the guest. The sedulous attention of the owner, Gerry Milsom, brought out Randolph’s most amiable aspect. After the meal was ordered, the wine list was proffered. Randolph said, ‘What would the sommelier suggest to give delight to Mr Le Vien?’ The wine waiter indicated one of the listed bottles. ‘This one is very popular, sir,’ he said. Randolph said, ‘Popular? What leads you to presume that I should ever want to drink anything POPULAR?’
One evening, I shared a third-class compartment with Paul Jennings on the train from London. Since I had heard him to be a piously uxorious Catholic, I remarked on the enlivening uses of adultery in making the marital world go round. Making oneself obnoxious to famous persons is not an unknown form of self-introduction, but I did not have much success. Some time later, I happened to buy the new Penguin pocket dictionary. Whether through sly intention or comic chance, the pairs of words that showed the first and last entry on each page had generated comic hyphenates: ‘corkscrew-cornetto, fruitless-fuck’ and so on. I sent word to our neighbour Mr Jennings, as a sort of apology perhaps, alerting him to the fun that he might have with these and other conjunctions. A few weeks later, his Observer column made protracted and witty use of them. He sent me neither a copy nor a word of thanks. There was no obligation to do so; that is what might have made it stylish if he had.
I finished The S Man and delivered it to Tom Maschler. A sustained piece of wilful cynicism, it merited the pseudonym, Mark Caine, that we clapped on it. A typical passage read ‘The success believes in the team. (His team.) The success believes in the loyalty of the team. (To him.) He believes that the team should stick together. (Until he wants to dissolve it.) He believes that the company comes first. (As long as he is first in the company.) He believes that if everyone can come up with just one more good idea, final success is inevitable. (For him.)’ I left the business of selling to Tom. He reported that Ian Hamilton at Hutchinson’s was enthusiastic, although he accused Tom of ‘bargaining like an Armenian’. A profitable deal was closed; the book would be out in time for Christmas.
Richard Gregson sent me to meet Stella Richman, who had been put in charge of drama for Lew Grade’s Associated Television. The best TV plays were generally agreed to come from the stable of writers put together for ABC TV’s ‘Armchair Theatre’ by Sidney Newman, a Canadian dramaturge with modish left-wing connections and ambitions. Expecting sceptical interrogation, I was greeted with immediate enthusiasm by a small, dark-haired woman. At once confident and unassuming, she was sure that The Limits of Love was going to be a big success, although she cannot have seen a word of it.
The ex-wife of Alec Clunes, Stella had been an actress and was alert to the prime importance of dialogue. She had a weekly drama slot to fill, directly after Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Lew had left the choice of material to her; we could do whatever we chose, as long as the ratings didn’t dive. The first thing she offered me was a treatment by Truman Capote, entitled Answered Prayers (he later applied it to another work altogether). Set in New York, its plot featured a prototypical S Man who gets his comeuppance from a woman who, when we went into production, was played by Maggie Tyzack.
To be in at the creation of TV drama and to have Stella for impresario was to join the happiest school I ever attended. She commissioned one play after another and they were usually in rehearsal no more than a few weeks after delivery. Since those early pieces were performed live, in the studio, in front of cumbrous cameras, the stories depended on the words and on expert playing. It became my habit to start a new 48-minute play on Monday morning and finish it by Wednesday afternoon. I revised it on Thursday and posted it to Stella on the Friday. She or her script editor, Lew Griefer, whom it took no great wit to label ‘the script-griefer’, made brief comments, to which I responded promptly and I then had the fun of going to rehearsal. Lew was an ex-Communist, now in analysis; either Marx or Freud supplied the maquettes on which all his proposed emendations were based. Stella did not insist that I bend with his predictable wind. There was, I soon discovered, nothing so educational as hearing actors saying one’s lines. It made me instantly alert to false quantities in the text and often able to interpose solutions before there was a problem. Rehearsal was, as Americans used to say, the best fun you could have with your clothes on.
One day, a youngish actor came up to me, as we were having a break, and asked whether I would mind if he asked me something. I imagined that he wanted a cut line restored or another added, but his question was ‘Do you seriously think that thermonuclear war is likely to break out in the near future?’ Not displeased to be taken for a pundit, I delivered a reasonable account, on the one hand and on the other, of why I thought that neither we nor the Russians had anything to gain and hence … etcetera. He attended to my lecture with the blinks and nods of a serious pupil and thanked me very much. As I finished my cold coffee, young Carmen Silvera touched me on the shoulder and s
aid, ‘Darling, do you mind if I tell you something?’
‘Of course not.’
‘When an actor comes up to you and asks you if you think that humanity can survive or whether strontium 90 is poisoning the water supply or the dictatorship of the proletariat will be good for the arts, there is one answer and only one: you put your hand on his arm and say, “Before I say anything else, let me tell you that you are giving a fantastic performance.”’
The Limits of Love was published at the beginning of the summer. I woke up and found myself very well noticed. Peter Forster, in the Daily Express, devoted most of a broadsheet page to proclaim me ‘a really remarkable new talent’. The characters in my book were said, in Graham Greene’s words, to ‘walk off the page into life’. Desmond Flower announced a reprint of my ‘considerable achievement’ almost as quickly as Victor Gollancz.
My feeling was more of relief than of exhilaration. In my callous innocence, I had no apprehension that any of the people on whom my lively characters were based might take offence. In fact, Beetle’s sisters were dismayed by what I took the liberty of saying about quite recognisable versions of their marriages. I was embarrassed but, in truth, indifferent. Graham Greene had written of the sliver of ice in every genuine novelist’s heart; if I must choose between a telling portrait and its subject’s good humour, I seldom hesitate.
I had dedicated the novel both to Beetle and to Paul (absit omen, since my leading character bore his name) and I thanked St John’s College for the money which the reverend Harper Wood had allowed them to bestow on me. It did not occur to me that Renford Bambrough, who had been my benefactor, would read my book or that he would take the character of Thornton Ashworth to be his portrait, although in many regards it was. Renford never mentioned the book to me, which is the only way, apart from his cool courtesies, that I knew that I had hurt him. I had assumed, conveniently, that scholars were above petty resentment.
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