by Mo McDonald
I enjoyed the new game of making voices talk for me on TV. It was dangerous, giving me an adrenaline rush that was like a drug. A godly power that gave me the last laugh on those who had thought me too jumped-up for the plum job in the world of the Arts on television. The following week I talked to a couple of acclaimed writers from the UK and let their words speak for me; they ended by saying that they did not regard themselves as psychiatrists, but that they felt the job of a good novelist was to help the reader to know his/her own nature.
Those two writers had helped to launch the season, and as Marian had already acknowledged that she was on my wavelength, I prodded them in her direction.
She wrote to me:
Dear Jack,
I just want to say ‘hallo’ and to tell you what a lovely uplift I have obtained – the only book of yours that I hadn’t read was Don’t Fence Me In and I managed to get a copy today. The silly thing is that I will not start it for fear of finishing it! As I read the words, you will be with me. I shall be lost in its spell. There are times when I cannot believe my good fortune, to have found your books, to have met you and to realise that you understand me is quite remarkable. Thank you for not writing me off as a stupid female. Thank you for your support.
Thank you for letting me witter on again.
Bye,
Love from,
Marian
A week later, the programme showed a film explaining the strange platonic affairs between different artists and their muses. She responded: ‘Please remember that I am out here and that I follow your career with interest.’
The next week, we featured the music from great classical composers, emphasising the powerful mood of a different type of written word when interpreted by the musicians who read it.
Dear Jack,
I would like you to know that thanks to you and a loving family, I am fit and well. I must tell you though that in the past I used to say, ‘Oh, no; not that Jack Kelly!’ Your younger image annoyed me – sorry! Please receive the following piece with my love…
‘I am always sure that you understand my feelings, always sure that you feel, sure that across the gulf you reach your hand. You are invulnerable; you have no Achilles’ heel. You will go on, and when you have prevailed you can say, at this point many a one has failed.
But what have I, but what have I, my friend, to give you, what can you receive from me? Only the friendship and the sympathy. Who has and gives those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you without those friendships etc… ‘
Jack, I have taken these words quite out of context from T. S. Eliot’s Portrait of a Lady.
Love,
Marian
Dear Marian
Thank you very much for your letter. I am delighted that you enjoyed Don’t Fence Me In. And I am really thrilled that everything is going so well. The beautiful piece from Portrait of a Lady pleased me no end.
I don’t at all blame you for not liking my earlier image; I did look a bit of a prat!
I wish you a happy Christmas, somewhat early.
Yours sincerely,
Jack
Then came the terrible news that John Lennon had been shot dead in New York City. I called an emergency meeting with the production team to plan and run a special programme, as a fitting tribute to him, as a musician and songwriter. The BBC gave us a prime-time slot to reach out to the nation. At the same time, thousands of grieving fans held a vigil in Liverpool. The words from his beautiful song ‘Imagine’ turned the screen into a memorial for the ex-Beatle and tributes came flooding in from the viewers.
For the final programme before Christmas, we looked at the story of Cinderella, stressing how it was every young girl’s dream to be found by her Prince Charming. And as it was Christmas, I felt daring; I allowed myself to say, ‘Goodbye and a happy Christmas to our viewers, out there.’ I looked straight into the camera as I said that with deliberation.
I felt content with this new attraction in my life. I had been used to living in my mind; now, I had a constant companion living there, one that I could focus on to my heart’s delight. I used Marian in whatever I planned for future programmes and I allowed myself to imagine what she would pick up on whenever I was interviewing performers or filming their work. Instead of the wider audience, I zoned in on my devoted fan and allowed my infatuation to grow and to flourish.
Because I wanted to encourage Marian and to show how much my emotions were inflamed by her, I wore a red tie on that Christmas programme, but it was no ordinary tie. It was pillar-box red and it was so long that when sitting it reached my ankles. I know it sounds as though I am exaggerating, but I’m not. It really was as outrageous as that. Looking back, I can see I was in a state of madness. I felt completely confident in my all-powerful BBC television celebrity role. Society had found a new ‘royal family’ in the world of media personalities. The likes of me were in our prime and our fame and power was at its height. The seventies and the eighties had seen the crowning of what was perceived to be the glory of the face on the box – the public liked to feel that they knew us because we were right in their living room. It felt good to be the gods of the airwaves and the privilege that went with this was huge. It was like an aphrodisiac and we were lording it over everyone, just like the Hollywood stars of the forties and the fifties. As they were losing their status, ours was growing. Of course, the viewing ratings had a huge part to play in our success, but the Arts world was, at last, being seen as important for the sake of the nation. This meant that we could survive so long as we remained entertaining and not too highbrow. Popularity was the all-important magic ingredient.
My newfound position as a personality in the world of television gave me a freedom as well as power. I was hailed like a prince throughout the London set and treated with kid gloves by all the ‘luvvies’ as well, because they all wanted a place on my programme. My power grew throughout the industry as I made more and more programmes and promoted more and more of the current culture. I had many admirers, not just because of my work but because of the opportunities I could put their way. I helped to form the thinking of the public as to who was in and who was out of favour in acting, pop music, bands, books, cinema, dance, opera, radio, television – you name it, I talked about it. There was much more to my programme than the hidden message to Marian. She was a trinket that sparkled in the dizzy world I inhabited.
The editing room became my favourite location, where I could mix and play with sound and images, like a child with a kaleidoscope. I put myself out in front of camera whenever I could, too, so as to be seen by her. I became more and more obsessed with getting under her skin in the way that I had allowed her to slip beneath mine. I recall that when I first started on the series I felt ill with nerves and it was normal for me to throw up in the bathroom before each weekly recording, but once I started to concentrate on Marian I grew in courage and, as I have explained, took great delight in pulling the wool over the eyes of the unsuspecting viewers. Nothing has filled me with such excitement since and I know it never will.
My world was very affluent. I was lucky and I knew it. The UK as a whole was in recession for the second time in five years and in August 1980 unemployment reached 2 million. Many MPs from the Conservative Party warned Margaret Thatcher that her economic policies were responsible for the current recession and rising unemployment, but she refused to listen. Even when the ex-Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan claimed that she had ‘got the wrong answer’, she remained unmoved. So, of course, when Union leaders also blamed her and warned that her policies could lead to civil unrest she grew still more determined against what she saw as the bully boys of Britain. She may have been encouraged by the fact that Britain had become self-sufficient in oil at the end of that year and she was maybe waiting and seeing if the economic turnaround might happen.
MARIAN
The past h
ad to illuminate the present in order to bring it alive on the page, just as it had in my head, and Jack did exactly that in his novels. I knew that my father felt the need to leave Ireland, just as Jack had done, but nearly thirty years before. After my grandfather had died, the land went to my Uncle Tom, his eldest son. When Mick, my father, was twenty-one, he said goodbye to his mother and took himself to England to see what it had to offer a young Irish man in prewar Britain. He hadn’t liked what the British had done to his country, but he was born British and decided to retain his British passport despite the fact that Ireland had gained its independence. Before he died in the 1990s, he told me that he would never see the day when the country would be reunited, but he prayed that one day it would be. Northern Ireland and the South ought never to have been separated and it was a dreadful British compromise in his eyes.
Jack wrote of his family at such times as if he had interviewed my very own relatives. Their experiences were so close to my family history that I was unsure where his fiction started and my father’s true story began.
Mick had told me that he was grateful for the chance to earn a living as an immigrant in mainland Britain, although he did suffer prejudice at times and saw signs stating: ‘No Blacks, no Irish, no dogs!’
However, England needed him and so he accepted the responsibility to fight for the British Army and volunteer when he could have gone back home to a neutral Ireland. By the time he joined up, he was in love with my mother and as he kissed her goodbye at Walham Green railway station, he said to her, ‘I am doing this for you. Don’t let me down and stay true to me, Flo, my love.’
Three of her brothers had already been called up and were fighting overseas, so he felt honour-bound to join them. He pleaded with Florence to wait for him to return. He was sent to Yeovil in Somerset to be enlisted with the Leicestershire Yeomanry and I know that he and Bob became friends on that very first day. Friends, in fact, until Bob died in the 1980s. Bob was a countryman from Somerset and he was a very brave scout when in action from Normandy to Germany. He would ride ahead on his motorbike looking for the enemy, so as to report sightings of danger. When they were fighting in and around Aachen, towards the end of the War, they made friends with a German family who were near to starvation but nonetheless very welcoming to the two young men, and Bob fell in love with Helena whose husband had been killed. Neither Helena nor Bob could speak each other’s language, but they managed to communicate and he promised that when the war was over he would return for her, and so he did. Their story is quite a remarkable one, too.
Jack had written about the First and the Second World War and the consequences on families and the difficulties that soldiers and civilians faced. I had read several of his novels on the subject, so I was glad to find a written account of my father’s experience amongst his memorabilia. I wished that he could be with me as I went through it and regretted how little attention I’d paid to his occasional war stories. There was so much that I wanted to know and I realised that when I was a child it seemed to have happened centuries ago. I remembered hearing my parents referring to ‘before the war’ or ‘after the war’ and to me it was just a phrase, as if they were saying before bedtime or after lunch. I was only two when the war ended and remember nothing of that terrible time when I lived in London with my mother at my grandma’s. My mother guarded me with her life and ensured that I was treasured as any baby from peacetime daily life would be, not one in the middle of the bombing in central London.
My grandma’s house had a basement that was used as a bomb shelter by the family and neighbours, because, although it was beneath the three floors above, it had a door that opened on to steps leading up to the back garden. Even if the house had been flattened, it would have been possible to survive down there. They had a sink with running water, a gas cooker, a table and chairs, and a cupboard in which they kept provisions. Each time the air raid siren went off, Grandma feared that I would be killed by my mother falling down the flights of stairs in her haste to keep me safe. A mask was hurriedly placed on my face for fear of being poisoned by gas. What a dreadful time to have to bring a child into the world and take care of her. I felt sad thinking of my mother and how she must have felt.
Everyone on the street wanted to be with Grandma because she made them feel safe. Once she heard the all-clear, she would go out to inspect the neighbourhood and check up on everyone. Our family was lucky and all survived the war, both at home and overseas, but what it must have done to their hearts and their minds I could only imagine. I considered their experience now from afar and realised how ungrateful and spoilt I must have seemed as I was growing up. I had no understanding of the hardship that they all had endured. I had felt to be in a very privileged world of plenty, when in truth my parents must have had to struggle to make a life when peace did at last bring them back together.
I had seen photographs of them on their wedding day; they both looked so young and happy on that Easter Sunday in 1941. They had had a long courtship, when suddenly Mick asked Florence to marry him by special licence, which meant within two weeks. Florence was taken by surprise and she said that everyone would think that she was pregnant, getting married in a hurry after going out with each other for such a long time. He said let them think what they like; he was being sent abroad and he wanted to marry her first. He had told me that my mother had been the sweetest girl in all the world and my mother had told me that she adored the very ground he walked on. Their honeymoon was taken during a forty-eight-hour pass and over the next two years they only saw each other when he could obtain leave. I knew that I had been conceived on his birthday, because my mother had joined him in Northumberland and they stayed the weekend at a pub, just outside the army camp at Otterburn. My mother thought she had eaten some rotten fish a month later when she experienced morning sickness. I was glad to know I had been made before he was exposed to the awful carnage of war. What terrible sights must have been imprinted on his psyche after that?
Reading Jack’s books brought so many memories flooding back to me, both of London and Ireland, that it was little wonder that I felt that he had written them just for me. I could relate to his words as if they were my own.
JACK
The new year saw me return to the office around 10th January 1981 but the programme was off the air until a week later. I was pleased to find Marian’s letter waiting for me, though.
Dear Jack,
Thank you for your very nice letter just before Christmas; it always gives me such pleasure to hear from you. May I wish you a very happy New Year and also remind you that I first wrote to you in January, a couple of years ago. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that from then on I would still be writing to you. How happy it has made me. I heard a repeat of one of your BBC Arts talks this evening – it was very interesting. I always learn from you. As I get older, I am excited by the fact that one goes on learning. I know so little about the things that interest me but I am eager to learn so much. The Show of Shows has been away so long, I look forward to its return. I noted before Christmas your reference to the viewers ‘out there!’
Love to you as always,
Marian
PS Reading this back to myself, I realise it would be difficult to find anything to reply to. Please remember that I do not presume…
PPS I found the first episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy last night. I’m not sure that it is my sense of humour. M
A week later, we were on the air with two black American novelists. They spoke of life as black Americans and how their novels and plays questioned the complex and psychological pressures on not only being black, but being black and gay. It happened to coincide that very day with the killing by arson of ten young black people in a house in the New Cross area of London; later, a further victim died in hospital. There had been no chance to mention the terrible crime and it would not have been appropriate for us to do so, anyway, but it did underline the problem wi
thin society. After the recorded interview, as was usual back then, I signed off by saying who was to be featured in the next week’s programme. I remember smiling as I mentioned that Lawrence would be our subject.
Dear Jack,
Welcome back. I enjoyed your interview with the black American writers. They were fascinating. I look forward to next week concerning D. H. Lawrence; I loved The Rainbow, best of all his books. It amazes me how both of you write about how a woman thinks and feels with such accurate detail. When I first read The Golden Chain by you, I didn’t have my own copy so I borrowed a library book. The four-letter word had been inked out, I suppose by a reader; surely the library would not do such a thing? I thought that book very sad and beautiful. Although, The Needle really made me cry. Your writing is always very soul searching – that is why I love it. I hope you are fine, as I am.
Love,
Marian
PS I wish the programme was transmitted live!
The next Saturday, I discussed the works of Lawrence and then Hardy with a studio audience. I encouraged them to draw on the theme which shows how love has the effect of killing a man when he must give it up for the sake of his family. Lawrence had enjoyed a brief affair with a married woman and, with her permission, had written about it. It was a beautiful piece of work. My intention was to share this with Marian so that she might understand how I felt.