Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  There was one evening when we were invited to dinner in Callander by Mrs Tennant, the grand lady of the district, who happened to be a Liberal of the Jo Grimond stamp. My canvassing in the town had been ineffective, as it was a public holiday and the whole town had gone off, either to a big city like Glasgow or into the hills to picnic. Not a door was locked. A fleet of furniture lorries could have invaded the town and emptied every home without hurrying. Rural communities in Scotland were still honest, and the local policeman had nothing to do other than intervene in some minor quarrel. We had a meeting in the local church hall, and before that our hostess had invited Patrick, Karin and myself to an early dinner at her house. “Tell me,” she asked Patrick, “are you a real actor or a television thing?” He did not know how to reply. He was a top actor with a long stage career and a particular love of Shakespeare, but at that time it was his television series that made him a national celebrity. But his presence brought in some of the returning Callander residents that evening.

  Many interesting things happened during the campaign. I had to attend a few platforms, where all four candidates had a chance to express their policies before specialized groups of constituents. At one such, organized by the National Farmers Union, there was no doubt that the SNP candidate, Elizabeth Whitley, had done her homework best and had been prepared for the questions, giving detailed promises of what her party had to offer farmers. I had been remiss at reading the piles of paper that the party sent me almost daily – preferring, perhaps arrogantly, to make up my policy as I went along, which although broadly in line with official views and dogma, varied in some respects where I had strong personal views. I felt confident enough to deal with any questions I was asked. So in front of the farmers I was shorter on detailed information than the others, and I know I did not do well that day.

  One amusing incident was in Braco, near my Uncle Rupert Dawson’s old house Orchill, where I had often stayed. Braco is a small village with a single long street, lined with houses on each side. As I drove up, so did another car plastered with Tory posters. I did some quick thinking. I had Alan with me and another helper, and there were three Tory ladies about to knock on the same doors. It was a hot afternoon, and I guessed that most of those at home would be in their gardens at the back. “Let’s just go around the back doors,” I said, and we started at the end, going down the same row of houses where our opposition had started, entering the back gates while the Tories rang doorbells on the other side. Sure enough, everyone was in their gardens, chatting to neighbours, hanging up washing or gardening, or just relaxing in deck chairs. The three of us leap-frogged around each other, handing out leaflets, talking to the residents, soliciting their votes. When we reached the end of the row and peeped round, we could see the three Tory canvassers, who had vainly been ringing all the doorbells, looking hot and bad-tempered, coming to the end of the houses we had just done. We crossed the road without being noticed and repeated the same exercise on the other side, going back towards our car. When we reached the end, we found that the other car was gone. With no result, the three ladies had given up and driven off. We had spoken to over a hundred voters.

  All our envelopes went out on time as Margaret Begg and Margaret Ryder, another committee member, ran the operation smoothly and directed all the volunteer workers around the many small towns, many of which now had activists doing something to help. More than a hundred people were giving their time, and canvas cards were telling us where our strengths lay. Patrick Wymark met many of the local gentry at hotel bars and later regaled me with what they said about “Alec” or “Dear Alec”. It was interesting to hear an actor tell the same story many times, always a little differently, imitating the voices well, but with always a small variation in the phrasing. It was a good example of the freedoms that traditional actors often took with their lines, to which the most serious playwrights like Beckett and Pinter objected, wanting stage directions exactly followed and lines always delivered exactly as written, with no variation.

  I do not think that the Labour candidate worked hard at garnering votes, because the party hardly existed in Kinross and West Perthshire. The SNP we saw all the time, and they hated us because by splitting the non-Conservative vote we would reduce their future credibility. They tore down our posters, denigrated us as woolly and insufficiently committed to devolution. The Tories thought it “cheek” to run against the previous Prime Minister, and of course considered me a traitor to my class. There were some repercussions at future Ledlanet performances, but not many. Liberals were considered on the whole to be harmless idealists, and the Leader, Jo Grimond, was personally popular. I had hoped to have some support from Duncan Millar, the previous Liberal candidate, but he was Perth County Convenor now, stayed aloof and had probably been Toryfied. From Kincardine in the east to Loch Katrine in the west, from remote northern villages like Crianlarich and Rannoch, where the great moor started, and the many beautiful lochs, the glory of the Highlands, I drove, wondering at the scenery. This area had once been heavily populated, but the clearances of nearly two centuries earlier – when landlords and lairds, many of them enriched by the industrial revolution, had preferred to cover their land with sheep for profit and stags for sport than have surly tenants paying low rents – had emptied it out. Lochaber was almost a desert as far as the population was concerned. Crianlarich, which is sign-posted from hundreds of miles away, is a tiny village where many roads cross, with just a handful of houses, a hotel and a rail marshalling yard. But it is all beautiful country, and I came to know it and many of its people well. It was an exhausting three-week campaign, but I revelled in it and discovered another side of myself. I also realized that selling is selling, whether it be timber, books, or yourself to represent voters in parliament.

  Election day came, and I was out early. I went first to Kinross to vote, naturally for myself, then I went all over the constituency to as many polling booths as possible, chatting to any of our supporters who were able to show the colours – which were not many, especially compared to the Tories, who had covered them all, often with caravans offering refreshments. I was new to all this and did not realize that I was supposed to go into the polling booths, shake the hands of those handing out the voting cards and chat with them, so I didn’t do it. There is a very low level of electoral expenditure allowed to each of the parties, and not being affluent and a new, reawakened political party with a small membership, we were well within our expenditure limit. The Tories on the other hand had printed their posters well before the election was announced and had many rich supporters who paid for what should have been accounted for in the election budget out of their own pockets. They were legally cheating. They also had hundreds of volunteers with cars, caravans, tents that could be erected anywhere, and other amenities available to them at no cost to the party. Early in the campaign, I had gone to one of Sir Alec’s election meetings and sat in the front row with Alan Clark, while Richard Beith and other Liberals were at the back to ask questions. A burly farmer who was chairing the meeting came up to me warily. “No tricks, Mr Calder, I hope.”

  “No, I just wanted to hear what Sir Alec has to say,” I replied, and sat quietly through it all, leaving my supporters to ask questions we had prepared in advance. When Willie Rushton had run, I had asked the awkward questions.

  On the eve of poll I persuaded Bettina – my committee had thought it very desirable – to join me on the platform and at the lunch the next day after the count in Perth. Right after that, I took her to the airport in Edinburgh to fly back to London. Tanja was due to come up an hour later, but she caught an earlier flight and Bettina saw her walking on the balcony outside the airport restaurant. That did not help matters at all.

  The Tories won with a reduced but still substantial majority, and I received nine per cent of the vote. It was not bad, considering that no Liberal had run there for seven years, but it was not enough to save my deposit. The final count was in Crieff, and the excitement of b
eing one of those able to be present to check the count as the votes piled up and were put in stacks of a hundred each is one of the rewards given to those who worked for the candidate during the election. I found it very nerve-wracking as, starting at ten, it went on until the early hours as the ballot boxes came in from all the outlying polling stations. I made my little speech, promising to run again, and drove home. The next day was the lunch in Perth, one of the photos in this book. I had now become a political animal.

  * * *

  The election over, I found that I was invited to many more local events. I opened the summer exhibition at the art gallery in Perth and the Milnathort flower show. I was still the candidate, and the last general election had been so close nationally that it seemed inevitable that the next one could not be far off. But the Tories had beaten Labour, caused largely in my opinion by the lowering of the voting age and the changed self-perception of working-class men, who having bought their houses with mortgages, saw themselves now as middle class.

  I had my usual lunch in Bianchi’s with Peter Gellhorn, where the popular manager, Elena, presided over the regular customers, all of whom – writers, musicians and BBC people for the most part – she knew by name. This was in the same first-floor room that had received the first ever television picture, sent by John Logie Baird from his bedroom on the top floor, because this building on Greek Street had once been his house.

  “What’s it to be this time?” asked Peter.

  “La clemenza di Tito.”

  He drew in his breath. “Lovely,” he said. And we started to prepare it.

  Some time towards the end of that year, Tanja and I decided to split up and remain friends. Through acquaintances of my sister, who by now had also been divorced from her Romanian husband, Paul Laptew, whom she had married in Canada in 1955, I found an unusual place to live. It was an artist’s studio in Pembroke Gardens, one of a series of such studios, built in Victorian times. The owner, Vasco Lazzolo, was a fashionable portrait painter, and part of a social group that included Prince Philip, which used to meet once a week on the top floor of Wheeler’s Restaurant on Old Compton Street. Lazzolo, an Italian, had spent so many years in England that he was to all appearances a prominent member of that section of the English upper classes that both creates and supports the arts, different only in its taste and pursuits from the aristocratic country cousins who came to London only for the races and Buckingham Palace Garden parties. Lazzolo belonged to a clique that had money and spent it lavishly in the most fashionable resorts of Europe – in Cannes, Saint-Tropez, Athens, the Greek Islands and, in his case, Malta, which was a tax haven, because he had married a rich wife. He was now living there and had stopped painting. Although he would never have admitted it, he was probably very bored and had to keep returning to London to rediscover some joie de vivre.

  I rented his studio, but he kept squatting rights. All the furniture was his, including a glamorous white grand piano, but with a loose key action, more suitable to a nightclub than a concert hall. When he was there, he played it rather well in the manner of Noël Coward. I took on the rental agreement of a certain Baron Franckenstein, who had rented it from Lazzolo; Franckenstein had obviously left it reluctantly for reasons I did not know, because he kept turning up. His father, Austrian Ambassador in London at the time of the Anschluss, had remained in Britain. He was a pleasant and aimless young man about London. I liked him, but soon lost touch with him.

  The studios belonged, in fact, to a trust which had been created to ensure that only practising artists lived there, but many had sublet to others who liked the eccentricity and calm of the place, set far enough back from passing traffic and closed to it during the night. My studio was large and cold, impossible to heat, except for the two small bedrooms behind a gallery overlooking the studio itself, which was two storeys high, with a skylight overhead. On the ground floor there was a kitchen off the studio, above it a bathroom between the bedrooms.

  I had only a few small gatherings there. At one, a previous boyfriend of Bettina’s turned up, Tony Hern, who had once engaged her to sing popular Viennese songs on his BBC Light Music Programme. He knew about our separation, so she must have talked to him recently. It may have been Lazzolo who invited the twenty or so people that evening. He himself came, with a very beautiful dark girl he was painting. Hern went up to her, said “You are very beautiful”, as if she were herself a painting, and walked out. I was later to meet his son, who became the publisher Nick Hern.

  I gave a fairly large party there, to which Jo Grimond came, but he never talked to anyone in particular and probably felt too remote from the mixture of literary people and others engaged in the arts. At one point I looked down from the balcony, where I could see everyone: no one ever looked up, and I could quite clearly hear each of the many conversations going on down below. Jo walked around for about an hour observing the scene, drank a glass and left. I think that for all his urbanity and sophistication he was not a mixer, and not particularly interested in the arts.

  In those years I always intended to go to the Orkney Festival, founded by Peter Maxwell Davies, but never did. I discovered later that, although he was the Orkney MP, Grimond gave it no support and was dismissive of it. Grimond was a strange man: admired by the left for his uprighteousness and obvious ability and intelligence, and considered by the right to be a traitor to his class. He was a god to his own party, that minority of about five per cent spread thinly around the country. He was, I think, a deeply disappointed man, and he was soon to step down as Liberal leader.

  * * *

  I was still obsessed with Tanja, and would in the future go on seeing her and even occasionally spend the night with her, but it had become apparent that our lifestyles were too different for us to live together.

  Tanja soon broke up with her new man, and we saw each other more regularly for perhaps a few months. We were genuinely fond of each other, and there was a certain mutual sexual need, but we knew that would diminish. She would have moved a fairly long way to meet me to do the things I most enjoyed – it was there the main difference lay – but I could not do the same the other way. We telephoned each other quite frequently, but I knew she was seeing other men, and I would quite frequently bring other ladies back to my studio. Once, after a visit from one long-standing girlfriend on a night when I knew Tanja was having dinner with André Deutsch, I performed very badly sexually. The lady went back to her own place, and I drove round to Overstrand Mansions, not certain that she would be there. She was, and made passionate love with me several times. But gradually, because we knew we could not really share our lives, we drifted apart and eventually became good friends and directed our passions elsewhere.

  About this time I met another lady, an American working for the Guardian newspaper called Elizabeth Wyler, probably through a mutual friend, Bill Webb, the literary editor of the same newspaper, who was without any question the best literary editor of any newspaper in Britain at that time. She was a vivacious redhead, open to adventure, earning her own living. She had been married to a British actor, Richard Wyler, best known for his roles in spaghetti westerns. They were separated but good friends. I took Liz to the opera a few times, propositioned her and she accepted.

  I was putting some unusual advertisements on the literary page of the Guardian then, not the usual “tombstones”, but fairly long copy with small headlines, designed to be read as part of the literary page, and as I used rather audacious and often politically incorrect headings to catch attention, they were certainly noticed, although not very favourably, prompting several letters of complaint. Whether they sold books or not I could only surmise.

  Liz was good company, very sexy, and I quickly became fond of her in the best way, by which I mean that neither of us wanted a deep love relationship and were content with good companionship spiced with satisfactory sex. She knew I had other relationships and showed no jealousy, but she did want to have an interestin
g social life in my company. She knew all about Tanja, not from me, but from another journalist who had had an affair with both of them and who had told her that Tanja’s large and well-shaped “Bristols” in the terminology of the time, were “the county and not the town”. There was one unfortunate incident when Liz was spending the night with me and I had a date with another lady for the next night. The other lady decided to leave her bag with me early in the morning, saw us in bed together and furiously walked out again. Liz, waking up, asked whose voice that was. I answered it was someone passing the front door.

  My studio in Pembroke Gardens was used by me for editorial work, and the longest session there was twenty days, not consecutively but spread over more than two months, spent with Aidan Higgins over his large second novel, Balcony of Europe. We cut his manuscript down by about a third, reshaped sentences, pruned the passages where the fine writing obscured and delayed the story to a more acceptable level and ironed out the oddities. The book was uneven, one brilliant passage being followed by a rather pedestrian one. Aidan’s biggest indulgence was putting in words for the sound, not so much for the meaning, covering pages with the names of shrubs and flowers that he had found in the dictionary, although he had no idea what they looked like. I cut all that. He also liked giving his characters the names of authors he had found in my catalogue, Stuckenschmidt for instance. We would start every day at about ten thirty, having collected him earlier from Muswell Hill, where he lived. We would then work well until lunch, which consisted of food I had ready, washed down with a gin-and-tonic and wine. The memory of Aidan, his sleeves rolled up, lovingly pulling the cork out of a bottle, is still with me, largely because of the look of pleasurable anticipation on his face. Then we would resume work, but he had a better head for wine than I, so by four o’clock I would begin to nod, and then become less severe, letting many things pass which I would not have in the morning. On one occasion, when Aidan had gone for a few minutes to the lavatory, I rewrote a sentence, adding a few words. When he returned he looked at the sentence. “I didn’t write that,” he said.