Collected Columns

by Michael Frayn

  ‘You can get down here in 4½ hours, you know,’ says Christopher, ‘if you avoid Snaith, and take that little road through Chocking which comes out just this side of Griever …’

  ‘Or 4¼, if you don’t get held up by all that terrible weekend traffic to the coast where you cross the main road at Westchamps Peverel …’

  ‘Which is awfully good, you know, when you think about it. It means that we can leave here at half-past four on a Monday morning, and be in our respective offices by nine …’

  Tea on the lawn, of course, sparks off an earnest debate on the nature of lawns in general, and of Christopher’s efforts upon this one in particular, which we gather are beyond all praise, given the patch of thistles and nettles he had to start with.

  Night comes down, obscuring the lawn wrested with such difficulty from the weeds, and the much-discussed patch of earth which Lavinia hasn’t yet decided whether to fill with orodigia or flowering pangloss, and the blue paintwork on the doors and windows (Luxibrite’s Melanesian Blue, which they think – and we definitely agree – is a much more subtle colour than Housallure’s Gulfstream or Goyamel’s Stratosphere); making the peripatetic conversationalists on the terrace only shadowy shapes as they murmur on into the dusk.

  ‘I’ll put the terrace light on. No, no – no trouble at all. We’re rather proud of our electric lighting, as a matter of fact. Aren’t we, darling?’

  ‘Honestly, you’d never believe the struggle we had to get this place on the supply. It seems a pity not to use it, now we’ve got it. Doesn’t it, darling?’

  Yes, it’s wonderful, as the Crumbles say, to get away from the dreadful rat-race in town for a day or two, and take a look at the one in the country for a change.

  (1966)

  D.Op.

  Some previously indeterminate figure on the fringes of the middle-men’s society, I see, was recently described as ‘a man of opinion.’ Now there’s a great new rank to aspire to – a high new destiny for all those arts graduates without vocational training who would in the past have ended up as mere men of letters.

  I think I might start studying for it. I should soon be indispensable. Theatre managers would cry ‘Is there a man of opinion in the house?’ and I should stroll nonchalantly up to the stage, only too accustomed to have my evenings off sacrificed to the desperate public need for my professional services.

  ‘Thank God you’re here,’ the theatre manager would say, leading me backstage. ‘We’re in a spot, I can tell you. The stagehands have come out on strike, the juvenile lead’s run off with the backer’s wife, the backer’s withdrawn his money, the Lord Chamberlain’s banned the whole of Act Two, and the theatre’s on fire.’

  ‘It certainly sounds as though you need some frank and stimulating opinions expressed pretty urgently,’ I should say, settling comfortably into a convenient armchair and sucking on a property pipe. ‘Let’s take the question of striking for a start. It perpetually amazes me that responsible trade union leaders apparently cannot understand that full co-operation with the Government’s economic policy is absolutely essential if this country is to be able to afford to keep men of opinion like myself in the style to which we are accustomed. Not that I don’t blame the managements as well. In fact I always make a point of blaming both sides in any dispute.

  ‘And that reminds me, in the queer way that we men of opinion are reminded, of another thorny subject – censorship. Now this is a question I have pretty controversial views on. I believe – quite passionately – that we ought to ask ourselves – all of us, you, me, the chap next door – to what extent plays, for example, should be subject to censorship. I know – in my heart – that there are a great many things to be said both for and against it. I’m not going to make any bones about saying frankly that I feel very careful consideration should be given to both sides of the question before we jump to any hasty conclusions.

  ‘You may think that’s pretty outspoken. But we have to realise what sort of world we live in – and it’s a world where nowadays a juvenile lead doesn’t think twice about running off with the backer’s wife. I don’t know what other people think about this sort of thing, but I can tell you this – whatever they think, I think the opposite. I mean, I could scarcely expect to be paid for my opinions if they were the same as everybody else’s, could I?’

  By the time I got on to the question of theatrical finance and the human problems behind the enforcement of fire regulations, the crisis would be practically solved, for everyone – deliquent juvenile lead, the enraged backer, his errant wife, and the Lord Chamberlain’s stool-pigeons – would all be standing round bewitched by the Orphean flow of melodious opinion.

  ‘What do you think of William Gerhardi as a novelist?’ they would demand dreamily. ‘Do you believe in telepathy?’ ‘Do you agree with Macleod’s assessment of Chamberlain?’ ‘Is the dodecaphonic scale an argument for duodecimal arithmetic?’

  ‘Well,’ I should reply comfortably, ‘I think a reappraisal of Chamberlain was long overdue. And I’m sure there is some sort of affinity between music and mathematics, though whether the duodecimal system would prove to be more popular than … Is the universe expanding? I’m inclined to support the school of thought that holds … What is truth …? Wasn’t it jesting Pilate who was asked this one, and who …? Do I prefer belt or braces? Well, I think the sensible man … By the way, is it getting suffocatingly hot in here, or do I really think that by appeasing Chamberlain the duodecimal system could be averted, while the braces are so immensely readable that I incline to the old-fashioned biblical view of the Common Market as being unfair to the older woman, with a crime rate expanding all the time through the baroque splendour of the Soviet leadership into a universe which is, in my view at any rate, just one huge, spongy, gaseous, ectoplasmic mass of stewed opinion …?’

  (1962)

  Destroy before reading

  I wrote a piece a few weeks back in which I expressed some scepticism about a mnemonic that one of my daughters used to have for remembering her personal identity number at work. I subsequently got letters from one or two people who accused me of destroying my daughter’s confidence and losing her her job.

  Ridiculous, of course. But then I realised that my daughter hadn’t said anything about the article herself … I began to worry. My children have all been amazingly supportive over the years about my professional activities – as scrupulously encouraging as the most devoted parents indulging the most insufferable child. Maybe I had been a little heavy-handed, I thought, perhaps even a little insensitive about mentioning the matter at all.

  So I rang her to check, and she said she hadn’t read the article yet. She’d put it aside to read, she said, but what with work and the children she’d been extremely busy, and they’d got the builders everywhere, and somehow the paper must have got thrown away. To my horror I realised that she had a rather defensive tone in her voice. She had understood my query not as an expression of tender regard for her feelings, but as a reproach for failing in her filial obligations. Not only had I destroyed her confidence and lost her her job – I’d somehow transferred my parental anxieties to her.

  This was, needless to say, the last thing I wanted – particularly since I know she scarcely has time to breathe, let alone read newspapers – and since I am in a permanent fever of guilt myself about not having read all the things that people I know have written. I can’t! There are too many people writing things, and only me to read them all!

  So of course I felt more anxious than ever. To set her mind at rest I made a copy of the article and sent it to her, then forgot the whole matter. I rang her a week later about something else – and before I could speak she said quickly: ‘I’m afraid I still haven’t read the article yet.’

  I said I didn’t know what article she was talking about. She said she’d put it carefully away to read as soon as she had the leisure, only what with work … Yes, yes, I said … And the children, she said … Please, I cried … And the house being rebuil
t …

  I said she didn’t have to read it. She said she was longing to read it. I forbade her to read it. She said she knew what it was like if you wrote things and people didn’t read them. I said I knew what it was like if people wrote things and you felt you had to read them. Etcetera.

  By this time I was feeling terrible. I thought of the burden I’d imposed upon all my children. Scribble scribble scribble. Articles, scripts, and advance copies of books piling up accusingly on their plates, like more and more helpings of nightmare strained spinach.

  Another week went by. I didn’t dare ring my daughter. And when at last I did – on some totally unconnected topic, I most solemnly swear – she confessed that she had now also lost the copy I had sent her. She had filed it carefully away in her kitchen, treasuring it up until she really had time to enjoy it to the full – and the builders had demolished the kitchen!

  It seemed to me that this thing was getting entirely out of hand. She’d had to destroy a substantial part of her house to find an excuse! Confidence – job – peace of mind – and now her kitchen – all gone! I ran to the copier to rush her another copy, if not another kitchen.

  Whereupon the copier ceased to function. A small enough punishment for destroying one child’s home and livelihood, but it relieved my feelings a little. I called the service engineer. (£45 call-out fee, which relieved them a little further.) He said that according to the meter inside the machine I had made 98,000 copies in the couple of years I had owned it. He implied that I had worked the wretched machine to death. So now I began to feel bad about the copier as well. Not to mention my children. 98,000? Had I forced that many copies of articles on them? No wonder they were being driven to such desperate measures!

  As soon as he had gone I rushed to the machine again to copy the article, and ease my daughter’s burden of guilt, if not mine. And immediately it died again. A curse had fallen upon our entire house! Or what was left of it.

  A second engineer came, and operated on the machine for most of the morning. When he emerged from the sickroom he told me that according to the meter I had produced only 1,900 copies in all the time I had owned it. I hadn’t used it enough, he said reproachfully. As a result the grease inside had gone cold.

  Since then the fax has jammed, the phone has gone on the blink, and the television has packed up. Either I’ve used them too much, or else I haven’t used them enough. I should have given them a proper balance of exercise and rest each day, like dogs, or a string of racehorses. A little light copying, a little light faxing, three times a day, so that they didn’t become bored and demoralised and start having breakdowns. Then a blanket over them and a brisk rub-down to stop them getting their grease chilled. And I shouldn’t have kept making the fax and the copier read things I’d written.

  Then I began to think of all the little machines I have with batteries in them. Some of them were lying forgotten in various drawers, their batteries never renewed, so that by now the acid would be corroding their little insides. I thought of all the machines with rechargeable batteries that I had failed to recharge – no, worse! – failed to discharge regularly, so that by now their capacity for holding a charge would be wrecked beyond recall.

  And now of course, I’m starting to worry about my daughter reading this article, and feeling that it’s somehow her fault that the copier jammed, and the miniature vacuum cleaner for getting dust out of electronic machinery has got corroded, and the laptop won’t charge. I’ll have to keep it from her somehow.

  Blow up the rest of her house, perhaps, just as this morning’s paper is delivered. I suppose it’s a fairly standard family saga. You start off with a passing remark and you end up with Götterdämmerung.

  (1994)

  Dig my dogma

  ‘If you don’t “dig” dogma,’ said an advertisement for a religious magazine in The Times this week, ‘you should certainly “get with” the current issue of Prism. The first five contributions concern themselves with John Robinson’s “Honest to God,” and concern themselves with it very deeply. To the agnostic who wrote this advertisement they were intensely stimulating and revealing reading …’

  The agnostic whose services were retained by Prism to testify to the stimulating qualities of their theology does not reveal his identity. A pity. The astigmatic who wrote this article (his name can be inspected on request at our Erith works) has gone into the advertisement pretty deeply and would have liked to congratulate him on a stimulating and intensely revealing piece of work.

  Not to mince words, I thought it was a unique combination of getwithery and godwottery. Or to put it another way, an exquisite blend of dogma and digma. In fact I thought it was the most stimulating and revealing bit of devotional prose published on the subject of John Robinson, aka the Bishop of Woolwich – known to millions of ordinary religion-lovers as Jack Woolwich – since Mike Canterbury said he was ‘specially grieved’ because Jack had published his views in a newspaper article which was, among other things, ‘crystal clear in its arguments.’

  Most stimulating and revealing of all was the advertiser’s basic idea of getting an agnostic to write the testimonial. It amazes me that Christians didn’t think of this earlier. (‘To the agnostic who wrote this gospel, the events narrated seem verily “far out” – but wondrously “swinging” none the less.’) I hope they will appoint a panel of neutral agnostic advisers to go right through the Thirty-Nine Articles from beginning to end and sort out the stimulating from the unstimulating.

  It would certainly be in line with the most enlightened modern practice as I have come to know it. Almost every single article I have ever written on the subject of religious belief has subsequently been either commended or reprinted by some religious publication. I’m not entirely sure with what motive the other cheek is not only turned but so relentlessly hammered against one’s fist. But I have an uneasy mental picture of a procession, like the terrible band of medieval flagellants in ‘The Seventh Seal,’ crawling across modern England on their knees, grinning with horrible pleasure as they scourge one another with anti-religious satire and blasphemous jokes, bearing aloft images of broad minds, and crying ‘Like us. Please like us!’

  ‘May I say how much I’m enjoying this article?’ writes the Bishop of Twicester. ‘I shall certainly take your tip and reprint it, if I may, in my Diocesan News, in a session we have entitled “The Other Chap’s Point of View.”

  ‘There’s nothing I enjoy more than having my leg pulled – the harder the better! I’m sure God enjoys it, too – though of course the question of whether His Leg exists to be pulled is one which, as you have shown in in your amusing articles, we musn’t take for granted too complacently!

  ‘You’re absolutely right of course. We are, alas, sometimes tempted to curry public favour. But it is also true that the best way to protect one’s most cherished convictions is not always to stand rigid against the enemy and be cut down, but to smile and co-operate with him. I think some of us are discovering that the Vicar of Bray was not as “square” as he has sometimes been painted!

  ‘After all, if we go some way to meet you chaps, you can scarcely help but come some way to meet us! Such is human nature. I saw in the paper the other day David Frost saying that after one of his little religious skits which had offended some people he went to church – and the sidesman told him how much he had enjoyed the programme. One concession calls forth another, you see. I myself had an interesting chat with Ken Nocker after that delightful take-off he did of the Crucifixion, and he told me that it was only the commercial aspects of it he was against really.

  ‘It used to be rock-and-roll singers we found ourselves entirely in agreement with, and then it was teenage satirists. Now it’s agnostic copy-writers. Of course, it’s a good thing for all of us – it helps to keep our minds open and flexible.

  ‘One of the most encouraging things about the age we live in is this ability not to take ourselves too seriously. There’s no harm in behaving like men of the world, after al
l, and I like to think that we can all enjoy a joke and a prayer together, whichever side of the fence we are on.

  ‘I dare say you’ll satirise this letter! It might deserve it, too, for all I know. More power to your elbow – I thoroughly enjoy having any complacency shattered!’

  (1963)

  Divine news, darlings!

  Among the aristocracy, reports a man at Glasgow University who has been studying their ways, one marriage in every four now ends in divorce. In other words, the aristocracy have reached the status of a Problem, and the Bishop of Twicester and I are deeply concerned about it.

  ‘I am convinced,’ he writes in a helpful little booklet entitled The Aristocracy Today: a Challenge and an Opportunity, ‘that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with modern aristocrats. We hear a lot about the bad ones, but at heart most of them are perfectly decent and uncommonly high-spirited folk.

  ‘The trouble is, they lack leadership. They have plenty of money to spend and they’re subjected to all sorts of unscrupulous commercial pressures. A regular barrage of suggestive advertising screams class, class, class at them seven days a week. Do we wonder they sometimes take the wrong turning?

  ‘Those of us who go among them to any extent know how resentful they are of ill-informed criticism, and how lost and bewildered they feel in a world which seems to be run entirely for the benefit of their inferiors. My work takes me into a large club for lords and ladies in the parish of Westminster, and I know from personal experience how very likeable and human some of them can be. In a club like this, where they are given proper facilities for self-expression, there is very little hooliganism or other delinquency.’

  The Bishop and I believe that the Church isn’t getting through to the aristocracy because it doesn’t really speak their language. All this ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ and ‘yeah, yeah, yeah,’ mean nothing at all to the average lord. And many of the teachings of the Church – particularly those that lay stress on poverty and humility – seem to have little relevance to life as they know it.