Our Time of Day

by Kika Markham

  “Corin said to have been in tears in evening at thought of going back,” say his diary on 12 May … “Corin very upset. Talk to him firmly. Nearly miss train and forget to give him his ticket.”

  Yes, but I remember that train ride, the most miserable of my life.

  And Corin went on to describe his school as a:

  hellish, cruel trap, a sort of labour camp, or worse, with remissions, which were the cruellest thing of all, because they gave you a taste of home and its comforts only to tear you away.

  In the end, Michael did take notice of Corin’s grief and took him away, and he went to a day school in London near his home, where he was happy. It was this story of his early unhappiness and of his friend Wilson, whom he had comforted as he sobbed with homesickness night after night that made me fall in love with Corin thirty years later.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Politics

  I left school with very little to show for it except a love of art and literature, two O Levels and a full-blown relationship with the art teacher, for which I was far too young.

  My love of literature began early, starting with Polyanna, Little Women, all of E. Nesbit, all the Brontës, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, and ending up with D.H. Lawrence, not necessarily in chronological order. Dad read all of Charles Dickens to us in the evenings during the holidays. There was nothing hidden away. Erich Fromm and The Art of Loving, Wilhelm Reich, The Function of the Orgasm, lay alongside the Farmers Weekly and Farmer and Stockbreeder on the kitchen table. My father was very interested in Reich and corresponded with him and Bertrand Russell. He arranged for an orgone box to be delivered: invented by Reich to free the individual from sexual repression and prevent cancer, radiation sickness and much else. We were encouraged to take our books with us into the orgone box – the size of a large telephone box – where we sat reading in our vest and pants to get the benefit of the orgone energy. I read with interest that Greg Bellow, Saul Bellow’s son also sat in an orgone box, but he used the time to masturbate. Ken Tynan came to have a look at our box; I think he was interested in getting one. Years later Corin played him in a play by Richard Nelson.

  Armed with this eclectic mix, I left home and ended up living with the art teacher in two attic rooms in Tottenham Street, and started life as a drama student. At Guildhall School of Music and Drama my status was rather high, not so much due to my talent as to my superior knowledge of contraception.

  I wrote a lot of monologues for interviews and auditions, gleaned from listening to the different languages of humans and animals which drifted up from the street below. I was very good at a dog’s bark, a bored but unhappy chained-up collie. No doubt an echo of how I felt in my own life. After receiving bemused and amused looks from casting directors I had to give up my idea of becoming a female Percy Edwards (the famous bird and animal impersonator), although Michael Winterbottom used my dog bark in his film Wonderland.

  After leaving Guildhall I started to get some work – and met Roger Smith, who had written a film script called Catherine, and Tony Garnett (who was an actor then and whom I liked very much) – in a short film directed by a (then) newcomer, Ken Loach. This new independence destabilised my domestic situation and the art teacher threw a cup at me across the room, which broke on my right eyebrow. The result was a visit to the Middlesex Casualty Department, which was luckily just around the corner, and fifteen stitches coasting down one side of my right eye. The only person I dared tell was my kind uncle Paul Dehn. An Oscar-winning screenwriter, poet and critic, and my mother’s elder brother, close friend of the Redgraves (another coincidence), he and he alone saw the dreadful purple-red, swollen side of my face.

  We had tea on his green sofa in Bramerton Street in Chelsea. He was kind and comforting, and pretended not to be shocked, although he must have been. I never told my parents. This horrible event provided me with the impetus to escape from the art teacher, whom my kind parents unwittingly took pity on, taking him with them on holiday to France, whereupon, I recently learned, he made sexual advances to my thirteen-year-old sister.

  Later, Tony Garnett introduced me to the Yorkshire playwright David Mercer, who took me out to lunch and then for a walk on Hampstead Heath. He was witty, sympathetic and ‘motherly’ in a Yorkshire way. Before long I was living in his flat in Compayne Gardens, above the writer Bernice Rubens.

  In those days, the late Sixties, you met a man and, if you liked one another – just liked, not loved – you could be living together within a few weeks, knowing barely anything about them. Shocking to write this now. My only role model had been my mother who, even after having given birth four times, remained determinedly unworldly and beautiful, discarding enhancements like lipstick, bras and high heels, which suited my father very nicely. Although I was already politically active, sitting down in Grosvenor Square in protest over the Vietnam War, marching from Aldermaston to London against nuclear weapons, as a young woman I was profoundly uncertain of myself and could have been the girl Shirley Hazzard described in The Transit of Venus… ‘fixed. subjected. fatalistic’ and waiting… With David I was sometimes required to be a minder as well as his girlfriend. The ‘culture of Jimmy Savile’ was taken for granted then, and the attitude of men generally and in the entertainments industry was often uncaring, and unprotective towards young women. David was not exploitative, he was very kind but dogged by self-doubt, which made him drink. But it was he who suggested that I see an analyst, seeing a faultline in my ‘docility’ and passive cooperation, which turned out to be rather helpful.

  Long afterwards I found out that David had previously lived with a woman called Dilys Johnson in the same flat. I had obviously taken her place. She might have been his wife. Where had she gone? Was she broken-hearted or relieved? I never found out. I wasn’t callous, just young and ignorant and responding to someone who wanted me, and because it was flattering living with a brilliant playwright. I don’t know whether he loved me – I wasn’t yet sure what love was… or what the convention required was.

  David was writing A Suitable Case for Treatment. He was a very funny, warm-hearted person, but suffered from depression. I accompanied him to the south of France to stay with Tony Richardson and Oscar Lewenstein. They were working on a new film script, The Sailor from Gibraltar. My job was to keep David away from all the booze – so that when a dinner party was to be held we were ignominiously shown the gate and told to come back when it was over. At that unhappy, but nevertheless interesting, time I almost met Corin’s sister, Vanessa, who was married to Tony then, but as I wasn’t at any of the social functions our paths never crossed. I do remember talking to one very sweet, small girl playing in the grass with a doll who I later found out was Natasha, Vanessa and Tony’s eldest daughter.

  Back in London David started taking me to Friday night meetings held by the Socialist Labour League. It was there that I developed my interest in Marxism. I felt I was getting educated for the first time in my life, listening to writers like David and Jim Allen. They discussed the Suez Canal, the Vietnam War, the Bretton Woods Agreement, taking the dollar off the gold standard, the crisis of capitalism, and the need for a planned economy, an idea dismissed at the time as a far-left and naïve, utopian fantasy. Today, Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century analyses why capitalism doesn’t and can’t work any longer. He advocates ‘a progressive tax, a global tax based on the taxation of private property’. How interesting that his focus on wealth and inequality mirrors what we were discussing at the time. Despite his rejection of a revolutionary answer, I find it pleasing that his parents were Trotskyists, and took part in the Paris uprising of 1968, as did my parents who took over food to feed the students during the occupation!

  I wondered whether socialism could ever be achieved through parliament in Britain. Certainly Trotsky believed it could never happen while the monarchy remained in power. Some years later I was in a TV drama, A Very British Cou
p, based on Chris Mullin’s book about an elected prime minister who was not only a socialist, but insisted on carrying out socialist policies – the fact that he was then overthrown by the Establishment fitted in very well with this view, although Chris Mullin was never to my knowledge a Trotskyist. My political education was beginning, and it was utterly absorbing. I was also, reluctantly, learning about the self-destructiveness of man – David – and the effects of alcohol. Nearly every Friday or Saturday night David would go to a dive in Soho called the Pickwick Club. I dreaded the phone call at midnight which would ask me to come and fetch him in a taxi.

  I would go downstairs to the dark, smoke-filled room and bar, where shapes lurked and ducked, and would try to spot him, hoping he was not in the arms of another woman – which could happen. Usually he was not, but sometimes he could barely stand and it was a tough job getting him into a taxi. And if it all went very wrong he would become angry and I would sometimes take off out of the house, running down Compayne Gardens in my pyjamas, and hovering around the corner outside the immense red-bricked mansions under the lamplight till I thought he would be asleep.

  My parents, always supportive of our boyfriends and often ignorant of the real situation, invited David down to Sussex for one Christmas. They liked him a lot. Mercer was friendly with David Warner, the actor, who was playing Morgan in A Suitable Case for Treatment, and had no plans for the holiday. So he came too, along with my sister Petra’s boyfriend Keith Johnstone (the legendary teacher of improvisation) and who, Petra told me, liked his cornflakes with warm water. It was a miracle that we all squeezed in round the tiny kitchen table. My father carving the turkey and doling it out as if to a hungry band of very tall, bearded children. Later David, learning my father and I were going to play some music together on the piano and violin, heard my father say ‘Come on Kika, let’s murder Vivaldi!’ and wrote a television play using the phrase as a title. It was about me and the art teacher. A cruel, funny play.

  I ran away from David on the night of his premiere in Paris of A Suitable Case for Treatment. We were staying at a five-star hotel. I felt very out of place, excluded and jealous as a beautiful blonde French actress was making her presence known to him, which he was enjoying far too much. Karel Reisz, the director of the film, and his wife Betsy were smiling and happy, unaware of my extreme discomfort. Our suite was huge with high, high ceilings and silver chandeliers. There was a giant four-poster bed with a velvet cover and tassels. Marble was everywhere and I hated it. I packed my bag… and disappeared from the hotel. I had remembered that Jehane West was in Paris, staying on her yacht, moored on the Left Bank of the Seine.

  An old family friend of my parents, and of the Redgraves, Jehane was godmother to my sister Jehane and an inspiration to us throughout her life. A poet, a sailor and a stage manager, she knew how to live. She was delighted to see me, and we sat on deck drinking tea, watching seagulls catching bread. I don’t remember if I went back to the hotel. David had an affair with the actress.

  After living alone in Chelsea for a year, I met Malcolm Tierney. He was kind and very funny and said he understood women because he had a sister – which turned out to be more or less true. We lived in a tiny cottage in Peyton Place. There was no hot water, so we went to the public baths once a week, and it was daringly primitive to me. Our life together was happy and adventurous.

  To be in politics was inspiring then. It seemed people were ready for a new socialist party, a party that had broken ranks with the communist parties in 1956 and followed Trotsky’s analysis, which he outlined in The Revolution Betrayed; a permanent, more human vision of socialism. To that end the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP) was formed out of the Socialist Labour League, concentrating its energies on theory – the grasping of dialectical materialism – democratic centralism, which I now take issue with. We began a daily paper called The Workers Press which later became The Newsline. Each area in London and the provinces had to arrange deliveries of the paper, preferably before people went to work, as well as early morning sales outside factories, tube stations, even the BBC. That could be quite difficult if you bumped into a producer although I used to sell one to John Birt sometimes.

  In July there were summer schools held in the country, when comrades discussed the theory of Marxism and were entertained by actors and writers, and we ate on long trestle tables in the open air. Gerry Healy, General Secretary of the party, was beginning to see how important theatre and actors were to a revolutionary movement. Corin had by now become a member but we only met on campaigns or at public meetings.

  The commitment required for this new kind of life had a drastic effect on our families. I had dreadfully painful arguments with my father who, from his anarchist perspective, could only see that I was being hopelessly brainwashed. I, on the other hand, was convinced that only the party had the vision to analyse the period that we were living through: that capitalism could no longer be progressive, unrestrained market economics leading to an increase in inequality, social conflict and wars. I hardly saw my sisters. Apparently I stopped talking to them and only talked at them: we were almost strangers. My tone had become hectoring or incredulous when others couldn’t see what I was getting at. I don’t think Corin’s parents were ecstatic about his and Vanessa’s involvement either, and it was certainly very difficult for his wife Deirdre as she had no desire to join the party. Their children, Luke and Jemma, hated the smoke-filled meetings held in their flat, and Corin being away for long periods of time.

  I had a disturbing encounter with Corin’s mother, Rachel, while I was campaigning for union rights for Equity at Granada rehearsal rooms. She spotted me from afar and shouted ‘There’s that dreadful woman! She’s mad and sees a shrink every week [I did] and she’s in that awful party that ruined Corin’s marriage!’ Rachel was a loyal person, and she was extremely fond of Deirdre, as well as adoring my mother – who could never do any wrong in her eyes. She didn’t know I was the baby she had knitted a cardigan for, and I didn’t know she would end up being my mother-in-law. Some years later, on my first, extremely apprehensive, visit to my future in-laws down at their beautiful cottage in Wilks Water in Hampshire, she welcomed me into the kitchen with the sweetest smile, saying ‘Forgive me’.

  CHAPTER THREE

  France

  In the late Sixties I worked at the Royal Court, playing Harriet Shelley in Shelley by Ann Jellicoe, Viola in Twelfth Night, Abigail in Time Present by John Osborne, and, on television, Jane in The Basement written by Harold Pinter, who was also in it. Oscar Lewenstein, who worked at the Court then, recommended me to the French film director François Truffaut (Jules et Jim; The 400 Blows) and Suzanne Schiffman, his close collaborator, for a film called Les deux Anglaises et le continent.

  I turned up to the interview wearing black, which troubled Truffaut who wondered why I had chosen to dress like a waitress, but I got a screen test and Stacey Tendeter and I were chosen as the two English sisters Anne and Muriel, opposite Jean-Pierre Léaud.

  Truffaut had been depressed. The film was planned partly to help his recovery and, little by little, as the filming went on, I became part of that recovery. Difficult as it was to act in another language, I loved working with ‘the family’, as he called his crew, and with him, and I desperately wanted to please him. I asked my sister Jehane to come out and stay with me as a chaperone to prevent me falling for him. But he was already picking me up after the day’s shooting in his sports car, writing me notes, which he would slip under my door, praising my work. It was too late.

  I had intended to try to recruit Truffaut into the WRP or, if not that, to get him to finance our paper with a huge donation. I certainly had no intention of getting entangled with him as I had been warned about his fondness for whichever actress he was currently working with. The following story sums up what actually happened. I wrote it two years after the film came out, in the third person for reasons of discretion (Suzanne’s instruction), and because it allowed me to be more truthful.
r />   Father Love

  ‘But how did you think it would end – did you imagine marriage?’ His voice was gentle, he was trying not to show exasperation.

  There was no answer to that, not in her limited French. She was crying on the end of the bed. He swiped at another mosquito with Le Monde and fiddled with the shutters.

  They were sweltering in a villa in Antibes. The sound of cicadas filled the unhappy silence.

  (She should never have come.)

  When the film finished, the affair finished. You went home and got on with your ‘real’ life.

  But she hadn’t been able to. After listening to all the warnings, she had betrayed her own instincts for self-preservation and had fallen, tumbled, into love with her director.

  She went to the south of France to stay with his collaborator and friend Suzanne, who had become her friend too. She hoped the director would find out that she was there and would send for her.

  Suzanne had an old farmhouse just outside Vaison-la-Romaine. The garden was a tumbledown orchard leading to vineyards and behind the house a white road crept up to a cemetery and village on top of a hill. She and Suzanne would walk up to the cemetery and pick the thyme that grew on the scrubby banks, and from there they watched purple and black clouds chase birds helterskelter into the trees before the storm. They talked of food, children and politics – anything and everything except the affair and her unhappiness. It would have been bad taste and besides it might have revealed countless other women that Suzanne had befriended in similar circumstances…

  Then a letter came.

  ‘Tu est plus vrai que mon cinéma… Viens me voir.’

  (‘You are more real than my film. Come and see me.’)

  It was a line from the scene where she said to her lover, ‘Tu est plus vrai que ma sculpture. (je t’aime)’