It is very quiet in the Cross, and sleep there is wonderful. So is drinking at the Strand and at the East Sydney with famous criminals and actors, and eating alone at Pinocchio’s, while reading the Listener and Private Eye, the one dish that is not on the menu, their wonderful vegetarian pizza, as I have every week for seven years now; and script conferences over coffee at the Moka, and walks up and down the strip-club district among the whores – ‘No, thank you, ma’am’ is the response I find they most appreciate – and brunch with ice water at the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar, out of whose windows it seems the Cross is still a beautiful place, and perhaps it is. Perhaps I am growing old. I was thirty-seven on Thursday last, and Annie for my birthday gave me a kitchen implement, something she would not have dared when I was young and furious still, and she was not yet my wife.
I am frightened of too much happiness, like most writers, and so feel threatened by the Peninsula. With its barbecues and nudity and sailboats and restaurants and saunas and marijuana, I could be quite corrupted into pot-bellied contentment. I am even considering joining the golf club. I played golf once, in Lismore. Went round in ninety-three. Nine holes. Kismet, however, is dealing with this dread possibility of happiness. Many film directors are moving into the neighbourhood, lowering property values and glaring at me across the supermarket …
I detest the ticks. I hate the hard drugs and the mindless wagon loads of surfing hoodlums. I fear for my son in these musclebound and psychedelic acres. I groan up the stairs. I shiver in the gales. And yet I will not leave. I am in love with these cliffs and spinnakers and clean air, and Annie my wife, and my ducks and books and British magazines, my television that gets six channels and a dishwashing machine that cleanses as I sleep. I am a warily happy man, and here is my looked-for end …
I am not the man I was, nor is Sydney the town. But I’ll shuffle down the remainder of the century thankful that I knew her slightly when.
Letters to the Future (first published in Daily Mirror, May 1979)
3.
IN THE MIDST OF LIFE
USA, 1968
I was twenty-five and, in the now improbable year of 1968, on my first trip overseas. A medieval Singapore, a Biblical Egypt, a Dickensian London, a Dylan Thomas Wales, a mythic stone-strewn Ireland, a glimmering Bardic Stratford-upon-Avon. A lusty nuptial night in Gretna Green with Annie, whom nine years on I would marry, interspersed much bed-and-breakfast griminess and cold nights cuddled up in the back of our van as we whisked round Europe, too fast, too fast. Rome, Athens, Amsterdam – ‘Two hundred Van Goghs,’ said an unbelievable sign, and there they were. We broke down in Sweden, were stopped on suspicion of smuggling books at the bullet-pocked Berlin Wall, watched on grainy black-and-white television the tanks enter Prague, and so on.
We didn’t much like Paris. We went to a Paul Newman festival, a three-star restaurant, ran out of money and left. Nor a disastrous, bickering car trip through the castles of the Loire with Les Murray. We spent more than we had and tried to pack too much in, fighting and making love and tussling for moral seniority and being young. We went to a lot of theatre – Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, Guinness in the deepening twilight of their prime, Judi Dench on her way up, Paul Scofield on the idle hill of his unending excellence – and so learnt skills that got us paid work as film and TV writers for twenty years, and then …
Well, Annie’s plan was to find in Bulgaria some of the people, the Stuletnik, who reputedly lived to a great age, and she there met a woman who was a hundred and twenty. Mine was to go to America and there see Bobby Kennedy nominated and elected president. Bobby’s murder in June meant I would gloomily view his grave instead. A small white wooden cross labelled ‘Bobby’, like the grave of a dog, hard by Jack’s eternal flame. Then, not too daunted by the Chicago Convention riots of August, I disembarked in late September, with perhaps a hundred dollars, in New York, alone.
This was not a good place to be, whatever the upbeat Sinatra and Tony Bennett songs proclaimed. Everywhere, gas-guzzling behemoths hurtled at me, barping, skidding and polluting, and belligerent, shouting citizens shook their fists like Seinfeld’s crazier relatives. Muggers lurked in the filthy subways. Metho-smelling street bums told me the story of their life. In a theatre in Harlem I was the only white fool present. Later, being amusedly, sneeringly stared at in the chill smoky street, I felt I had perhaps two minutes to live, both of them pretty scary.
I tried attending political rallies – Rockefeller, Humphrey, George Wallace – but was urged to leave because of my beard and long hair by big beaming men with shoulder holsters, the cultural battle over hair length being then at its height. By then you were either a clean-cut, suburban sell-out on a commuter train to work in Wall Street for a megalopolitan corporation or else a bathless, Biblically-bearded, pot-smoking, commune-dwelling sharer of women, bawling obscene free verse in San Francisco cafes. I by my beard and long locks was clearly one of the latter. Unwelcome. Unclean … I ate a lot of pastrami, drank Budweiser in bars like Cheers and everywhere marvelled at a society primarily bent on threatening strangers with revenge, who hit car bonnets with their fist and shouted, like Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, ‘I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!’
On election day, however, I watched in reverence proud black women queuing up in their hundreds for three hours outside schoolrooms to be a part of their democracy and vote for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society under his big-spending Democrat successor Hubert H. Humphrey. By ten p.m. Humphrey was narrowly ahead. By two a.m. he seemed to have won, and I went thankfully to bed and slept soundly. Six hours later I awoke and Richard Nixon was president, and the world unutterably changed. It was the moment, probably, that smashed forever the Rooseveltian consensus, the Good Times I look back to now with mutinous aching nostalgia. The sky darkened; I swore to leave America, to go home.
A plane departing Chicago in three days’ time for San Francisco, and another from there to Sydney, I soon had valid unchangeable tickets on, and just enough money for a Greyhound bus ride and a few hot dogs, with delicious American mustard, from New York to Chicago. I packed a big brown bag of dirty clothes and secondhand books – that weighed maybe eighty pounds – boarded the bus on a slate-grey afternoon and began my final fearsome American journey to the end of the night.
Thronged with society’s dregs, the growling Greyhound offered a single vacant seat beside an intense, sandy-haired man, thirtyish, with bright, blank, blue accusing eyes. As we pulled out, he ominously engaged me in conversation in an accent distinctly, ungently Southern.
‘Ah lark to kill peeyuple,’ he said.
‘Oh really,’ I said pleasantly.
‘Honeymoonin’ couples, mostly. Ah lark to tie ’em up and drarve over them, or lock ’em up in cupboards and smother ’em. Ah lark to dew that.’
‘Er … why?’
‘Ah dunno. It’s jest mah way. It’s mah hobby, yew mart say.’
With thirteen hours to Cleveland, Ohio, and only there a possibility of changing seats, I tried to avoid conversation with this American psycho, but he skilfully bullied me into listening. His mother had smothered his father when he was three, he said with satisfaction, and then a subsequent husband, and then a harmless male visitor, a country cousin staying overnight. She was eventually put in a padded cell, and he, my travelling companion, raised by a drunken sluttish auntie till he ran away from home at fourteen, and thereafter, as a self-employed freelance burglar, one night came upon a sleeping couple in a honeymoon suite … Various post-nuptial murders – perhaps no more than twenty-three – he described to me in loathsome detail. How they begged and pleaded, the sounds of their cupboard-stifled sobbings …
At Cleveland many people disembarked, and I was able to secure another seat. The bus proceeded without incident, in daylight, to Chicago. The murderer lurched past me at one point, walking heavily on steel crutches, a congenital cripple, it now seemed. So he couldn’t have been a burglar. He probably, please God, made it all up.
In Chicago I found all my luggage had been off-loaded at Cleveland and was now, oh Christ, in Florida, and would take at least forty-eight hours to come back. ‘It will come back, sir,’ I was assured, ‘but it’ll take two days, maybe three.’ By which time my plane would have gone. I had five dollars left: not enough for a room or a phone call, barely enough for five hot dogs with American mustard and one Coca-Cola and the train fare, the essential train fare, to the airport.
I had to stay awake for two days, therefore, sitting up very scared in the Chicago bus station. Chicago, post the 1968 Convention, was full of cops on the look-out for troublemakers with beards whom they could rough up and gaol on suspicion for twenty-five years. I was twice accosted by such a cop, and twice forgiven my Jeremiah appearance, though narrowly.
In the fourteenth hour of my hungry vigil the sound of approaching steel crutches woke me, and there, once more, was the murderer.
‘Somebody stole mah wallet on that theyah bus,’ he said. ‘It weren’t yew, were it?’
Summoning eloquence that would – in even that year of unlikely candidates – have got even me elected president, I somehow persuaded him that, no, I had not nicked his wallet. He believed me, and sat down amiably beside me and told me more of himself. How the injury was recent – in a car crash when he was being chased by an angry, interrupted male honeymooner who had, happily, died in the car crash. I began then to doubt his stories altogether. A rich eccentric invalid, clearly, who liked to travel on buses affrighting fellow voyagers. He went away at last, on his crutches, a happy disabled lunatic with miles to go, I reckoned, before he slept.
In the fiftieth hour, after dozing, waking, eating four hot dogs with American mustard, but saving always the dollar I needed to get to the airport, I found my luggage had arrived. It was all there, all the dirty underwear and grimy books. ‘Greyhound always does you right,’ said the florid, thickset official. I could have kissed him. I got the train, I found the airport, the flight, got on the plane …
We took off. Though in second class, I was aberrantly given chicken and champagne, and told the in-flight movie was Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, thereafter my favourite film comedy ever. From this unforeseen luxury I looked out of the cabin window down over the dwindling lights of an America where, for want of two dollars or a dodgier bus company than Greyhound, I might have died howling in a Chicago gaol and thought how narrowly we escape catastrophe sometimes and how close is holiday comedy to torture.
Soon, over the red roofs and green lawns of Sydney, I thought how ordinary, how safe, how dreary home was, and how energising the great world, with its murders and wars and craziness, its castles and monuments and unending, exciting trouble. And I was very, very glad to be home.
Nation Review, 1970
ENGLAND, 1974
SEPTEMBER
A gutted mountain, huge and dingy, loomed above the tiny murmurous gathering in the rain. Among the shifting umbrellas, Michael Foot, his grey head bare, holding his microphone as intimately as a pop star, enthralled the patient miners with their immemorial plight. Shale on the mountain and slag heaps over the village resounded to his practised rhetorical sincerity but were not finally shaken. Too many honourable Fabians, frail and pink and shiny-goggled as he, their monumental idealism worn threadbare by a lifetime of dedicated exhaustion in committees, had, like him, arrived and preached for an hour and were then driven away. Things for these epic toilers of the earth, broad-faced, broad-bodied, still-eyed, would never finally change, though Nye Bevan himself return from the dead and rage till the valleys rang.
‘With a Labour government we will get through,’ Foot was saying. ‘Without a Labour government my people in this community will go under.’ His courtly cadences rolled, and the people cheered and swarmed forward and buffeted him with their autograph books and fierce opinions, and he gave as much of himself to these dear, open, vulnerable people as he could, a cultivated man’s compassion – ‘nice to see you, nice to see you’ – shook a few hands and went on his way. Three more mining villages that afternoon awaited his oratorical solace and, after them, the world.
He was, needless to say, as truly good a man as the House of Commons had brought forth since Gladstone; but the times, alas, needed more than a good, compassionate, honourable House of Commons man. The time required some epic, romantic, gigantic fool of the order of Churchill to stir the nation’s blood and glaze its eyes with the glory of struggle. The times, alas, required Nye Bevan, but Nye was gone and forgotten …
NOVEMBER
I heard the enormous noise – a perfect tower of noise, as Les Murray once said. Above Piccadilly in the night, an A in the Swan and Edgar sign fell, burning, four storeys to the ground. Sixty yards away, three bodies lay among the smithereens of a postbox – exactly where I would have been had I not crossed the road to buy a Playboy. The crowd swarmed not away from but towards the scene of the noise.
‘Get back, you stupid bastards,’ cried the bobby. ‘There’ll be another one going off in a minute.’
I moved away, ran down Shaftesbury Avenue, then thought, no, this is history, and ran back towards Piccadilly. People were talking agitatedly, bemusedly, class barriers down, as they must have talked in the Blitz. The stupid fools, they said, what do they think they’re achieving? The dead, blanketed, were slid into an ambulance, which swerved away. The talking among the massed crowd grew; acquaintanceships were made, and sealed in surrounding pubs.
I found the actress I was there to meet – Carol Drinkwater, later a star of All Creatures Great and Small – distraught outside our appointed bar, her suitcase beside her open on the pavement.
‘I’d just got back from Rome,’ she said, ‘and meeting Bertolucci, and I didn’t know. And I asked the barman if I could leave my luggage there while I went out to look for you. And the bar erupted in five seconds flat. It was horrible.’
We went back in, had a drink and in due course – fifty yards from the scene of the murder – witnessed, in Zeferelli’s production of Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Lady Olivier as an Italian fishwife arrive on stage on cue, while the police searched the cloakroom for further explosives. One way or another, England went on: went on anyway. There was no other choice.
Two Weeks in Another Country, 1983
MARALINGA, APRIL 1985
‘I’m the best-dressed man in Central Australia,’ said Jim McClelland, looking pin-striped over his beer can round the saltbush with satisfaction.
Had he seen the Gillies Report sketch, I asked. Yes, he said, and greatly enjoyed it.
‘Anyone who wants to portray me as an exhibitionist fop,’ he added, ‘won’t be too far off the mark.’ He looked about contentedly, then came to a decision. ‘I’ll just go and empty the judicial bladder.’
He did this, and was photographed midway to the horizon returning in his pin-striped suit, his elbow up, with a KB in his hand.
It was easy to love the judge. His other nickname, Diamond Jim, no longer seemed operative once you knew him a little, as I had in this past anti-climactic boozy decade. Something about him – the rubicund complexion, the erect deportment, the self-mocking hauteur, the juggler’s ease with words – brought to mind some of the more striking characteristics of the late William Claude Fields. Have you any last requests? I want to see Paris before I die. Noose tightens. Philadelphia will do. Make that Maralinga. Maralinga will do.
On the night of the break-up party that followed the London hearings, sharing his cab home from Gordon Barton’s tasteful apartment through falling snow, I had sensed in Jim a melancholy self-judgement: Well, if that’s a bloody swan song, I’ve had it. Maralinga will do. There’s no last rainbow now. No bouquet-showering encores. Fade to black. A lingering echo of his lacerous debunking of Margaret Thatcher’s dress sense. A half-remembered phrase or two about the inertia of the British bureaucracy and Aborigines wandering among the plutonium. Was it enough? It had to be.
Moved by his silence, and by his talk that night with Barton about the comin
g end of the world – odds on, he thought – I bought him the Oxford Book of Epigrams and wrote him a note about how important Maralinga was, and this inquiry, and how posterity would know of it. Like Adam and Eve cast out of Paradise after eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil – that necessary poison – all of us, since the first atomic bomb, will never be that innocent again. ‘I see you,’ I said in the note, ‘as some aged angel at Eden’s gate, with a flaming sword and a road sign saying “no way back”.’ He appreciated the Old Testament reference: the garb of a scalding prophet sits well on one so dress-conscious. Posterity, I fear, may make less of him, but then posterity never had much taste.
England had gone pretty well, all agreed, especially now, in the wake of Thatcher’s admission of overweening secrecy. The Royal Commission was blessed by two characters, Martell and Menaul, admiral and air vice-marshal respectively, quite obviously devised by Evelyn Waugh and sent on ahead to jolly up the latter part of the twentieth century, which sorely needed jollying.
‘Look at me,’ said Martell, and stuck his chest out, a profoundly healthy septuagenarian man. ‘I ate oysters off ground zero. Look at me.’ And he left the court with an accompanying voluptuous blonde.
‘We got on very well with the Aborigines,’ said Menaul. ‘We gave them beads. We gave them mirrors.’ Later on he added that certain American colonels had wanted to see the Aborigines, and he had flown them across in a helicopter to the blacks’ camp. ‘It was the kind of service we provided,’ he said. ‘They wanted to see the Aborigines, and we flew them across.’
Bob Ellis Page 5