Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  Whew. That Frank. So Geoffrey could climb up on the roof and run across the chimney pots then.

  Dee was now calmly telling Frank to go away, or she would have to call the police again, and he would remember what happened last time. My friend turned softly to me.

  ‘Come back to bed,’ she whispered. But I was fully dressed and somehow I was thinking about the school bus and my British friends.

  I became close to Geoffrey but ended the tour resentful of him. We had a few days left before we went back to England. It seemed a good time to go off and explore the States together. But Geoffrey went to New York to catch up with Dee instead. This was no good. He was my new soul mate, but Geoffrey dropped me for some intimate, grownup, mature thing like a proper relationship with a girl. I felt betrayed. I was having too much fun to have to spend hours talking sensibly with one woman.

  Besides, I had all the responsibilities of my own proper relationship waiting for me back in England. Was I quite ready for this? It had been prearranged. The spring term beckoned, and Charlotte and I began a fierce skirmish that was to last seven years, with intermittent periods of ceasefire.

  From the very beginning, I loved her. I loved so much about her. I loved her straightforwardness, her handsome good looks. I loved her briskness and drive and enthusiasm. I loved her bonkers impetuosity I loved being with her. I liked her settled existence in Newnham. She was a pusher of Earl Grey tea and a fierce advocate for the importance of civilized trappings — new to me, but I loved it. Her friends were not only called Cassandra, they were called Penelope, Hero and Oenone, as if their distempered corridor was some Greek grove, and I liked that. I loved the fact that, like me, she fussed very little about the notion of coupledom. I loved her determined domestication. I loved her courage. Where I would nervously approach the water hole of social insecurity Charlotte had the conviction of a cobra, the fastidious discrimination of a lynx and the loyalties of a water buffalo.

  She was to be my education and my indivisible self for nearly a decade. And I disagreed with her about absolutely everything — degree, value, commitment and intent. Everything.

  One night, after I had shared the neatly embroidered, bevelveted and cushioned tidiness of her existence for some time, we left a production at the ADC on our bicycles (Charlotte naturally had a splendid antique sit-up-and-beg version with a wicker basket in the front). We turned left up Bene’t Street. It was one o’clock in the morning. A young policeman hailed us. He was quite calm. ‘Were you aware you were cycling the wrong way down a one-way street in utter darkness without any lights at all?’ he asked.

  Cravenly, I was ready to apologize. But Charlotte felt a pressing need to say something.

  ‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’ she started in an admirably forthright tone. ‘Haven’t you got anything better to do than harass us!’ She grew a little more strident. ‘We’re not harming anyone, there’s no danger, but no! You have to stop us!’

  It was fantastic. A mélange of Margaret Rutherford and Vanessa Redgrave, it somehow gave the status of ‘the pigs’ a social nuance as well. He didn’t take it well and grimly took our details. We were eventually handed a fine we could scarcely afford, though I seem to recall that Charlotte continued to rant on about abuse of police power as he scribbled. When we got back to her room, it was my turn. I became incandescent with rage and, as became increasingly common, we enjoyed a mouth-watering, life-enhancing five-hour row.

  Charles Maude called Charlotte ‘la Belle Dame Sans Merci’. It was elegant. Others knew her as ‘Shut-Up Charlotte’, because that was how I habitually addressed her.

  Whenever we were together (and we feared minor traffic fines because we increasingly spent time spending non-existent money on dog-meat moussaka in restaurants), friends would quietly remove the cruet and breakable plates.

  ‘I remember the time Rory and you pushed me into a ditch after a May Ball and just left me there,’ Charlotte recalled, thirty years later.

  ‘I suspect it was more likely that you fell in the ditch in a drunken stupor and they just walked on,’ said Jonathan, her husband.

  But we had a fierce attachment too.

  ‘Apart from having a thing about Michael I was faithful to you for seven years.’

  ‘Yes … What thing about Michael?’

  ‘You must remember.’

  I didn’t. I know who Michael is now He is that tall, bald bloke with the strange taste in ties who runs a major institution. But I thought I had met him for the first time at a fund-raising dinner. He was always rather cool towards me, but I put this down to the natural disdain that the director of a world-famous institution who wore frock coats would entertain for a low comedian. I had no idea that it might be because my girlfriend had a thing about him when we were students.

  ‘You were rather incredible about it. One evening Michael and I were in front of the fire in my room in Newnham, and it got dark. We were sitting there together in the gloom and you suddenly came in. And you switched on the light and said, “Hello you two,” and just sat down at my desk and immediately started writing an essay’

  ‘Did I?’ It only sounded incredible to me that I was writing an essay I certainly didn’t remember any suspicion of hanky panky. Jealousy is a strangely permanent stain. (This was thirty years ago. We’re both married to other people now, with grown-up kids. So is Michael.) But I take consolation from the fact that I nearly said hello to the sort of undergraduate who would go on to run important national institutions after university even though I didn’t know it then and appeared to ignore him altogether.

  Charlotte was in the meantime perfecting a balancing act between the demands of her strongly held principles and a hectic social scene. She knew quite a lot of posh people. We were all invited to a party in the Lake District by someone who owned a lot of it. I was there as the entertainment, not to present The Chinese Airman Reports Back to His Comrades, but a Footlights cabaret.

  I lodged with a mad vegetarian and ate nettle soup for supper. Charlotte was a guest in ‘a stately’. She was driven back there afterwards by Hoorays who crashed their cars for fun. (Cambridge in those days was quite a broad social mix.) She walked up some hill with Michael, and he got terribly interested in things, or so I discovered thirty years later. This was all going on behind my bloody back, while I was performing, without my trousers on, for the benefit of some of Charlotte’s poncey friends who never liked me anyway.

  I met plenty of proper public schoolboys at Cambridge. I assumed that their louche assurance was a direct result of their education. How great to know how to behave. How comforting to have the assumptions of your caste so ingrained that you even know which are proper shoes and which are not, which are the right shirts to wear and which are not, how to talk to people at dinner parties and how to belittle them with confident disdain. Naturally, I despised them for it. I hated them for never having been beaten up in a playground in Harlow because of the way they talked, for treating ‘going on a bus’ as quite an adventure, for having no taste in music beyond the sickly sentimental pop they played each other in their studies. But I envied the easy assurance: I was a trimmer. I adjusted my sails to the prevailing wind.

  ‘A born-again Marxist, he spouts dialectic while sitting at the helm of his father’s yacht.’ My biography in the Footlights programme was written by the son of a naval captain from a public school. But of course they were all only pretending too. They were just better at it. What I liked was the ability to enter all these worlds, the politics and the theatre, the Pitt Club full of Hoorays and the poetry society, and find there were always people playing at it. Everybody was pretending. It wasn’t an elite, it was a cloister. The inanities of Oxbridge were a background against which anyone could shine as long as they had the brass neck.

  I was celebrating at the end of a second year. I had been happy to kick on: a fake, intense Brechtian, a grotesque for the Footlights, a director of spectacles at the ADC and a party-going sophisticate with a girlfriend too
. Nothing seemed to be falling off as yet.

  The only thing I was losing confidence with was History itself. After two years of galloping, I was about to face a Beecher’s Brook: Part One exams. Apart from the papers on Political Thought the whole subject had become a little too mature and objective for me. Besides, if I was going to read under pressure, I might at least read well-written literature, instead of mock-scientific turgid journals (although whether literature would be as susceptible to speed-scanning as articles on the three-field system in thirteenth-century Leicestershire was questionable). I had an interview with the director of studies in English, wrote a trial essay on E. M. Forster and now prepared to jump horses, but only if I did well enough in the forthcoming exams.

  Ah, yes, those exams. I somehow had to fit ‘Part Ones’ into what was already a rather busy term. Geoffrey McGivern and I were both in Chox, the May Week revue at the end of the year. It was Geoffrey’s first. ‘All that silly decadent stuff,’ as he described it.

  It was ‘silly’, because of Cabaret and Bryan Ferry. Being camp in public had become fashionable. But we weren’t camp. We were just spotty undergraduates. The opening ‘ironic’ dance routine was even less ironic than usual. ‘What do we all have in common? What do we all do together? If it’s just a bar on your birthday, or a ten-pound box bound in leather …we eat Chox! Ba — tuppity, tup tup — baaa…’

  We rehearsed during the Easter vacation, got everything ready, and then took a break to sit some exacting papers.

  My second summer vacation was fully occupied with the Footlights. In Averham, where the tour stalled for a week, we decided to re-enact the alcoholic excitements of Days of Wine and Roses. We stayed in dormitories above the theatre, in a sort of farmyard by a church, under huge electric pylons, just a few fields away from a massive ditch at the bottom of which the River Trent slopped along. We had no transport and no pub.

  Donald Wolfit had begun his career at Averham. His bust leered out from a corner of the stage. But it was understandable that he left. The theatre was merely a hut with a tin roof. When it rained, it rattled so loudly the audience couldn’t hear anything the actors said. This might have been a good idea. They had been shipped in by tractor. The authorities shut up the drinking facilities ten minutes after curtain down, and it was a long night in the middle of nowhere. ‘Binge drinking’ is an inadequate description.

  Struggling to place orders for six or seven pints, we had to jostle with our audience at the foyer bar.

  ‘You were a very quiet audience.’

  ‘We didn’t like to laugh in case we missed the next joke.’

  The first night we said farewell to the charming old ladies who ran the place, sat staring at the walls for a few minutes and then forced the padlock on the bar. We drank ourselves insensible. They were a little upset the following morning. ‘I know you’re prepared to pay but you must promise you won’t do that again.’ So we promised and the second night we didn’t even wait until their car had hit the main road before we took a crowbar to the hatches.

  The audience were being polite. They weren’t laughing because the show was getting worse. The ‘actors’ in the revue (less inclined to drink) were beginning to gang up against the ‘writer-performers’ — Clive Anderson, Jon Canter, Martin Smith and myself (more inclined to drink). We wanted to sort them out. We wanted them to do the scripts properly: the funny way, as we saw it and as we had written it. To our annoyance, Geoffrey, who sometimes pretended to be a lad with us and sometimes to be a camp nonce with them, sided with them.

  Thirty years later he was outraged at the suggestion. ‘I did not. I was the voice of calm reason!’

  ‘You joined the side of the actors.’

  ‘I wasn’t with anybody!’

  ‘Traitor! You just pretended to be all grown-up and adult and sided with those bastards.’

  ‘I remember you sitting underneath the sink with a saucepan in each hand banging them together because you couldn’t get your way,’ he said.

  I also remembered crawling through puddles in the pouring rain at three in the morning howling with rage, but I can’t remember what on earth for. I think we were on the point of calling the whole thing off, packing our bags or having a stand-up fight when a telegram arrived: ‘congratulations stop michael white will present you in the west end stop telephone me stop’.

  Geoffrey snorted. ‘I remember saying I thought we’d be mad to go. We’d be slaughtered.’

  ‘We were.’

  ‘I got some very good reviews.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Geoffrey? The whole show was slated. Michael Billington’s notice started “If this dismal little revue …”

  I had read all the critics on the top of a bus coming into the West End. Outside the theatre I stood watching a man from an advertising agency balancing on a stepladder. He was desperately trying to find some words of good cheer to stick up on his hoardings. Literally scratching his head, he saw me and scowled. ‘I don’t know what you’ve got to laugh about,’ he said.

  It was a strange way of spending a summer. We dug in for four weeks and were filmed by the BBC. After a few days, Michael White came to see us and took away the meagre subsistence we were paid, in order to save on overall costs. (‘Well, you’re students, so it won’t matter to you.’)

  I stayed in London at Charlotte’s home and took to exploring the life of her parents, who lived amongst piebald cats and potted plants in a cluttered flat in West Hampstead. They were exemplary student accessories. Anne, Charlotte’s mother, related to the Thackerays, was kind and judicious, and one of the founders of Britain’s social services. Kellow had written a whole book I had heard of called The Victorian Underworld and had been a Communist in the thirties, when such things had been the height of fashion. Now he was working on a history of sporting life, a project sadly never to be finished, but he would throw up his hooked nose with a fruity chuckle and disconcert visitors to his green-baize— covered dinner table by assuming that their knowledge of eighteenth-century London, or nineteenth-century boxing or Byzantine bishops was as detailed as his own. When he asked, ‘Oh what was the name of that fat chap in Tom and Jerry?’ he meant the nineteenth-century popular novel not the cartoon. I learnt to mumble distractedly, as if the name had just eluded me too, until Kellow grew impatient and pressed on. I would leave this little capsule of literary bohemia to sing the ‘Fork Lift Truck Driving Song’ at the Comedy Theatre. ‘He’s the best forking forker in the whole forking world.’

  Geoffrey remained resolutely sober until the final night at the Edinburgh Festival. It was like bookends. The extravagances of 1973 had bankrupted Cambridge drama at the Festival so Footlights went alone, sharing a hall with Oxford. We put on extra shows and took the money for ourselves, and, despite London’s critical outrage, it was a well-honed popular show by then. We did three performances on the final night, with a midnight matinee and then an extra, extra-late, performance at one-thirty in the morning.

  As the festival finished, it was almost time to go back to Cambridge. And I had been given an extra year to finish the race to my degree. ‘Two more years before exams! Wow.’ Now I could really enjoy myself.

  We blundered on into our next year, feeling light and feeling free. Or some of us did. Simon came from a conventional enough middle-class background. His father was a pathologist. Simon specialized in gruesome comic monologues about syphilis and disfiguring ailments, but just like everybody else he took part in any play that was available. When Simon’s results came through his father ascended from a trap to drag him back down to hell. He failed the first exams of his two-year Part Two in Law There was to be no more play-acting. He had to leave and take his bar exams separately (He is a successful barrister today)

  We were in Southampton footling about in Paradise Mislaid when the phone call came, as if from another world. Never mind his public, Simon had to go back to Cambridge to face his tutor and then, worse, his dad.

  At the time, we discussed it in hushed
awe. This was like the past coming back to haunt us. We had managed to artificially mature beyond our real responsibilities. We had used the last two years to mark out our own territory. We weren’t doing this for our parents any more, were we? Or were we?

  Simon’s father was a powerful presence. I met him ten years later during the height of Not The Nine O’Clock News. He quizzed me about whether I was earning a living, nodded a little curtly when I told him I was, and then leaned in closer. ‘How’s your father taking it?’ he asked sympathetically.

  I like to think that I never went home, but I probably skulked back to Epping in September. Around this time my father had started to venture across the Channel in his boat and he needed help. I had certainly gone with him on his first trip, sitting callowly to one side as he fretted about his navigation and became convinced that we had drifted a hundred miles north in the space of an hour because he spotted an oil rig. (It was being towed down the Channel.)

  I definitely joined the boat on some canal in Belgium for a week at the end of my second year, when my father’s prickly self-justification and anxiety at unfamiliar foreign lock etiquette, his fear for his topsides, his daughter’s embarrassments and his son’s headstrong independence all shaken up inside a twenty-nine—foot cask kept threatening to detonate into a blistering family row On the day I arrived, I met my sister storming along a jetty, off home, with my father chasing her down the dock apologizing. I don’t suppose I made it any easier, berating him for his dithering as he vacillated about squeezing his precious cargo into a slab-sided lock shared with four two-hundred-ton motorized Rhine barges.

  ‘But who will go with him if you don’t?’ pleaded my mother. Who indeed? Len and Derek had their own boats and had stayed the other side of the Channel. Twelve months later I managed another trip, but only by taking my Footlights friend from Middlesbrough, Chris Keightley, as a fender. Chris was a scientist. He was uncomplicated and interested in things like diesel engines. He could talk with my father, or at least talk at my father, who couldn’t sail a boat, worry about future hazards and make anything approximating to conversation all at the same time.