Soft times
When I’m travelling as a writer to strange and distant lands my conscience tells me that I should be living like the indigenous people. I should be experiencing whatever privations and discomforts they are suffering on a daily basis in order to fully absorb the colour and patina of their lives. If that involves a lack of running water, cooking a sparse dinner over an open fire and encountering insects that make your nights a waking nightmare, then so be it. I’ve read enough from authors like Wilfred Thesiger, Jan Morris and Paul Theroux to know how a real travel writer should throw themselves into the moment.
Sometimes, of course, that is exactly what happens and it is often a highly rewarding experience – at least it is once you are safely home and looking back through your memories. (Graham Greene, after all, was almost finished off by illness while travelling in search of his own version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Liberia in 1935, but lived on to become one of the greatest writers of his generation.)
I have to confess, however, that the more strange and distant the lands I am visiting, the more I relish having a base in an anonymous, international, five star hotel. The hot shower so powerful it massages out the muscles that have become knotted with the bumpy roads of the day at the same time as shooting away the dust; the air-conditioning that lowers the body temperature; the ability to make yourself understood in your own language and the bland international breakfast and strong coffee that set the stomach up for a day of local delicacies. It is the very blandness and anonymity of these hotel chains that soothes the nerves and provides comfort for the body and the mind after a long day of often violent stimulation.
I do, however, feel guilty whenever I find myself scampering back to the five star safety of an international hotel chain, but then I tell myself that even Greene ended his days in Antibes, possibly one of the most comfortable and civilised places in the world, far from the ‘Heart of Darkness’ he once sought out so eagerly.
A pain in Baguio
The pain woke me in the middle of the night, like a knife had been rammed into the lower part of my back. I was in a hotel in Baguio, in the middle of the Philippines. I had been travelling with a government guide, retracing the life story of Ferdinand Marcos, the country’s President, as part of the same vague, unspecified public relations brief that had led me to lunching with his wife in Manila. I had no idea whether the guide was staying in the same hotel; she had merely made sure I was checked in before disappearing for the night.
Until the day before I had been with a group of journalists on an ‘educational’, but the others had now flown home and I had gone on with my guide to do more research. In the dark and quiet of the tropical night I suddenly felt very alone as the pain repeated in steady waves.
I pulled myself out of bed and tried moving around the room to see if it was a muscular cramp of some sort. It abated for a few moments and then returned with greater severity, almost knocking me off my feet and making me feel nauseous. It was time to ask for help. I phoned down and enquired if there was a doctor attached to the hotel. A few hours later I had been given an injection and the pain had magically lifted.
When my exquisitely groomed government minder arrived at breakfast time to escort me wherever we were due to go to next I told her of my night’s adventures. She listened with a serious level of concentration and when I had finished she raised one immaculate eyebrow.
‘Could it possibly have anything to do with the things you got up to in Manila?’
It was a fair cop, if a rather dubious medical diagnosis. On one of our days touring round Manila we had been taken to a beach where a gentleman from the London Times (with whom I had been designated to share a room) and I had been approached by a young man selling weed. Despite the disapproving looks we had received from the rest of the group, and from our minders, we had made a purchase and later settled down in our hotel room to enjoy the goods before dinner.
That night was to be an official banquet to mark the end of the tour for the other journalists and some important person was coming from the other end of the country to meet me and brief me on whatever it was I was going to be doing on the next leg of my trip.
Up to that point I hadn’t had much more than schoolboy experiences with drugs and I was not prepared for the strength of whatever it was we were happily puffing on as we sat on our balcony overlooking the beach, serenaded by the waves and the cicadas. By the time I realised that I was high as a satellite it was too late to do anything about it apart from giggle and talk nonsense. Aware enough to know that I needed to sober up if I was going to make sensible dinner table conversation, I decided to have a cold shower. That might have helped if alcohol had been the problem but the only effect it had that evening was to make my hair stick out from my head at right angles.
Not bothering to look in a mirror I decided that I was now in a fit state to present myself and floated to the banquet as if everything was normal. It was only as I started to come gently down from the clouds an hour or so later that I realised everyone around me had been having considerable difficulty following whatever it was I had been babbling about. With the immaculate politeness that characterises so many people in the Far East no one had mentioned that they had noticed anything, until the moment I owned up to my night-time pain.
The rest of the trip passed uneventfully and a kidney stone finally worked its way agonisingly through my system once I was safely back in England. It almost seemed like a fitting punishment for my transgressions.
Whoring myself again
I hadn’t heard my son coming into the office as I typed away at some self-promotional piece of blogging or tweeting or whatever was the social media flavour of that day. He only needed to stand behind me for a moment to grasp what I was doing, being a world-class reader of screens.
‘Whoring yourself again?’ he enquired cheerfully before ambling off to the kitchen to stare into the fridge for a while.
The bluntness of his comic timing made me laugh, as it often does, then I got to thinking. ‘Whoring yourself again’ is pretty much the perfect definition of freelance life. I’ve spent time with a great many people who have at some stage been involved in prostitution, either voluntarily or enforced. You sell your body or you sell your brain – either way you run the risk of ending up selling your soul.
Most writers hate promoting themselves, always hoping that publishers or agents or critics or fans will do it for them. But in our hearts we all know if we wait for other people to sing our praises and rush out to buy our wares we are going to starve to death, so we hitch up our skirts and return to the kerbside of life.
The suppression of the ego
‘Have just swum round hotel pool,’ my youngest daughter texted from Zante, where she was indulging in her first non-family holiday. ‘Saw four different people reading your books. So annoying that I can’t tell them my dad wrote them!’
Virtually everyone, from Mariella Frostrup, the Queen of Radio Book Shows, to the proverbial bloke in the pub, wants to know the same thing about the battered egos of ghostwriters. ‘Isn’t it frustrating to have a book at the top of the bestseller lists and for no one to know that you wrote it?’
‘I think it’s a matter of expectations,’ is my usual reply. ‘If I had written a book expecting it to be published in my own name and to bring me great glory, then I would be very disappointed – perhaps even bitter – if the publisher informed me at the last moment that it was going to go out under the name of a footballer or soap actor. But if I know that is what I have been hired to do from the start I am merely pleased to see that I have succeeded in achieving the brief I was given. If I had been Barack Obama’s speechwriter and a speech that I had written gained him a standing ovation and led to him being praised for his eloquence and getting into the White House I would not feel frustrated that he received the glory rather than me, I would simply be pleased that my speech had done the trick. It’s the same with books.’
There are, I believe, more
positives to being invisible than negatives. While there are always moments when everyone fantasises about being feted and adored, nominated for prizes and fawned over on chat shows, there is also a great deal of comfort in not being someone who had hoped for such things, only to be disappointed. Once I finish a book I can move straight on to another one, immediately immersing myself in a completely new subject and not having to trail around obscure radio stations in the middle of the night to talk about something I wrote a year earlier, or obliged to turn up for bookshop signings only to find that no one is remotely interested. Earning a living as a writer opens you up to enough potential situations for rejection as it is without going out looking for more.
On the subject of Mariella Frostrup, sort of, I was being interviewed at home one day by an outside broadcast team for one of her various bookish television programmes. Asked why I so liked writing in the voices of people of different genders, nationalities and backgrounds to myself, I gave a pat answer which seemed to me like a clever sound bite.
‘I am white, male, middle aged, middle class, middle brow and English-speaking,’ I pontificated to camera. ‘I think the world has heard enough from people like me over the last few hundred years, don’t you? Perhaps it’s time to listen to a few other voices.’
I thought no more of it until the show was aired. I neither saw nor heard any danger signals as I admired the screen version of myself delivering my smart answer. The item ended and the programme returned to the studio, where Mariella was sitting with Peter James, a kind friend and enormously successful author, and Robert Harris, the man who had so generously quoted me in his ghostwriting thriller.
‘So, gentlemen,’ the mischievous Mariella began, ‘Andrew Crofts thinks we’ve heard enough from white, male, middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow English-speaking authors … what do you say to that?’
I thought both the white, male, middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, English-speaking writers were extremely forgiving under the circumstances.
The Pope’s secret mistress
‘Who would you most like to work with if you could choose?’ people ask.
I’m not sure I can answer that because the best stories are always the ones you know nothing about until they arrive in your inbox. If someone is already known to you well enough for you to want to work with them on their life story, the chances are you already know a lot about them. Unless they are going to reveal some completely new and secret side to their story it would not be particularly interesting to spend several months of your life on it.
It would have been fun to have been given the access that Andrew Morton had to Princess Diana when she decided to talk for the first time about the realities of being part of the royal family, but revelations that dramatic from people who are already heavily scrutinised by the media are very rare indeed.
The most interesting stories are the ones that come as complete surprises.
‘Hi, I am the Pope’s secret mistress,’ would be an opening line that would definitely catch my attention.
A writer’s pit
I suspect I am not alone in needing to have a small room or cave all to myself, somewhere where dust can accumulate like tumbleweed and papers can stack up around me with no concession to either logic or the ‘paperless office’. Some writers have sheds, some convert spare bedrooms. My cave was originally a game larder and has the vital ingredient of having windows knocked through three of its walls. Without compulsory daylight there would always be the temptation to opt for hibernation during the bleakest months of winter.
I dare say this primal need for privacy and dominion over a small space started in the womb, was fed by an only-childhood with parents who pretty much left me to my own devices in my bedroom as long as I didn’t do anything to actually damage the fabric of the house, and came to fruition at my public school where our small studies were actually known as ‘pits’.
I recently visited one of the few remaining monasteries in England, the spires of which I could once see from the windows of the game larder (the garden has since grown up to screen them), and was shocked by how much I was reminded of school by the monks’ cold and spartan cells.
It was in that school pit, which can’t have been more than six foot by six foot, that I hid myself away behind a locked door with an upright typewriter in order to bash out my first novel when I should have been studying for A levels. Although that book was never published (no surprises there), I was unknowingly taking the first step on a career path that has lasted ever since.
Recently my adult pit became so cluttered and grubby that my wife launched a pre-emptive strike. I had flown down to the Uganda/Rwanda border for a long weekend of interviewing so she knew I was safely out of the house. She went in like a one-woman television makeover team, replacing stained and ragged carpeting with polished wooden flooring, crumbling cardboard boxes with elegant rows of files. The children stood and watched her labours as she assembled new office furniture late into the night and issued dire warnings about how displeased I would be when I returned to find my sanctuary invaded in this way.
Returning to find my private world transformed was indeed disorienting (especially after a long overnight journey back from the heart of Africa), but at the same time liberating. I felt like I had finally been promoted into an adult world. I gloried in the newly created order and cleanliness despite an illogical nervousness that I would not be able to find vital pieces of paper at moments of importance (I would never have been able to find them anyway in the previous chaos).
Gradually, however, to my shame, I have to confess that the clutter and the dust have returned to cover the clean and polished surfaces, reverting it to a state no different to how it was when I was 16 and avoiding the real world in my pit at school.
Who moved my nuts?
‘Have you nicked my glasses cleaning cloth?’ I demanded.
‘What glasses cleaning cloth?’ my wife replied without bothering to look up from her Sudoku puzzle.
‘The one I keep on my desk. The really nice big one.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
I decided to leave it. I would catch her out later, polishing her glasses when she thought I wasn’t looking. I missed having the cloth within immediate reach whenever I was working and suddenly noticed finger-marks on my glasses. It had also been particularly good for polishing computer and iPad screens.
There are certain things that need to be in the right place so that you don’t have to go looking for them and break your concentration while in full creative flow. The most important of these things is a steady supply of nuts and raisins for those moments when sudden pangs of hunger strike and there is no immediate prospect of a meal. That was why I was even more peeved a few days later to find that someone had moved some of my nuts from the open jar and secreted them in a small drawer where I keep paper and calling cards.
‘Have you been moving my nuts?’ I asked, less sure that this accusation sounded credible.
This time she thought it worth looking up. ‘Are you mad?’ she enquired in a voice that suggested she had already decided what the answer was. ‘You’ve probably got mice.’
‘If I had mice I would have seen signs of droppings,’ I replied, indignant at the very thought. ‘Why would I get mice?’
‘Because you leave your nuts lying all over the place.’
I refused to continue with the conversation and my certainty that I was being targeted in some subtle hate campaign was reinforced a few days later when someone severed the lead on my headphones and dropped the earpieces into the open jar of nuts. This, it seemed to me, was now turning into one of those movies where Michael Douglas ends up being attacked with a knife. Even my wife could see that this latest development was intriguing.
‘You must have mice,’ she said categorically. ‘I told you, you need to clean up in there.’
‘There are no droppings,’ I insisted, certain that man-the-hunter would know if he was being invaded by
wild life. ‘And anyway the cat would have got them.’
‘The cat is too deaf to hear a dog in clogs coming these days,’ she pointed out. ‘You can’t rely on her.’
The following morning I came into the office to find the cat deeply asleep on my chair and an alarmingly well-nourished mouse staring at me from on top of my keyboard. Although he seemed in no hurry to leave I still failed to get him before he vanished through an impossibly small hole in the skirting board, at which point the cat deigned to wake up and stretch luxuriantly. In my search for my prey I opened drawers that hadn’t been opened for some time, revealing my favourite glasses cleaning cloth, shredded into bedding and shaped into a cosy nest.
I had been made a laughing stock and my revenge was fast and effective (thanks to B&Q), with 12 of the invaders dead within days and my nuts secured beneath a tight fitting lid. My wife kindly refrained from gloating.
‘Everyone says it would make a great movie’
So often people decide they want to write a book because what they actually want to do is make a film. Who wouldn’t prefer to have their story up in lights over Leicester Square rather than sitting on a table in Waterstones with a hundred other stories? Think of the premieres, the hanging out with film stars and the courting by the Hollywood executives.
It is a wonderful dream and anyone who investigates it will soon be told that it would be better to start with a book and then sell the rights, since every man, woman and both their dogs is trying to flog scripts to Hollywood, Bollywood and the BBC, and other outlets far too numerous to mention. That is when they start looking around for a ghostwriter to get them started.
Confessions of a Ghostwriter Page 17