She looks quizzically.
‘Yes, I know that this is a bad sentence; Frank advised against ending any sentence with a preposition; so did the late Richard Brain of the TLS and so does the style guide of The Times. But ‘hit by’, positioned for emphasis, purposefully out of its proper position in the way that Latin allows, suits a memory of David’s head very well.’
‘I first saw him as a reflection, an image in the wood of a dining room table, in a house where he could throw walnuts into the gardens of Buckingham Palace. I was late and he was already sitting with his back to a mahogany door, black hair cropped short, broad neck bound in a red napkin, talking to his butler, looking like some prosperous communist propagandist, the kind imagined by novelists when Marxism was in its youth.’
‘I sat down next to him (there were only two chairs) and he thrust his head towards me, the bristles on his brow almost on the bridge of my nose. He began with paintings by Walter Sickert, bought by his father, he said, who had beaten Lord Beaverbrook for them, none costing more than £200, one of them connected in some way to the Camden Town murder of 1907. He affected surprise that I had not heard of this great news event of its time, the throat-slitting of a prostitute, a Jack-the-Ripper story but from west not east.’
‘I nodded with minimum commitment. His Sickerts seemed a well trodden path of conversation, the first of many such paths as I came to discover. David liked best what was familiar to him but exotic to others. He moved on to D. H. Lawrence (perhaps he thought this would give a better impression) and about belief belonging to “the blood” not the “fribbling intervention of mind” (which merely made me think he was mad). Then came the subject of traitors and “tagging” and how, if he did not trace and track down the subversives in the political departments of the press – “not excluding The Times” – the chances of Margaret Thatcher coming to power were even less than conventional wisdom decreed.’
‘I smiled at him. I was merely a reader of The Times back then. Lunch for the two of us was a pyramid of roast birds and bright vegetables. It seemed impossible to me that a quail or an artichoke or quince could be removed without the structure’s collapse. But a shaven-headed boy filled our plates and nothing fell. David had a silver toothpick and a thin grey dog that he said was a lurcher.’
‘After this first time we remained friends till his death in January 2011. When I was powerful he was a pest. When he was a friend in need he was also a pest. But he was a very special pest and I was fond of him.’
‘He was physically strong, recognisably so in rooms where most were writers, well able to lift an enemy or a bale of hay until in the last decade of his life he was gradually wasted by disease and could barely lift an eyebrow.’
‘As a narrator of the truth he was frail, a fuzzy presenter of his own past even as he was a very precise observer of the present that we came to share. So I am sure that he was right about where the Wapping missiles went. Many of the throwers at that part of the line were clerical workers and journalists. There must be many a reminder in that pit of sharpened iron and glass, some of it hurled in anger, most discarded in fear.’
‘David pretended much of his knowledge but he did understand dissent. Unless it was his own he was against it. He made a speciality of finding Margaret Thatcher’s enemies. He came to know her through one of her favourite think tanks, the Centre for Policy Studies. He befriended its most radical members. He was resilient to failure, sending to her short speeches and thoughts for speeches, accepting that lesser, closer courtiers would keep them from her until from time to time he broke through.’
‘When I first wrote about politics this softly moustachioed Mr Hart was the most belligerent, bull-headed, most vehement, viscerally political man I had then met. I had not seen such raging certainty for twenty years.’
Miss R lowers her head towards her notes, murmuring a query without looking at me.
‘That first man of certainty was the right-wing Essex father of my left-wing Essex girlfriend or, to be strictly honest, the girl I most wanted to be my friend. He need not be part of your story. He and David, for all their shared frustrations with the world, could never possibly have met.’
She pushes her pen into her paper, pulls it back and points for me to go on.
‘David believed most of all in battling an enemy to the end’, I tell her, returning to the former field of conflict in front of our eyes.
‘Thus Wapping was something of a disappointment to him. Except on Saturday nights when the pickets’ enemies, police horses mostly, felt the force of ball-bearings and darts, this was a mostly peaceful show. No newspaper worker, he would wistfully complain, wanted to be caught with an object that might be interpreted as a Molotov cocktail. It was much safer to toss a Coke bottle over the low part of the car park wall, where the pit has now appeared, than to risk its association with someone else’s cottonbud fuses or four-star fuel’.
‘A Molotov, said David as though he had known the inventor personally, was much more appropriate as a talking point at Wapping than as a protest weapon. Despite sharing the same streets as the battles against the blackshirts of the 1930s and the dock-owners of the 1960s – or with the Thatcher government elsewhere over the coal mines – ours was fundamentally a war about print. It was a war for talkers. Many among the pickets could have passed a Part One degree course in Molotov Studies. Few, David suspected, had ever thrown one.’
‘The chief risk for the printers was of misinterpretation. The Metropolitan Police, or “Maggie’s army” as the pickets jeered, might easily confuse a trade unionist who wanted his hereditary job back with an armed man seeking Socialism. That was a real risk. Mr Hart was just one of those keen to misinterpret the picketers if they could. He used to send in articles for publication in The Times, perfectly typed in 22-point Times New Roman on handmade paper, exposing communists in the newsrooms of other newspapers.’
‘Back in 1984, in the high days of the Right after Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory, he turned the Miners’ strike into an ideological war. He has received due credit (and disgust) for that.’
Miss R interrupts coldly. ‘Yes, there is going to be a play called Wonderland about him.’
‘Is there? I don’t know.’
She looks pleased.
‘In 1986 he wanted Wapping to be like the coal mines. If a picket could be demonised as a petrol-bomber he or she would be. But David always knew when he was struggling. He loved life’s extremes. He was sometimes a fool. In his shorts and flat cap he often looked like a fool. But Wonderland would be the wrong word. He was not a deluded fool.’
‘There were varieties of extremists on both sides of our battlefield. David was on the side of ‘freedom to print’. He always wanted the word ‘freedom’ in his causes. The other side fought for the freedom of trade unions, manipulating language from the other edge of politics, anarchists who played arsonist at night, those who saw newspapers as full of capitalist lies that only print-unions should profit from printing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, it was very profitable for the unions to have monopoly rights to print the very articles they deemed politically unacceptable.’
She taps her feet in impatience.
‘Hereditary monopoly rights were a fact for many print-workers, jobs handed down the generations. Yes, it was unpleasant to pass the picket lines. But many who abused us for entering the ‘Great Wapping Lie Factory’ were like any other heirs to a good thing. Yes, they scratched our cars and called us “scabs” but they were prosperous protesters, enjoying their anger, and did not want anyone to think otherwise for very long.’
‘Pickets came and went for the shortest shifts before resuming their work as teachers, taxidrivers or minders of other newspapers’ machinery. David Hart was not the only temporary attender on the line, not the only demo-tourist who, twenty eight years ago, was standing on the ground below us.’
‘And as I remember now, it was David’s plan that I too should
find a black leather jacket and woollen hat and pretend to be a protester for a while. He thought it was feeble to be so close to a historic event and not to get in among it.’
‘During the Miners’ strike he had got “snow on his boots” and learned directly what was being said and done ‘on the street’. That was when he adopted his David Lawrence name as suitable for the Nottinghamshire coalfields. He had travelled hundreds of miles and thought it ridiculous that I wouldn’t venture out a hundred feet.’
‘I refused at first. In 1986 I was Charles Wilson’s deputy, in charge of leaders and opinion and much else. I had a lot to lose from the misrepresentation of such a mission. If it were so important, why was David Hart himself only so occasionally among the pickets? He was too well known now, he said, thinly attempting to convey sadness as well as pride. I didn’t want to be a spy, I argued. He replied that I wouldn’t be spying, I would be seeing.’
‘I gave way and on one Thursday night in June I was down there in jacket and hat. Thursdays were always quiet. The protesters were saving their strength for the weekend, lobbing only the sporadic bottle of green glass, Fantas and 7Ups, all of them probably already excavated now from the pit down below, historical evidence of a kind though unlikely to have been recognised as such by the excavators.’
‘I was sure I was being watched. I looked around nervously for anyone whom I knew or who might know me. I was so nervous that I hallucinated almost everyone I had ever known, from Left and Right, friends and enemies of my father, my first girlfriend, my first would-be girlfriend, Latin teachers, fellow journalists from Oxford and the BBC. Afterwards I don’t recall telling anyone, certainly not Frank Johnson who thought that David was absolutely mad, that I was too influenced by his madness and our idea of what we called history almost wholly deceptive.’
Frank preferred only the grandest historical themes and Wapping, he said, ‘would never be one of those’.
12.5.14
Today the pit has gone. There is only a small pile of bricks, stones and demonstrators’ rubble on what before the weekend was the short side of a possible pond. Perhaps the developers have already buried what they wanted to bury, or unburied it, or tested for pollution or pollutants, or done the minimum required to prove that there are no remains of earlier settlement here, no shackles of Napoleon’s prisoners of war, no Tudor tokens or relics of the Roman trade in dogs. Whatever they have done they have done it quickly.
13.5.14
Don’t think I spend all of my time staring at diggers and dumpers. I read book reviews, I edit pages. Yesterday afternoon I was a mile away from here on Fleet Street at a Memorial Service, remembering a man who never passed through those old Wapping gates, one of my very first newspaper bosses, an editor from the old Sunday Times who stayed outside when the time came for the then new age.
Ron Hall, an opera-loving mathematician, a master of headlines and Greek wine, worked for Harold Evans, the revered editor who gave me my first newspaper job. Those who praised Ron bemoaned what happened here in 1986. We sang rousing hymns and remembered what newspapers were like two revolutions ago.
These were the journalists, judged then and since as the greatest of their kind, scourges of political scandal, the kind whom Woodrow Wyatt, flatterer of the powerful, and Frank Johnson, comic master of parliament, liked least, the kind whose influence on me and The Times they disliked even more. In some ways I wish that Frank and Woodrow had been there. We could have had more of the conversations we used to have about what journalism was for. But they would not have been there even if they were alive.
From a polished pew I watched grey re-enactments of my earliest days as a journalist in our pre-Wapping home, young meteors now old, men and women with the same ways of mocking, sniping and sniffing, softer in some cases but not in all. In the latecomer’s seats I thought I saw Miss V, my oldest friend, that girl who never quite became a girlfriend, daughter of that first man of the Right I ever knew. I could not be sure.
It was quite possible that she might have been there. Those journalist giants of their age were the first who knew me outside of Essex and Oxford also to know Miss V, a regular visitor to our disputatious newspapers, supporting the trade union side as she had always done when we were young.
16.5.14
On a rainless afternoon the outlines of the pit below are visible again. Beside them is the yellow JCB which dug and returned the earth. Seen from up here, the rectangle has returned, the proof of how aerial archaeology works, by the watching of clay dry. The light is so bright that the two lines of fir trees between the fence and the former hole are of sharply different colours, the one of them lit pale and melon green, the other shadowed like deep forest.
I will miss everything about this view when we are finally removed to our next new home. No one again will ever see it as it is now. The eastern sky of churches and tower blocks, will remain. But the sometime home of the Sun newspaper, the News of the World, the Sunday Times and The Times has today started to fall. The days of dust and preparation are over. The ‘plant’ has begun its collapse to the ground, mingling thin white dust with the air and thistledown of Spring.
18.5.14
Miss R arrives early this morning. She goes straight to the white chair I have brought in from outside and puts her red cap down beside it. The piles for the removal men do not worry her now. She separates her own piles, notes the plastic match between her seat and her wristband, picks up a book, flicks through some papers, looks at some photographs of me in fat men’s suits.
‘When did you first hear of Seneca?’
It is as though she is talking about Thatcher, Millar or Hart. She asks her standard question. She checks the piles of books and notes, the spilling brown-inked letters, the variously labelled Seneca files.
Is the man from Cordoba on her list? I am ever more used to answering her now. She seems to know some of my answers before I give them. But then she is a researcher. She has done research.
‘I first heard of Seneca on the same day that I first saw him.’
She lowers her chin like a satisfied teacher.
‘I saw him when I was still a child. He was made of wood but no less frightening to an eleven-year-old for that.’
‘Go on.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m sure. We have time. I want it all.’
I look out of the window. I point down the river, calling out a catalogue of place names, listing dots on the map before the Thames becomes the sea, the Wapping Canal, Isle of Dogs and Millennium Dome, Tilbury, Grangemouth, Southend, a twist to the north to Walton-on-the-Naze, a place of bungalows, breakwaters, bingo, beaded net curtains and balsa wood.
‘I’ll begin with the balsa.’
Miss R sits back. Everything that happens in this story began in Walton, the seaside town that throughout my Essex childhood was neither Clacton (rough with dodgem rides and slot machines) nor Frinton (too posh, not even a pub) and thus the place that my parents might comfortably take me. Without my experience in Walton I might not have experienced Wapping or Cordoba at all.
‘So yes, in 1962, the year when I first saw Seneca beside the sea, it was the wood called balsa that began it all, the soft, pale wood that grows like weed in South America but to me was the precious material of models, of aircraft, boats and castles. Anyone then could make a car, an abbey, a jet plane, a place of inquisition from balsa. Mr V, the father of my twelve-year-old friend V did exactly that, although he did not show all of his work to her, only to me.’
‘This V was the girl with whom I was then trying to spend most of my time. Because V was her name I knew her parents by the same initial. She wore pale skirts above pale knees, wide belts and a necklace with a single agate stone. If I had been more free I would have followed her like a dutiful dog. As a dutiful schoolboy I tried to follow her as best I could.’
‘It was a wet Sunday in May, a day like today, pebble-dash dampened by warm rain, old ladies on their way to the Odeon, inky clouds over t
he nasal peninsula that gives the town its name. East London is part of the east of England, the part where I was born but do not live now. On the east side is where this story stays.’
‘Seneca was, as I saw him first, as real as any of the players in my story when they were alive, even more equal now. In his same first scene in the same pale room behind the same covered windows, like every horror-comic hero from a childhood, Seneca has stayed the same.’
She picks up a pile of letters and sifts them through her hands.
‘So this is how it was and still is. My wooden Seneca is a Roman in his early sixties, about the same age as I am now, though heavier in the face than the self whom you have come to see, sun-blasted, dark-eyed, shocked, a frightened man who is used to frightening others, a rich man who wants to be less rich, suddenly much less rich, an artist who has prospered by giving political advice but who no longer expects either to prosper or to advise.’
‘On the face of this Seneca there is damp and cold in every crevice, fear visible in the wrinkles that run like wastepipes, right and left, on each side to where his hair grows high above his ears, hidden in the rolls below his chin, only imaginable within his phlegm-filled throat, a man in a crisp white toga that is quickly becoming creased, a man asking a favour while fighting for his life.’
‘Despite the passage of half a century this balsa scene in a library in a model palace is as solid in my mind as is Dockland brick on the ground. The walls are made of boxes the size of matchsticks. There is a tiny chest of overflowing scrolls. The balsa Seneca himself is barely more than a curved stick; with him is a shorter, stout-stomached man, the Emperor Nero. The man who first showed me this creation added parts of speech and speeches to give his human figures life. Without those words I would have known nothing. A knife on balsa, however sharp or subtly used, does not show terror or pride.’
‘In every book about Seneca (and there are dozens of them here about to be boxed and moved, hundreds more in more learned places) the writer explains that the family Annaei came originally from Spain, that the father was a teacher of speechwriting, that the eldest son earned a bit-part in the Acts of the Apostles, a nephew in the history of epic poems but that the middle son became the star, the power-broking artist who swayed the fate of an empire.’
The Senecans Page 5