‘Are these all of them?’
‘Everything that is left is here, but not for long.’
She shuffles some frail pages.
‘I replied to Mr V only a few times. He did not want replies in 1987 any more than he had in 1962. My one attempt to answer a question he posed about the world’s oldest parrot fossil (found a few hundred yards from his front door) produced a fusillade of abuse. He wrote like a man with a gun, “fire and forget” as the missile men of Marconi used to say.’
21.5.14
Miss R is calmer this morning, her hands almost still and retracted neatly from sight. She has time. Perhaps she knows she is in the right place. Her new patience is like my own in these days of limbo.
Next on her list is Ronnie Millar, my man ‘who put the words in Mrs Thatcher’s mouth’.
‘Was he a friend to David Hart?’
‘Ronnie said so, especially at the start.’
Miss R says nothing more until she asks with her most mechanical voice, crossing her legs, tapping her feet, like a moving mannequin in a shop window: ‘When did you first see Sir Ronald?’
That is the question on her list, the one she should have asked before.
‘It was at the end of 1980 in my second year as a journalist’, I reply.
‘This was two years after I first met David but well before I had any power, indeed before there was any likelihood of that. I was still not yet thirty. It would be six years before the newspapers moved to this watery patch of London and I moved to the “executive Mezzanine”. Yes, I was on the other side of town then and, as it seems today, on the other side of time.’
‘Ronnie Millar was my earliest guide into the court of Margaret Thatcher. When I first spoke to him it was on his sixty-fourth birthday, only a year older than I am now, and he said that he had her on the piano. He later somewhat changed that story. He did sometimes change his stories. But the time of my telephone call to him is clear in my diary, the afternoon of his birthday, November 12th,1980, and he had absolutely no idea then who I was.’
‘I was sure of that. Unlike David he had not sought me out. At breakfast I had seen his name on the Court and Social pages of The Times. As the Prime Minister’s speechwriter he had won an official eminence that plays and films had never brought him. Later, at lunchtime, I shared a bottle of white wine with a fellow reporter, both of us anxious about where our next story (though, in those opulent days, not our next bottle) might come from. That afternoon I looked up the name Millar, R in the telephone directory, a source then of contact details inconceivable today, and called to wish him Many Happy Returns.’
‘A lilting voice immediately mentioned Mrs Thatcher and the piano. I said that I was pleased that she was sitting on the instrument and not under it. There was a pause, then a light sound that I optimistically took for laughter: “My dear, we’ve been rolling around on the carpet for an hour”. I asked if I might come round and talk for a birthday hour about life, work and Prime Ministers. Absolutely, came the reply. Why not right now?’
‘Two hours later he had given me some jokes and stories that I could use in the Sunday Times and many more that I could not. For my reporter’s notebook he rejected any suggestion that he and “dear Margaret” were like characters from Private Lives: “I mean to say, we don’t roll on the floor while a record player blares out ‘Some day I’ll find you’”.’
Sir Ronald Millar
‘I pointed out, politely I hoped, that he was the one who had made the comparison. He spoke about her the whole time as though she were the star of his Robert and Elizabeth or Abelard and Heloise, one of his once famous musicals, a singing poet or nun. He treated me as though I were still some sort of theatre critic: what did I think, how could she improve, why was the rest of the cast so jealous and useless? I don’t think that he had then met many journalists. We drank the champagne that she had sent round, snipping the dark blue bow around the bottle’s neck with nail scissors.’
Miss R frowns. She is becoming anxious again. She begins to look as though she has been in the same position too long, her legs in tight trousers today and splayed over old Oxford lectures.
‘You’ve told interviewers this before’, she says.
There is a mild menace in her tone.
‘I am saying only what I remember’, I reply.
‘You mean, what you have said before to other people?’
‘Partly, but also what I wrote in my notes.’
‘Has anyone else ever seen those notes?’
‘No.’
‘Did Sir Ronald talk much about himself?’, she asks.
‘I have told you all I can remember. I’m sure that I was drunk’, I say, ‘and so was he. It was his birthday.’
The mention of drink makes me want a drink now. I would like to offer Miss R a glass of wine but Wapping has always been hostile to wine. Office alcohol was one of the vices that in 1986 the new world of newspapers was meant to leave behind.
We sit against the darkening sky, each of us with a plastic cup of water.
‘Ronnie never gave much of his privacy away’, I say, ‘not even when we were alone. He had a preference for personal discretion that contrasted sharply with his indiscretion about others, the MP whose philandering would always keep him from the Thatcher court, the minister who collected miniature spirit bottles and had tried to interest Margaret in this enthusiasm.’
‘With some difficulty I learned about his schooldays at Charterhouse. This was Charterhouse in Surrey, successor to the London site occupied by numbered pensioners where we said goodbye to Richard Brain. With even more difficulty I learnt how in 1940 Ronnie had been a classicist at King’s College, Cambridge (his fees paid by a secret benefactor) before first, Her Majesty’s navy and secondly, Her Majesty’s Theatre had claimed him as their own.’
‘He approved of secret gifts?’
‘Yes, so did Seneca. They were the purest kind’.
‘His first political speechwriting was for “Mr Heath”, two words always spoken softly at this time, but his commitment to the art came with “Margaret”. His voice was low that very first afternoon. The piano was silent. His mother was asleep in the second bedroom.’
‘On his bookshelves were three copies of Sophocles’ Antigone in Greek (one of them marked up phonetically for the actor playing the part of Creon, the wicked uncle), some blue-and-white scripts of his own musicals, a paperback of the Satyricon in English, the copy now here in my office, and two OCTs, both bound in blue leather, some of the Cicero speeches that have long been deemed “improving” in certain sorts of schools and some of Seneca’s letters and plays that mostly have not.’
I look down into a large brown box and pull out an Oxford Classical Text to show her what I mean by an OCT, a severe volume of Latin without a word of English encouragement. I add that on the lid of Sir Ronald’s piano, reflected in the black polished wood, was a photograph of Britain’s first female Prime Minister in a silver frame.’
‘For the next seventeen years, as he grew ever closer to his “Margaret”, we spoke every week, sometimes several times a week. And yes, he and David seemed to be friends as well as allies at the start.’
‘When did you first notice them together?’
I am beginning to anticipate Miss R’s questions before she poses them? I reply quickly.
‘It was in the Falklands War. This was the event, more than thirty years ago now, that saved Margaret Thatcher’s career. It was also the first event that alerted me to your four courtiers, the ones who became my Senecans, how they worked together, how they did not and how sometimes they failed to know the difference.’
22.5.14
Miss R has found the Seneca pile. She opens a battered red book, a Loeb edition of essays, and reads the titles of the chapters aloud.
‘On the Value of Advice, On the Usefulness of Basic Principles, On the Vanity of Mental Gymnastics, On Instinct in Animals, On Obedience to the Universal Will.’
She speaks mockingly w
ith pauses as though waiting for me to stop her.
‘Which of these is your favourite? Did the Senecans have a favourite?’
‘The Senecans did not yet exist, not as a group’, I tell her. ‘You are losing your chronology.’
She looks anxious as though that is what she has been particularly instructed not to lose.
‘At the beginning of April, 1982, Millar and Hart were still merely separate names in the contacts book of a political reporter. I knew as little about their contact with each other as I did about the Falklands. They knew nothing of the Falklands either. No one did.’
‘But the Argentine invasion of our South Atlantic islands was unexpected, embarrassingly so for the beleaguered Thatcher Government. The Prime Minister might either be blamed for allowing an enemy in or praised for throwing an enemy out. Who could know which? There were suddenly big prizes on offer to those who learned to care about South Georgia, those who could appreciate what a transforming story this might be. Millar and Hart lacked nothing in “animal instinct”.’
‘Yes, I see. Which animal were you?’
‘You decide. Generally I prefer birds.’
‘I had moved on a bit since that day in 1980 when I first wished Ronnie his many happy returns. I had risen from the reporter’s room of the Sunday Times on the Gray’s Inn Road into the job of leader-writer and factotum editor at The Times next door. This brought with it a junior observer’s position at Margaret Thatcher’s court. I was lucky. I argued about M1 and M3 and other ‘money supply targets’ with motorway names. I knew about the throw-weight of missiles that might threaten Moscow.’
‘On the afternoon that war began I was also one of many journalists still trying to find the Falklands in an atlas. Our designer had a book of penguins from which he was hoping to produce illustration for the empty sea. The islands themselves, numerous and spread throughout the unexamined pages, were hard to discern. Some of the names were in Spanish, some in an obscure numerology. No one cared. There was a much more important football World Cup in the offing and the Princess of Wales was for the first time pregnant.’
Miss R presses her elbows to her knees, leaning forward as though this is my first fact of real interest.
‘One ordinary morning Charles Douglas-Home set off grumpily for the Ministry of Defence. My Editor at this time had a limited patience with officialdom, a limp and a lump on his head, the latter two signalling the cancer that would kill him just before we left for Wapping. Before he left the office there were other anxieties on his mind too, the imminent visits of the Pope and President Reagan, Margaret Thatcher’s maladministration of her own policies, her equally imminent electoral defeat, and the health of his cousin, the Princess.’
‘By the time that he returned, his limp renewed as an uneven stride, there was only one issue. We were “all Falklanders now”.’
‘Obedience to the Universal Will?’, says Miss R coldly.
‘On Fleet Street even those who despised principles on principle discovered righteousness and self-righteousness with precise simultaneity. In the newsroom we just had to find out precisely where all “we Falklanders” were supposed to be living. It was all quite comic before sailors began to die’.
‘Yes’, she says.
23.5.14
The stage below is shifting as though for some new scene, maybe a new act. The protected trees around the pit are now part of a fence. The wooden boxes were moulds for concrete cubes and have fallen away. I was wrong last week. There are no new trees. There never were any new trees, only posts. The site of the pit now holds a cage for what is perhaps a particularly valuable JCB. A picket could still hit it with a carefully lobbed bottle.
This time, for the first time, I am looking from my window at the right time and can see Miss R walking towards me, watch her pick her way past the relics, watch her taking photographs, talking into a phone. She has the shoulders and colours today of a toy figure, a poster-paint postman on my old Essex train set, bright blue between the square red plant of Lego and our Rum Store, a plastic model farm.
‘Two years ago I was in Argentina myself’, I begin, taking the initiative after ten minutes of her desultory sifting through books and papers. She puts down her notes. She does that when I abandon her chronology.
‘Three decades on’, I report as though to a newspaper news desk, ‘there are still Falklands protests, “Fuerza CFK” protesters supporting Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, a President who likes to compare herself for glamour with Margaret Thatcher and John F. Kennedy, while decrying their views. They wave their placards at everyone whom they deem to be British, a group that, on the morning I was there, included a Danish couple, their small dog and a thin Canadian with a Father Christmas outfit in a carrier bag.’
‘There are also balsa trees’, I add.
She grimaces.
‘Inside the army museum there is a map on the wall of the Salas Islas Malvinas which would have been very useful to us at The Times in 1982. It is not a very big Sala, more of a corridor between massive celebrations of victories against nineteenth-century Brazilians. On one side there is a boy’s bedroom of plastic aircraft, Mirages and Lightnings, on puppet strings. On the other a glass case contains three blue-ribboned medals, a model Mercedes truck and a green bottle of Tierra de Malvinas dry mud.’
She closes her eyes.
‘A sign to the toilets leads the careless eye away from a sailor’s hat with the name General Belgrano, a bright colour photograph of a warship and the names of 323 “heroes” who were drowned when Margaret Thatcher ordered torpedoes against a “fleeing enemy”. A plastic Sea Harrier completes the scene. The sinking of the Belgrano was Millar-Hart-and-Wyatt’s first joint move in my direction, May 2-5, 1982.’
Miss R opens her eyes, picks up her book again and begins to write. She has a curious knack of asking for explanation without saying a word. I give the answer that I think she wants.
‘The British Task Force (a curious name that for reasons unknown had attached itself to the available ships of the Royal Navy) had by early May, after many a nervous moment, reached its distant destination. The diplomats were in disarray. The war had begun. A torpedo in the side of the battle cruiser, Belgrano, a ship in the wrong place at the wrong time, seemed a reasonable response to reasonable fears.’
She makes an electronic note. I am back on the right lines.
‘News of the sinking arrived slowly. Slowly too there emerged awkward questions about our target’s position. This was not a total war. Diplomacy still decreed its wrong and rights. Those who knew about ‘rules of engagement’, including the newspapers’ Defence Correspondents and their friends at the Ministry, said that the Belgrano was outside the combat zone and moving away from the Task Force at the time, that the attack was a disgrace, should never have happened, that admirals’ hats should roll, ministers too.’
‘There were politicians in all parties who hoped that a sunken ship might even sink the Prime Minister. My first call was from a Labour friend, ringing to explain how helpful this former cruiser could be to her cause. She was not a senior figure. Her name was Jenny Jeger, the J in ‘G, J, W’ a newly fashionable company formed by a young Socialist, Liberal and Tory to lobby on behalf of companies.
‘Individually these three were not important: G, a languid Liberal of the then dominant Scottish aristocratic kind; J, a bouncy niece of a battle-hard Labour aunt and MP; W, a witty art collector who had worked for Ted Heath. But together they represented what was still the orthodoxy of all party elders, a yearning for the days before Margaret Thatcher was invented, a return to normality that could surely not be far away and that a war crime in a botched war might bring closer.’
‘In Margaret Thatcher’s inner court this was a problem. Millar and Hart were just two of those who had the task of telephoning the press, pioneer Falklandistas, part of a campaign of military precision to ensure us that the experts were wrong, that the Belgrano was an acute danger to our sailors, that it was ‘zig-zagging’ t
o evade pursuit. How could anyone tell in what north, south, east or west was its due destination?’
‘When Ronnie called his voice was more than usually like Noel Coward’s, strained in the intensity of the role he thought might impress me most, the patrician head of an Oxford college, disappointed in the cleverness of his charge. He said loftily that I should see our ships as scholarships and that, if I did so, I might better prize their survival.’
‘Beware the vanity of mental gymnastics’, says Miss R softly.
‘Yes, that was more or less what he was trying to say.’
‘David Hart, decades younger, fit and full of purpose, was on a slightly different track. He arrived at the front door of The Times in an armoured car. SAS colonel? Cruise-ship crooner? He attracted suspicious newsroom attention.’
‘Once behind brown wooden doors he was calm and confidential. He had already advised the Prime Minister that a major Argentine ship needed to be sunk. It was what the people wanted on “the street”, those beyond the political class, the football fans who, when Britain played Argentina, wanted a result. He wanted one or two aircraft too, definitely more than one, a black eye for “Johnny Dago”, a carefully calibrated black eye.’
‘“The sinking should be cause for celebration”, he confided in a whisper. “GOTCHA” ran the first-edition headline of the Sun when the news arrived. There was also, of course, the very serious threat to the Task Force from the Belgrano, the ease with which a ship might launch weapons while appearing to be in flight and the fact that, as a man of scholarship (was that the only kind of ship I cared for?), I should know better than anyone about the Parthian shot, the arrow shot from horseback by enemies of Rome in a seeming retreat.’
‘David did not deliver his message as succinctly as Ronnie had. But the taunt and purpose were the same. Later on the same day our columnist, Woodrow Wyatt, followed their lead. Between them they ensured that The Times saw the issue as it was meant to be seen, while avoiding any tasteless triumphalism that might trouble our readers.’
The Senecans Page 7