‘As other guests arrived there was a brief diversion. The subject was the appropriateness at dinner parties of serving good wine at one end of the table and bad wine at the other. Woodrow said he did this all the time. It was fortunate, he said, that young people normally preferred to sit together even if it meant that their champagne was from Sainsbury’s.’
‘Amis said that the practice was fine as long as one’s own position at table was guaranteed at the good end. I said something haltingly about the dinner of Trimalchio and how the satirist, Juvenal, had howled when the rich of Rome tried this trick on their guests. Amis mentioned an awkward incident with an Arab ambassador. I said nothing. Instead I watched our host pour pale wine from old bottles, and listened as he asked if Juvenal and Petronius had parts in I Claudius. He did not recall them there “creeping and poisoning about” but those were the Romans that he liked best.’
Woodrow was a latecomer when we began our Latin lessons at The Old Rose. But he successfully annoyed Frank with the amount he could remember from his schooldays. And he loved Robert Graves. A Roman bestseller, packed with parallels between then and now, was one of the kinds of novels he most wanted to write.’
‘Which Roman “enemy within” was most like Margaret’s “enemy within” and would-be successor, Michael Heseltine? Which bore was most like her early supporter and estranged foe, Sir Geoffrey Howe?’
‘Before I could stumble to an answer, Amis quoted the appropriate wine lines from Juvenal – which made me wish that I had never raised the subject in the first place. Woodrow assured us that we were not to be drinking Sainsbury’s champagne any time soon. Amis grasped nervously at his glass of Scotch and we went in to lunch. This menu too would be committed to his diary.’
‘Afterwards Amis signed the copy of his book on the library table. Woodrow smiled and praised the sagacity of the Booker judges. He was as keen a collector of books as I was, one of our earliest bonds. Most of the recent winners, he said, were rubbish. In the year before The Old Devils the substantial cash prize, satisfyingly free of tax, had gone to a book about a deaf-and-dumb Aboriginal: the money had been collected by a women’s collective, a conga of Maoris creeping around the dinner tables. It had been a fiasco. He thought the prize would never survive it.’
‘And then, why had his friend, the black-haired beauty, Beryl Bainbridge, never won? Maybe “beauty” was not quite the right word for Beryl. She had a simian appeal at best, he said, but sexy, certainly sexy. She also wrote very good books, though not as very good as Kingsley’s, of course. She was a fine painter in oils and charcoal. She was from Liverpool, via Camden, and a “general good thing”.’
‘As I left to return to the office, Woodrow put the signed copy into my hand. I looked surprised. I was surprised – and pleased. The black-ink inscription read “Jolly good lunch and cheers to old Peter, Kingsley Chez WW, 1986”. This was the first, but not the last, time that I was ‘Woodrowed’.’
‘Woodrow mentions in his diary of this lunch Amis’s admission of having given up sex. I did not hear that myself. He also notes the 1964 Cos Labory and the Graves Royal 1947, wines that I drank without discrimination. After that we became almost friends. I did not try to reduce his contributions again, or at least not for another eleven years.’
My ‘first edition’ of The Old Devils is now by Miss R’s feet. She stacks it carefully on one of her piles before getting up to leave.
She is going to miss the main show of destruction today. At Wapping this afternoon, Woodrow’s corridor has already gone. The floor half-carpeted in blue for the most senior managers has gone. The zone with the sign welcoming visitors to Sun Country has gone.
The grandest offices of all are to be crushed by the claws of the highest crane. A man in a blue overall points up to a place in the sky. I am trying to remember the pleasures I took there, the storytelling, the hunts for stories, the successes, the wit and wisdom of friends. Instead I am seeing all the aggrieved subjects of newspapers in the past thirty years who would love to be driving that smash-and-grab machine, would probably pay to be driving it.
‘Just think, Miss R, of all the people who hate the newspapers that were in those offices, sometimes with a reason, often with none.’
She stops. Perhaps for once she is following me rather than leading. She seems keen to leave as fast as she can.
‘Think of the pickets of 1986, the Tories too fond of schoolgirls, the celebrities with mobile phones, the “scroungers”, the Prince of Wales (for reasons, architectural, political and personal), that Karmic football manager, that other football manager whose face was turned into a turnip, the doctors in bed with their patients, the Cabinet ministers who did not have sex in football kit or keep a Miss Whiplash in their basement.’
I cannot remember all their names. All I can see of Miss R now is the back of her tight belted coat as she leaves the room, just like one my mother once had. I am even remembering the rock star who did not surgically silence his guard dogs, who sued, and won a grand apology. I am thinking on and on, of worse and worse, because bringing back bad memories is what the dying of a building, like the dying of a person, seems to do.
12.6.14
‘Margaret Thatcher was not one of those who hated newspapers, not in her high days in power anyway. The Daily Telegraph was her paper of habit and the Daily Mail was a reliable supporter. She also once mentioned to me her reading of Today, a “plucky newcomer in the middle of the market”. This paper, now dead, was edited briefly at Wapping at the time by the fierce Labour Party supporter, Richard Stott, a master of editorial disguise, author of Dogs and Lampposts, soon to be available again in a nearby Oxfam shop.
From the rest of the press her courtiers aimed to manage her moods, ensuring that she should read only the parts that she would like. Columns by Frank Johnson were often in her cuttings file. She best enjoyed sketches that compared her to something conquering and stately, a galleon perhaps or a giant gun.’
Miss R looks surprised. ‘Did she have a sense of humour?’
‘No, she often failed to see Frank’s jokes, but laughter was not what she was looking for. She was not even unusual in that. Most Members of Parliament liked to be sketched by Frank. Unlike a cartoonist he did not exaggerate their thick necks and noses. Any minister who had made a speech might find himself the butt of an extended parody but this was at least some proof that the speech had been made. Even The Times had stopped recording speeches in any other way.’
‘When did you and Frank Johnson first meet?’
This time I snap back at her. A greater variety of approach would be good.
‘Rather than keep asking the same questions, you might do better reading what Frank wrote about Margaret Thatcher herself. He is still a good guide to how she wanted to be seen – as confident, motherly, harder working and farther seeing than the rest of her kind.’
She asks her question again. She has her list and she will not be deviated. She is comfortable and has adopted the two-seater sofa for her own.
So when was it? She has made a strange game for us but I am in it now. I must not be caught out. Frank and I must have ‘brushed by’ one another often after 1978 but when did we first ‘meet’?
I take a longer pause. ‘The date that Frank and I sparred our opening rounds, shadow boxing, the role we came to occupy for the rest of his life, was probably in 1985. I remember the scene if not the precise date. It was another mark in that crowded year before we moved to Wapping, when newspaper revolution was in the air for those keen to sniff it, even if the exact form that it might take was known to very few.’
She makes a note on her SENECA pad.
‘We were both looking out over a different London skyscape at the time, one just as little known to me in detail as the one we are looking out at now.’
‘Are you proud of that?’
‘No, I am not proud. Everyone should know the names of the landmarks outside their windows. It is only polite to be able to do so, to make visitors feel
at home or at least to feel that they are with a host who is at home.’
She looks around the piles of personal and professional relics, the two types indistinguishable among the removal piles.
‘We were at a party on the roof of what “in 1929 had been the tallest office block in London, 55 Broadway, headquarters of London Transport, a masterpiece of Art Deco, all grey limestone and Murano glass with a statue of the West Wind by Henry Moore”. But it required Frank’s companion to tell me that.’
‘Who?’
‘Well, at least he seemed to be Frank’s companion. I knew Frank then only as the wittiest journalist to have ever worked in parliament (thus almost never in the offices of The Times) and as our present Bonn correspondent (posted temporarily abroad at his own request on an assignment for self-improvement). The authority on Murano and Henry Moore turned out instead to be the companion of our party host.’
‘It was a summer night and this very learned visitor from Canada was here looking to “buy properties”. He leant against the roof-garden wall and looked like a pile of gift boxes, battered but expensive cubes loosely tied with string, his square face scouring the skyline ten degrees at a time, naming, turning, naming, turning, naming, turning until he saw the Houses of Parliament where he stopped.’
Miss R turns her own eyes too. So do I. We each embarrass the other.
‘The visitor was challenging Frank or me or anyone to say Big Ben, to embarrass ourselves by naming something so obvious. No one was so foolish as to speak so, in the next ten minutes, Mr Black, who had dressed for the night in the darkest shades of brown, had identified every office, church and tower block that we could see.’
‘It was as though he were responding to questions that he alone had heard. Over there was the glass tower of New Scotland Yard.’
With no sign of thinking Miss R signals student dissatisfaction at a mention of the police.
‘And then there was Falkland House, home base for our watery colony, the Equal Opportunities Commission, from whose clutches all had to be saved, or so said Frank. Mr Black (‘Conrad’ as we were to call him) agreed.’
‘It was thought that this distinguished visitor might soon own the Daily Telegraph, where Frank was once a star. So there was a small crowd around him, individuals trying hard not to be a crowd, who listened as he spoke, laughed at what they hoped was a joke, and worried that the visitor might ask one of them a question about their home city that he could not, or chose not to, answer himself.’
‘The head of London Transport, Keith Bright, an equally polymath businessman, had to parry the most dangerous thrusts. He was the only man I knew in London life who had also known my father as a laboratory colleague in Essex. I very much wished Max Stothard had been with us on the rooftop that night. The two men shared Marconi sports days. We talked about those, the cream cricket flannels, the distinction between engineers and technicians, between the cakes (good) and the sandwiches (poor) which we took at tea.’
‘After fifteen further minutes on top of the capital’s most artful underground station, Frank was firmly in charge of the senior conversation, saying that Henry Moore’s “West Wind” was the finest work on the building but that Jacob Epstein’s “Day” might have come close had it not lost an inch-and-a-half of penis to the censors.’
‘“And what do you think happened to the rest of the penis?” Frank smiled his question. Conrad Black laughed. There was even louder laughter from his circle of listeners. After that Frank and I noticed each other more and more, warily at first, testing each other like boxers, trading insider gossip to impress where we could. He said that he was keeping a diary where one day all would be revealed.’
Miss R is taking lengthy notes now. Occasionally she looks out east where we first looked when she first arrived. There will be no good for her today in playing the Conrad Black game and asking what buildings we can see. Yes, I have worked in this sliver of riverside land for almost thirty years. I ought to know. But most of the time I was in that thin brick warehouse down on the ground. And, even in the best of circumstances, I can understand geography only if I do it as though for an exam. In today, out tomorrow.
As for this particular spot, I am a newcomer. I have been in here, up here, overlooking the Wapping plant site, on the sixth floor of Thomas More Square, for barely more than a year. There has been no time to change the spatial incuriosity of a whole life.
Next month everyone in the TLS, The Times, the Sunday Times and the Sun newspapers is moving west a little, to a new home beside London Bridge Underground Station. One of the titles that came here is missing. Woodrow’s old home at the News of the World has disappeared in recent scandals which, as she quietly makes clear, stand outside Miss R’s period of study.
‘Nothing after 1997 please’, she says, clinging to her calendar.
Outside this window the rubble is piling. The gatehouse has gone. Yellow-jacketed men pick over the flat remains like scavengers on a toxic copper mine, gingerly turning over the relics of security gone by. A small crane eats the few pieces of metal and plastic worth placing in its mouth. The next occupant of this office will not care what was there before. There used to be a grey-box bridge across the cobbles, like a sea-container washed up after a storm. I wonder what happened to that. No one will need to explain this place to visitors, not ever again.
‘And no, Miss R, don’t test me. No, we cannot see the execution grounds where More and so many others met their ends, not unless we go to the other side and look out west towards the underground at Tower Hill. We can see some Hawksmoor churches and their graveyards for exotic trees and birds.’
She makes a querying note.
‘Any grotesque church around here is quite likely to be by Hawksmoor and, unless you are unlucky enough to meet a polymath like Lord Black (O yes, he occupied his newspaper property, and his peerage, before spending a little time in an American gaol), you can reasonably safely pretend.’
‘Look instead at the Highway as it stretches out to the east, the Ratcliff Highway of the old marching songs. Watch for the dry-docked sailing ships that were once supposed to entertain shoppers at Tobacco Dock. There is no point in going back too far (thirty years are enough for me) nor going too far away. Most of what you seem to need happened in the hundred yards I can see without straining or thinking. The Senecans can properly be bade goodbye from here. It is too late to learn the names of the tower blocks now.’
July
To shower bounties on the mob should you delight
Full many you must lose for one you place aright
—ANONYMOUS
Cited by Seneca in On Giving and Getting
9.7.14
This morning Miss R is dressed like a builder or protester, heavily jacketed for a warm day. She has her silver SENECA notebook in her hand, her pen poised to write, when, outside the window, down beside what was briefly in April the pit, a crowd begins to form, a swirl of men, workers in search of the right entrance, a cloud of yellow jackets like bees blown by a wind. Mixed among them stand starkly outlined figures whom we know by name.
The first swings like a drunk between the new trees set in their metal boxes. Then comes another, clasping the black brick wall beneath Thomas Telford’s stencilled alphabet. Further ahead are two men enfolded in polythene wrapping, protection for that part of the plant wall that is not yet ready for felling. Smoke belches sideways into the narrow road. Among the flow of demolition men our class is once again leaving the plant for its Latin lesson, dodging, diving, hiding as it used to do.
The view is not exactly as it would have been in 1987. We rarely all walked together then or even as far apart as the figures are now. Only Frank, Woodrow and I ever walked in Wapping much. Ronnie drove his bronze Rolls Royce and parked it with impunity. David walked only on his own property.
Today the four seem as one with all the other walkers. As the smoke swirls and the plastic billows a ragged line forms, fast at the front, a slower gradual exit for those behind. It
is like closing time at a bar, or the few minutes before the end of a football game when the knowing leave for the car park, or the flight of animals from a forest fire.
David Hart is the first, the most hurried at the head of the line at the farthest end of the narrow cobbled path. Close beside me Miss R is unpacking her case, a blue satchel designed in expensive imitation of schooldays. I have told her much about David already, not all of it good. What to add, if I am asked, now that he is closer?
One thing is for certain, one of rather few certain things about him: of my three metaphors for his exit from the stricken plant he would have accepted only the forest fire. David did not go to football matches or, except for Latin lessons, drink in bars that closed at legally designated times. Yes, he was a “man of the people”, trading forever on his reputation as the representative of popular will; but, no, he did not do many of the things that “men of the people” do.
It was Ronnie, the figure swaying third in the line, who first told me some of things about David that later everyone said: that he was a bankrupt and not to be trusted; that he kept women in different parts of London and was not to be trusted; that he claimed to be a confidante of Margaret Thatcher but was not trusted by her at all, especially not in the election campaign of 1987 when no one was to be trusted; that he hunted crypto-communists in the media, a sport that, while virtuous in intent, was, like communism itself, more effective in theory than practice.
I must remind Miss R that Ronnie was David’s friend. His enemies made charges that were much worse. David did know a lot about a few things, including about animals and forest fires. Piero di Cosimo’s panel landscape of fleeing birds and deer, based on Lucretius’s philosophical Latin poem, De Rerum Natura, was one of his favourite things. He said that if he could steal a single object in the world, that would be the one. In Oxford’s sleepy Ashmolean Museum it would not even be hard.
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