‘Frank could be a careful editor but for the most part he wanted the status more than the work. Like many great writing journalists he had a variable enthusiasm for improving the words of others. My own view of the Telegraph tactic, which I ill-advisedly set out in an office memo, was that it would be better for us if Frank “fucked up” the heart of the opposition paper than ours. But this wisdom was ignored and by May he was working directly for me in The Times’s most sensitive parts, plotting for pleasure every day.’
‘On a good day on the Mezzanine Frank saw me as merely “misguided”, one of his favourite words. He considered that I had made my name by doing exactly that of which he disapproved, reporting hidden facts that Mrs Thatcher and her friends preferred not to be reported. Frank’s fame came, as he liked to see it, from seeing more of what could already be seen, much the more desirable talent.’
‘He prized analysis over investigation – and made it clear that his was the only right way. He liked words in a leader that benefited a good cause. If he deemed an action likely to help a Conservative cause, he would want to do it. If a hundred businessmen wanted to sign a letter to The Times declaring obsequious allegiance to Mrs Thatcher, where was the problem? If a hundred schoolteachers wished to do the same for Labour, we could simply say no. Consistency was an overrated virtue, hardly a virtue at all.’
‘After the Telegraph raid I was Frank’s boss on the letters, leaders and opinion pages. This suited neither of us. Most routine political leaders in The Times in those days were tactical advice for ministers and the Prime Minister about how best to achieve their ends, where they should trim or tack to reach their destination. Frank deemed these to be vulgar, preferring that every point be backed by stated principle and quoted text, from Hobbes or Machiavelli or even John Motley. Turning a draft leader that Frank wrote into what The Times could say was a trial. Frank disliked our arrangements in every respect except that I had Latin and Greek. Maybe he could profit from that.’
‘And Seneca?’ Miss R looks up from a slew of notes within her funereal garb.
‘The choice of our teacher from the past was mine.’
‘Why?’
‘I knew that Frank would like him.’
‘Seneca was good, a realist, a hypocrite when he had to be, a force of moral restraint. Seneca believed in a deity that was everywhere and not too troublesome. So did Frank, who called himself a deist when he talked of his religion at all. Seneca both understood power and used it. He was not a favourite of liberal academe. Many educated people knew nothing about him. He was ideal.’
This morning there is a wrecking-ball hole in that place where there once squatted that skip, where On Giving and Getting began its journey to The Old Rose. Miss R spends the last part of the day among my files and boxes. She is both distracting and helpful. She leaves much later than she promised. She has no funeral to go to. I am beginning to prefer it when she does not promise times at all.
15.7.14
‘At the first lesson with Frank in The Old Rose Ronnie Millar arrived by mistake.’
Miss R looks away. Chance is no use for her ‘Thatcher project’. She wants links and intentions.
‘No, that first group lesson was wholly unplanned. Someone sent Ronnie on to us from the Mezzanine, keen to get rid of him, I suspect. Newspapers hate visitors, just as actors don’t want their audience backstage.’
‘He had “an important message”. He had abandoned his bronze Rolls Royce in the car park where the pond and fake trees are now. It was only a short walk but Ronnie had a very Senecan policy of walking as absolutely little as was necessary. My theatrical friend was somewhat frayed when he finally stepped from the traffic fumes into the bar.’
‘The scene inside was one that Ronnie must often have imagined. East End pubs were a comic cliché and ‘there was nothing wrong with a good cliché, my dear’. No book was so bad that a good line should not be stolen from it. This was the piece of advice from Seneca that he used the most.’
‘The Old Rose was not, however, the kind of commonplace that this West End man had experienced directly. On his right as he stepped through the door was a solitary woman, straight-backed, her hair set like pink cement. On his left was a young man, no less alone, with shiny black hair, gelled as though with tarmac. As Ronnie stumbled, he only barely avoided the need to grip these human supports.’
‘He did better once he was inside. He dipped his head beneath a low-hanging fluorescent tube. He conjured a drink with speed and style – as though he had known the barman in his Beverly Hills days – and sat down gratefully on a beer-stained wooden chair. Frank and I were “in the back” already doing our verbs.’
‘Which verbs?’, asks Miss R, more like a journalist seeking “colour” than a researcher in search of understanding.
‘Dabo, dabis, dabit, dabimus, dabitis, dabunt. I will give, you will give, he she or it will give, we will give, you (plural) will give, they will give too. We had decided always to begin each session with some grammar and we stuck to that decision. We maintained the idea that we were language teacher and student even when Frank’s greater concerns became great Roman principles, plus the latest political failing by myself and The Times. The angrier that Frank became the more useful the Latin was.’
‘Once Ronnie had settled, his welcome message to us that day was of the “utter shambles, my dears” within the campaign to win Margaret Thatcher her third general election victory. “To be David Young was not very heaven”, he said, citing Wordsworth in support of Margaret’s current Cabinet favourite and twisting the words as he always liked to do, imagining some speech ahead.’
‘Our contrasting message to him (which he did not see as a welcome at all) was fo, fas, fat, famus, fatis, fant. Ronnie reinforced his no-time-to-waste look. He was determined and urgent. Our words were not even Latin although, as Ronnie knew well, do, das, dat, damus, datis, dant would have been an accurate conjugation of the present tense. Frank invented famus, fatis, fant. His usual drink at The Old Rose was Fanta, some sort of ironic reminder of his childhood.’
Miss R smiles.
‘Frank and Ronnie both thought this funny too. Woodrow and David would not have done. Frank and Ronnie respected one another’s wit. Woodrow and David shared a mutual wariness which only resembled respect. The resemblance sometimes deceived even the two men themselves.’
‘Late-learners of a language take a different approach from the young. Frank liked to contrast words that might have existed in Latin (like “fant” if there had been a verb, “fare”), with those (like Fanta) that could never have existed and that, indeed for all three other Senecans, would better not have existed. Fare, he proclaimed, “two syllables like X-Ray”, meant “to fuck up a newspaper or an election”.’
‘“Fa, magister”, intoned Frank. “Fuck it, master. The magister is in the focative case. We had better all believe it”.’
‘The news that Ronnie brought about the Conservative campaign launch of 1987 was that every senior participant thought that every other senior participant was “fucking it up”. Some top Tories brought mere sartorial problems, hair too long, waistcoat too yellow. The Prime Minister herself brought the TBW, That Bloody Woman problem, a verdict from the opinion polls which required more delicate handling and was not getting it.’
‘Ronnie must have thought that you were mad.’ Miss R screws up her nose as she screws down her pen into her pad.
‘Yes, Ronnie did not like the cod Latin. He was the only Senecan to be trained as a classicist himself, a King’s College student of Greek, influenced, though not economically, and certainly not in Margaret Thatcher’s hearing, by John Maynard Keynes.’
‘But Ronnie was also a veteran playwright. He had thought hard about the relationship between politics and language. He saw Seneca as a model. He saw emulation as a potent reason for reading the classics. But he did not want to talk about Latin while there was an election to be won. He was sure that Seneca would have agreed with him if he had agreed w
ith democratic elections which he most certainly would not have.’
‘And Frank himself?’
‘Frank was torn between learning and life, scholarship and the Ship of State. He wanted victory for the Tories and civilisation for himself. He was still a bit stunned by attending a pre-election dinner which featured the adoration of Mrs Thatcher by a drunken cricketer and the abuse of her government failures by one of the men most responsible for them. We were at a party for a think tank. Frank sneered out the words, “to, tas, tat, tamus, tatis, tank”.’
‘In the first of these party-pieces, as Frank recalled, Sir Keith Joseph, anguished minister, scholar and wise tutor of her first phase in power, had torn apart the education policy that he had himself imposed as Secretary of State for Education. In the second, a purple-faced Sir Denis Compton plainly thought that his role was to respond to Denis Thatcher and not to Margaret herself. The once famous batsman and Arsenal footballer, still a hero for certain Tories of a certain age, made several jokes about being the night’s “second Dennis” before collapsing into abuse of Opposition “bouncers”. The Prime Minister maintained a face like glass throughout.’
‘Frank was in self-mocking despair for days. Ronnie reminded him that Denis Compton was renowned for forgetfulness. He had once had to borrow a bat from the Old Trafford museum to make a test match century; he so regularly ran out his partners that a call for a run from Compton was deemed “no more than a basis for negotiation”. Frank snarled. He hated sport. He hated anything that a humorist could not make more absurd than it was.’
‘Yes, Margaret was wasting her time on nonsense. Yes, too, he was keen to start our lessons. He liked The Old Rose, ‘our purple place’ as he called it. He liked how it teetered beside the lorry-lines of the Highway, suitably coloured, we thought, for the study of empire, and how, early in the day, we wouldn’t be expected or disturbed. He would have preferred Ronnie to have stayed away.’
18.7.14
Miss R made an appointment to come yesterday and cancelled it. This morning she says again that she is on her way and will be with me soon. She has to speak first to her mother who is visiting her grandfather and needs her help.
I will see her approach only if she comes in on the Wapping side, past the pile of logs where the fir trees used to be, past the nest of concrete cubes that last month I thought were tubs for trees. More likely she will come by the execution block from Tower Hill.
Whichever way she comes she won’t see inside the new kidney shaped pool and L-shaped trough behind the new grey steel wall, not until she arrives up here on the sixth floor. Three quarters of the upper offices have gone. The hose-pipes play on.
I am packing and staring out the window. It does not matter if she comes or not. She has begun something. I have the notebooks and the letters. Now that ‘something’ goes on without her.
It was May, 1987, the Thursday that the Senecans took a new turn. Woodrow arrived at The Old Rose before Frank did. The Voice of Reason was not sure what was happening on the Highway but he did not like the sound of it. At first, he seemed determined only to show me that, out of all of us, he was the most at home in a Wapping pub. He succeeded in that.
Woodrow could act many parts. A sometime soldier in wartime and socialist causes, he had sought votes in harder places than the Highway. Short in stature he could be combative or cringing as required, bow-tied in a boulevardier’s or bookmaker’s way, depending on how he wanted to look. Somewhat bandy in his legs, he might have been a master of fox hounds or have begun life in the docks.
It was important to Woodrow that he alone was the true man of Wapping. He considered Ronnie and David, who had never veered from the Right, to be untried by life. I was even worse, he thought, although he knew nothing of my life before he met me. He bought two pale ales (‘nothing that isn’t from a bottle in a place like this’), somewhat breaking his ‘man of the East End’ spell, and started giving me advice.
He had heard that there had been a difficult leader conference at The Times the previous day. He sketched the scene in the long windowless room on the Mezzanine as though he had been there himself, with Frank arguing Margaret’s case, me playing the part of her would-be replacement, Michael Heseltine, with various colleagues taking the roles of other ministers and shadows.
We often did this, I told him, overtly or almost without thinking. The best way to work out a policy for The Times was to play out how the politicians were planning. We all took our roles and we could usually agree a result. It was the part of the newspaper day that I always enjoyed the most, not taking ministers to lunch but understanding what they might mean.
Miss R is not concerned with Cabinet ministers. Others on her team, senior figures, are attending to those. But if she wanted to find out anything from me about Michael Heseltine I could tell her more from arguing his case than from seeing him, meeting him, or sharing drinks at a party.
But Frank had explained my advocacy quite differently. And Woodrow was supporting him. Even to countenance the view of Margaret’s most dangerous enemy was a heresy. The Times should be aiming to advance her case better, not to test it as though we were in some useless politics department of a university or playing parts on a stage.
For almost an hour there were only the two of us at the table. We discussed what it meant for a newspaper to have an opinion, how at the Guardian the leader conference was open to all, how on the Telegraph that Frank had joined the writers were personal acolytes of the Editor, virtually the only staff that the Editor had who were free of the dictates of news. The leaders of The Times were, in Woodrow’s view, the only ones that mattered as leaders had mattered in the past. I was their steward and I should step up to my role, my role as defined by him.
He spoke much more freely than he had ever done in the office or at his house. He said I had too little idea of the dangers of the world. Life was a “slipper wheel”. As well as slipping, there was always the risk of falling over or being pushed. Everyone needed a protector – and mine should be the man who had improved my Kingsley Amis collection.
What was this “slipper wheel”, I asked after he had used the phrase several times. He intoned the lines to The Old Rose. It was hard to keep such sonority to a single table. He looked a little embarrassed. It was the only time that I ever saw him embarrassed.
Stand, who so list, upon the slipper wheel,
Of high estate; and let me here rejoice
And use my life in quietness each dele,
Unknown in court that hath the wanton toys
He stopped. This ‘slipper wheel’, he whispered, was a quote from the sixteenth-century poet Thomas Wyatt, not, he insisted too loudly again, his relative. He and his children were related to the other Wyatts, the architectural ‘Wexford Wyatts’. He had a mad aunt who was always trying to link the family to the Tudor courtier and inventor of the English sonnet, the lover (or not) of Anne Boleyn, the queen who did for Thomas More. It was nonsense but she would not stop. But it was a good quote, even if it was from outside his family. Dele means part, he said, as though that were my last remaining query.
The longer that we sat together, the other two seats of red and green leather still empty, the darker the domain of danger that he painted, a place of paths that he knew and others that he did not. All power was at the centre, in politics and in newspapers. I was privileged and powerful and did not recognise what I was. All life now was a court, a network of help and hindrance and ‘frightened little people’.
The slippery wheel was originally a phrase from Seneca, he added. I looked surprised to hear him mention the name. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing, he laughed. Frank must have kept him informed of everything. He said he wanted to join in. The quote was from Thyestes, he went on, not wishing me to miss his knowledge of the most brutal tragedy from all antiquity. Woodrow left on that occasion even before Frank arrived.
Miss R arrives as though on cue to pick up the next part of the story. She sees me writing. She has h
er cold gaze. She is looking far away or as though I am the one far away, far from the subject she is seeking.
‘What was Frank attempting to do – improve his job prospects, improve Margaret Thatcher’s prospects or improve his Latin?’ Answering her is suddenly like answering a statue in a cemetery or in the last act of Don Giovanni. But this time I do have an answer.
‘I’ve told you already. Frank wanted to learn Latin because he thought that a civilised man should know Latin – even at the cost of learning it from a colleague whom he did not see as civilised in the best sense. He wanted to know about one of the great ancient speakers of Latin. He might have chosen Julius Caesar, where his hero John Motley and many students once began, or Cicero, where many of them too early ended. Instead he had our copy of the Loeb Seneca, Moral Essays Vol 3, newly rescued from the skip, not read since 1935 according to the Times library ticket.’
‘On that May day in Wapping, with Woodrow on his way down the Highway, he opened it and read aloud from the English page:
Among the many and diverse errors of those who live reckless and thoughtless lives, almost nothing that I can mention is more disgraceful than that we do not know how either to give or to receive benefits.
‘Ahah, my boy, he said. Whatever else was on his mind there was no warm-up to Frank’s enthusiasm for this text, a product from the first century AD that set out a survival guide for rich and poor, strong and weak, controversial, practical. The Latin was a catalyst, a comfortable base for an awkward thought, the first of many.’
‘For Frank the tension between learning and life was low. He wanted the one to illuminate the other. Seneca was the servant of a new kind of government at Rome. Seneca took Frank directly to the impact of newly centralised authority upon people still adjusting to that change. It took him to the Tory party whose tired leaders, at what should have been the height of their power, were quarrelling their way through the election, feeling unappreciated, failing to appreciate each other, fighting each other much of the time.’
The Senecans Page 12