CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE Read online

  Laurie Lee is an enormously talented writer who can find more ingenious ways than most people of putting off the appalling moment of putting pen to paper. When he has made coffee, filled his pipe, changed his typewriter ribbon, moved the furniture, telephoned his mother, had a sleep, gone for a walk, he is often reduced to copying out the newspaper. I don’t know if he found this rate of progress perfect for poetry, but his poetic prose created difficulties in the documentary film world. Perhaps his heart was still in Spain where he had walked the dusty roads from village to village, drinking with the soldiers and playing his fiddle to pale girls with tragic eyes. At any rate the sound of his recorder was heard less often in the corridors and in time it was learned that there was to be a vacancy in the script department.

  After what seemed a lifetime as an assistant director I was called into the office of the new Head of the Crown Film Unit, an extremely kind man who looked at me sadly.

  ‘We were wondering,’ he said gently, ‘whether you were exactly cut out by nature to be an assistant director. I mean, Doris says you’re having a bit of trouble saying “Quiet please”.’

  ‘Just a bit.’ I had to admit it.

  ‘When I was an assistant director I was on my toes the whole time. I mean, are you quite sure you are?’

  ‘Well. Not the whole time. No.’

  ‘Bit of trouble, Doris tells me, getting the electricians to Liverpool?’

  ‘I did find them in the end.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t ever have lost them. Isn’t that the point? You know, it seems very hard to me to actually lose an electrician.’

  I might have said that if he thought that he didn’t know our hourly boys. Instead I looked suitably contrite.

  ‘Doris and I have gone over the situation from every possible point of view and the conclusion we’ve come to is that you’re not exactly a “natural” as an assistant.’

  ‘Not a “natural”, perhaps.’

  ‘Look, you are a writer, aren’t you?’

  I had had one story published in the Harrovian and one in Lilliput. I secretly cherished half a novel about the Crown Film Unit which I was writing between takes. ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘I’m a writer.’

  ‘There’s going to be a vacancy in the script department when Laurie goes. The idea we’ve arrived at, that is Doris and I have arrived at it, is that we should all be a great deal better off with you in the script department. Scriptwriters have almost never been known to lose the electricians. Look, we’ll send you off somewhere to write a script and then you can show it to Laurie and if he passes it you’re on.’

  I went to the door in a sort of dream. My first novel may have been unpublishable, but now I was a writer; my pay-packet would say so just as my battledress shoulder-flash said ‘Crown Film Unit’. Only when I got to the door did a doubt cross my mind.

  ‘Where will you send me off? To write a script, I mean.’

  If the Head of the Unit was laughing to himself he had the mercy not to show it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What about Watford Junction?’

  I went to Watford on a bicycle and spent a day staring at the railway lines and the rolling-stock without inspiration. Then I went home and wrote a script, based on the movies I had admired (La Femme du Boulanger and La Bête Humaine), about a station-master’s wife and her unhappy love affair with a GI in charge of an American Army Transport Post. I sat by the fire after dinner and read it aloud to my father, doing the characters in various voices.

  ‘When the war’s over,’ he said when I’d finished, ‘I think you ought to take the bar exams. I think that would be a wise precaution.’

  Jill typed out my script very neatly and I gave it to Laurie Lee, who vanished with it. I didn’t see him again for a number of years. However he must have given it his seal of approval, or my ‘Quiet please’ must have deteriorated even further, because a month later I was posted as an official writer, with a salary which rose to the almost unthinkable height of eleven pounds a week. The time had come to say goodbye to Slough and the aircraft fitter. I moved to London.

  Time, like short sight, improves every view, but there is no doubt that London, a place I now inhabit only under compulsion, was a better city then. There were no tower blocks, Soho was full of food shops and Italian restaurants, and only a very occasional and apologetic grimy window displaying Durex, trusses and a volume of Krafft-Ebing, hinted gently at the distant coming of the ‘Pornorama’ and the ‘Boutique of Sexual Aids’. It seemed a perpetual adventure to buy second-hand books in the Charing Cross Road, or drink in the Swiss Pub or the York Minster or stand outside Goodge Street Underground Station in that long silence, filled with infinite possibilities, between the moment when the buzzbombs cut off and the thud as they fell somewhere else.

  So I lived in London and went on journeys in blacked-out trains to factories and coal mines and military and air force installations. For the first and, in fact, the only time in my life I was, thanks to Laurie Lee, earning my living entirely as a writer. If I have knocked the documentary ideal, I would not wish to sound ungrateful to the Crown Film Unit. I was given great and welcome opportunities to write dialogue, construct scenes and try and turn ideas into some kind of visual drama. I had the pretext, which the law has also given me, for talking to an endless variety of people and asking them impertinent questions. But my aims and interests were far from the documentary ideal. Drama to me meant the lines of Shakespeare that my father recited with relish, the nervous elaboration and distinctive music of Gielgud’s ‘Hamlet’, Laurence Olivier rolling down a flight of stairs as dead Coriolanus, Donald Wolfit bringing tears to my eyes as Lear in lunchtime Shakespeare played in front of tabs with minimal support. With my head full of such miracles I found it hard to reconcile myself to lines which always had to be played with a stiff upper lip, like ‘Roger and out’.

  And the writers I admired, an ill-assorted gallery now peopled by Dickens, Chekhov, Firbank (for the dialogue), Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler and Lytton Strachey (who still seems to me to have had the best prose style of any writer this century, and to be the only true genius of the Bloomsbury Group), could hardly be said to have had the documentary approach. What they all had in common, I suppose, apart from an admirable determination to entertain, was a belief in the importance of style and a preference for trying to catch some fleeting truth in a web of artifice, rather than bashing it on the head with a camera and a tape-recorder.

  What obsesses a writer starting out on a lifetime’s work is the panic-stricken search for a voice of his own. His ears are full of noises, a cacophony of sweet airs from the past and the even more delightful sounds of the present. When I sat in dark trains and wrote the novel I had planned about the Crown Film Unit, I thought I could, and for the first time, hear some noises that didn’t come straight out of other people’s books. My novel was called Charade, and reading it again it does seem to have some personal sound, which got lost later, and didn’t reappear until I had spent ten years listening to other people’s problems, and had learnt much more about dialogue in Law Courts and Legal Aid Centres, and met a lady called Nesta Pain, a radio producer of undoubted genius, who made me write a play in which the sound of my own voice would at last become consistent and audible.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Pensotti’s out of the army.’

  Whatever became of us all? Tainton was killed in a ridiculously brave, fated commando raid on a French port; it may be that he alerted the enemy by his practice of blowing a hunting-horn before he went into battle. Martin Witteridge went into the Pioneer Corps. His brother Tom went into the Guards and was found by Major Witteridge, their father, in bed with a surrealist poet in the Witteridges’ Sloane Street home wearing nothing but a Guards officer’s cap and an Able Seaman’s hat respectively.

  ‘You two men,’ Major Witteridge was reported as having said, ‘are a disgrace to His Majesty’s uniform!’

  ‘I don’t think he would have minded half so much,’ Tom told m
e later, ‘if we’d taken our hats off.’

  The head boy at Harrow survived the war to become an English butler in Hollywood, a profession for which his education had prepared him admirably. Weaver, whose parents had committed the solecism of having side-plates at dinner, died with extreme gallantry in Normandy. And Henry Winter? Winter’s death was still far ahead, lost in the mists of peace. He sat with me now in a North London pub where he had been gently putting me right on such matters as the effect of Passive Resistance and the Universal Value of Art, and why Mozart is a more satisfactory composer than Brahms. He had corrected some of the wilder grammatical constructions in Charade, which he received with cautious approval; and then he gave me the news of Oliver Pensotti’s premature demobilization.

  ‘But the war’s not over yet. Hasn’t he heard?’ I wondered.

  ‘They got rid of him. They turfed him out of Army Intelligence.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He told them he’d fallen hopelessly in love with his Sergeant-Major.’

  ‘Had he?’

  ‘No. It was a ruse. Pensotti’s a very devious character. Probably something to do with that school you were both at. He had to get out of the army because he’d fallen desperately in love with Lillian.’

  ‘Lillian? Your Lillian?’ I had still to get used to the tendency of life to move in ever-narrowing circles.

  ‘She’s not my Lillian.’ Winter sounded, as always, philosophic. ‘I had absolutely no right to possess her.’

  ‘But how on earth did she meet Pensotti?’

  ‘I asked him round for a vegetable stew at the Pacifist Service Unit. He came in his military uniform.’

  ‘With dark glasses?’

  ‘Yes. Apparently Lillian told him that she might feel quite passionate about him if it weren’t for this military thing. I don’t really know what happened. I think he took her to the Dorchester.’

  ‘But what about her lover, the Leader of the Bayswater Pacifist Group?’

  ‘Oh, he fell for a huge blonde Wren. He’s volunteered for the Navy. Pensotti and Lillian are moving into a house in Flood Street.’

  ‘It’s rather strange.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All the most sensational events of the war seem to take place among the Pacifists. But don’t you mind?’

  ‘Mind? What’s the point of minding? It was pretty inevitable.’ Winter was refilling his pipe.

  ‘You mean “It is written”, as the Asiatic characters in Somerset Maugham stories always seem to say.’

  ‘Written by something. Certainly not God. Anyway, I’ve met the person I think I’m going to marry.’

  It seemed that Winter had met a girl who served in a cigarette kiosk which he often passed on his way to bomb-sites. She stood in a small window and was invisible from the waist downwards.

  ‘We talk every day. She’s extremely intelligent and she smiles nicely. And she has splendid tits.’

  ‘You haven’t taken her out?’

  ‘I’ve only spoken to her, when she’s been in the kiosk.’

  ‘And you want to see more of her?’

  ‘That’s the sort of joke that you ought to restrain yourself from putting into your books.’

  We were interrupted then by a girl called Angela Bedwell who came into the pub to ask if we’d happened to have seen an Australian airman called ‘Benny’ who sometimes bought us a Guinness. We hadn’t, so we asked her to come to the house-warming party which we decided that Oliver Pensotti would have to give the following Saturday to celebrate his departure from Intelligence (Military) and his unilateral Treaty of Peace.

  The London I had known from my childhood was in the North, the Wrong Side of the Park, the remote uplands of Swiss Cottage and the heights of Hampstead.

  When I left the aircraft fitter I had a room with an engineer in a Haverstock Hill house where the going was extremely tough. His Irish wife was often unhappy and sometimes desperate. Strong-minded toddlers, reared to an alarming state of physical fitness by frequent doses of Ministry of Health cod liver oil and orange juice, tramped about the kitchen with their plastic pants and dirty nappies clinging to their knees or, barebottomed, lurched across the living-room to shred copies of Penguin New Writing or the ‘Left Book Club’ George Orwell which they tugged from the shelves. The infrequent meals were mounds of grey rice covered with grated carrot. On the day I found a used Tampax under the piano I decided to emigrate, Southwards if possible. Chelsea seemed a remote region, where the climate was different; where people no doubt had siestas and lay about eating grapes and playing the guitar. Meanwhile the only way to deal with life in Haverstock Hill was to spend as much time as possible visiting Northern Coal Mines for the Crown Film Unit or down the pub. Oliver’s house-warming party in Flood Street marked an enormous change in my way of life. I moved to Chelsea and fell painfully, anxiously, ecstatically, and for what seemed like about a century, in love with Angela Bedwell.

  ‘I heard about you leaving the Intelligence Corps.’

  ‘Oh really, is that what you heard?’ Oliver Pensotti looked amused. He was no longer in uniform, but wearing a silk scarf, a green velvet jacket with evening trousers and his balding suede shoes. We had a conversation along these lines:

  ‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Is it? You seem to know so much about it.’

  ‘Winter told me.’

  ‘Winter only knows what I told him.’

  ‘Well, what did you tell Winter?’

  ‘I really can’t remember now. Why don’t you remind me?’

  ‘The one about falling in love with the Sergeant-Major.’

  ‘Oh, that! I thought Winter might appreciate that one.’

  ‘You mean you didn’t say you fancied the Sarge?’

  ‘I certainly said that to Winter.’

  ‘But is it true?’

  ‘What is truth, said Jesting Pilot?’ A little late in life Oliver had started to write his novel in the style of Aldous Huxley.

  ‘Come on, Pensotti. Don’t tell me you’re still in the Intelligence Corps.’

  ‘Well, if I was I wouldn’t be able to tell you, would I?’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Intelligence.’

  He smiled at me with great amusement. From then on I was never sure if I hadn’t been entirely misled about my friend Oliver Pensotti. Was it all a gigantic cover, his stormy life with Lillian, his visits to undisclosed addresses in the country ostensibly to write his novel, a work he composed at the rate of about a page a month? Was he in fact engaged on some Top Secret assignment, dangerous but vital to the country? Could you get out of the army by pretending to be in love with the Sergeant, and if this were so why didn’t unhappy conscripts embrace their non-commissioned officers in droves? Was the truth simply that Pensotti had been kicked out of the army for some quite different reason, or that he hadn’t been kicked out at all?

  ‘But really, about the Sergeant … ?’

  ‘Shall we say an excuse? Even if excuses sometimes happen to be true.’

  The house Pensotti had acquired in Chelsea was tall and extremely comfortable. The whole of the top floor was a studio in which the house-warming party was being held. Lillian was a publisher’s secretary and she had invited a number of her authors, and Michael Hamburger was there among the poets. Pensotti had prepared great bowls of some opaque mixture in which leaves and slices of fruit were floating, but this cup, usually so uninteresting, had a kick like a mule.

  ‘I can’t think where you got all the gin from.’

  ‘Oh, you can get plenty of spirits,’ Pensotti smiled and I knew he was mocking me, ‘when you’re in the Service.’

  ‘And I thought you’d left the Service.’

  ‘You can get even more when you’ve left the Service. Now you tell me something, if it’s not entirely secret.’

  ‘The more secret it is the more likely I am to tell you,’ I said. I have never had Pensotti’s talent for concealment.

  �
��Why did you insist on my giving this party?’

  ‘You’re enjoying it. Also I wanted to ask this girl.’

  ‘Now we’re getting at the truth,’ Pensotti said, as if he valued frankness above all things. ‘What’s her name?’

  I told him and he laughed. I didn’t think it was as funny as all that.

  The truth was that I longed for Angela Bedwell with a yearning so acute I didn’t even like to think of the strange accident of her name, which seemed to make her a walking advertisement for the pleasures of others. I wanted to think of her as living quite alone in her room near Hampstead Heath, travelling alone to the Air Ministry where she read a book during her lunch hours and never spoke to a man in the canteen. In my wildest fantasies I thought she only came into the pub because of the loneliness of her bedsit and that she spoke to the Australian airman only because she had been introduced to him at work and wished, in a purely platonic manner, to further goodwill towards the Dominions. Even as I talked to Pensotti I knew with a sick feeling that she wasn’t going to turn up at the party.

  Angela seemed to me to be all I wanted and all I was ever likely to want. She looked small and quite fragile, like a brunette Veronica Lake with long hair, green trousers and a shoulder bag; and yet she was surprisingly athletic and spoke in the clipped, sensible tones of a modestly efficient officer in the Brigade of Guards. Her background was military; her father was a retired General who lived in Dorking, her mother enjoyed a high rank in the WVS. On some nights she used to look round the door of the pub, provide us with a second of nervous beauty and then vanish. On other occasions she’d let me buy her a drink and sometimes a sausage. Then she’d tell me about her father who once shouted at a heavily bearded man he saw sitting in a tea-room, ‘You bloody awful-looking creature, can’t tell if you’re a man or a woman!’ She also told me about her Uncle Arnold, and said he was a charming but very elderly bachelor who often took her out to dinner at the Ritz and would advance her money if she were ever really broke. I told her about my job, which I made sound a great deal more exciting than it was, and the book I was writing, and the friends, like Mrs Cox, whom I knew in the country. I told her about nights in the Swiss Pub and the York Minster and how once, when too drunk to remember much about it, I had had tea with Stephen Spender. I mentioned my father to her, but not the fact that he was blind.