A Life in the Day Read online

  For Margaret,

  obviously, so lost without her

  CONTENTS

  1. Happy Days

  2. Paper Pleasures

  3. Margaret’s First Novel Fails

  4. Buying a House

  5. Writing Lives

  6. Atticus

  7. Film Fun

  8. The Beatles

  9. Abroad

  10. London Life

  11. Back to Journalism

  12. Football Mania

  13. Margaret

  14. Family Affairs

  15. Now for Something Different

  16. Back to Books

  17. My Life in Columns

  18. Loweswater

  19. Bliss in the West Indies

  20. The Big C Returns

  21. Family Matters

  22. Margaret’s Last Books

  23. The Three Hurdles

  24. Notes from a Hospice

  25. The Big Meeting

  26. The Funeral

  List of Illustrations

  Bibliography

  Index

  1

  HAPPY DAYS

  You don’t often feel blessed at the time, only when you look back, but every day, every moment of the year 1960, I was actively aware and grateful for all the wonderful things that seemed to be happening to me.

  Margaret of course was the number one happening. I could hardly believe she had agreed to marry me, which we did on 11 June 1960 at Oxford register office. The fact that I failed my driving test the day before, so our best man had to drive with us on the first stage of our honeymoon, was not a bad omen, did not seem like a worrying way to start a marriage, for I never believe in bad omens, preferring to smile and whistle, always look on the bright side, all is for the best, which is what I do, even though I know of course it is mostly total rubbish. As anyone who gets to the age of eighty well knows. Or even eight years old.

  I did the actual driving. Mike Thornhill sat beside me. Margaret cowered in the back. There was an L plate on the car, front and back. That could also be seen as symbolic. We were aged twenty-four and twenty-two, still learning about most things in life, but it didn’t feel like that.

  Margaret was always middle aged and, also, more surprisingly, middle class, in that she had tastes and confidence, social skills and attitudes, which belied the background and family she had come from, the rough council estate with her dad going off in his boiler suit each day to the Metal Box factory. I don’t really know where she had come from, how she got formed, but I could see it from the moment I first met her, back in 1956, when she was still at school, aged seventeen, and I was nineteen.

  I was two years older, but only on paper. I had no idea what my tastes were, what I thought, what my opinions were, being ever so young for my age. That’s what people told me. I looked young and acted young, which does not sound too bad, or juvenile and childishly enthusiastic, which is not so good but probably more accurate.

  In 1960, at the time of our wedding, I was still being taken for young, which I was beginning to think was not all that much of an advantage. The opposite, if anything. I could tell when I started going to interview people for the Sunday Times they would often be slightly taken aback: could this callow youth really be on that paper, can we take him seriously?

  Harold Wilson suffered from a similar problem. He became an MP in the Labour landslide of 1945 and Attlee made him President of the Board of Trade while still only thirty-one, making him the youngest Cabinet member in the twentieth century. I later asked him if it had been hard to be taken seriously – and he said that was the reason he grew a moustache.

  I have worn a moustache most of my adult life, but I didn’t start one till much later, and then the reasons were laziness rather than trying to look mature. I always had such a strong dark growth and would often need to shave twice a day if I was going out in the evening. I reckoned having a moustache would give me less face to shave. Oh, I was so virile in those days. Should I therefore have grown a moustache at twenty-two, not thirty-two, in order in 1960 to look the part of whatever part I was playing? Do I regret it? Stupid question. Wouldn’t it be great if, as we went through life, growing or not growing a moustache, or having a fringe, dyeing our hair, was up there with the Big Things we now think we should not have done.

  Mike did not actually come on the honeymoon. He dropped us off at our new London flat, then next day Margaret and I flew off to Sardinia. It was the first time Margaret had flown in a plane but I had flown to Cyprus as a war reporter the previous year, when working on the Manchester Evening Chronicle. An experience I boasted about for years, saying I had been a war reporter, oh yes, even though I had only been there two weeks on an Army PR facility visit.

  It was John Bassett who suggested Sardinia. He was a friend of Margaret’s from Oxford, who went on later to help bring the four Beyond the Fringe members together, all of whom had been at Oxford or Cambridge – Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. I think John’s mother had some connection with Sardinia. We liked the idea of going to an island, not a mainland place, and told ourselves we would always have our holidays on islands, from now on.

  We went on one of the earliest package holidays – run by Horizon Holidays, the pioneer of post-war packaged hols. The notion of all-in tours had been created by Thomas Cook in 1841, when he organised a trip for temperance supporters between Leicester and Loughborough. He went on to organise packaged trips all over Europe and Egypt. But in those days they always went by train or boat.

  Horizon, in 1950, was the first British company to run their package trips by plane, flying from Gatwick on charter planes to places like Corsica and Sardinia. In just a few years, one million Brits were going on packaged hols every year, mostly to Spain, their hotels, meals, flights, transport, all part of the package. It created a social revolution for ordinary Brits who otherwise would not have attempted going to any of those funny foreign places, not on a plane, not on their own.

  I had interviewed the founder of Horizon just a few weeks earlier, Vladimir Raitz, a White Russian, who had come to London as a boy, studying at the LSE and working first as a journalist, before starting Horizon.

  His office was in one of those streets behind Oxford Street, in Newman Street, traditionally a rag trade area. When I pass that way today, I still think about going to see him, but then I do that all the time, every day, everywhere in London. I am continually remembering going to certain houses, offices, streets to interview people, now going back almost sixty years ago.

  I contacted Mr Raitz, after we had decided on Sardinia, reminded him of our meeting, and that I had written an Atticus piece about him, and managed to get out of him a 10 per cent discount on the holiday. I never revealed this to Margaret. She would have been appalled at my cheek and meanness. Getting a discount on one’s honeymoon, how unromantic, how penny pinching. All true.

  We stayed at a little hotel in Alghero where the head waiter, Constanzo, took a shine to us, amused by us being a honeymoon couple. Every meal, even breakfast, when we asked what was on the menu, he said freedmeexedfeesh. That was the extent of his English. He was very ugly and bald and seemed very old, probably about forty, but he had the most stunning, luscious-looking teenage girlfriend. He had a little Fiat and used to take us out with her on his day off. Strange how you can remember, decades later, hotel waiters, yet it’s unlikely they can ever remember you, once you have gone.

  Towards the end of the holiday, I discovered a large spot on my bottom, which turned into a boil, which turned into a source of awful agony, Ivy. In the end I got the hotel to call an emergency doctor. She came to our bedroom, threw me on the bed, pushed and pummelled the boil. She was a large woman, with large muscles, and had clearly mi
ssed out at medical school when they taught the principles of charm and bedside manners.

  I closed my eyes, trying not to show she was hurting – and heard a crash on the floor. Margaret had fainted. I could stand it, being a man, being brave, but she couldn’t stand me having to stand it. When she came to, the doctor said, ‘Un peu de courage, Madame,’ in French. She did not speak English and we did not speak Italian, but I had boasted I spoke French. I did get an O-level in French, after a resit when I went to the grammar school.

  The second really nice thing that had happened to us in 1960 happened straight after our honeymoon – our flat. I was nearly as proud of living there, and its address, as I was of marrying Margaret. How can you compare a house to a human? You can’t, but they can each uplift your spirit, give you a warm glow when you see them, make you feel good and excited when you enter into them.

  The address was 9 Heath Villas, Vale of Health, Hampstead, NW3. The postcodes were quite short in those days – and NW3, as I had already discovered from my few months in London, was one of the most desirable postcodes of them all. NW2, which was where my first flat had been, before we got married, had no cachet, no resonance. NW4, I never knew where that was. NW5 was on the other side of the Heath, the wrong side of the Heath, the Kentish Town side. No one I knew or came across in 1960 ever turned out to live in NW5, or at least admitted to it.

  The flat also had a most desirable phone number – HAMpstead 3847. You just dialled the first three letters, then the number. When you gave it out, people always knew where you lived. In NW2, in Shoot Up Hill, my number was GLAdstone 4788 which nobody could ever locate. I never found out where the Gladstone bit came from, though later heard it was a park, but we never went there. Even living in NW2, we always headed to Hampstead and Hampstead Heath on Sunday afternoons, just to ogle the lovely houses, the lovely, affluent, sophisticated people.

  The Vale of Health is easy to miss, a little enclave tucked away off the East Heath Road. It is a dead end, with just one road into it, totally surrounded by the Heath. The title was said to have come from the fact that it was the only place in London that escaped some plague or other, being so cut off. Lots of famous people had lived there, and there were plaques to prove it, such as D. H. Lawrence and Leigh Hunt. Opposite our flat was a plaque to a Bengali writer I had never heard of, Rabindranath Tagore, who turned out to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.

  I used to love coming home from work each evening on the Northern line from King’s Cross, getting off at Hampstead Tube, then walking through the little Georgian squares and lanes towards the Heath. I varied my route each time, as there were so many ways, all delightful. East Heath Road was usually busy, with a long line of cars crawling up going north, but once over that road, it was like entering a rural oasis, so artistic, quaint, quiet and altogether wonderful.

  We had found it through some friend of Theo’s, Margaret’s best friend at Oxford, who warned us that the landlord lived on the premises and was rather eccentric. We were told he would want to interview us first, check us out, before agreeing. Margaret was still at Oxford at the time, in her last few weeks, so she came through for the day and we were grilled by Mr Elton – Leonard Sedgwick Elton. Grilled is the wrong word, because he was incredibly shy and hesitant, did not look you in the face, muttered and mumbled. He was a bachelor, a retired civil servant of some sort. I did ask him if he was related to Elton the historian – Sir Geoffrey Elton, expert on the Tudors – whose dreary books I had ploughed through at Durham, and he muttered something about being a distant cousin. (Ben Elton, the comedian and writer, is his nephew.)

  He was obsessed by three things. He wanted peace and quiet, tenants who would go to bed at ten o’clock, make no noise afterwards, and not even pull the lavatory chain. He worried that as we were so young, compared with the outgoing tenants, who were an older couple – must have been in their thirties – that we might be noisy. We assured him we always went to bed at ten, in fact one minute to ten, every night, even New Year’s Eve.

  He worried whether we could pay the rent. I assured him I had a staff job but Margaret did not, still being a student. And thirdly, he was terrified that once having moved in, we might have children, a thought which petrified him. And us.

  We both immediately fell in love with the flat. Back at Oxford, Margaret wrote him a creepy letter about the wonders of his flat, saying that even if he did not see his way to us being his new tenants, she would never forget his flat. That seemed to do the trick. He offered us a three-month trial, at a rent of six guineas a week.

  It was in fact the most inconvenient, ill-arranged house. It had not been arranged or converted at all, not in the normal sense, with no privacy, no facilities and no separation of living quarters. It was a four-storey, flat-fronted Victorian house, untouched, unaltered. Mr Elton lived alone on the top floor. We never heard him move around or even breathe. Each evening he made himself the same meal – sardines on toast – and drank a small bottle of red wine, the third of a bottle size, which you hardly see today.

  We lived below him in a large through-room overlooking the centre of the Vale, with two large picture windows at the front and a kitchen at the back of the room, with a window over the pond.

  We shared the WC and bathroom, which was on the landing, with Mr Elton. If by chance we met him on the stairs, or he heard us approaching, he vanished, disappeared. And if a full frontal meeting was unavoidable, he looked the other way, pretended he had not seen us.

  We communicated by notes which we left for each other on the hall shelf behind the front door. This suited Margaret perfectly. She always adored writing notes, preferring them to telephone conversations.

  Our bedroom was on the floor below, the ground floor as you came in, at the back of the house. Next to it, at the front, was the sitting room of Mrs Woodcock, an elderly lady we did not meet for some time. She had the whole of the basement, plus this one room upstairs, right next to ours. The whole arrangement was mad. It only worked if everyone was incredibly quiet and respected each other’s privacy. Which we did. We might have been in our early twenties, but our lifestyle was more like folks in their sixties.

  Mrs Woodcock was very refined, very snobbish, clipped and autocratic. She enjoyed ordering us around, commanding us to come to sherry, or to take her rubbish out.

  She took to Margaret instantly, was fascinated by her, loved to hear her views on literature, all of them of course delivered forcefully, and on the theatre, on Hampstead and on Oxford, which Margaret had never liked, but was amusing in her criticisms. I don’t think Mrs Woodcock had much interest in me, which I didn’t mind. I was happy enough to sip her dry sherry and let Margaret do all the sparkling and entertaining.

  Margaret then got into the habit of having sherry twice a week with Mrs Woodcock, just the two of them. They would sit upright in her button-back chairs by the fireplace and discuss serious, artistic and political matters. She was usually summoned at 5.30, before I had got home from work. Which suited me fine. I was not interested in uplifting, clever chat. Never being much good at it.

  It was one of the ways in which Margaret always appeared to me some sort of cuckoo in the nest, being able to connect and interest and impress and understand the middle class and middle-aged people, as if she was one of them, despite her background. She just did it naturally. Even as a little girl at home in her council house, she had middle-class values and tastes, forever criticising Arthur her father for the way he ate, the horrible fatty breakfasts he scoffed, the way he spoke, how he came home from work in his boiler suit and washed himself at the kitchen sink. She would tell him it was revolting. And leave the room, even during a meal. Poor Arthur. Where had she got it from? She was not a snob, or pretending to be something she was not. It was just how she was – and she never drew back from expressing her opinions, whether asked or not, which of course someone like Mrs Woodcock so enjoyed hearing.

  We both picked up one habit from Mrs Woodcock, drinking dry sherry, whi
ch of course we had never drunk in our Carlisle council houses, though I had been allowed a sherry allowance at Durham, when I had been Senior Man. Dry sherry was the smartest drink in smart social circles in the fifties and sixties. From then on, we always had a bottle in the flat, for special visitors.

  We never had wine in the flat, not like today, when I have crates of it all over the shop for emergencies, such as getting to 5.30 without having so far had a drink.

  If we were having friends for supper, we might have bought a bottle of wine specially, but regular wine drinking – i.e. drinking it with every meal, and before and after every meal – did not exist in the circles we moved in.

  Strange how drinking habits have changed. The history of the sort of wine we all drink, in all classes, has also changed over the decades, with dry white wine now being the most popular. Sweet or even medium white wine has disappeared, and as for Babycham, women drank that when out feeling quite sophisticated, not having acquired the taste for wine of any sort. Now look at them. Drinking as much as men these days. And swearing. As for dry sherry, I don’t think I have had a glass of sherry, dry or otherwise, or kept a bottle in the house, since, let me think, about 1975.

  Our flat was unfurnished, so we spent most of that first year looking for the sort of polished Sheraton-style dark wood bureaus and button-back chairs which Mrs Woodcock had in her flat, considering them the height of good taste. We made lists and on Saturdays trawled the second-hand shops in Hampstead – even the High Street had one or two second-hand furniture shops in those days, but most of the local ones were in Islington or Camden Town. I remember shopping at Ron Weldon’s – the first husband of Fay Weldon. He used old ancient wood to re-create new but old-looking pine kitchen tables.

  We didn’t have beer in the flat, and I generally did not go to pubs, except for social occasions after work, but there was a large and ancient Victorian pub at the end of the Vale of Health which we often went to on a Sunday, after our long morning walk round the Heath. The barman was a rather moany, miserable Scotsman, who was always trying to chuck people out, long before the official closing. ‘Have ye no hames to go tae? Your roasts will all be burning in the oven.’