The Blue Touch Paper Read online

  DAVID HARE

  The Blue Touch Paper

  A Memoir

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York • London

  For Nicole

  Contents

  List of Plates

  Foreword

  1 She Could Have Done Worse

  2 Mignon

  3 Lear on the Cliff

  4 The Mercedes Symbol

  5 Serious, Not Solemn

  6 Don’t Come

  7 Five Good Scenes

  8 I Saw Her Today at the Reception

  9 Cream and Bastards Rise

  10 Spilling the Sacrament

  11 007

  12 Birmingham University

  13 The Underlining

  14 Like Everyone’s a Writer

  Our Child Will Understand

  Acknowledgements

  Illustrations

  Also by David Hare

  Plates

  1 Mum and Dad, Abbey Close Church, Paisley, 1941

  2 My sister Margaret and DH, St Leonard’s, 1951

  3 DH with Roger Dancey, California, 1965

  4 The Fields House prefects at Lancing College, 1964

  5 Portable Theatre: Snoo Wilson, DH and Tony Bicât

  6 Howard Brenton, photographed by Snoo

  7 Pen and ink drawing of DH by Richard Cork, 1966

  8 Royal Court: the playwrights of the 1971 season

  9 DH with Tennessee Williams, Manhattan, 1978

  10 Band and vocals for Teeth ’n’ Smiles, 1975

  11 Fanshen, the first production

  12 Bill Paterson, in Licking Hitler, 1977

  13 Kate Nelligan in Plenty

  14 Darcy, Margaret, Joe, DH and Lewis, Christmas, 1978

  15 DH with Kate Nelligan, Dreams of Leaving, 1979

  Foreword

  In the summer of 2010, I was approached by the estate of Terence Rattigan to write a companion piece to The Browning Version. Traditionally, this well-known one-act play had been presented in a double bill with an inept farce called Harlequinade. It would be enlivening, the estate thought, if Rattigan’s popular piece about masochism and manipulation could for once be matched with something a little less facetious.

  I loved the idea of writing about my time at Lancing College in the 1960s, so that Rattigan’s version of his schooldays could sit alongside mine on the same bill. Normally a full-length play might take me a year to write, but on this occasion I finished a one-act play in four weeks. All writers dream of a moment when your subconscious dictates and you are able to act as nothing more than a stenographer. It had happened to me only once before. On some nights, I would wake at three in the morning and scribble in a bedside notebook. My wife would stir and ask me what I was doing. ‘Writing tomorrow’s dialogue,’ I would say, before falling asleep.

  The result, South Downs, was partly fiction. The plot was made up and so were the characters. But the ambience was true to my memory of attendance at an Anglo-Catholic school fifty years previously. The subject, essentially, was the need to fake a confidence you don’t feel. It was about the price of pretending you understand when you don’t. Everything about the play seemed to delight me, the cast and the director, Jeremy Herrin. Unusually, it was rehearsed and performed without a moment of strain. Anna Chancellor, who played the crucial part of Belinda Duffield, a West End actress who visits the school and thereby transforms the life of the fourteen-year-old hero, remarked that when she first read South Downs, it was as if the play had never been brought into being. It simply was. William Empson, praised for his apparent fluency, once said, ‘The careless ease goes in last.’ But on this occasion it had gone in at the time.

  After so many years of anxious struggle, it was an unusual experience for a dramatist to be handed a play for free. I asked myself why it had happened this time and not before. But I also had to answer letters from many contemporaries, most of whom I had not spoken to or heard from for half a century. They, like me, had spent recent years haunted by everything unresolved from their distant adolescence. I kept thinking of William Faulkner: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Or as my friend Wallace Shawn observed, ‘They warn you life’s short. They don’t warn you it’s simultaneous.’

  Up till then I had taken it for granted that I had lived through a period of little historical interest. Because I was born in 1947, I had spent most of my life feeling that I had missed the main event. The Second World War had ended before I was born, even though over and again it provided the setting for my imagination. But when I wrote South Downs, set in the early 1960s, I realised what an extraordinary distance we had travelled. Its world seemed to me closer than yesterday, but for many of the cast it was unrecognisable. I had to explain to the young actors that I had been born into a country the majority of whose population at least professed to believe in God. They also believed in their empire, their institutions, their democracy, their public figures and the essential decency of their civilisation. In particular parts of the country, belief in socialism was also deep-rooted and widespread. Sixty years later, those same people, or their descendants, appeared to have lost faith in everything except private virtue. They ascribed positive qualities to their friends but to almost nobody in large enterprises or public life. How on earth could so radical a change have occurred and how could it have gone so little remarked while it happened?

  When writing plays, I’ve preferred to steer clear of direct autobiography. I may have plundered an incident or a remark, but rarely a storyline or a whole character. Writing about, for instance, the privatisation of the railways or the distribution of aid to the poor, I’ve tended to find inspiration in the external world. It’s difference that has stimulated me, not similarity. So when surprised by a desire to record the circumstances of my own life, I felt a novice. I wanted to be expansive, to move where my memory took me, and I felt this could be best achieved not by writing prose, but by talking. A series of conversations over a year with Amy Raphael followed with the aim of discovering why it was so hard for my generation to put the past to bed. Using as a primary source her edited transcripts – to which, with her exceptional taste, knowledge and literary skill, she made an essential contribution – I have fashioned this book. If, as with my education at Lancing, I have already written about a particular time or place, I have felt free to draw lightly on that previous account.

  My hope is to show how a lifelong engagement with two disparate art forms – film and theatre – may reflect at the same time on more diverse questions and on more intimate. This book is the story of my apprenticeship. It seeks to tell how a young man became a dramatist, and to describe the cost and effect of that decision. There are many ways to become a writer and mine is just one. But I suspect certain aspects overlap with the experience of others. I made a series of peculiar choices, but they were in response to common problems.

  In an opinion survey, one person in six said what they wanted most before they died was to write a memoir. All of us live lives where we are both large and small: large because of the intense focus of our self-attention – and small because, however fierce our concentration, the universe remains indifferent to us throughout. My life has been no different from anyone else’s: both everything and nothing.

  DH

  London, February 2015

  You see, when one’s young, one doesn’t feel part of it, the human condition; one does things because they are not for good; everything is a rehearsal to be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

  SYBILLE BEDFORD

  1

  She Could Have Done Worse

 
When I was growing up nothing excited me more than getting lost. Walking bored me when I knew the way. Until I was twenty-one, my home was on the south coast, firstly in a modest flat up a hill in St Leonards, later in a semi-detached in Bexhill. But when we made our annual family trip to my maternal grandmother’s in Paisley, my sport was to get on a bus, close my eyes and then get out. I was barely ten and I had no idea where I was. Sometimes I recognised Love Street, the home of the local football club, St Mirren, for whom my uncle Jimmy was a talent scout, but nothing else made sense to me. My grandmother Euphemia was furious when I got back two hours late for tea – in those days ham, lettuce, tomato and pork pie, followed by a lot of biscuits and cakes. This after a lunch of mince and tatties.

  When I disappeared, nobody seemed overly concerned. Children vanished from time to time, that’s what happened. A lower-middle-class childhood on the south coast of England in the 1950s became a distinctive mixture of freedom and repression. It was because children were encouraged to make their own way home from school that my nine-year-old friend Michael Richford and I encountered our first sex offender on the Downs, right next to the air-raid shelter which no one had bothered to demolish. The spectral predator was moustached, wearing a grey overcoat and a grey scarf. Our refusal to show him our penises did not seem to lessen his pleasure in showing us his. We two boys hurried home, through the abundant nettles and brambles, up our separate back paths and past the hen-houses that lingered on beneath hedges at the ends of gardens for so many years after the war. Later we were taken by police to line-ups and asked, unsuccessfully, to identify various old men coming out of the Playhouse Cinema after a smoky matinee of The Dam Busters. But, in spite of all the dark parental huddles which followed on the incident, I was still allowed at thirteen to go on my own by train to London. Why? At fifteen I was hitch-hiking across England to Stratford in the hope of seeing Vanessa Redgrave in The Taming of the Shrew. At seventeen, I left for America. My mother wished me good luck, and no doubt she fretted, but at no point did she try to stop me. I was free. Later I read Nietzsche: ‘All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.’

  Over the years I was to convince myself I’d had an unhappy childhood, though I would never have dared say so in public while my parents were alive. Even writing these words causes me a flush of shame. The very over-sensitivity which equips you to be a writer also makes being a writer agony. But in retro­spect it’s extraordinary how much licence my mother allowed to my sister and me. It goes without saying that after the Second World War, when dealing with their children, adults almost never stooped to our level. Down where we were, we looked up at all times. There was none of today’s dippy celebration of children as little unfallen gods. We were not pushed self-importantly through the streets in thousand-pound chariots, scooping up croissants and ice creams on the way. Nobody told us we were wonderful. But on the other hand, even in the stifling atmosphere of suburbia, among those rows of silent, russet-bricked houses and identically tended lawns, adorned with billowing washing lines, strawberry plants, runner beans and raspberry canes, we were granted a level of independence which now seems unimaginable.

  Or was that simply because of my mother? Nancy Hare, as she came to be known, had been born Agnes Cockburn Gilmour just a decade into the twentieth century, and brought up as the middle child of three by fiercely puritanical parents who did their best to force upon her a poor opinion of herself. The result, in her mid-twenties, had been a nervous breakdown, precipitated perhaps by the feeling that she was never going to find a husband. She was tall, striking rather than beautiful, with looks which seem typical of their period. Her only escape from what we would now call low self-esteem was her flair for amateur dramatics. She had a good voice and a prized diploma in elocution. The family business was road haulage. Even in my youth, the men stood at lecterns and horses were maintained in stables and sent out on the roads, admittedly as a sort of tribute to past practices, but maintained nevertheless. My grandparents had been the first people in Paisley to own a car, but if that implied prosperity, then letting it show in any way beyond the motor-mechanical would have been frowned on, the subject of ceaseless comment from neighbours never reluctant to pass damning comments on each other. The family religion was judgement.

  My mother had been raised in Whitehaugh Drive, a cheerless, rising street of Victorian stone houses, blackened by industry and with back yards the size of handkerchiefs. A few doors up was the spinster Betty Richie, who, on its release, was to see The Sound of Music 365 times, once for every successive day of the year. The strong-minded Euphemia had done her very best to make sure that my uncle Jimmy stayed unmarried as long as possible, the better, she hoped, to look after her in her old age. When Jimmy did, at forty, eventually make it out of the house with the inoffensive but marginally vulgar Nan, a childless spinster who bestowed sweet tea, jam and honeyed flapjacks down the throat of any child who came near, his mother refused to allow that the marriage had happened or to admit Aunt Nan to the family house. Only the favoured Peggy, the youngest and brightest of the three children, was lined up to make a brilliant match, and even allowed to go off from Paisley Grammar School to Glasgow University, where she at once fell in love with a medical student who also shone as a rugby player. For my mother, to whom the drunken, violent pavements of Paisley were nightly torture, a fate like Betty Richie’s seemed to await.

  For the whole of her life my mother was scared. She managed to be scared for forty years in Bexhill-on-Sea, a Sussex dormitory for the retired and soon-to-be-retired which is not, on the surface at least, the scariest of places. I both inherited her fear and tried to reject it. Her mother left Nancy with a strong idea of how things should be done. I only once saw her in any kind of trouser. Respectable women wore skirts. No incident loomed larger in her later anecdotal life than the time when, during the war, while working for the Wrens, she mistakenly drank a china cup of whisky late at night in the belief that it was tea. She made the resulting wreckage of her consciousness in the early hours sound like a descent into un-merry hell. Her horror of alcohol, of men, of violence and of any kind of public disorder seemed to me in my equal primness like a horror of life. My mother was always on guard, always on watch, expecting men, children, neighbours, strangers, and, I’m afraid, her own family to betray signs of their underlying beastliness. Civilisation was a veneer, a pleasant veneer, yes, but not to be trusted. Essential things always came out. I grew used to her favourite rebuke. ‘I love you,’ she’d say to me. ‘But I don’t like you.’

  Nancy was an intelligent and sensitive woman, born, by bad luck, into the wrong place at the wrong time. She passed her days as a secretary, or as she herself preferred to call it, a shorthand typist, at Coats, the cotton firm, where sometimes, among the reels and bobbins, she wondered whether she belonged with the professional actors like Duncan Macrae who would come from the Citizens’ Theatre to Paisley to guest-star in otherwise amateur productions of thrillers and James Bridie’s romances. Macrae was an expert in what the Scots of the time called glaikit comedy. We would call it gormless. But if a working-class satellite of Glasgow was not easy for her, then nor, I think, was the suffocating gentility of the south coast of England to which my father transported her after the war. They had met at a dance in Greenock in 1941, and the progress of their mysterious courtship was recorded by my aunt Peggy. In her diary, for reasons not clear to me or to my sister Margaret, Peggy sometimes calls my mother Agatha, even though that was neither her given nor her adopted name.

  27 September 1941

  My beloved sister went off at 10 o’clock this morning and didn’t get back till the minutes before midnight. She was very gay when she came in and announced that she was bringing an Officer for lunch on the morrow. Shrieks from mother.

  28 September 1941

  Clifford came. He was most charming and an easy talker; he was obviously very fond of Agatha, kept turning round and beaming at her in such an adoring way. Agatha dashed into the back kitchen between c
ourses and asked me what I thought of him. I gave my hearty approval. I think she could do a lot worse, especially at her age. Admittedly, he’s queer looking and smaller than she is, but he’s kindness itself and very generous.

  9 October 1941

  Bombshell arrived today at lunch-time. Nancy’s letter for this week brought the news that she was going to marry Clifford quite soon. Mother was bowled over by the news and called me all sorts of names for not letting her know sooner. Clifford is coming to see Father at the weekend and Dad is going to ask him gravely if he thinks he can keep her. It’s going to be killing.

  13 October 1941

  Again an ominous date. Clifford arrived tonight to explain his financial position to Father. Then we had some supper and everything seemed to be flowing smoothly until the date was brought up. Both Nancy and Clifford want it soon, very soon; in point of fact, next week. Mother almost fainted.

  22 October 1941

  It’s all over. The whole affair went with a decided swing and passed far too quickly. Everything passed off excellently. There was no confetti to bother Agatha, although the men hoisted Clifford on their shoulders and carried him downstairs, forgetting all about his sore leg.

  Reading this diary so many years later, the obvious temptation is to assume that this was the familiar story of a wartime marriage. Two people come together and feel they have no time before the man will go away once more to put his life at risk. Soon after his visit to the Abbey Close Church of Scotland my father was indeed back on the high seas, though not before Betty Richie had sent the happy couple an ambiguous telegram reading simply: ‘You have done it now.’ But so little in the lives of either of my parents could be called impetuous that this single action stands out as uncharacteristic of them both. Their decision was destined, in subsequent years, radically to transform my mother’s life while having remarkably little effect on my father’s. You would think that two people could not meet and almost immediately mate unless it was what both of them already had in mind. But what was in my father’s mind was never clear to me, and, from her own reckoning, I’m not sure it was ever apparent to my mother either. For all the ceaseless blue flimsies that passed between them while Dad was away at sea, I never read anything in either of their letters which suggested a strong bond of understanding or of passion. My father became necessary to my mother, essential even, without ever becoming adored.