REPORT 56 MAY 2007
Tim's more or less monthly blog since May 2003
Oh, did I mention that the bank manager has vanished unexpectedly. . . .
THE BEST occasions last month took place under canvas. This sounds
amazingly sweaty and reminds me of the rather sad inscription in my
copy of “The Ascent of Everest” by John Hunt. I was about ten years
old at the time and John inscribed it “Timothy – hoping that one day
you too may find adventure among the hills.” Well, to my shame, not
really. Still, Penny and I went to three events in the big tent at our
local Fowey du Maurier Festival; to a re-union lunch for 450 in a
marquee on the Upper at Sherborne School and a hundredth birthday
lunch for Daphne du Maurier in a smaller tent at Ferryside , the
Dame’s old house now occupied by her son and daughter-in-law, Kits and
Hacker.
One of the Festival events was Jan Morris who, as James, was the
Times correspondent on the 1953 John Hunt Everest expedition. The
name-change is the result of a controversial and much-publicised
sex-change accompanied by surgery in Casablanca. This was in the
seventies and seems light years ago. Jan sat and read from a paper in
a chatty discursive way which went down well and which I certainly
enjoyed. She and her wife, Elizabeth, came to lunch the following day
and a good time was had, I think, by all. I’d first met Jan shortly
after the operation and the book “Conundrum” which she wrote to
forestall intrusive hostile publicity. We met in a Georgian flat in
Bath and I remember turning up with a lit cigar which Jan was too
polite to ask me to extinguish even though she was and is a passionate
non-smoker. Then we met again in Toronto when I was an editor on
“Weekend” Magazine. I suppose I must have commissioned an article
though I forget. I do remember that I’d just written a short story and
Jan said rather wistfully that she envied me “the fictive gift” Huh!
Our other two Big Tent events were Michael Portillo and John Mortimer.
Mortimer, who had broken his leg or foot a few days earlier was in a
wheel-chair and seemed very frail. I had a drink afterwards with his
biographer Valerie Grove who chaired the event and she confirmed that
the old boy was not in particularly good shape but that the sense of
an audience out in front of him had an incredibly galvanising effect.
From the stalls you could see it quite clearly. He was wheeled on
looking more or less out of it but then suddenly he got a whiff of
greasepaint or whatever, Valerie pressed the Oz trial button and the
lights came on, cogs started to whirr and wheel and lo and behold out
came the anecdotes immaculate as ever. Valerie said, when I mentioned
it, that she had failed to press the “judge” button, which usually
produced one of my favourite stories, the one about the couple in the
bath and the significance of which party sat at the tap end. It’s very
funny and I would love to hear it one more time.
Portillo had a sell-out crowd and was tremendously impressive, fluent,
disarming, self-deprecatory and almost unrecognisable from the rather
dislikeable conservative politician and aspiring party leader which he
was not so long ago. I had two main objections. One was that he stood
throughout and although he moved around in a very professional way I
found it off-putting in a way that I had sensed while doing talks with
Cunard. If he had sat in a chair like Mortimer and Morris the effect
would, I think, have been less hectoring, less me up here and you down
there, more intimate. He also told several hoary old general-purpose
jokes including the one about Holmes and Watson at night looking up at
the stars. I know this one off by heart and I’m sure half the audience
did too. Once he got on to his Spanish antecedents or what it was like
working for Thatcher he was original, sharp, insightful and
mesmerising. So why waste time telling stale jokes? And, at least
think about sitting down. Even so it was a tour de force. Nine out of
ten, but with minor modifications could have been a straight ten in my
book.
On the Sunday the du Maurier centenary birthday lunch in a tent on the
lawn at Ferryside, was a mixture of family, locals and London
publishers and agents Waiting for the ferry we bumped into the two du
Maurier daughters, Tessa and Flavia and Tessa’s husband Viscount
(David) Montgomery. The Viscount is uncannily like his father, the
Field Marshal. He took me on one side and said that Kits had asked him
to say a few words of thanks after lunch as a non-family member, “But”
protested the Viscount, “sounding just like Dad, “I AM a member of the
family. So it’s quite inappropriate for me to speak. I think you
should do it.”! So I found myself mumbling a very few words of thanks
after a very jolly meal at which I sat next to Ursula Mackensie, the
boss of Little Brown who knew that I was one of her authors (“Village
Cricket”) but had absolutely no idea that I wrote crime fiction. “A
baker’s dozen published crime novels”, I said, not too pompously and
frostily, I hope. Not her fault, I suppose, but oddly
despair-inducing. What, after all, is the point? Well over 600,000
words of crime fiction and one of your publishers has no idea about
them at all. Oh well, onward and upward. She seemed quite keen on a
book on Chinese cricket which could be fun. The Browning family were
moderately distressed by a double-page spread by Michael Thornton in
the Mail which rehearsed all the old canards about lesbianism.
I had already had my piece questioning this sort of thing accepted and
paid for by the same paper so I too was rather put out. Still, that,
it seems, is life and at least I was paid. It’s a bit galling though
and reinforces my pessimism about the current state of journalism in
the UK.
The Browning tent came the day after the under-canvas lunch at
Sherborne. Food, drink and even the speeches were all exemplary. I
never thought I would find myself saying that Sherborne carried off a
reunion with much more panache and style than Balliol but it was true.
Not the least pleasure was that whereas in Oxford no-one including the
Master (not nearly as impressive as Simon Eliot, the Sherborne head
master) and the Chancellor Chris Patten, sat down without begging for
money, no-one in Dorset seemed to mention money at all. The catering
both at the small black-tie dinner in the old school house dining room
and the tented lunch for over four hundred the following day was
really good. Very cleverly they have been encouraged to be commercial
when not looking after the school and they have the contract,
apparently, to do the executive catering for Yeovil Town Football
Club. V imaginative I should say.
That’s enough tented stuff. I did a panel on “Q”, aka Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch, in the Town Hall. About two-thirds full, chaired by the
ubiquitous Bert Biscoe. It was OKish although I felt that a panel of
four – Bert, me, Piers Brendon from Cambridge and the big cheese from
the Charles Causley Soc was way too many. But it was still nice to say
a word about the old boy and redress the balance which has shifted
towards Daphne in a faintly ludicrous way. She may have been a better
writer (debatable) but she was certainly a far less significant and
substantial figure in local or indeed national life. It isn’t, of
course, a competition but “Q” put together the original Oxford Book of
English Verse and effectively created the English Literature Faculty
at Cambridge. He deserves, surely, to be celebrated for these two
achievements alone quite apart from the verse, short stories, novels,
and quangoism – he was Mayor of Fowey, Commodore of the Yacht Club and
Chairman of the Cornish Education Committee. A great man in his day
but now, alas, almost forgotten. A lesson for all.
There has been some tidying up of Princess Margaret to do – the
index, having, reluctantly to accept the Royal Archive ruling that I
can’t quote a couple of letters in toto because I’m not technically
“official”. Maddening but we have reluctantly accepted it. I’ve done
stuff for Bertrams and Gardners the two big book distributors; the
Sunday Times have apparently made an offer for serial rights and
BCA have bought a reasonable number at book club discounts. On Friday
I’m having lunch in London with the publicist. It all seems to be
going quite well, in rather sad contrast with “A Death on the Ocean
wave” which Hale publish a few weeks later. A big contrast between a
potential best seller from a major publisher and a “mid-list” one from
a small house.
We’ve had Tristram, the second son, to stay with his long-standing
partner Beth, also our friends Betty and Jonathan from Hong Kong and
Jill and Jeff from Putney. All provided welcome excuses for long walks
and long meals. Apart from proof-correcting and so on I have been
struggling on with the new Bognor though I confess I don’t find it
easy when practically everyone including my agent would clearly much
rather I didn’t bother! I’ve also used up my Air Miles on an October
break in Budapest as a birthday present for Penny (neither of us have
ever been). I think my agent has finally sold the idea of doing a book
about Douglas Jardine’s fabulous cricket tour of India which followed
the Bodyline trip to Australia. The Spectator seems to have
accepted my piece on Helsinki though they won’t publish for a while.
Emma and the two small grandsons have arrived in London from Miami and
we will see them soon before they come to visit us down here in
Cornwall. And my 86 year old mother seems to have finally got herself
a satisfactory regular cleaner. I am trying to decide whether to go to
a funeral in the local church this afternoon. Did I know the deceased
well enough? Does it matter? I missed Sheridan Morley’s epic-sounding
memorial at the Gielgud Theatre in London where my editor Ion Trewin
bumped into Princess Margaret’s daughter, Lady Sarah Chatto and had
what sounds like a very satisfactory chat. In other words much the
same muddly roller-coaster as usual. Oh, did I mention that the bank
manager has vanished unexpectedly and we are waiting for a replacement
from Ivybridge?. He is alleged to be arriving on June 11th and before
then I simply must get a new, big, lucrative book project organised.
And now June 1st looms. To my horror I realise that it is fifty years
since Randall Hoyle, the headmaster at Connaught House School, near
Bishop’s Lydeard, came into my dormitory, South Dorset, very early on
June 1st 1957. He was brandishing a telegram and he said, more or
less, “Well it certainly IS the glorious first of June. Heald this is
to tell us that you have won an English exhibition to Sherborne.
Hurrah!” Fifty years ago, and I have the Honours Board from the now
vanished Connaught House school to prove it. I suppose it was a
defining moment. The future then seemed to stretch ahead indefinitely,
full of promise, hope and expectation. Now in 2007 the future has
become the past with all which that implies. Happens, in a sense, I
suppose, to all of us but you’re never, I suspect, properly prepared
for it.
Young tyro becomes old fogey. Discuss. Story of our lives!
Tim Heald
