LETTER TO MONIKA

Dear Monika,

I know it’s unlikely, but did you by any chance listen to Summer with Monika, the dramatisation of the poems that went out on Radio 4 in April 1998? Of course, if I had an address I could send you a cassette or CD. It is so long since I saw you, can it really be over forty years? A lifetime.

In fact, it’s so long ago that people who weren’t born then ask me what Liverpool was really like in the sixties. As if I should know better than anybody else of my age. And to be honest, I don’t, for memory is so selective, isn’t it? Except, of course, that it was always sunny in those days, and that people were always smiling and being nice to one another. All right, I jest, but the fifties were so dully retrospective and conformist that things could only get better. They did away with National Service for a start, just in time to save me from a fate worse than jankers, and that gift of two years really made a difference to young men of my generation. Would John, Paul, George and Ringo, while serving in the King’s Own Liverpool Light Infantry, have got together one night in a Nissen hut and formed the Beatles? I doubt it. Billy J. Kramer and the Royal Corps of Signals? The Swinging Khaki Trousers? Gerry and the Squarebashers? Suddenly there were alternatives – art colleges, universities, all available for working-class kids. A generation of teenagers with hope and energy and time on their hands, who didn’t want to dress like their parents or listen to their kind of music. Was it the same where you were?

And do you know what else they ask? They say, Monika, was she a hippy? Can you believe that? When Flower Power drifted across the Atlantic from California in the late sixties many young people grasped the ideals of freedom and gentleness that it seemed to enshrine, but I was old enough to be cynical. What may have begun as a peace movement initially, an antidote to the horrors of Vietnam, had become a fashion show. It was fun, but essentially mindless. If I sound slightly jaundiced, it’s not because I’ve got jaundice, or because I believe that as a decade it is often misconceived, so powerful are the images of the period, but rather that I regret the false sense of nostalgia that passed into the tribal consciousness of young people. They inherited, many of them, a sense of loss, an ‘if only I’d been there’ sort of yearning. What was exciting about the sixties for me was that I was young, and there’s never a better time to be young than when you’re young. The summer I wrote about was early sixties, pre-pill, pre-psychedelia, CND not LSD. And as for the Permissive Society, it may have sashayed on to Merseyside years later, but if it ever went to parties, then it arrived just after I had left.

Decade

We never wore kaftans or put flowers in our hair
Never made the hippy trail to San Francisco
Our Love-ins were a blushing, tame affair
Friday evenings at the local church-hall disco

Heard it on the grapevine about Carnaby Street
Looked for Lucy in the sky, danced to the Mersey Beat
There were protests on the streets and footprints on the moon
Times they were a changin’, but the changin’ came too soon

Those were the days my friend, there was something in the air
Though we never wore kaftans or put flowers in our hair
.

Just across the road from the huge building site that was to become the Catholic Cathedral (or Paddy’s Wigwam as the wits would have it) was a former evangelical church called Hope Hall, and before it became a music and poetry venue, and long before it became the Everyman Theatre, it was a cinema. A sort of art house showing foreign films for intellectuals with a penchant for soft porn, and one evening I was walking past on my way to the Philharmonic (the pub, that is, not the concert hall) when I saw a poster advertising Summer with Monika, and I knew it was a foreign film straight away because they’d spelled Monica wrong. I also noted that Ingmar Bergman had directed it, but what struck me most forcibly was the girl in the poster. Without clothes, you were simply beautiful, stretched out on the lake shore at the end of a golden summer’s day. (There may have been a boy there too, but he has been erased and replaced with an idealised image of myself.) Monika, long-haired and naked, beside a lake in a pine forest. Very unscouse. An image a million miles from Merseyside. Although I loved the poster and filched the title for my sequence of poems, I never did get to see the film, for which I’m thankful because it left me free to make up my own story.

There had been the love poems I’d written about different girls before meeting Thelma, and those written while living with her. Poems about the pain of loss, about the need to be in a relationship and immediately feeling trapped by it, but there didn’t appear to be a thread and the poems seemed like little bleatings in the dark. But having fallen in love with you on the edge of that lake in Sweden, I brought you back to a tiny flat overlooking the Anglican cathedral where we went for long walks round the table and picnicked on the banks of the settee.

I hope you’ll be pleased to hear that the poems were published by Michael Joseph in 1967, which turned out to be a very good year for me. It was my first book and I was delighted. The trouble was that the publishers didn’t have enough faith in the poems and twinned them with a short novel I’d written called Frinck, about a young guy who fancies himself as a singer-songwriter and goes down to London to seek fame and fortune. This was early Scaffold days and the story was partly a warning to myself about the contagion of celebrity. I thought of trying to contact you at the time and sending a copy of the book you helped inspire, but you know what it’s like, I was busy and you were … you were? I had no idea.

Monika managed to give Frinck the slip in 1978. In other words, a small publisher called Whizzard Press published the poems on their own, with wonderful illustrations by Peter Blake, although the cover, a glorious painting of a girl sunbathing nakedly on a bed, the sandcastle not quite hiding the naughty bit, was to prove too explicit for many High Street bookshops, who declined to put the book on their shelves. Despite this it sold well enough for Penguin to republish in 1990 (with a more decorous cover by Peter).

By the way, Monika, I assume you’re familiar with Peter Blake because he’s been world famous since he designed the sleeve for the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper album and was very much involved in designing the set for a production we did at the Lyric Studio in Hammersmith. Directed by Mel Smith with music by Andy Roberts, it starred Alyson Spiro as Monika, Greg Floy as the lover and me as the narrator. Central to the design was a bedroom and Peter was keen to re-create the one from his original painting, which featured on the book and album cover. So while Mel Smith was putting us through our paces in a rehearsal room above a pub in Chiswick, Peter spent the weeks painting tiny pink roses on to a backcloth to represent the wallpaper that extended on three sides around the set.

I would love to be able to say that the show was a huge success and that it transferred to the West End before moving on to Broadway, followed by a round-the-world tour, which included a short season at the National Theatre in Stockholm where Ingmar Bergman, attracted by the title, dropped in and was so enthralled that he insisted on producing and directing the film for Hollywood. (With you playing the lead, of course, Alyson being very decent about handing over the role.) But I can’t. The theatre was packed every night and the audiences were enthusiastic. Unfortunately for us, the reviewer on the Evening Standard was less so; he put the knife in and that was that. The show never transferred.

(Incidentally, Monika, the reviewer was not a butcher but a sort of drama critic. Do you have them also in Sweden?)

The show closed on Saturday 22 December and I spent until the unearthly hours with Peter and his favourite student, Ian Dury, drinking whisky in my flat on the Fulham Road. On Monday morning I went down to the theatre on King Street in Hammersmith to collect my things and clear the dressing room. It had also occurred to me, and I’d mentioned it to Peter on the previous morning, that a roll of his painstakingly hand-painted wallpaper might be nice as a keepsake. The thought of cutting the canvas backcloth into rectangles and having them framed, stored and sold over the years had of course never crossed my mind. But too late. On Sunday the backstage crew had dismantled the set and the delicate pink roses had disappeared beneath two coats of black paint.

And so, nearly four decades later, I write a play for radio using some of the poems from the book and I think about you and wonder whether you heard it. And I wonder, too, what became of Monika, that beautiful girl, long-haired and naked, sitting beside a lake on a poster in Hope Street, Liverpool 8.