A month ago, at the funeral service of a friend, not a bosom pal but a local poet and artist whose reputation didn’t extend beyond the pub, I read a poem I’d written. Next Thursday I’ll be standing in another pulpit in another church to read another poem for another friend. A closer friend, this time, and I have yet to write the poem his widow and family have requested. It’s always difficult to write verse for such an occasion, not resorting to easy clichés that will have the congregation, already brimming with emotion, turning on the taps. I should talk to him rather than about him. Perhaps write him a letter or chat as if we were in the pub, find a tone of voice that won’t buckle under the weight of metaphor, that doesn’t sound like a chopped-up sermon. There are now more funeral than marriage services, the wreaths outnumber the bouquets, the eulogies the epithalamia. It comes with the uncharted territory, of course, all the vacated perches swinging gently in the late evening breeze, and although not a hypochondriac as many of my fellow poets confess to be, I do worry about becoming one, and this chronic state of anxiety brought on by the fear of developing hypochondria can affect my work. Quite a few poems deal with suffering, ageing and dying, and although some are the result of real experience, others have been written almost as spells, to charm and counter evil spirits, to take the sting out of their tails.
I have recently been reading favourable reviews for Simon Gray’s memoirs, addictively entitled, The Smoking Diaries, and most reviewers refer to this ‘curmudgeonly old man’ who writes wittily and movingly about mortality on a path strewn with fag-ends and empty champagne bottles. A literary warrior of bygone days, still able to throw punches and settle a few old scores. When I reach his age, I thought, I hope I still have a sense of humour and, more important, the energy to sit down and write my non-smoking diaries. Then I notice that he is practically the same age as me and feel suddenly curmudgeonly. I mean, I realise that it wasn’t a computer virus that caused various government departments to send me senior travel passes, winter fuel vouchers and weekly pensions, and that the occasional young man (usually Italian) who offers me his seat on the Tube, isn’t taking the piss, but even so … Ageing? Possibly. Old? Not in a million years. (No, that can’t be right, can it? In a million years I’ll be 1,000,066 which is getting on a bit.)
But despite the book’s good notices, I probably won’t be reading Gray’s memoirs because he married a favourite ex-girlfriend of mine in 1997 and, being a Scorpio, I would find it hard to sit back and enjoy heart-warming recollections of the good times they have shared.
John Brown, who became a hugely successful publisher, was a young dynamo in the publicity department at Jonathan Cape when they were publishing my books in the seventies, and he liked nothing better than being out of the office on Bedford Square and on the road with the poet, armed with a case full of slim volumes to flog after the reading. We became chums, so when he mentioned how he had always wanted to watch the Grand National at Aintree, I invited him up to Liverpool to stay the weekend at Windermere House. Had John been a racehorse, he would have been a thoroughbred, raised in swanky stables and fed on a diet of top-class hay, and when he joined me for breakfast on that first morning wearing his silk dressing gown with a white linen handkerchief tucked into the top pocket, I could not escape the feeling that Windermere House was really his and I was merely the valet.
Deep down, of course, I knew that I owned the house because I had bought the white stuccoed Palladian pile in Princes Park in 1970 in an attempt to cheer myself up after breaking off with Thelma. Rumour has it, according to the nuns from Bellereve Convent next door, that I turned up one morning with a brown canvas bag containing bundles of used fivers, profits from the weekly sales of ‘Lily the Pink’, and made the owner an offer he couldn’t refuse. My own recollection, however, is more mundane, involving a Halifax mortgage and a brown canvas bag filled only with poems and dirty laundry.
I think I may have been under pressure from my accountant to invest in property, and certainly John and Mike had bought houses, but I can only put down the purchase of a six-bedroomed mansion built for Sir Joseph Paxton, with a garden the size of a small jungle, as a symptom of mental instability. Within months of my moving in Thelma, now pregnant, joined me and we lived happily for a couple of years until, a wedding and two sons later, the rot set in:
It began in a corner of the bedroom
following the birth of the second child.
It spread into the linen cupboard
and across the fabric of our lives.
Experts came to treat it.
Could not.
The Rot could not be stopped.
Dying now, we live with it.
The fungus grows.
It spreads across our faces.
We watch the smiles rot,
Gestures crumble.
Diseased, we become the disease.
Part of the fungus.
The part that dreams, that feels pain …
In November 1976 Thelma moved into the side of the building we had converted for letting to tenants, taking the boys with her, while I was confined to solitary in the main house. Like most half-brained, stupid-assed ideas, this seemed like a good one at the time. There would be easy proximity, the children wouldn’t feel the full pain of separation and it left open the possibility of an eventual reunion. In reality, of course, it merely enlarged the boxing ring.
Instead of thrilling to the sound of horses’ hooves thundering towards Beecher’s Brook, and marvelling at the sight of scarlet, sky-blue and gold, John bore open-mouthed witness to a no-holds-barred slanging match that lasted all weekend and wilted his linen handkerchief. Although there was no actual violence, Thelma drawing the line at physical abuse, it must have been a frightening experience for gentle John, rather like being hurled through time into the future, to be saddled with a non-speaking part in a particularly tacky episode of Brookside.
Whenever I look at my diaries for the years 1974–7 I am overcome with a sense of fatigue and have to go for a lie-down. I hardly seemed to be in one place for more than a day at a time. There were long, gruelling tours with Grimms – the poetry/comedy/rock outfit; recording sessions in out-of-the-way places with strange-sounding names; the demise of the Scaffold involving tax inspectors toting small firearms; poetry festivals at home and abroad; creative writing courses at the Arvon Foundation; presenting Focus, a long-running series for BBC children’s television; as well as popping over to Loughborough University on my days off to carry out my duties as Poetry Fellow. Thelma might claim with some justification that one of the reasons for the breakdown of our marriage was my constant travelling. She needed stability and there were those nearer to hand who could provide it, so we called in the lawyers.
I needed to move away from Liverpool and began to spend more and more time in London, either with Brian in his dark but flower-filled basement in Holland Park, or with Jim Goddard in his luminous top-floor flat round the corner. On the other side of Holland Park, in the house that would loom large in The Smoking
Diaries, lived Victoria Rothschild who was a friend of John Brown’s, and one evening, after a reading in Guildford, we dropped in to catch the tail end of a small party. As well as being super-intelligent and darkly beautiful, Victoria was bruised fruit, still recovering from the break-up of an intense affair, and I made her laugh. I think it was probably as simple as that. We started seeing each other and before long, and far too soon, I moved in with her.
If I’d hurried through the divorce as soon as it became obvious that the marriage was over, sold White Elephant House, agreed on a settlement and moved to London, who knows? I might have been the next Lord Rothschild. At least we could have done a bit of old-fashioned courting, phone calls, flowers, evenings at the cinema, instead of a few jokes and a long kiss followed by a brown canvas bag in the hall.
Although not divorced from Thelma, I was divorced from reality and living in a dream world in which I was single and free from all responsibilities. The truth hit me like a kick to the shin, twelve days after I had moved into Victoria’s house in Addison Avenue, when Thelma arrived with the responsibilities, aged three and five, keen for them to carry on seeing me regularly, dropped them off at the front door with suitcases full of their toys and clothing, and drove straight back to Liverpool. I sensed the going might be uphill after that and I was right. To add injury to insult, Tom, was a toddling time-bomb, and within days Victoria had contracted chicken-pox and was unable to continue in her new post as a lecturer at Queen Mary College.
The following Monday afternoon, while Finn was sledging down the stairs on a tea tray, the invalids were in darkened bedrooms, whimpering softly and I was making an origami revolver out of a Nigel Dempster column in the Mail headed ‘DOCKER’S SON DESERTS WIFE AND FAMILY TO LIVE WITH HEIRESS’, when the front doorbell rang. It was Lady Rothschild with a flower stall wrapped in cellophane for her daughter, and, although she must have been mightily unimpressed with the latest boyfriend, and rightly so, she was too gracious to let it show. If I’d been her ladyship I would have kicked me out on my Scouse arse; instead, she sympathised with my predicament before going upstairs to comfort Victoria and cheer up Tom.
I was later to meet Lord Rothschild too, a meeting that was far scarier because his children were very much in awe of him, but he didn’t attack me physically, as I feared he might. Instead, he made it clear that his daughter had been through an emotional wringer and needed a carefree settled life to enable her to enjoy her new academic post. He hoped that Victoria and I could sort out the arrangements with the boys and wished me well. In May I enrolled Finn at the Fox School at the back of Kensington Church Street, where Ivor Cutler taught, and pretended that everything would be fine. However, the strain on Victoria was ridiculous, particularly as I carried on my life as a performing poet, which had included the final appearance of the Scaffold at the Albert Hall on All Fools’ Day, with the Monty Python team, Barbara Dickson and Alan Price, as well as three nights away in Paris: ‘Victoria darling, just popping over to Paris for a few days, conference sort-of-thingy with Charles Causley, Dannie Abse and Jon Silkin. Any problems with the kids just give Brian Patten a ring. Ciao.’
In June, my mother, who had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for a number of years, was admitted into Walton Hospital, suffering from bowel cancer, so when the Fox School closed down at the end of the summer term I thanked Victoria for bravely putting up with us all, as well as putting us all up, wished her well and returned to Liverpool.