Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks Read online

  Which left me with just two numbers in my little black book: Havana 305 031 and Cairo 768944. It took me a day to get through to one, and three days to reach the other (all calls to Egypt are subject to censorship), and when I finally did make contact, Fidel and Anwar were, needless to say, busy elsewhere. Both, however, promised faithfully to ring me back, which is why I leave them till last. Courtesy I like. Not, though, that they actually have rung back, but who knows? Even now, the dark, dependable forefingers may be poised over their respective dials, groping along the cables for a chance to chew the fat and swop a joke or two. If not, and if they read this first, don’t worry about it, lads. It’s nothing urgent.

  I just wanted to say hello.

  17

  The Rime of the Ancient Film-maker

  There has been much speculation as to why, when Ken Russell’s first film on the Lake Poets was so uncharacteristically restrained, his second was so characteristically extravagant.

  Part I

  An ancient director It is an ancient Film-maker,

  meeteth three And he stoppeth one of three.

  viewers about to ‘By thy long grey script and glittering lens,

  watch Match of the Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

  Day, and detaineth one.

  The telly’s doors are open’d wide,

  We’ve got the Guinness in;

  There’s cheese’n’bacon Krunchimunch,

  And peanuts by the tin!’

  He holds him with his podgy hand,

  ‘There was a film,’ quoth he.

  ‘Eff off! It’s Stoke v. QPR!’

  Retort the Viewers three.

  He holds one with his glittering lens –

  The viewer is The Viewer stood stock still:

  spellbound by ‘Is this for Candid Camera?’

  the old man’s The film-man hath his will.

  Arriflex. There The Viewer sat down on the step:

  may be money in it. This could be fame at last!

  And thus spake on that ancient man,

  The mad-eyed cinéaste.

  ‘The script was cheer’d, the treatment clear’d.

  Mr Melvyn Bragg is Granada coughed up loot!

  hired, and works for I grabbed my crew and off we blew,

  an entire morning. Bound for the first day’s shoot.

  The book is

  finished. The Sun came up upon the left,

  Into the lens shone he!

  A blood-red smear, a crimson tear,

  Was all the lens could see!

  The film-maker gets ‘Cut! Print!’ I cried; for in that shot

  to the heart of Was all I asked, and more:

  Wordsworth. A sense of doom, in that one zoom;

  All Nature steep’d in gore!

  ‘Lake poetry is pain and lust

  And death!’ the old man roared.

  ‘And—’ here the Viewer turned his head,

  For QPR had scored.

  Warming to his ‘And then—’ the Viewer’s head jerked back

  theme, he hires six ‘—we cut across to France.

  helicopters and In every scene, the guillotine:

  abattoir. Well, why pass up the chance?

  A sonnet is carefully The fat heads roll’d, and, green with mould,

  interpreted. The rotting torsos lay;

  While, nude, the Eskdale Shepherd gasped

  And rutted in the hay!’

  The viewer is ‘Stone me! Is all that poetry?’

  amaz’d by the sheer The Viewer cried. ‘By heck!

  vision of the ancient I only know The Boy Stood On

  director. The, wossname, Burning Deck!’

  ‘You have to read between the lines!

  Between the words, forsooth!

  For what I read is what I know:

  There is no other Truth!

  Granada, hearing But fools’ – and here his face grew black –

  rumours, despatch a ‘Will ne’er let genius be:

  studio spy. A man was sent from Manchester;

  His brief: to check on me!

  Each day, he scribbl’d telegrams

  Back to Granada’s boss;

  Each day, his calculator clicked.

  His name was Albert Ross.

  The spy, in a vision, And when he saw what we had shot,

  foresees ratings. His flannel chops turn’d white!

  ‘You call this family viewing, son?

  You call this Sunday night?’

  Thereafter, sat he with our crew;

  Thereafter, every day,

  They fawned to do his every whim,

  For they had heard him say,

  The spy takes That if the film did not pass him,

  control of the If there was one more shot

  project. He could not show his grandmother,

  Then he would scrap the lot!

  The ancient And they were men with mortgages,

  director is sold for a And they were men with wives:

  mess of pottage, There was no room for genius

  plus overtime. Within their little lives!

  I stood apart, as in a dream,

  And let them shoot at will;

  They filmed each lousy skylark, shot

  Each stinking daffodil!

  Yet, while I stood, my brain did not:

  It, fertile, laid a plan;

  A perfect crime, to wait the time

  The film was in the can!

  The ancient director And, as it left for Manchester,

  draws his I left to cut my loss;

  own conclusions! And, with a Props Department bow,

  I shot that Albert Ross!

  Part II

  A free man, the ‘The Sun now rose upon the right:

  ancient film-maker We went to film Part Two.

  launches into The But when they scann’d the scene I’d plann’d,

  Rime of the Ancient Rank terror gripp’d the crew!

  Mariner.

  They look’d behind, to ease their mind,

  But no fat fink did follow!

  Nor any day, with bonus pay,

  Came to the film crew’s Hollo!

  Sheer brilliance They did not guess; nor did they press

  overwhelms doubt For further explanation:

  yet again. Since genius brooks no challenge, and

  Technicians know their station.

  But Friday came; it brought no cash.

  Their nagging made me cross.

  And like a fool, I blew my cool:

  Confess’d I’d murder’d Ross!

  The film crew are They shriek’d! They swore! They tore their hair!

  deeply stricken by They fell down in their woe!

  news of the poor For all averr’d I’d kill’d the bird

  wretch’s death. That made the cash to flow!

  And when, next morn, I found my teeth,

  Arose, and quit my bed;

  There came no sound from all around:

  The camera crew had fled!

  And yet, and yet: my actors stood,

  Waiting in serried ranks;

  Thank God, I thought, that actors are

  As thick as two short planks!

  They stared at me, made-up and dress’d,

  With simple, empty eyes.

  And what I saw when I stared back

  Were blessings in disguise!

  The ancient filmmaker Who needs a camera crew? I cried;

  recognises Who needs their bleating moan?

  his own supreme I took the kit, and shoulder’d it,

  qualities. And went to film alone!

  And oh, the reds! And oh, the greens!

  And oh, the clever angles!

  And, bless my wig, is that a twig,

  Or something Coleridge dangles?

  The ancient filmmaker Was ever documentary made

  pre-empts So bravely to defy sense?

  critical acclaim, Is, surely, this not what is meant

  wisely. By she
er poetic license?

  For am I not a poet, too,

  Indeed, not far less boring

  Than all those Lakeland buggers—’ he

  Broke off. The man was snoring.

  He jabbed his ribs; the Viewer woke.

  ‘Who won?’ he cried, ‘Did Rangers?

  I know Stoke’s bleeding midfield play,

  It’s full of hidden dangers.’

  The ancient filmmaker The ancient film-man grasped his throat!

  still struggles ‘I talk of Art!’ he cried;

  to communicate, ‘Of Culture for the masses!’ ‘Stoke’s

  with no more than A bloody tricky side,’

  usual success.

  The Viewer said. ‘they’re all up front,

  I’ve mentioned it before.’

  A sadder (but no wiser) man,

  He went to find the score.

  18

  Good God, That’s Never The Time, Is It?

  The weather would pick tonight to break. Just when I thought the whole dread moment might pass unnoticed, one day sliding into another without even a perceptible click. And now the sky is full of thunder, lightning, raindrops the size of golfballs, and hot golfballs, at that, dogs are going mad in the explosions, the cat’s under the stairs, nightbirds are shrieking themselves hoarse at the thought of all those worms belting up through the topspit to greet the end of the drought . . . the entire galaxy is rotten with augury. If this were Fiji instead of Hampstead, you wouldn’t be able to see for flying beads, there’d be blokes jumping up and down on hot coals, and senior civil servants tuning in to their local volcanoes to see what had set the gods off this time, and remittance men from the Home Counties sweating the stitches out of their seersucker suits and praying that the demented house-boy’s kris might find an alternative place in which to sink itself.

  It can’t all be because I shall be thirty-five at midnight. I don’t know Anyone with that kind of pull.

  I had intended the whole thing, as I say, to pass unnoticed. Thought I’d go to bed at around eleven, aged thirty-four, and wake up in the morning with it all over. Like having your appendix out. Never expected to sit through midnight, June 26, watching everything turn into mice and pumpkins. And here I am, an hour off the end of Act One, and can’t sleep for the thunder rattling the rooftiles, threatening the gutters.

  I’ll be fifty-eight when the mortgage is paid off. Pass like a flash, those twenty-four, all right, twenty-three years, if I’m any judge. Last twenty-three went by like that.

  Sorry for the paragraph break. I snapped my fingers at that, and pain shot all the way up to the elbow; no doubt, arthritis sets in at thirty-five. A few years ago, I could snap my fingers, oh, a dozen times on the trot. Where was I (senility setting in, too, half a million brain cells been conking out annually since twenty-one, that’s seven million brain cells, wonder how many I started with, maybe the entire skull is empty, like those joke ashtrays where you put the fags in the eye-sockets, just a couple of doz assorted brain cells left, huddling together like stranded amoeba, watching one another die)? Oh, yes, about the shooting-by of twenty-three years – I was twelve. I can still feel being twelve. Looking forward to the Festival of Britain. I went down to watch the Skylon going up, in short trousers. Me, that is; the Skylon went around in a sort of tin slip. I can exactly recall the feeling of chapped legs, wind coming over Waterloo Bridge. I went up the Shot Tower and spat off it. Tonight, I feel as if the spit hasn’t hit the ground yet – twenty-three years?

  Of course, thirty-five may not be significant at all. I might go on to ninety-six, in which case I ought to be writing this article at forty-eight, i.e. in about ten minutes’ time. The thing is, one thinks in terms of three score years and ten. It’s about all I have left of formal religious belief. That and a lingering guilt about non-payment of fares. One of the few things I don’t have instant recall over: what it was like to believe in God. Stopped believing circa 1953, don’t know why.

  Other things I find it impossible to remember, (1) Virginity (2) What it was like not smoking (3) Being unable to drive (4) Not shaving.

  The point is, am I about to become half-dead, or should I consider myself as being half-alive? I am extremely aware of deterioration tonight; I can see it spilling over the belt, feel it when I run my fingers through my hair. It’s a short run, these days, barely get off the blocks and you’re through the tape. Also, I appear to have more moles on my forearms than heretofore. I may be growing gnarled: finger-joints seem to be taking on angles, quite arbitrarily, which probably explains why my typing has been falling off. It’s as accurate as ever, but the fingertips whang down on the neighbouring keys as often as not. Line up on a “g” and an “f” appears on the paper.

  Eleven-thirty.

  Deterioration is the last thing I worry about, normally. What I feel most is psychic age. It manifests itself most clearly in the sudden awareness that one is actually part of history, and therefore disappearing fast. I look at old newsreels, Stalin and Roosevelt and Churchill chuckling away at Yalta, it could be an eon ago, it might as well be the Treaty of Utrecht they’re wrapping up, they could be ceding Mercia to Wessex, it’s all dead time; but I was alive when they did it, six, going on seven, fully formed, you can see it in the school photographs, same head. I’d already seen Hatfield House, had teeth filled, eaten Radio Malt, fallen in love, caught fish. At bloody Yalta!

  We all got a plate from George VI and a framed message congratulating us on our war effort. George the Sixth – it looks like William Rufus, when you write it down. Twenty years since the Coronation, we bought our first telly for it, 12? Murphy with doors, somewhat larger than a wardrobe, used to stand oakenly in the corner like a coffin at an Irish wake, blowing valves faster than you could say Joan Gilbert; twenty years, and I can recall the exact clatter of Muffin’s hooves on the piano-lid as if it was . . . in twenty years’ time, I’ll be fifty-five, Without A Pension I Really Do Not Know What I Shall Do.

  It isn’t that thirty-five is old in itself; merely that it is, as it were, the hinge, Halfway House, with Death sitting in the snug, biding his time over a brown ale, under the clock. An index of what’s left, how long it will take, life’s little Rorschach, you just fold it across the middle, and each mirrored blot is thirty-five years long. Or short. I got here so quickly; I was at Oxford yesterday, took O-levels Monday morning, learned to ride a two-wheeler over the weekend, and was it Friday I was dry all night, for the first time? I can’t be sure, but I remember my father was in uniform; an old man, nearly thirty.

  I wish more had changed, it would endow my degeneration with more significance; jet travel, sliced bread, colour TV, automatic transmission, professional tennis, and golf on the Moon – it isn’t much, really. I would like, I don’t know, England’s coastline to have altered beyond all recognition, dolphins to have taken over the world, something of that order. I’d like to have had an Ice Age or two, been through the Jurassic Period, watched man climb down from the tree, grow less prognathous, discover the wheel – ‘Hey, Al, you’ll never believe this, ha-ha-ha, I just made something that rolls downhill!’ I don’t seem to have been here very long, that’s all, and shan’t be for much longer.

  It could be my fault, of course; maybe I ought to have done more. Not that I haven’t done a considerable amount, I’ve eaten almost everything there is to be eaten, play most card games passing well, visited all forty-nine of the continental United States, written four million words, many of them different. But nothing solid. Mozart, Keats, Jesus Christ, Bix Beiderbecke, they were all dead by this point. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, here to introduce his new opera, The Eve Of St. Agnes, is Alan Coren, son of God and first cornet.’

  Can’t be sure it’d be any better, of course. Achievement need not be a hedge against decay. Look at Ozymandias; or, to be more precise, his feet. I grow melancholic (it is five to midnight) at a thought no more complex than that I like it here; it’s a good dance, a good movie, a good match, and I glance at my
watch and discover that it’s half-way gone already: life’s little irony number eight, there’s no pleasure, however intense, that cannot be flawed by a brief reflection upon its inevitable transience.

  Midnight. There we are, then. I’ll be all right in a minute. Feel better already, as a matter of fact. Well, it’s easier downhill, if nothing else.

  19

  Going Cheep

  This week, I need hardly say, nine birds have been added to the schedule drawn up under the Protection of Birds Act 1954, that list of feathered items which persons of curious taste may not legally kill, steal, or, for all I know, train to whistle the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

  These birds, as I know you have read, are the short-toed tree-creeper, the little gull, the Mediterranean gull, the gyr falcon, the purple heron, the scarlet rosefinch, the shore-lark, the green sandpiper and Cetti’s warbler, and millions of you have written to me in considerable excitement, asking for enough information about them to be able to drop their names with confidence at this weekend’s cocktail parties and dole queues.

  I have, in consequence and knowing where my professional duties lie, made some investigations, not to say speculations, and am now well able to give you a few salient facts with which to start your conversation off and, I trust, stimulate further ornithological enquiry. To take them in order, then:

  SHORT-TOED TREE-CREEPER

  This is a small shifty bird, mottled brown in colour, that hangs around tree roots and sneers at anything that passes. It does not work at all, believing song to be a mug’s game, and makes a point of getting up for the dawn chorus only to lean against its roots, examine it claws with studied nonchalance, and occasionally spit out of the corner of its beak. It does not, of course, tear about building its own nests, but squats in those of other birds foolhardy enough to have migrated south without putting their premises in the hands of a reputable agent. It does not go out of its way, in spring, to preen, woo, or otherwise seek a perfect partner, but instead attempts to mate, for form’s sake only and out of an instinct it personally finds an irritating drag, with anything it happens to bump into while creeping about. Many have been killed, as a result, by affronted mice, large bees, and the occasional sprightly toad. It is interesting mainly for its supporting role in interminable shaggy-dog stories about Long-Toed Tree-Creepers.