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Thursday, May 17th

Back to my writing room for the first time in two weeks. At the desk by a quarter to eight. And then three hours after breakfast. The novel turns into a play – which seems to rattle very easily off the typewriter – so I will blow with this wind for a while.

Saturday, May 19th

In the p.m. I have to open a fete at William Ellis School. Usually try to avoid public appearances in the local area – once you start they all want you – and anyway, the less conspicuous I am around here, the more comfortable life is. But W Ellis is the most likely school for Tom and William to go to, so I’m interested to see it. It’s on the edge of the Heath, was a boys-only grammar school, now a voluntary aid school within the comprehensive system (though still boys-only).

We are collected, en famille, by a car at a quarter to two and don’t get home until after five. I give a short opening speech, then have to walk around like the Duke of Edinburgh, with various members of the ‘committee’ at a discreet distance behind me, whilst I smile and sparkle and fail to hit anything with seven balls on the smash the crockery stall!

Tea with the headmaster in the middle of all this. He’s a short, unflashy, rather serious man, who I’m sure does his job well. I think there’ll not be much problem getting the boys in. He practically kidnapped them on the spot.

Sunday, May 27th

Take Ma to see the Tate extension. Enjoy the Rothko room this time. After a bit Ma, who has been patient, says rather touchingly ‘Before we leave, we will go and see some nice pictures, won’t we?’

Home for Sunday lunch, then a trip to the zoo between showers (all except Willy, who won’t come because it’s cruel).

To help convince Warner Bros that they were doing the right thing in backing Brian, Denis O’Brien corralled most of the Pythons into a marketing trip to Los Angeles.

Friday, June 1st

Taxi collects me soon after ten. Another Oak Village send-off, as the children cluster out in the street to wave and Tom announces to Mrs B and any others who may be around that Daddy is going to Hollywood!

The plane takes off an hour late – they’ve had to change aircraft as the first one was faulty – and we head off on a route I’m not accustomed to – straight up England, past Gospel Oak. Soon after which the pilot makes the momentou’s announcement that we are flying over Sheffield. He must have relatives there.

At LA Airport meet Graham and Bernard McKenna. Graham is at the wheel of a long, grey Cadillac, which is in itself an astonishing sight – I’ve never seen GC behind the wheel of a car in my life. But here he is, with his leased Cadillac, heading us through heavy traffic – eight lanes of cars on either side of the freeway making rather a mockery of the hair-tearings over the world fuel shortage.

The weather is dull and cool as we pull up to GC’s bungalow in Brentwood – a most salubrious-looking area of extensive houses and gardens. He pays $3,000 a month for this pleasant abode and, sitting out in the garden, sipping a Perrier and watching humming birds darting about and pointing their long noses into hibiscus and honeysuckle, it looks almost worth it.

Graham drives us back to the crumbling Chateau Marmont. It’s quite a reasonable time in LA – before midnight. But it’s dawn in England as I nod off over Evelyn Waugh’s diaries.

Saturday, June 2nd, Chateau Marmont, Los Angeles

No-one seems to have slept very well. Potter in my room until mid-morning, then go with a group of us to the Egyptian Theatre, Hollywood Boulevard, to see Alien – the Shepperton-shot, British-directed, space monster movie that is the latest to do record-breaking business in this film-hungry country.

The Egyptian Theater is a wonderful piece of extravagant decoration in itself – a lot brighter and more cheerful than the movie, which is very well directed and very creepy, up to a point, and loses its way in the last half-hour, by which time all the best shocks have happened.