Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [353]
Terry J rings to say that the show was approved of very much in Camberwell. So the day is bright.
Drive to Notting Hill to buy a birthday present for Helen. Wander about. To BAFTA by 2.30 to do an interview with Ivan Waterman of the News of the World. I’m thankful of being warned by Maggie Forwood of the Sun on Tuesday that Waterman was ‘very keen’ and always muttering ‘must make it dirtier …’ He seems to be quite bright.
But I have to guffaw when, at about ten past three, as burly BAFTA ladies are hoovering under our feet he asks ‘And finally, sex?’
At nine the phone rings. It’s Al from Sag Harbor. He’s decided to marry Claudie. He wants me to investigate the possibility of a register office wedding in Hampstead in mid-November. He would like a gathering of’just a very few people’ and he and Claudie want to come and stay at No. 2 for a while after the wedding. ‘We’re a couple of old romantics, Mike. She’s rung her sister, and I’ve rung you. You’re the second to know.’
I am unaccountably depressed by the news. Why he should feel he has to marry her, I cannot totally understand. Lovely girl though she seemed. It’s Al’s huge, warm, lovely, romantic soul welling out of him with happiness. And as such I don’t think he is in a fit state to decide on marriage. He is not yet back in life. He may think he is, but his affair with Claudie is still too much like a dream, I fear, for the reality to be anything other than anti-climax. I would rather big A had got back into the mainstream of life – a job, an interest, a project that brought him back amongst people – than pursuing so single-mindedly a relationship which can only isolate him further.
I may be wrong in all this.1
Friday, October 12th
Up at seven to prepare for departure to Gordonstoun to address the sixth form and the Preparatory School before this day is out.
In the queue for the Inverness flight, meet Les Megahey.2 He’s off to the Highlands to do a week’s research for a film on Landseer. He’s second in command to H Burton at BBC Music and Arts. Later on the plane – a reassuringly plodding Viscount crossing the country at 320mph – he mentions that if TJ and I, or either one of us, have any ideas for films we might like to do, he does control twenty of them a year, and has a very good relationship with crews and technicians.
On arrival at Gordonstoun, was taken on a tour of the school site by Graham Broad – the brother of David, my classmate at Shrewsbury in 1960–61. He walked me up the Silent Walk – a mile-long stretch of isolated school site, where boys have to walk in silence as a punishment. Graham assured me, quite seriously I think, that it was alright for us to talk. The trouble is anything he said on the Silent Walk was drowned out by the screaming roar of Nimrod and Jaguar fighters, taking off in pairs from RAF Lossiemouth – about three-quarters of a mile away!
Tea with the headmaster. A young, bright, effective-looking man, four years my junior. G Broad seems very scared of him. Two sixth-form girls and two sixth-form boys – one with hairy legs protruding from shorts – are also present. A cake is passed around. I feel I must consume my slice. It’s given in that sort of spirit. Everyone dutifully eats their slice.
At 6.30, as dusk is falling, I leave Gordonstoun and, with the 16-year-old daughter of the prep school headmaster as my guide, drive over to Aberlour House – the prep school of Gordonstoun.
I arrive just as the smallest boys (many of them, inexplicably, blond, blue-eyed and yet from Peru) are squatting on the floor engaged in some ritual prior to being packed off to bed.
The headmaster was a quite different character to the steely Mr Mavor of Gordonstoun. Tall, rambling, with that air of slightly disreputable elegance which speaks of nights, rather than days, well spent. Even the name, Toby Coghill, is straight