Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [19]
Chapter Four
THEATRE OF THE WORLD
As we set off on our First Theatrical Tour (as my Diary calls it) I bore in mind Mary Queen of Scots’ epic words on the eve of her execution: ‘Remember that the theatre of the world is wider than the realm of England.’ First in Hamburg, then in Berlin, and a little later in Yugoslavia, all in terms of productions of Harold’s plays, it was difficult to envisage the hullabaloo which had occurred in England, since everywhere we were treated as a perfectly ordinary couple. I had always enjoyed going to the theatre since my childhood in Oxford where the carpentry master at the Dragon School took me regularly to the New Theatre and the Playhouse: we did joke in later years that I enjoyed going to the theatre rather more than Harold did. As a matter of fact, as a spectator not a participant, I had relished the political world (Labour) in which I was brought up and the political world (Tory) into which I married. Deep down my private world of history was the one that mattered to me, also since childhood; but that was mine alone.
One of my mother’s dire predictions: ‘You will never be accepted in theatrical circles,’ always made me laugh and we often quoted it in later years. What were they exactly? In reality, whether it was Harold’s obvious devotion to me or mine to him that moved the members of these famous circles, I had the warmest welcome. Rather more so, I reflected, than as the daughter of a Labour peer married to a Tory MP. At which point it struck me that neither of my two marriages had been remotely what my parents wanted; rather the reverse. Much later, after Hugh’s death, my mother confided to me that although she had loved the man deeply, she had abhorred Hugh’s ‘right-wing politics’. Yet it is to her credit that you would never have known it. I think some of this ‘abhorrence’ was due to the fact that Hugh and I had married at the time of Suez when he was a prominent advocate of military action and my parents equally strongly opposed to it.
12 February
There was a last gasp of the English press at the airport. A huge predatory crowd of photographers. It made me shake with helplessness. I just looked at the ground and recited Wordsworth: ‘Earth hath not anything to show more fair …’ Harold frightfully angry and tried to swat them away on the grounds they were flies. He also gave the V-sign and said: ‘They won’t print that.’ (He was wrong.) In Berlin we were met by Klaus Juncker, Harold’s agent since 1959, on the strength of The Birthday Party. He presented me with red roses in cellophane and gave Harold regards from another of his writers, a Czech called Václav Havel. Snowing. Collapsed at the Kempinski Hotel. I had flu but managed nevertheless to get to No Man’s Land.
13 February – a Friday
Nothing particularly unlucky except my persistent flu. Knew I still had a temperature. Nevertheless spirit kept me going to see the Wall: its tattiness, its dirtiness, the chief impression, plus a certain disgusting element in the thick pipe which now tops it. Connotation of the sewer now resting on top of the world.
All round the Wall: a real Niemandsland. Mounted a platform to look at the other (East German) side. Klaus Juncker’s old mother can now visit him from that side one month a year and he visits her. Nevertheless you see by the river-wall the white crosses to those who perished trying to cross it: ‘Ein Unbekannter’ – ‘An Unknown’. One was dated as late as 1973. And the Brandenburger Tor, now cordoned off to protect the Russian monument to their war dead. There are ‘two real live Russian soldiers’ standing there, as Harold puts it. Guide (a West German) points out enormous losses of Russians compared