Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [42]
14 July
John Fowles has written Harold a charming letter approving the screenplay: ‘I had doubts about the interweaving of past and present (the present was all invented by Harold, at Karel Reisz’s suggestion) but found myself really looking forward to your bits, the bits typed in red.’
52 Campden Hill Square – that Haven – was becoming more and more of a tip, with the influx of quantities of teenage children and their friends who never got up and if they did get up, never washed up. Harold, an only child, a fastidious only child, was in despair with which I totally sympathized.
23 July
The Reign of Terror has started. Decide to wake both Benjie and Damian, my elder sons. ‘You can’t talk to him. He’s still asleep,’ says an unwise voice from upstairs. ‘GET HIM UP! IT’S HIS MOTHER SPEAKING!’ ‘Why?’ said the unwise voice still more unwisely. ‘BECAUSE I SAY SO.’ Stormed about the house ranting and shrieking, having read a learned medical article in the Guardian that morning saying that people who suppress their anger fall dangerously ill. An hour later I shout: ‘Damian!’ ‘Jawohl, Stalin,’ he replies. ‘It’s the Cheka come to get us,’ wail the unhappy teenagers. Soon the house is clean and tidy. Victory.
27 August
My forty-seventh birthday. Day haunted by Mountbatten murders. Later I continue to be haunted by the subject, not the death of the grand old boy, dying a hero’s death full of years and honours, to merit a Ceremonial Funeral, but those children, those bright young faces on TV including an Irish boat-boy.
8 September
Frances Pinter is reading Charles II with evident enjoyment. She has also written one of the most charming letters I have ever received in my life, saying in effect, how happy I have made Harold. It’s odd. Laura Lady Lovat didn’t want me to marry Hugh, wearing black at our wedding which shocked my mother (I still have the black hat labelled ‘the hat I wore at poor Hugh’s wedding’ which I found after her death), yet I was young, Catholic and willing. My crime was that I had no money, as she made clear from time to time. Harold’s parents might justifiably shrink from the Catholic, divorced mother of six, yet they are displaying great warmth now they have got over the shock.
18 September
We revisit the Hotel Lancaster in Paris for the French production of No Man’s Land. I recall to Harold his remark four years ago that he might find it difficult to live with children. Me: ‘You were quite right. Who can?’ (It has become one of our jokes.) Harold to me, last thing: ‘You may not agree but I am actually very calm these days.’ In the meantime I have floated the idea of writing a study of women in the seventeenth century: both George Weidenfeld and Bob Gottlieb seem keen.
This became The Weaker Vessel: enormously successful in the US in 1984, largely due to the energetic promotion of Bob Gottlieb who made it into a bestseller; in the UK in contrast it was perhaps ahead of its time as women’s history – America much more advanced in that respect – although it did win a Wolfson History Award, to my eternal joy. It remains the book of which I am proudest, because it was so difficult to write: ‘Fifty-one per cent of the population for a hundred years, no narrative structure, no nice neat birth, life and death,’ as I groaned to Harold on the first day I sat down to write.
29 September
Poets at the Purcell Room for a TV programme directed by Harold. (It never came to anything but a good time was had by all, since the poets included those famous bon viveurs George Barker and W.S. Graham.) The most touching moment came when Judy Gascoyne, wife of David Gascoyne, got up and recited her life story as if it was a poem. Which it was really, and I laid it out as such in my Diary.
I was married to a vet
For thirty years
He left me for another woman
But it’s essential, isn’t it?
To keep cheerful
Anyway, that is what I did
I went to the asylum
I read to the insane
For them I read poetry
My favourite poetry
So one day in an asylum
I said: ‘This is a poem
A