Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [51]
At some point in the ensuing FamHol in Ischia, Harold asked me to write down the words ‘Something is happening …’ because I had a typewriter and he didn’t.
13 November
Harold is reading Awakenings by Oliver Sacks. Apparently that line which he dictated was an ‘awakening’ of his own; an idea; one of his images; a woman speaking. But he hadn’t read the book, only heard talk about it. Now he’s reading the book.
20 December
Harold has written a play, a one-acter, based on the idea of Oliver Sacks’ book. I found it very moving, very complete. He read it to me as I lay in my bath. There’s always such an exciting feeling in this house when Harold writes. And he’s so happy.
25 December
Christmas lunch. Peter Hall and Maria Ewing came. Harold told Peter about the new play and that it would last an hour. Peter smiled in a pasha-like way and said, ‘That could be encompassed.’
28 December
The play is now called A Kind of Alaska, having had a short period as A White Tent. My parents came to dinner and afterwards Harold read the play to them. I was touched by the immense concentration with which Mummy listened, her face getting closer and closer to the script as she leaned forward. She takes an acute interest in Harold’s work with occasionally unexpected results. For example, when she watched a video of The Lover she was endlessly intrigued by the sexual fantasies played out by the husband and wife. Mummy: ‘Did Harold study the subject? Did he read medical books?’ Me: ‘Mummy!!!’ She adds hastily: ‘Perhaps he had a friend with these problems, so that was how he knew.’
1982
5 January
Harold read his new sketch Victoria Station to Natasha and me; we howled with laughter. It’s based on something that happened to him in a minicab going to see his parents, and drove him to a frenzy. It’s twenty minutes so the composite evening is adding up.
12 January
Harold waiting anxiously for Peter Hall’s call re Alaska and is quite thrilled when Peter announces: ‘the first play I’ve read for ages that has excited me’.
20 January
Every day is Christmas. Peter does like Victoria Station: his silence which put Harold in a state of early-to-bed depression was due to his being in Scarborough.
27 February
PEN protest in favour of Solidarity outside the Polish Embassy was one of those things which oddly worked well. Protests in my experience are not always successful as such, although the causes are always good. However in this case Andrew Graham-Yooll got us such good press coverage that maybe our protest will be like the mustard seed in the Bible. News of it went out in Polish on the BBC external service. The weather was freezing. ‘Colder in Poland,’ says I loyally into one of the many mikes. I have to say that there are more mikes than writers: news reports talk about 100 writers but there were actually 100 journalists performing an excellent service by swelling our ranks.
We congregate on a traffic island outside the Polish Embassy in Portland Place, on the walls of which I notice a plaque to Field-Marshal Lord Roberts. I point it out to Angus Wilson. ‘Little Bobs! Oh, he’d turn in his grave,’ says Angus, roaring with laughter. Only three of our number, led by V.S. Pritchett, stalwart figure in his eighties, are allowed inside. Harold and I shiver outside, feeling like the excluded boy on the hillside in the Pied Piper of Hamelin: will we ever see them again? Finally they emerge after a confrontation