Must You Go_ - Antonia Fraser [69]
Only one soldier guards the gate. But: ‘I hear the sound of hammering,’ says Harold, in a puzzled voice. And looking to the left, we see this amazing sight of people of all races and nationalities busily bent down towards the wall and hammering away with huge hammers in order to hack their own pieces off. For all the world like the Seven Dwarfs in the film, something comical at any rate, not the Nibelungen in Rheingold. Meanwhile in front of them were ten or so trestle tables on which lay pieces of the wall of all colours (bright blues, greens, as well as pinks, blacks) with enterprising lads selling them. Capitalism, quick off the mark! Harold bought me a pink-and-black piece looking like a jellied eel for about £6. Then I decide to do better myself and borrow a hammer from a dark-eyed energetic girl and hammer away. We photograph each other cordially.
Scrawled at the highest bit of the Gate were the words: ‘Vive l’Anarchie!’ But it was far from being anarchy we saw here, a new kind of order rather.
21 March 1990
Havel’s visit to London. We are asked to a small, i.e. non-State, lunch at Buckingham Palace. I wear my impractical white suit, bought for Anne Somerset’s wedding and more or less on hire from the cleaners ever since. A loyal crowd of Czechs, many in national dress, flowing red ribbons, outside the gates. Homemade banners. Other guests: Phyllis (P. D.) James in an elegant beige straw hat, Sir Charles and Lady Mackerras, various kindly attendants such as Sue Hussey.
When the Queen arrives with the Duke of Edinburgh, into a small sitting room decorated with pictures of the daughters of George III, she looks very like Phyllis but smaller and prettier. I find myself with the Duke of Edinburgh. He asked me what I was writing – I was dreading that. When I revealed that it was The Six Wives of Henry VIII, he said quite angrily and looking irritable too: ‘Why do people always say “Henry VIII and his six wives” as though it was all one word? There is plenty more to say about Henry.’ Me, cravenly: ‘Oh yes, sir, there is, I mean he was a wonderful musician.’ The Duke, sounding even crosser: ‘He was a wonderful military strategist, a fighter, he bashed the French.’ He repeated the words with great emphasis. ‘He bashed the French.’
At lunch the Queen is notably sympathetic, says Harold. She expresses interest at the change of Havel in his life from being a playwright to being a head of state. ‘But of course you were always working with your head?’ And she sort of mimed it. In the middle of lunch Václav leant across the table and said: ‘I never thought to see an unofficial playwright in Buckingham Palace.’ Pause, while everyone is slightly surprised at his choice of the word ‘unofficial’. Then: ‘No, Harold, I mean you.’ The men from the Foreign Office are convulsed.
Later Václav answers questions brilliantly at the ICA. Czechs now have liberty, he says, but with liberty comes the need to make decisions – for them to make the decisions. ‘Freedom means what it says. Now you decide. You don’t ask me whether there should be a cable car from Mountain A to Mountain B. That’s not my job.’
Throughout our summer holiday in Corfu in 1991, Harold had been cracking away at his screenplay of Kafka’s The Trial, to be directed by David Jones. He lurked in the little white annexe to the modest low-built villa, which we called the Cowshed. My mother actually did a watercolour of him at work: Harold was oblivious. He said that he wrote his early plays with