The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [115]
It was about ten months before we could move in and we couldn’t wait. We weren’t disappointed when we finally made it – the house and the grounds were wonderful. The only blot on the landscape was not our house (which was carefully designed to blend in), but some of the attitudes we encountered. The day after we moved I spotted a helicopter flying overhead, taking pictures. I knew it was a newspaper after a story. I wondered what nasty thing they could find to say about such a lovely place. When the piece came out it was every bit as snobbish as I feared. One of the big English supermarket chains bases the design of its country stores on the same sort of barn type as mine – an ‘Essex barn’, as it is known. So the journalist decided that I had built my house based on the design of a supermarket, obviously assuming that someone who is working-class by birth would be incapable of any taste or intelligence. I’m used to some daft stories in the press, but sometimes you do need to swallow hard . . . In Britain if you are successful and from a working-class background, you get this sort of thing all the time. It’s often a tiny and insignificant comment made by a tiny and insignificant person, but it’s annoying – a bit like being bitten by a flea you can’t quite ever squash. I remember talking to a reporter years ago about my elder daughter, Dominique. ‘Oh,’ he said, trying to stifle a laugh, ‘so you named her after the singing nun, did you?’ (There had recently been a number one hit called ‘Dominique’, by a Belgian nun.) ‘No,’ I said. ‘I named her after the heroine of the Ayn Rand novel The Fountainhead, Dominique Francon.’ I can still see the look on his stunned face: how could this ignorant Cockney bastard have read a book like that?
Class prejudice works in weird and wonderful ways in Britain. A supreme example of this is our planning system: thousands of apartment blocks were built for lower-income families after the war, with nowhere for tenants to park their cars. I suppose at the time the planners didn’t envisage that the working class would be able to buy cars. As well as stuffing up large-scale projects like that, the planning authorities also seem to like to stick their noses into small-scale affairs. We had some real trouble with the planning authorities at our Surrey place – although it had its funny moments. As soon as I moved in, I built a large pond at the bottom of my garden, which meant installing a rubber liner over sixty feet in diameter with a big hole in the middle for an island. We had to put this in manually and about thirty of our neighbours turned up to help us, which was wonderful. Now, on the whole we have been blessed with our neighbours, but there was one person who didn’t feel so warmly and reported me and my pond to the council . . . When the inspector eventually turned up – a young woman of about twenty-five – I recognised the attitude immediately. It’s called the ‘you may be a big movie star but that doesn’t impress me’ attitude and it usually means that you’re not going to be treated fairly at all. She was bristling with outrage and efficiency. She pointed to my lake. ‘Have you got planning permission for this building?’ she asked. ‘It’s a hole in the ground,’ I pointed out, ‘not a building.’ ‘Well, that is a building,’ she said and pointed to a tiny landing stage. ‘But it’s at water level,’ I said. I had her there, but she wasn’t going to give up and she held up a hand and looked around her. ‘What are those trees?’ she demanded. She was obviously on the scent of something. ‘Fir trees,’ I said, ‘planted to shield us from the sight and sound of the road.’ ‘You can’t plant trees,’ she said triumphantly, ‘it’s the Green Belt!’ She had me there and I couldn’t think of an answer for a moment, but eventually