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31 - 7 - 13

31/7/2013

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PictureThe Author as Zorro
When I woke up this morning I planned to write my weekly blog post on an aspect of British social history - a subject very dear to my heart. The reason for this  sudden change of tack? Explained in a single word - palindrome. I sat down after breakfast with a mug of tea to get going on my daily word quota for the first draft of the book I'm currently working on. I'm quite methodical in the way I work, and always number and date subsequent drafts, so when I 'Saved As' I noticed today's date was a palindrome. Okay, I know in the US dates are recorded with the month appearing first, but here in the UK we Brits do it differently - day, month, year - so definitely a palindrome, see! Do I detect a note of ennui here, the odd cry of 'So what'? Let me explain the reason for my excitement: today also happens to be my birthday. And although I'm quite
renowned for my lack of mathematical dexterity, by my reckoning, this won't be happening to my birthdate again for a hundred years. Whilst I do of course have every hope of being there in 2113 to celebrate my birthday, I don't generally plan that far ahead!
 
So, birthday, mine, today, palindrome, wow! (Well, okay - maybe just a bit wowish)
 
I can't deny that I occasionally experience the' black dog' referred to by Churchill for periods of depression. However, most of the time I remain pretty optimistic and cheerful, at least this is what those closest to me say. I once worked with someone who if you wished him, "Good morning!" would at once respond with, "Really, what's good about it?" Believe me, it was hard
work!
 
Despite the potentially auspicious nature of my palindromic birthday, I have no plans to do anything particularly 'special' today, which is actually just how I like it. Sometimes we'll celebrate a birthday, but for me it's really a day for quiet appreciation - the flipside of the coin marked 'expectation' is 'dissatisfaction', and I really have nothing at all to be dissatisfied about.  Our whole Western culture seems to be obsessed with the word 'special'  - that special occasion, special holiday, special day, special person, special thing! Occasionally, I have stood
stock still in Southborough Woods, listening to the birdsong and feasting my eyes on the splendour and beauty that surrounds me, and tried to imagine how truly awesome this experience would be if I was hearing and seeing it for the first time. I guess what I'm saying is that whether a time or place is 'special' is almost entirely down to me and my perception of
it.
 
Every day I wake up next to a woman I adore (always the same one I hasten to add!). We have a great many interests in common and we laugh a lot. We are not affiliated to a particular religious doctrine, although we both choose to live our lives along spiritual lines. Every morning before she goes off to her place of work we spend ten minutes together in silent meditation. Then I make a cup of tea and I sit down and write. I find the experience endlessly
absorbing.
 
Some years back, a senior executive in a major publishing house urged me to trust him that my book Niedermayer & Hart was "Going to happen" - about two years later, when it clearly wasn't, I felt thoroughly crestfallen. It took me a while to get over it and as the song goes, pick myself up, dust myself down, and start all over again!  Everyone who writes must occasionally entertain a fantasy that their work will ascend into stratospheric orbit, like Harry Potter. I doubt J K Rowling ever expected her work to be received in quite the way it has been. All I can say is, that today, on my birthday, I am delighted (and a little bit proud) to have written two books. A few weeks back Niedermayer & Hart received this brilliant reader review from someone who won one of two copies in a Goodreads Giveaway and was kind enough to write down what she thought of it - believe me, it is incredibly gratifying when someone truly 'gets' what you've written. My other book Roadrage (published June 2013), a psychological thriller, is acquiring reviews slowly, but what there has been so far is good.
 
So, as I sit here before my computer screen drafting this blog on my palindromic birthday, wearing a new T-shirt my wife presented me with this morning (along with some other great stuff), and looking forward to seeing my son Tom and his girlfriend Lou who are coming round later, I feel pretty happy with my lot in life. I have a lot to be grateful for!


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The Door

24/7/2013

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PictureMe and my first dog Petra
I've been gradually working my way through my old 'Just William' (see my recent post) book collection and have nearly exhausted them - so I guess this means that I'll shortly be returning to the world of adult literature. However, these nightly excursions back into the mind of a small boy have conjured up a world I'd largely forgotten; vividly bringing back to life sights, smells and colours, once part and parcel of the little universe of my childhood. The time and place of my own early years came along about forty years after Richmal Crompton had  established her eponymous hero. The stockbroker belt of South East England was then and now a far cry from the working-class communities of South Wales. Yet, the mental and physical landscape a small boy inhabited hadn't really changed much, it seems to me, from the twenties to my own time in the 1960s.
 
We hear a lot reported these days about children who just can't tear themselves away from their Playstations to go outside and get on with stuff, and a lot of shocking statistics about the rising numbers of childhood diabetes and obesity. Many parents seem reluctant and too fearful to allow their offspring to roam about these days in the way that both I and 'William's' generation did, the perception being that it just isn't safe. However, our police maintain that statistically there's no more 'stranger danger' for our current children than there ever was, and a lot of the anxiety about this has been hiked-up by the media. I honestly couldn't say. 
 
My life as a child seemed to revolve around home and family, friends and school. Home was where you ate and slept, fought with and sometimes 'clecked' on your brother, and where your mum was when you needed her. If you were a younger brother, as both I and my friend Keith were, your clothes were invariably hand-me-downs - to be honest I never actually thought about it, we would have looked blankly back at you if you'd ever raised the concept of 'lifestyle
choices'. Huh? As for school, it was that dreadful place where you were forced to go every weekday for a large part of the year. There were certain teachers who, when instructing you on a particular subject (maths for example), could
make time pass at about the same rate a stalactite grows. It seemed to us boys that school was something that only that whole different species, known collectively and dismissively by us as 'girls', related to and really enjoyed. School was interminable agony, a place that engendered such boredom in us that at times it must have brought us dangerously close to a state of coma; just the thought of returning to school as our summer holidays drew to a close was enough to fill a boy's soul with ennui. Real life was whatever you experienced after school, at the weekends or during the school holidays.
 
This story happened to me and my friend Keith, during one long hot summer in the early sixties. It would have been about the same time as the Beatles first appeared, when our Dads, to a man, all said that nobody would be able to  remember who they were in a year's time.
 
Keith and I had always been fascinated by the empty house. As far as we knew it had always been that way. We certainly couldn't recall anyone ever living in it. This fact alone was of course indisputable proof that the place was, beyond any shadow of doubt, haunted.
 
"My uncle told me that the man who lived there gassed hisself," said Keith, who had always possessed a fertile imagination.
 
"When was that?" asked I, open-mouthed in horrified awe.
 
"Years ago, before you came here to live."
 
"Why did he gas hisself?"
 
"Dunno. My uncle didn't say. Prob'ly the police was after him for somethin'."
 
"Why was the police after him, did he murder someone?"
 
"Prob'ly. Yes, I think my uncle did say there was a murder too ... an' then he gassed hisself."
 
The empty house drew us in irrevocably like a magnet.
 
At the rear of the house there was a 'lean to' shed that was open on one side. Here, the property's back door was located and had been boarded up. For us, seeing inside that creepy place became not just an obsession but a matter of honour; it was a thorn in our joint sides. At first we approached the 'lean to' with great trepidation, but gradually we grew in confidence, and it turned out to be to be a terrific den. Some days passed, then, after some closer inspection, we arrived at the conclusion that if we borrowed (unofficially) a few select tools from my grandad's shed, we would be able to remove the wooden boards concealing the door. We put our plan into action immediately!
 
I recall it was hard work, some of the nails were many inches long and demanded great effort from our eight or possibly nine year old muscles. We attacked that door with the kind of zeal and enthusiasm only known to children. If our mothers had requested that we put anything like the same kind of effort into tidying up our bedrooms, it would have been met with despair. Our great task however, to break into the haunted house, running a very possible risk of  meeting the ghost of the gassed man, fired us with enthusiasm and drove us on. When the pangs of hunger tolled, and figuring it must be lunch time, we arranged to meet immediately afterwards.
 
In fact, our morning efforts had been so thorough that there was only one board now left in our way before we got to the door. Applying what can only be described as superhuman effort we prised it off. Finally, the door was won!
 
It was locked, we discovered, and our attempts to shoulder-barge it like the square-jawed heroes we'd seen successfully do countless times in the movies, didn't seem to work. We stood before the door perplexed!
 
Then we thought we heard something. Noises coming from the other side of the door. To our mesmerised amazement it sounded like bolts being drawn back and a key being turned!
 
The door opened, and before us stood a middle-aged man in a striped towelling dressing-gown and ankle socks, yelling at the top of his voice, "What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?"
 
I think I'd have no difficulty believing it if a witness had described Keith and myself at that moment as possessing eyes on stalks and hair standing up on end.
 
It was after a good quarter of a mile of really fast sprinting that we dared look back to see if we'd been pursued.
 
We avoided that house in future. In fact, Keith and I didn't care very much to discuss the matter. We used to take alternative, often rather circuitous routes to avoid passing it. Whenever I did, it used to make my hair feel funny. As far
as I can remember nobody ever moved into the house.
 
Fortunately my grandad had lots of tools and didn't seem to miss the ones we'd abandoned at the haunted house. Well, if he did, he never mentioned them to me.


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Two Visits to Pompeii

18/7/2013

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PictureScala
The first time we visited Pompeii was some years ago when we were staying in a village called Scala (literally 'Steps' - and they weren't fibbing!) on the Amalfi Coast. Scala itself is roughly about three or four miles from the nearest bit of coast at Amalfi, reached by pursuing a torturously winding road which snakes its way through the steep hillsides.

PictureHeading towards Amalfi
Until the 1930s, when the road was built, the only way down was via the numerous steps that run up and down the hills, on which you might still encounter the occasional farmer riding a mule carrying water bottles. We found it was possible to get to Amalfi from our hotel in the village in under twenty minutes. We waved goodbye to a nice Italian couple one morning who had rushed through breakfast, intending to get a bus from the village to Amalfi, in order to catch a coach to Sorrento. We finished our breakfast in a leisurely fashion and took the steps. We were waiting at the coach stop in Amalfi as they alighted from the village bus - trying hard not to look too smug!

Picture
We took a day-trip organised by our tour operator to see Pompeii and the volcano Vesuvius. The one and a half hour guided tour of  Pompeii, with a commentary in English and Italian because the group was mixed, was  inevitably disappointing. It was a bit like taking a trip to the British Museum and finding you only have enough time to look around the foyer and bookshop!

Picture
The Amalfi Coast because of its terrain is not an easy place to get to and from without difficulty. The coach to Sorrento, probably a distance of less than twenty miles, takes over an hour and a half for example, as there is just one narrow road that weaves and bends its way along the coast. The trip to Pompeii convinced us to enjoy Scala as a place for walking amongst lemon groves and spectacular scenery. After a few days of going up and down literally hundreds and hundreds of steps we also developed calf muscles worthy of Popeye. However, we did formulate a plan to 'do' Pompeii properly sometime.

Picture
We did some research, and two years later we chose to book a hotel as base in Sorrento. We discovered an excellent thing called an Arte Card, which for a reasonable price included bus and train travel anywhere in Campania, and free entry at a certain number of historical sites. The ancient ruined city of Pompeii is only about twenty minutes on the Circumvesuviana train route, which runs from the centre of Sorrento to Pompei Scavi. We spent about fifteen hours at Pompeii over the two-week holiday and literally only scratched the surface - but inevitably there were other places we wanted to see and of course had to find time for relaxation too. It is the most incredible place, a city that met a sudden irrevocable end, and has been frozen in time since that moment. The human plaster casts (some of which are on display) were made by filling the space in the ash left where the two thousand asphyxiated victims of Vesuvius, including their domesticated animals fell and rose no more. They lay buried for the next fifteen hundred years beneath approximately 16 or 17 feet of volcanic ash.

PictureA bar Pompeii style
You can picture wives gossiping on the streets of the easily imagined porticoed shops. Or see whole families as they go to the theatres, or revel in their municipal excellence at the games put on for their appreciation by the city fathers. Or imagine craftsmen, or businessmen, or the many visitors the town must have had, sitting around in the various bars with a glass of wine: or chilling-out in its marvellous baths (I think the only place in the city where its curved and corrugated ceilings remain intact), or indulging in more carnal pleasures at the brothel with its pictorial menu of sexual offerings ( because not every tourist and visitor to the city spoke Latin). Apparently, the townsfolk of nearby Herculaneum ( also destroyed and equally worth visiting) found the people of Pompeii a little garish and vulgar - snobbery it seems is nothing new. Pompeii was renowned for its 'Garum', a kind of sauce made from the fermentation of fish, pretty stinky and probably a bit unpalatable to modern tastes, but the Roman world loved the stuff and Pompeii was famous and rich from the export of it.

PictureHouse of the Faun
However, conservation at Pompeii and the vast area it covers is a major headache, and every year the site deteriorates a bit more. For over fifteen hundred years the molten ash that had destroyed and buried it was its protector, but exposed to the sun, air and the 2.5 million tourists that visit annually, the site is under huge pressure. When we visited the Villa of Mysteries, beyond the Necropolis and outside the city walls, decorated with the most exquisite wall paintings, we were horrified to see our walking boots scuffing the ground and unintentionally kicking-up pieces of two thousand year old mosaic floor tiles. Pompeii is a marvellous piece of human heritage, a place where people lived, played, worked and died. I felt like they were reaching out across two millenia and saying to me, 'we were much the same as you, had similar ambitions and passions, vanities and foibles'.

The ancient Roman city of Pompeii lies close to the modern and similarly named suburb of Naples, Pompei. Together with the neighbouring town of Herculaneum, it was destroyed when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD. The population of Pompeii is estimated to have been about 20,000, and it's thought about ten percent actually died there. An eye-witness account of the eruption exists, written by Pliny the Younger who watched the whole thing from across the Bay of Naples.

There is currently a major exhibition about Pompeii on at the British Museum.
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Just William

10/7/2013

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Picture
I've been doing quite a bit of serious reading, research etc for the book I'm currently working on, and ploughing through The Richard Burton Diaries, although hugely enjoyable, was massive with interesting footnotes (which I am pathologically unable to avoid) on just about every page. Something must always be read of course, otherwise a day wouldn't be complete. And when in doubt about what might be next, I sometimes turn to the book guru at my side and get her advice. She takes books very seriously, and seeking her assistance is a bit like paying a visit to a medical practitioner.

Two minutes is generally all it takes. "I know," she said, "How about Just William."

"I haven't read any Richmal Crompton since I was a boy," I said. They were always a firm favourite then, especially if I was off school with a mild temperature. Pure bliss, a glass of lemon barley water on the bedside table and a 'William' to read. Many of these books which I'd have read around the mid-sixties were published by Armada with new illustrations. These are more cartoonish than the charming originals by Thomas Henry and the collections of stories themselves were cobbled together from several books and given new titles. This wouldn't have bothered me as a boy, but as a man I like to read things in the order they are written and how an author intended. The book guru was on the case and returned from our back bedroom (yes, books in every room!) with a hardback copy of Just William that bore the inscription:

To Ian
With Best Wishes
From Wynne
Christmas 1957

Although Wynne went on to become a distinguished professor of Mathematics, I doubt he was writing in such a well practised hand, being only two years old in 1957 as I was! Now here's an interesting piece of synchronicity; the last time I saw Wynne was at Theatr (no E in Welsh version) Gwynedd, Bangor, North Wales when I was performing with The Welsh Drama Company in the late seventies. However, I received a message from him completely out of the blue only yesterday - he'd found me through this blog and used the website Contact Form to email me! Now isn't that incredible - that I was currently reading a book with his name in it? Reconnecting with people I'd lost touch with has been the unexpected great bonus of keeping this blog and website going.

Anyway, back to Richmal Crompton (1890 - 1969) and the William Stories. She was born in Bury, Lancashire, the daughter of a clergyman. She graduated in 1914 from The Royal Holloway College, part of The University of London, with a BA in Classics, and was involved in the women's suffrage movement. In 1923, after contracting polio, she lost the use of her right leg, which seems to have precipitated giving up her teaching career to write full time. She wrote all-told thirty-nine William books throughout her lifetime, the first being Just William (1922) and the last William the Lawless (1970, published posthumously). She wrote over a hundred other books, many for adults, but it is the William books that she is remembered for.

And what was it like reading Just William again? I can only describe the experience as sublime. For someone who never married and didn't have children of her own, Richmal Crompton manages to get right under the skin of an eleven year old boy in a way that no one else, to my mind, has ever done better. These highly amusing stories about force of nature William Brown and his band of pals who call themselves The Outlaws are pure delight. For the past week the guru can testify to the fact that there has been a good deal of chuckling and a few whoops of delight coming from my side of the bed. Incredible to think that Just William was over forty years old when I first read it, and is now over ninety. We read the stories to our son when he was small and he lapped them up. They have a sense of period obviously, and are of the time when they were written, but they haven't really dated. Maybe this is because she knew her subject so well and eleven year old boys haven't really changed very much. I mean to say what's a mere ninety years in the evolution of boys! Four hundred odd years ago William Shakespeare wrote:

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.


So, no change there then!


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The Winds of War and Me!

3/7/2013

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Picture
I'm still enjoying my wife Judith's recent about-face with regards the Western genre. I wrote a piece about this (see Could The Aliens Who Abducted My Wife Please Return Her!). It's very nice indeed to sit down companionably together of a Saturday evening. I'll ask, "So what shall we watch?" and she regularly replies, "How about a Western?" I've learnt to hide my look of surprise, I mean, nobody likes to be asked if they're feeling okay in the head, do they? Exercising some caution may also be wise - who knows, with her undercover identity blown she might use her ray-gun on me!

We recently watched El Dorado with John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and James Caan. So good to see Wayne and Mitchum in a film together when they were both right at the very top of their game. I had the great pleasure of working with Mitchum in 1981 on a TV epic called The Winds of War. By my reckoning he was 64 by this time (I'd have been 26), but on screen he still looked a decade younger than this. The Winds of War was based on the novel by Herman Wouk and documents the escalation to World War Two, up to the point where the US became involved. I was involved in a twenty minute sequence where Admiral Henry (Mitchum's character) goes on a fact-finding bombing raid with the RAF.

I have a lot to thank the RAF for: the original plan had been to shoot the briefing scenes at Hendon RAF museum, and then a week or so later to travel to Scotland for four days to film the plane's interiors in what I believe is the only surviving Wellington bomber in the UK. Unfortunately, (but fortunately for me and my British actor chums playing the air crew) the RAF, pointing out that they were not flying Wellingtons at the time it was stated they did in the novel, wouldn't allow us access to their plane. The director/producer Dan Curtis sidled up to us when we arrived at Hendon, explained the problem together with the odd expletive whenever the acronym RAF came up, and asked if we'd object to flying over to Hollywood to complete the scenes a few months hence. We sighed at the aggrevation of it all and after some serious thought, stoically agreed to do it (whilst trying to contain the shrieking child who learns that its birthday and Christmas have mysteriously fallen on the same day this year!).

I went off and did a new play at one of our regional theatres in this time-off period and flew to LA in early December. Mitchum was one hundred percent professional. He must surely have known how totally in awe of him we were, but he treated us as his equals. Great movie stars aren't expected to hang around the set between takes, but Mitchum never went to his trailer once and just loved to sit around and chat. On our final day I spent about six or seven hours in the studio mock-up of a bomb aimer's bubble with Robert Mitchum squashed in beside me. He didn't use a stand-in while the scene was being lit, even though he might have done, and it was stiflingly hot and uncomfortable. We entertained ourselves by telling each other jokes and discussing stuff that interested us. He was a very smart guy - much much smarter than most of the hard men he regularly played.

He inisited that the company provide us with another day to see the city of LA that he loved, and threatened to shame them by paying for us out of his own pocket if they refused - which they did of course. He bought us dinner at the famous Chasen's restaurant in West Hollywood on our final evening.

I think anyone might agree, all in all not a bad few days work!


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