Try to Tell the Story Read online

  Of course, there was another box, and it was like my theater in that it only worked if a light came on inside. It was the radio—the wireless—though whenever I saw inside there was this jungle of wires, impossible to chart, let alone repair. The radio was large, a piece of furniture, a cabinet with fretwork over the speaker. Hardly anyone then had portable radios, let alone the sort you can pop in your ear. The radio was as immense as a piano, and Grannie had a piano, a baby grand by the French windows. But the piano was out of tune and never repaired, while the radio was alive every evening.

  There was much to listen to—there were shows and the news and plays, or books done as narratives. And when I was no more than five, there was a version of Oliver Twist, with the noises of the streets and Bill Sikes's dog, and Fagin teaching Oliver how to pick a pocket. We listened to it and then my father replayed the scene, using the Vizier's handkerchiefs. His Fagin was probably on the broad side, and so I was not too surprised years later to discover that Alec Guinness's superb Fagin in the David Lean film was regarded in the United States as anti-Semitic.

  The idea of following a story like Oliver's week by week was inspiring, though I had no idea then of how far it resembled the pattern of many Dickens publications. I did not understand all of the story, but I grasped the desperate plight of Oliver, torn between vivid scoundrels and insipid goodies who would take care of him. To say that the BBC did such things well is like congratulating Warner Brothers and RKO Radio for capturing a certain mood. And I still believe that radio is a matchless medium, sadly neglected in America, where I live now. This is the story of a lucky boy—lucky to be raised in the age of radio. The BBC—and that's all it was back then—filled the air with plays and dramatizations. They even had a standing company of actors. I thank my stars for Carleton Hobbs, Norman Shelley, Grizelda Hervey, Mary Wimbush, and so many others. To this day, though I haven't heard the radio serial The Archers for forty years, I know that Ysanne Churchman was Grace Archer and was killed on a shocking night to rival the crash of the Manchester United plane in 1958.

  I may not have realized that Oliver Twist was Dickens, but the Sunday-night drama was noticed in the house. And thus it was that Miss Jane Davis came to my parents and said … Well, what did she say, or how do I put it? Try something like, “Perhapsh de boy shd rrrd a l'lle Dickenge.”

  This is an inept transliteration, and I have no wish to be cruel. The good news was that Miss Jane Davis was secretary of the Dickens Society. The bad news was that she had an afflicted palate so that hardly anything she said could be understood.

  Miss Davis was shy, and the spirit of spinsterhood. But there was no doubt that she was passionately moved by reading Dickens and knowing about him. She showed me her shelves of Dickens books. She made terse, very warm comments about them. She told me how Dickens walked and walked the city to find characters. She had cartoons of Dickens characters—Micawber, Pickwick, Miss Ha-visham—and she introduced them like companions from life. She urged that I be taken to the 1946 movie of Great Expectations, but my mother had heard that the first appearance of Magwitch on the marshes was so terrifying that it was not to be risked. Miss Davis sighed. Yes, it was true, Dickens knew a harsh world of great pain and hardship. But if the boy was in any way attuned to drama, then perhaps the show was more than the terror. Years later, after decades of film study, let alone living in a world of appalling unkindness and cruelty, this still seems to me a besetting suggestion.

  I was afraid—for the people in concentration camps, of the Grand Vizier, of my father being away and that my mother, too, might disappear. I was afraid of everything. I still am. But handling fear is a step toward art. And I had heard a bugle call—Great Expectations.

  “What is Great Expectations?” I asked Miss Davis.

  “Rrrurding,” she said. I couldn't understand. She repeated the word and then opened the book. Her tiny forefinger began to trace the lines of type. I saw how wrinkled it was.

  She looked at me. I cannot really remember how she looked. But I recall the weight of her concentration and I think of her now as someone not just proposing Dickens, but emerging from him. “Yes,” I said. She died not long after this, and I don't know how. I just saw that she had vanished from the house. She left reading.

  SECOND PART

  9

  KATE, MY MATE, and I will skate in the park.” This was the opening sentence in my first reading book at school. There were colored pictures of an old-fashioned time with children skating, and it looked like Christmas. But the time was not as old as that of Mr. Dickens (I had seen the classic illustrations to his stories) and not as harsh. Kate in the pictures was my idea of a “silly girl” and, after all, if they were skating, then I couldn't understand why they were not playing ice hockey. I don't recall seeing ice in nature that one could trust—or not until the winter of 1947—but my father had taken me to Streatham Ice Rink, where there was a hockey team filled with Yanks and French Canadians who hadn't made up their minds about going home yet. I loved the way that without the game being stopped three subs would step over the wall and glide onto the ice while three others skated away for a rest. I was mystified by the stupid and deliberate ways in which the players picked fights—unless that was what the game was really about. Otherwise, my sporting education was based on being a good sport. Indeed, accepting defeat was what sporting meant, since I wasn't good at games. And I hated it. For I could feel, even if I could not quite see, the absolute need to win.

  School provoked a far deeper hatred, a kind of anathema. This had its roots in being separated from my mother and in resisting and dreading the company in and uniformity of school. Though I was responsive to good teachers, I had a deep-seated instinct that education was a private business and responsibility. I had nothing to hate at school. The place my mother chose was near ideal. The people there were tender and smart, and I excelled. I have the recollection that I learned to read my Kate book in a few days. That owed a lot to the letters and soundings I had done with my mother every night, and lying between my mother and father in their bed on Saturday mornings. (Yes, they shared a bed, and yes, they made a nice show of sharing me so that we were a team. To this day, I believe in Saturday as a blessed day and a team day—the holy day in my week because of our threesome as that dawn came in.)

  The school was a private preparatory school called Rosemead, and my going there was a sign of my parents’ wish for gentility The fees must have been a test for their odd budget, but the bargain was more than justified. The teaching was expert and careful. The society of little boys and girls was cheerful and enthusiastic. The school uniform was purple. The school's first premises were in Leigham Court Road and then it moved to South Clapham, and in my time there the school was dominated by its owner, Miss Plumridge, a Lady Bracknell figure in my imagination—immense, beyond question, the law, and the way—though I suspect in her own mind she still had a dash of Margaret Lockwood. As a star pupil, I was treated with rare generosity and sympathy, except by a couple of the senior teachers who I sensed had picked me as a self-dramatist early on and were inclined not to be a loyal audience. And I felt I was besieged by girls at the school. All my life, I have practiced keeping team lists. I can reel off the Australian cricket team of 1948—Morris, Barnes, Harvey, Bradman, Hassett, Miller, Tallon, Loxton, Lindwall, Johnston, Toshack—just as I can still give you a list of Rose-mead girls I was in love with (for a season or a minute). I fear I was a monster of infidelity: Maureen Bly, Shirley Coles, Lesley Payne, Joan Fletcher, Judith Otter, Susan Frampton. If any of them are alive and reading this I hope they will forgive me for remembering (and naming) them. Not an iota of scandal falls on them, of course. They were real, but they were in my head along with “Kate, my mate,” and the voices on the radio, and they were helpless co-conspirators in a dream called romance. At seven or so, I was painfully in earnest about needing to get married. After learning to read, what else was there?

  I read anything and everything. I had a very good memory. And
I was furiously eager to know about people— what made them function or decide. It wasn't so much an altruistic attention to human nature as a kind of directing instinct: how could you get people to do your will, to be figures in your story or your scheme? It might have looked like kindness—and that may have been why girls were drawn to it—but the impulse was manipulative and creative, not sympathetic. I think I half saw or believed that if you had a place in a story you required no sympathy. Just act your part. It was years before I realized that this mixture of perfection and cold-blooded instruction was vital to the movies.

  But I fell ill or faked illness a lot—my father said it was “schoolitis,” and he blamed my mother for not seeing through it. So I missed school days that had been paid for, and that sort of deficit always impressed Dad and made him parental. Yet in all my time at school, I never found that I had missed anything important, or anything, at least, that I couldn't catch up on myself. Maybe that is arrogance still, but the confidence grew nonetheless and left me more casual about attending. To this day, I am excited by reports of home schooling or of kids who somehow missed out on “school” altogether, but who turned out to be smarter or more successful than those with formal education. So I love stories about Gore Vidal or Warren Beatty having no college degrees, and I am moved and sustained by the plain evidence that people like Louis Armstrong or Charlie Chaplin survived so many handicaps and deprivations and yet knew the human heart as if they had invented it.

  Of course, I cheat: I was sent to good schools, and I was there more often than not on the financial sacrifice of others. I remember the current left by great teachers. So it was my attitude as much as my experience that told me the kid in school was an invader and a pirate—take what you can and trust your own thieving heart. Education rests in your confidence and desire more than in the eventual pouring of 100 cc, or whatever, into your patient glass. So I love stories about people without training or learning who fall into vaunted jobs and carry them off. Impostors can be heroes in my scheme of humbug and hypocrisy. And I have never quite seen that they may be outlaws and murderers in the process. One reason I have aways loved Orson Welles—as a kid determined not to grow up—is that as a child fortune-teller he realized that if you told any supplicants that they had a scar on their knee and the shadow of some great sadness, most of them were yours for the rest of the story. Say “Rosebud” with enough religious certainty and you will have most people for a couple of hours. And if you can't put two hours to good effect, then you have no idea of Saturday afternoon and the chance of winning. Orson Welles, you may guess, gave up schooling at sixteen, took a gypsy caravan on a tour of Ireland, and thereafter impressed the many dinner tables of his life as someone who knew everything (including the great difference between the histories and cultural achievements of Switzerland and Italy as spelled out in The Third Man—a primal event in my childhood). That is not education—it is a stage trick, and I fear it may denote the reluctance or even the adolescent refusal to grow up.

  “So, who's your girlfriend this week?” It was Sally. I was home from school, unpacking my books. There was a modest amount of homework to be done.

  “Oh, I don't know,” I said in an airy way.

  “I thought I was your girlfriend,” she said, and she pretended to look hurt.

  “You're my sister,” I said. “My friend.”

  “No, I'm not,” she said—and I knew she was speaking of danger.

  “You are,” I said.

  “I'm not. Look away and I could be gone. Just like that. Is that what you want?”

  “No,” I said. “You're not to go.”

  “Listen to you, giving orders.”

  “Did you go to school?” I asked her.

  “Of course I did. Council school, not like spoiled boys. Bloody hard it was. Lots of fights with other kids. Not your kind of thing.”

  “But all the things I want to know, you know. I know you do.”

  “You'd best remember that,” she said. “Sally's got her head screwed on.”

  There was this lovely way in which Sally was always smarter than me, more worldly, no matter she'd missed my kind of school. She said “Rosemead” as if the word were caught in her nose. “Oh, excuse me, Rosemead.” And she made me laugh and it kept me cheerful. It wasn't for years until I noticed that it was like the way Barbara Stanwyck talks to Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. But it was too late by then to lose that teasing, alluring voice.

  10

  HE MUST HAVE MADE the decision, and I am grateful for it. Granted, it was just a few weekends, but my father gave himself to me in the years in which I went from five to eleven. And Mum stood back to let it happen. I have mentioned ice hockey already, but Dad made it his calling to introduce me to any sport being played. Yet I know now that he was already involved with a woman a good deal younger than he was on the other side of London. She was a demanding person, and I suspect that in those first years she might have wanted or reckoned she had a right to children. And whatever Dad had planned when he left us, he was still prepared to give us two weekends in three and to live a life of pretending that he had not really left. I suppose he picked sports as our main shared activity, but he must have seen that I was ready for it. He had been able to play any game he tried and be pretty good at it; more or less, it was the same with me. (Though later, when I went to a posh school—a rugby school—I had to play a game he had never played. So he mocked rugby)

  At some time in the 1930s, he had worked for the management of Wimbledon Stadium. It was not the All England Lawn Tennis Club, but an oval stadium that featured a speedway, dog racing, boxing matches, and various other events. So he knew people in sports, and had a friend, Archie Kempster, who was often offered up as someone who might get us tickets for some big event. It was while at Wimbledon Stadium that Dad—a handy amateur boxer—had sparred with Tom Heeney, the British heavyweight champion who had gone to New York in January 19 31 to be knocked out by Max Baer (who later became heavyweight champion of the world). Heeney had liked my dad as a sparring partner because as a lightweight he was quick.

  I had a pair of old boxing gloves, and I sparred with my father. He did it to teach me, he said, and I never remember him hurting me. Still, I was the only child I knew who had a subscription to the Children's Newspaper and the Boxing News at the age of about seven. I read both with total interest, and so it was that I was able to keep up with current fights while enjoying the historical articles about people like Jimmy Wilde, Benny Lynch, Harry Greb, and Stanley Ketchel, “the Michigan Assassin,” a man who had given thirty pounds away fighting Jack Johnson.

  My father had an old scrapbook with pictures from the fights. There was one of Dempsey hovering over Gene Tunney, refusing to go to his corner. That was the occasion of the long count, when Dempsey threw away the chance to get his title back. There was another of Dempsey being knocked out of the ring by Luis Firpo. But Dempsey, “the Manassa Mauler,” got back in the ring and slaughtered Firpo in the next round. There were pictures of the movie-star-handsome Georges Carpentier, and my father told the story of how someone he knew had gone to see Carpentier when he came to London to fight Ted “Kid” Lewis. The man bent down to put his hat under his seat and while he was doing it Carpentier hit Lewis and that was it. First-round knockout. The man never saw a punch.

  Boxing was crowded with astonishing stories—the fights between Max Schmeling and Joe Louis, the tragic story of Primo Carnera, “the Ambling Alp.” My father said great boxers grow out of terrible poverty, and many go back there afterward. We used to go to the White City to watch athletics, and at the White City station there was always a wreck of a man, sitting in a corner, collapsed and begging, staring through sightless eyes. That's Johnny Summers, my father said, used to be British champion. My father had a lot of boxing talk: the bigger they are, the harder they fall; left hook a southpaw; they never come back; break without a blow. The actor in him liked to give a running commentary on the battle as we were sparring. The contesta
nts were never us; we were Joe Louis and Tommy Farr, Willie Pep and Sandy Saddler, Turpin and Robinson.

  In many of the live fights I followed, there was a grim pattern. The British would develop a promising boxer, and he would triumph at home and in Europe. But then he would face American opponents, and it was always the same story. Louis had beaten Farr, the Brown Bomber against the hero from the Welsh mines. Joe Baksi beat Freddie Mills, Lee Savold beat Bruce Woodcock. It seemed automatic or genetic, and my father said that after 1945 Americans were better fed, which was surely true. But English fighters stood in line to be good, plucky losers against American powerhouses, and it hurt them and me.

  Then came Randy Turpin. He was colored (it was plain to see), though he came from the British Midlands. He had a boxing family, and he was West Indian originally Around 1950, Turpin rose and took the British middleweight title, then the European. He beat everyone he fought. And it was then that Ray Robinson—Sugar Ray-came to Europe on a tour. From May 21, 1951, Robinson had six fights in Europe in five weeks. The culmination was Turpin in London on July 10.

  By then, Robinson was weary. He was living well and courting publicity—he came in a pink Cadillac, with a glamorous wife. He likely underestimated Turpin. It was a midweek fight, so Dad was not home. But Mum let me stay up, sitting in bed, to listen to the live radio commentary. It was a close fight, and maybe a British referee favored Turpin. You could say that Turpin was lucky. But after fifteen furious rounds the radio commentator could scarcely believe it himself as the referee went from adding up his scorecard and moved toward the British boxer's corner. I remember the exhilaration in his voice, the disbelief and the relief. “Turpin has won”—and I was standing on the bed using it as a trampoline, being urged to be careful by my mum. The joy was brief but it was intense: Turpin was world champion until September 12, when he went back to New York and Robinson knocked him out. Fair enough, and a proper result, I'm sure, as Robinson resumed his full professional discipline. Even then, I could sense that Robinson was the more intriguing man—a flashy black showman who talked. He was Ali before Ali. To this day, I want to write a book about the prolonged duel between Robinson and Jake LaMotta (Marty Scorsese's Raging Bull), in which Robinson had to beat LaMotta five times in six fights between 1942 and 1951. Think of it, a portrait of America in those giddy but terrible years, with the great duel holding it in place and Robinson as the touchstone of a new country.