(The Old Country, pp. 52–3)

  The young man has had to wait twenty years for his case to be considered so he is no longer quite so young or living in the metropolitan suburbs but two hundred miles north near a municipal park. But it is the same man.

  I am repelled by the self-righteous morality of gaols and their hierarchy of offences whereby murder and grievous bodily harm are thought of as respectable crimes and sexual offences are not. I also feel that the press hysteria over paedophilia, and in particular over offences that occurred long in the past, has reached dangerous proportions and the availability of monetary compensation for the possible psychological effects of these injuries has made the situation more fraught with difficulties. But such is the atmosphere surrounding the subject that one thinks twice before setting out any opinions one might have on the matter.

  Murder is a messy business and for Marjory in The Outside Dog one feels it’s just another skirmish in her continuing campaign against dirt. Even a more balanced character like Rosemary in Nights in the Gardens of Spain shares some of the same concerns so her first thought in seeing Mr McCorquodale’s blood on the sheepskin rug is what a job it’s going to be getting it off.

  Somewhere Proust says that no matter how sad the occasion with women it will eventually resolve itself into a question of trying on. It could, more charitably, be said to turn into a question of cleaning down, though that’s a side of life Proust didn’t see much of.

  Keeping dirt at bay in the way that Marjory does used to take up a substantial part of every housewife’s day: there was the shaking of the rugs, the blackleading of the range, having a run round with the Ewbank, not to mention putting mountains of washing through the wringer. This was the lot of every self-respecting housewife in Leeds in my childhood, where in addition to the soot there was a continuous rain of fine grit from Kirkstall Power Station.

  For a woman to adhere to such a routine (and the assumptions behind it) today seems wilful or neurotic, a deliberate narrowing of the scope and satisfactions of her sex. In those days keeping a clean house was the be-all and end-all, every day the occasion for the ceremony of purification, the successive stages of which culminated around the middle of the afternoon with the celebrant sinking into a chair before making the solemn declaration, ‘This is the first time I’ve sat down all day.’ There would then be a brief interval before the children came home from school and the men from work and the place was turned upside down again.

  I see my mother sitting by the newly blackleaded range, her leg nearest the grate mottled blue-black by the fire as women’s legs often were then, and saying imploringly, ‘I’ve just got the place straight. Don’t upset.’

  This is not the first time I have written about it:

  1 May 1978, Hartlepool (Afternoon Off)

  We film in the sluice room of the cottage hospital.

  Racks of stainless-steel bottles and bedpans, a sink that flushes and a hideously stained drum on which the bedpans are sluiced out. This room would be my mother’s nightmare. Conditions are cramped and I crouch behind the camera tripod in order to see the action. I am kneeling on the floor under the bedpan sluice. If my Mam saw this she would want to throw away trousers, raincoat, every particle of clothing that might have been touched and polluted. This has got into the film. Thora Hird plays a patient in the hospital being visited by her husband.

  ‘I bet the house is upside down,’ she says to him.

  ‘It never is,’ says her husband. ‘I did the kitchen floor this morning.’

  ‘Which bucket did you use?’

  ‘The red one.’

  She is outraged. ‘That’s the outside bucket. I shall have it all to do again.

  I am assuming this is common ground and that the tortuous boundary between the clean and the dirty is a frontier most households share. It was very marked in ours. My mother maintained an intricate hierarchy of cloths, buckets and dusters, to the Byzantine differentiations of which she alone was privy. Some cloths were dish cloths but not sink cloths; some were for the sink but not for the floor. There were dirty buckets and clean buckets, brushes for indoors, brushes for the flags. One mop had a universal application while another had a unique and terrible purpose and had to be kept outside, hung on the wall. And however rinsed and clean these utensils were they remained tainted by their awful function. Left to himself my Dad would violate these taboos, using the first thing that came to hand to clean the hearth or wash the floor. ‘It’s all nowt,’ he’d mutter, but if Mam was around he knew it saved time and temper to observe her order of things. Latterly, disposable cloths and kitchen rolls tended to blur these ancient distinctions but the basic structure remained, perhaps the firmest part of the framework of her world. When she was ill with depression the order broke down: the house became dirty. Spotless though Dad kept it, she saw it as ‘upside down’, dust an unstemmable tide and the house’s (imagined) squalor a talking point for the neighbours. So that when she came home from the hospital, bright and better, her first comment was always how clean the house looked. And not merely the house. It was as if the whole world and her existence in it had been rinsed clean.

  (Writing Home, pp. 277–8)

  As a child I had a recurring dream, imperfectly dramatised in my play Intensive Care, in which my mother and I were sitting in a spotless house when suddenly the coalman burst through the door and trailed muck throughout the house. Though the dream owed something to the then adverts for Walpamur in which a child covered an immaculate wall with dirty hand prints, looking back I see that this intrusive coalman was probably my father, which accounts for the fact that, despite my alarm, my mother took this intrusion quite calmly. I can see that The Outside Dog is another version of this dream; not that that is much help to the viewer or the reader, though it may be useful fodder for the A Level candidates.

  The Vale of York, where the open prison is located in Nights in the Gardens of Spain and where Rosemary and Mrs McCorquodale go on some of their jaunts, was just out of biking range when I was a boy and so seldom visited. Pre-prairified and dotted with ancient villages, duck ponds and grand country houses, it was a distant sunlit idyll and seemed to me a foretaste of what life must be like Down South. It was England as it was written about in children’s books, and because I go there seldom still, it has retained some of this enchantment. Visiting country churches, which I used to do as a boy, is something I’ve rediscovered in middle age so in that sense I identify with Rosemary though not where gardening is concerned. I am no gardener, never managing to take a long enough view of things, finding the whole business not unstressful; I see the battle against weeds (ground elder in particular) as a fight against evil and one which invariably puts me in a bad temper.

  Prison for Mrs McCorquodale is a kind of release just as it was for Miss Ruddock in A Lady of Letters in the first Talking Heads. This is a romanticised view, I’m sure, and having occasionally had to speak in men’s prisons it is not a view I would so glibly advance on their behalf. I tend to regard women’s prisons as women’s institutes with bars on the windows, a prison sentence an ideal opportunity to brush up on the rug-making or learn French. If it were ever so it is not so now, education and vocational training in both men’s and women’s prisons the first victims of cut-backs.

  I was put off writing Waiting for the Telegram for a long time because of the purely practical consideration that Violet would have to be impossibly old (nearly a hundred) to have had a sweetheart killed in the First War. And, of course, the longer I delayed writing the script the more acute the problem became. Eventually I decided that the time factor didn’t really matter: in an old people’s home time goes at a trickle anyway, what year it is is not of much consequence, least of all to the residents whose own age is often something of a mystery as it certainly is to Violet.

  I see her living as a girl up Tong Road in Leeds, the route traversed by the No. 16 tram, the tram Violet feels she should have told Spencer about. It was a neighbourhood close-packed with red brick back-to-backs, including ‘The Avenues’, a run of eighteen streets named by their number, First Avenue, Second Avenue and so on. This was instanced in some sociological account I read as an example of the soullessness of nineteenth-century slum development but it wasn’t quite like that. Each avenue had an atmosphere of its own, some certainly better (more genteel), others rougher or dirtier but far from being components in a featureless urban desert that the bare numbers might suggest.

  Tong Road, with Sleights the greengrocers, Burras Peake’s the outfitters, Gallons the grocers, and Hustwitt’s the sheet music and gramophone shop, has long since gone – all that is left the unchanging black silhouette of St Bartholomew’s and, a few streets over, Armley Gaol, twin bulwarks of church and state. Nowadays, with flimsy new houses clustered around the gaol, Tong Road seems bleaker than it ever was and certainly with less character, though doubtless a child brought up there today would be able to discriminate between its seemingly identical streets as effortlessly as we did then.

  Some question arose during the rehearsing of the piece about the nature of a vanilla slice. It is, I suppose, a downmarket version of a millefeuille, with confectioner’s custard sandwiched between layers of flaky pastry and topped off with white icing. Someone bringing vanilla slices home from the confectioner’s, fancies too, and certainly fruit pies, would bear the bag like the priest the host, held high on the flat of the hand lest the fruit leak out or the icing adhere to the paper bag. It’s a sight – a rite almost – that I associate with Saturday dinner-time when we would be sent ‘on to the end’ to McDade’s, the confectioner’s on the corner of Tong Road and Gilpin Place, to get something ‘to finish off with’.

  Violet keeps being told she will soon be getting a telegram from the Queen, though whether that custom persists and whether it is a telegram I am not sure, though doubtless I shall be told. Telegraph boys still rode the streets on their high bicycles when I was a boy, in their uniform of blue serge with red piping and a little pill-box hat. The telegram itself came in an orange envelope, smaller than the average letter, the message in capital letters on ticker tape stuck on a half sheet of rather mealy paper.

  In our family one did not send telegrams lightly, partly because they were expensive but more because one was fearful of the initial shock when the door opened on the telegraph boy, the immediate assumption always being that he brought bad news. This was a legacy of the First War when telegraph boys were over-employed. Bumping over the setts on their high bicycles, every day they brought news of deaths in the trenches so that a single boy in four years of war might tell the fate of thousands. Seeing him go by women would stand at their doors to see which house he stopped at, this pageboy of death. And the same, presumably, in Germany: Der Todeskavalier.

  I thought once of writing a TV play about such a boy, who, with men being called up, heard in the autumn of 1914 that ‘they were taking on down at the Post Office’ and so goes and gets his first job. He becomes a telegraph boy for the two years before he himself is old enough to enlist, thus every day bringing tidings of the fate of others that he knows may one day be his own.

  And finally, an apology. How dramatists use (and invariably sanitise) illness for their own purposes is an interesting subject. The illnesses change: a hundred years ago if a character needed to fade away it was with TB or ‘consumption’. When fifty years or so ago TB ceased to be incurable it lost its popularity as a dramatic disease to be replaced very often by leukaemia, another condition with which a character could make a slow and dignified exit. That neither disease was as tidy or as well-mannered as dramatists chose to imagine seems insulting to the victims and now I am conscious that I have treated Francis’s death in much the same way, deaths from AIDS seldom so quick or so clean as I have made his departure, my only excuse being that it is Violet’s story more than his.

  *

  The six monologues were each rehearsed for just over a week and generally taped over one day at Twickenham Studios. I am grateful to all the performers, the directors and the production team whose names are separately listed and they will know that it is no reflection on them when I say that at every stage of the production process I never ceased to miss the presence of my long-time producer and friend, Innes Lloyd, who produced the first series of Talking Heads and who died in 1991. It is to him these monologues are dedicated.

  THE HAND OF GOD

  Celia . Eileen Atkins

  CELIA, A MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN, SITS AT THE END OF A REFECTORY TABLE. THERE ARE ODD PLATES ON THE WALL, A GRANDFATHER CLOCK: THE CORNER OF AN ANTIQUE SHOP. IN THE COURSE OF THE MONOLOGUE CELIA SITS IN VARIOUS PARTS OF THE SHOP, OFTEN BY AN OIL RADIATOR.

  I won’t touch pictures. I make it a rule. I’ve seen too many fingers burned.

  Woman comes in this morning starts rooting in her shopping bag saying she has something I might be interested in, been in the attic etcetera etcetera. The usual rigmarole. Hadn’t thought anything about it, apparently, until she saw something similar on (and I knew what was coming) that television programme about antiques and that someone on the programme from Christie’s…

  I said, ‘Barrow boys.’ She said, ‘Come again?’ I said, ‘Sotheby’s, Christie’s. Barrow boys. Nicely spoken, lovely suits, finger-nails immaculate. But barrow boys.’ She said, ‘Well anyway, he said £2000.’

  I said, ‘Well, he would. He doesn’t have to get up at four in the morning and flog his ageing Volvo halfway across England just to sit all day in a freezing marquee and come away with two trivets and an umbrella-stand.’ £2000! It was one step up from Highland cattle.

  She said, ‘It’s a genuine oil painting. Look at the work that’s gone into it.’ I said, ‘Madam, if you’ll forgive me, could I point you along the street in the direction of A Tisket A Tasket? Basically a café it doubles as a bric-a-brac shop and Yvonne does pictures on the side…’ though what I didn’t say was that they tend to be mice in pinnies-type thing.

  I popped over the road to tell Derek and Cyril. They’d just had a buyer in from Stockholm who’d practically cleared them out. Staffordshire mostly, which is their big thing. Doesn’t do anything for me but Derek and Cyril love it; chunky, I suppose. Actually I don’t have a particular line. Good cottage furniture sums it up, elm, fruitwood and anything painted. And clocks, of course, when I can get hold of them. Plus pots of the period.

  Some things I won’t sell. Teddy bears, for instance. Teddy bears are a minefield. I was at a sale in Suffolk and saw a teddy bear actually torn apart between two bidders, one of them a vicar.

  These days they’re all going in for little sidelines. Eking the job out with jam and little pots of chutney. Woman came in the other day, said, Did I have any chutney? I said, ‘I shall start doing chutney, madam, when Tesco start doing gateleg tables.’ But the garage sells pot-pourri so what do you expect?

  I think of Lawrence. ‘Christ, old girl, I didn’t sink my gratuity in this place to start selling bloody condiments.’ He was in bomb disposal which was why to begin with we went in for clocks. Though of course there were clocks then. There was everything then. Furniture. Pottery. Stock no problem. And if one had the eye, which I do, one could pick and choose.

  Not any more. Take what you can get. And money, money, money. If you love beautiful things, which is why I came into this business in the first place, it just breaks your heart.

  And everybody’s an expert now, up to all the tricks of the trade. You’ll see something catch their eye and they don’t ask about it straightaway; they enquire about something else, pretend they’re not interested then it’s, ‘Oh… incidentally, how much is this little thing?’ It’s the oldest dodge in the world and they expect you to be taken in by it. Of course they’ve picked all that up off the television. I won’t have one. I said to Nancy Barnard, I refuse to watch. She said, ‘Well, we only have it because of Fay.’ Fay! They’re both glued to it!

  Wish I could shift this refectory table. It was a real snip when I got it but I’ve had it a year now and not a nibble. Lovely top. Elm.

  She gives a little smile as someone obviously looks in the window.

  Old Miss Ventriss seeing what there is. Took two Crown Derby plates off her once, just as a favour, one of them chipped.

  Looking a bit frail. Going on.

  Lovely cameo brooch.

  FADE.

  They talk as if you’re not in the room.

  Couple just now, looking at the Asiatic Pheasant tureen. ‘£60!’ she said, ‘I gave £2.10 for mine.’ ‘Yes, but when?’ I wanted to say, ‘1955?’

  And some of them so careless they practically hurl things to the floor. I’ve got a notice up now:

  ‘Lovely to look at, nice to hold,

  but if you break it

  I say Sold!’

  Somebody looking in. Goldfish bowl.

  No. You can’t see the price, however far you bend. You’re going to dislocate your neck and you still won’t see it, because I’ve carefully arranged the ticket so that if you want to see the price you’ll have to come into the shop. Which you’re not doing.