Nicci French Blog

A finger points.....

Nicci:

A couple of days ago, a report came out which seemed to demonstrate that children whose mothers went out to work ate less healthy food, watched more television, did less exercise and were more likely to be overweight or obese. It wasn't a value-laden report, but a statistical one; the authors were certainly not saying that women should stay at home with their children; I assumed they chose to look at mothers working in particular, not men, and not parents in general, because the great change in working patterns has happened to women, not men. Never the less, a familiar feeling of anxiety settled on me when I read the report, even though my children are pretty much grown up now, and so the reports findings are no longer directly relevant to me and so do not have the power to send me into a hand-wringing wretchedness. It felt as though a finger was being pointed - that same old tut-tutting finger that has been pointing at working mothers for as long as I can remember. 

When my four children were small, I was a full-time working mother. I was also, for a short time, a single mother. Twice, because of my particular job and contract, I had to return to work absurdly quickly and I felt as though I had been ripped away from my babies, it hurt so very much. For many years, I felt I lived a double life ruled by love and guilt. I would bake cakes in the early hours of the morning, to prove to myself i was a proper mother. I would hurtle around London on my bike, trying to get to the parents' evenings, the school concerts, the sports days. I made excuses at work that kept the children out of it - somehow it's OK to take time off to go to the dentist or wait in for the plumber, but not to look after a sick child.  At home, I often tried to catch up with work, and at work, I would be worrying about things at home, or simply feeling that I was in the wrong place. I had to work - I didn't really feel I had much choice - but also, in spite of my intense feelings of missing and regret, I wanted to work (just not so hard, not for such long hours, not so that i felt I was being torn in two). I was one of the very lucky ones though - Sean worked from home and so he could do some of the caring I wasn't able to. Sometimes, under my great gratitude, I felt the surge of primitive jealousy and resentment. That was my job; mine. 

 

Later, as they grew older, turned into teenagers, I still worked, but did it from home - that was so much less painful. I could somehow be a full time worker and a full time mother, like a magic trick, like a con artist, like a demented insomniac, like Elizabeth Gaskell who wrote in the kitchen with the soup on the hob  and a child under her chair. Most of us don't have that luxury. I can see it's a problem when two parents work full time at demanding jobs - what happens to the children? Who helps them with homework and hears about their day and puts salad on their plates? But surely we should be more flexible and accommodating, not just to parents but to all workers. Most of us work too hard and more and more of us don't work at all.People should be allowed to work until well over 65, if they want. Women and men should be able to job share. Fathers and mothers should be able to share maternity [sic] leave. And mothers wouldn't feel so very guilty, whether they work or whether they don't.

  

Dealbreaker

Is it a male thing to judge people by what they like or don't like? It shouldn't matter, I know. But still...

I'm a keen reader of David Hepworth's blog and his contributions to the Word magazine website. There aren't many people shrewder about the rock music business. But then somebody started a thread on the site asking: 'What is the greatest film ever made?' There were all kinds of suggestions, from the interesting to the baffling, and then Hepworth contributed: "'Meet the Parents'. Obviously."

Oh dear, oh dear. I mean, if you're going to choose a modern comedy (which you shouldn't), at least go for Groundhog Day; and if you're going to choose a Ben Stiller movie (which you really shouldn't), then Something About Mary was groundbreaking (though it was ground that I wasn't necessarily glad to see broken).

It's ridiculous, of course. Edmund Wilson said he didn't see why F.R. Leavis made such a big deal about people's literary preferences. (A bit rich coming from the author of the savage attack on crime fiction, 'Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?', but let that pass.) 'Isn't literature just a part of life,' he wrote. 'Like conversation.' He's right. But I'm afraid I'm one of those people who when they visit someone's home for the first time, ignore the furniture and the decoration, but check out the books and the CDs. And I always learn something that the person had kept hidden.

Anyway, everyone knows that the greatest movie ever made is Rio Bravo. Or Wild Strawberries. Or Spirit of the Beehive. Or Two-Lane Blacktop. Or M. Or..., oh, well.

Bibliophilia

I shouldn't like Tolkien's Gown and Other Stories of Great Authors and Rare Books by Rick Gekoski. The author is an English literature academic who became a book dealer and here he tells the story of twenty books from the perspective of his second career. It's completely riveting, both as an oblique form of literary criticism but also for many of the very odd encounters he had with the books' authors. Graham Greene emerges as both sexually and financially rapacious, J.D. Salinger as compulsively litigious, Harold Pinter as foul-mannered. And then there's Gekoski's valuable first edition of Sylvia Plath's first volume of poetry, with an inscription to her husband, Ted Hughes. But how did Gekoski get this book when Hughes was still alive? The answer is that, via a friend, Hughes offered it to Gekoski for four thousand pounds. In 1992. This was at the time when Hughes was repeatedly complaining about the Plath industry and the invasion of his privacy. You couldn't, as they say, make it up.

By the way, I'm fibbing slightly. I knew the book would be good, because John Naughton recommended it on his blog.

Now we are three

Nicci: 

I still catch myself thinking that I am a young mother with little children, when of course I am actually a middle-aged mother with teenage and grown-up children.Three out of the four are now at university; in two years' time, Sean and I will be rattling around in our house of empty bedrooms and organised fridge. That time of knowing the day-to-day, hour-to-hour intimacies of their lives has long gone; the years when I woke them up and put them to bed, cleared up their mess and packed their lunch, chose their clothes and met all their friends, collected them from the school, hugged them better, squabbled with them as if I was still a small child myself, nagged them about homework and paired their socks has slid into the past. Yet it feels very near still - which is why we are watching the series Outnumbered on DVD at the moment, just at the moment when we are no longer outnumbered.  It is a comedy about a couple and their three young children whose drama comes from the innumerable moments of farce and conflict that arise from the day-to-day hurly burly of of family life. Its pleasure lies in recognition - yes, we too know what school-morning breakfasts are like, what it's like to live in a chaos of broken toys and squashed bananas, what it's like when one of your children loses their favourite bowl etc. 

But gradually, watching this unsentimentally funny drama, a melancholy crept up on us both. When we started out on this complicated business of being parents, we were so romantic and so idealistic. We thought about the big issues - how our children could be brought up to be happy, kind, truthful, moral, self-guided; how we could be calm and patiently unselfish - but bit by bit found we were in a world made up of tiny, absurdly urgent matters: where the glue has gone and how to make the printer work and who took the last biscuit and why x is fighting with y now and why z is morose. In a way, being a parent is a series of small or not so small failures, and the image one has of oneself as a wise adult disintegrates. You can never live up to the hopes you had for yourself. All you can do is muddle along, do your best, show your love, count to ten, hold your nerve, bite your tongue, clear up after your mistakes and allow your children to make their own.  

Migration

Today we took our third child to university (or 'uni' as it's now called). As we drove along the A1 we started to recognize the signs: cars piled high with bags, duvets. Today was a day of vast migration across England. And when we arrived at the student residence: slightly embarrassed young men and women accompanied by weepy middle-aged women, weary middle-aged men carrying packing cases, bags of clothes, kettles. Cities across England were suddenly overwhelmed. Then, in the late afternoon, there were queues of cars leaving, lighter, emptier. Another cohort of young people unloaded into the world. All over England there are deserted bedrooms; parents who have spent years trying to tidy them suddenly not wanting to go into them. 

On the Road

I've just finished On Roads: A Hidden History by Joe Moran. It's one of those books you keep stopping in order to tell someone the interesting fact you've just learned. That the Chiswick flyover was opened by Jayne Mansfield. That the Newbury Bypass was opened at 1.30 in the morning to avoid protesters. Subtle, even-handed, beautifully written. As an author I was particularly chastened by the following passage:

'Every year, more than 120,000 new books are published in Britain, creating millions of volumes that will never be opened, let alone read. Many of these unread books are shredded into tiny fibre pellets called bitumen modifier, which can be used to make roads, holding the blacktop in place and doubling up as a sound absorber. A mile of motorway consumes about 50,000 books. The M6 Toll Road used up two-and-a-half million old Mills and Boon novels, romantic dreams crushed daily by juggernauts.'

Better than burning them. Better - in many cases - than reading them.

Troy Kennedy Martin

For a couple of weeks I've been intending to pay tribute to Troy Kennedy Martin on this blog, and now he's suddenly died, at the age of 77. He's famous as the creator of Z-Cars and the screenwriter of films like The Italian Job and Kelly's Heroes. But I want to write about Edge of Darkness, written by Kennedy Martin, produced by Michael Wearing, directed by Martin Campbell. The best ever TV thriller? Almost certainly. The best ever TV drama? Not implausibly.

I think it was one of the key inspirations for Nicci and me. It just works on so many levels. First, it's a gripping, superbly plotted thriller. It is a harrowing drama about grief and yet it's funnier than most comedies. It is utterly authentic, and yet at times wildly surreal. (It must be the first police procedural thriller which ends - or, at least, was supposed to end - with the hero turning into a tree.) It's also a startlingly political work, but in a really deep, troubling way. Kennedy Martin explores Green politics in a way that now seems incredibly prescient. It's also brilliantly performed. The actors are almost visibly grateful for the privilege of such rich material to work on. And you can buy it in DVD for about a fiver.

It was instantly acclaimed. Uniquely, it went out on BBC2 and was then repeated on BBC1 less than a fortnight later. Why was Kennedy Martin never given that freedom again? Just the traditional curse of the screenwriter, I suppose. Still, even to manage it once was a miracle.

The Way We Wish We Were

I was just flicking through Peter Manso's oral biography of Norman Mailer. What a life. (Good book as well.) You know the old question about what earlier time you would like to have lived in. What about Hollywood in the 1940s?  This is Gene Kelly recalling the milieu in which he met Norman Mailer, when the young novelist came out West in 1949 after the success of The Naked and the Dead:

'We just had fun, laughs. I saw Norman quite a bit socially with mutual friends like Harold Hecht, Burt Lancaster, Shelley [Winters] and Farley [Granger], and Michael Gordon, the director. We were always in groups, in bunches, and during that period there was sort of a New York group that usually met at my house - everybody that came from the New York theater, the New York artistic establishment. [John] Garfield was around, and we also saw a lot of Monty Clift.'

But Kelly is just warming up...

'Salka Viertel and her son, Peter, a novelist and screenwriter [and later husband of Deborah Kerr], had a famous salon of expatriates. Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, the Feuchtwangers all gathered at Salka's house, and Charlie Chaplin was there two or three nights a week. Salka wrote screenplays for people like Greta Garbo. She'd been an actress, Polish origin, a very lovely, charming lady whom we all adored, and she and Peter had the intellectual European salon, while we had the fun salon for New Yorkers at our house. That was about the way it was divided up. Ours was more the type where there would be Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Lena Horne....'

Yeah, we know the type...

'...and all the piano players like Lennie Bernstein, Oscar Levant, and Johnny Green, who'd drop in and make music.

'Our group was predominantly liberal and left-wing, so there was naturally a lot of political discussion. The same was true of Salka's. The town was very divided at that time. Unlike New York, where you could sit in Ralph's on Forty-fifth Street and discuss something, Hollywood had hard lines drawn up.

'I don't know whether Norman and I actually spent that much time together at the Viertels', so I don't know whether his reaction was the same as mine. I can only say I was playing mostly the part of a listener because I was so awestruck by those guys. It was a Golden Age. The list of people in Hollywood at that time was overwhelming. There was a resident genius every few blocks, so even Norman didn't cut as wide a swath as you might think, not when there was Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Charles Chaplin, and Greta Garbo. He was young [he was 26], a guy who'd just come on the scene. I had been in New York theater as an actor, choreographer, director for several years, the usual kind of personal history that goes with coming up through the theater. So there was a kind of clustering; we were the huddled masses out there in Hollywood who missed New York, and Norman was seen as the latest emissary from the East. He was conspicuously New York. He had "Brooklyn kid" written all over him. He had a quick, staccato manner of speaking and spoke very spontaneously, off the cuff. He didn't adopt any so-called "Hollywood ways," he didn't have time.'

There are just so many levels on which that couldn't happen today.

Masters Remastered

It's not really about the sound.

During the 1960s my parents, north London, media folk, bought precisely five LPs of contemporary music: two by Tom Lehrer, Alice's Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road. There were also a few Beatles' singles: 'She Loves You', 'I Want to Hold Your Hand', 'Love Me Do'; and a couple of EPs (remember them), featuring songs like 'All My Loving' and 'Twist and Shout'.

We used to play them on a strange, allegedly portable gramophone. It looked like a grey plastic typewriter case. The removable lid was the speaker. It was cracked because someone had trodden on it, perhaps me, while dancing to 'She Loves You', aged five. It would be hard to imagine anything lower fi, but I played those singles hundreds and hundreds of times. I will never - could never - have a connection to any cultural artefact on that level. There just isn't world enough and time.

But of course I bought the Beatles remasters last week and, of course, I bought the mono version. The real one. I don't want to see newly colourized versions of Laurel and Hardy, I don't want to read Chaucer in modern translation. In the same way I want to hear those songs as closely as possible to the way they were when they changed the world.

Predictably people have been saying that the hype has been too much and has spoiled things. The hype about everything is too much now. But none of it really matters.

Just play the last track on Please Please Me (the Beatles' first LP, as referred to in the Philip Larkin poem). The time: ten thirty in the evening of 11 February 1963. The place: Studio 2 of EMI Studios (now renamed Abbey Road Studios). The Beatles have just been pulled off a tour with Helen Shapiro. (They'll rejoin the tour tomorrow.) They've had only one day to record the LP and they've been in the in the studio for twelve hours. They need one last song. They decide to do a cover version of an Isley Brothers song, 'Twist and Shout'. Let me hand over to Ian MacDonald in the best book on the Beatles (apart from the Hunter Davies biography), Revolution in the Head:

'Back in Studio 2, the group knew they had at most two chances to get this demanding song on tape before Lennon lost his voice. At around 10.30pm, with him stripped to the waist and the others 'hyping' themselves by treating the control-room staff as their audience, they went for it. The eruptive performance that ensued stunned the listening technicians and exhilarated the group (as can be heard in McCartney's triumphant 'Hey!' at the end). Trying for a second take, Lennon found he had nothing left and the session stopped there and then - but the atmosphere was still crackling. Nothing of this intensity had ever been recorded in a British pop studio.'

Listening to the version on the mono box set puts you in the studio with them. Or in my case dancing round the sitting room to a plastic speaker.

 

Tour de Suffolk (and Essex, and Herts)

Nicci: 

I wrote a few days ago about fast travel; now for slow travel:

For many months now, Sean (who once he gets an idea in his head doesn't easily let it go) has been poring over OS maps with a gleam in his eye, laying them out on the kitchen table and perfecting his plans. Two days ago, we put them into agonising practise and, with our plucky youngest daughter, cycled all the way from our house in Suffolk to central London in a single day. Remember the child's game where you try and climb around a room on the furniture without touching the floor. We tried to do as much as possible off-road. We set off in the clear and windy chill of early morning, and where normally we would be blasting up the clotted A12, we cycled along rutted and sunken lanes, past stubble and through woods, to Braintree. Thirty miles down, a third of the way. Then we took the Flitch Way, a rail track that has been turned into a cycle path. This would have been the A120, and indeed we cycled under and over the dual carriageway several times, and under the Stansted flight path, on our peaceful hidden track. No-one else was around. Another thirty miles or so, stopping only to gulp energy drinks or eat a piece of energy bar. Our final third of the journey was on canal towpaths, which took us all the way from Sawbridgeworth in Hertfordshire, into Stoke Newington. It felt impossible we were reaching London, for still it was green and empty. The Lea Valley is a marshy strangeness. During the last several miles, there were spooky abandoned warehouses and the water turned green, bobbed with litter. A heron stood on the path, a fox nosed its way along the opposite banks, there were sheep and vast pylons. Then suddenly we were off the canal, our secret way, and into the heart of London, swerving to avoid buses and lorries and thwarted by traffic lights. 

Now it feels like a dream: 95 miles along quiet routes into the metropolis. Except I have my reminders: sore knees, sore back, sore bottom, sore and unburnt nose. And Sean still has that gleam in his eyes - he wants to do it the other way round, from London to Suffolk, and he has a few changes he thinks he'll make to the journey, to make it even more peaceful, even more odd.