In My Mind's Eye Read online

  Faded, scribbled all over, sometimes in pencil, sometimes in blotched ink, with crossings-out and amendments everywhere, outdated telephone numbers and half-legible street names and code addresses and postal codes and outdated married names and crossed-out references and incomprehensible foreign reminders, sideways, upside down, sometimes in black ink, sometimes in green pencil – and peering everywhere through the chaos are the names of my acquaintances down the years. I imagine them nervously awaiting their rediscovery, or re-enactment, and they seem to me like so many neglected invalids, or even tattered ghosts.

  Ghosts, of course, half of them are. But consider the faces that peer back at me now. What became of W, when last we parted? How went his life? X, of course, we all know about him, and love him still, despite his problems. Oh, how touching, to see the repeated changes and corrections in one old friend’s address, but how reassuring to find that another, confidently recorded half a lifetime ago, hasn’t shifted one iota since!

  So it goes, sometimes making me laugh, sometimes making me cry, and sometimes driving me to the telephone to test if a number is still extant. It is a healthy corrective to my emotions to realize that across the world there may be people idly looking through their own discarded telephone books to see what became of me.

  DAY 64

  Here’s a dual confession. Yesterday we met for lunch a group of eight delightful young visiting relatives. They had suggested eating at the one expensive seafront restaurant that we have in these parts, so I telephoned the management beforehand to make sure that after the meal the bill would be presented to me, and not to them. God knows I am not rich, but they were young working people and children, and I was sure that if I let them, they would do the paying. This made me feel deplorably self-righteous.

  Well, all went well. The meal was excellent (especially the local mussels), the conversation was fun (the one small boy who was a bit bored sensibly went off to play solitary football outside), and over the coffee I surreptitiously slipped outside to pay the bill with my credit card. It was a lot of money, of course, but smug as I was, I did not for a moment resent it, and I asked the cashier to add a generous gratuity to say thank you for the service.

  ‘We don’t accept tips on credit cards,’ she coldly said. ‘Cash only.’

  Something cracked inside me then. ‘Too bad,’ I lied to her, ‘I don’t have any cash,’ and I stalked off disgruntled. For this ugly denouement to a happy event I blame partly the damned bureaucracy of it, if that’s what it was, but chiefly myself, and today I am doubly self-chastened.

  *

  PS My grandson Sam, who once worked in a restaurant, tipped our kind waitress with cash when I had gone.

  DAY 65

  The merry actress Debbie Reynolds has died, but with her name one of my happier memories lives on. She became a star in 1952 by playing opposite Gene Kelly in the smash musical Singin’ in the Rain, a film that’s still delightful even now, and down the years she became for me a sort of spirit of Hollywood.

  I never met her, but the star and studio system that had made her famous was in its prime when I first went to Hollywood. It was 1954, and I was buoyant myself with the international kudos of the successful Everest expedition the year before, which I had reported for the London Times in a much publicized scoop. Because of Everest I had introductions to many film people, and although I never met Reynolds herself, I see now that in a sense it was her Hollywood that I encountered.

  Success was in the very air of the place! Hardly had I landed there than I took tea with a sort of earlier incarnation of Debbie Reynolds. The grand dame of Hollywood in those days was Mary Pickford, who lived in immense grandeur, guarded by snooty aides, but who turned out to be, over tea and cakes in her garden, a most kindly old-school hostess happily basking in her own legend. Almost as celestial was Walt Disney, of Snow White and Bambi and Pinocchio, who was just about to launch his world-changing Disneyland, and he went to great trouble explaining to me how his cartoon chipmunks conversed (in English, played extremely fast backwards). I met the Oscar-winning art director of Gone with the Wind, then the most profitable movie ever made, and he and his wife took me to a local bingo club, where he won a prize of one dollar. I remember to this day the modest diffidence with which he accepted it when it was presented to him in the bottom of a goldfish bowl, and how genuinely pleased he was! These Hollywood eminences were good people, I swear, and so were the Hollywood technicians I met, the cameramen and the floor managers and the audio men and the electricians, ladies and gentlemen one and all, and true craftspeople.

  All in all, then, I took to Hollywood 1954 – the Hollywood of Debbie Reynolds and Singin’ in the Rain and Gone with the Wind and the chattering chipmunks – as I took to the America they represented. Now that Debbie has left us, and her America too, I remember them one and all with fondness, gratitude and sad admiration.

  DAY 66

  Yesterday I realized that I lived in the best place on earth.

  It was a glorious evening of early winter, a time of wondrous colouring – golds and greys and vermilions and deepest blues, interspersed and overlaid by towering structures of white clouds – a majestic kind of evening, across which evening seabirds elegantly flew.

  Against this background you must imagine our landscape, as I experienced it breathless last night. To our south we see the Irish Sea in the evening tide, languidly rolling with its gentle line of spray, and beside it the long grey-blue line of the hills, speckled with farms and seashore houses, away down towards Carmarthen and Pembrokeshire beyond, and dimly guarded – can you see it? Just beyond the point there? – by the proud silhouette of Harlech Castle, where Glyndwˆ r of Wales fought the thievish English (and both sides still sing about it).

  Turn around now, look to the north. Higher by far, and statelier, are the mountains of Snowdonia, striding down to the bay across the water meadows of Glaslyn. A more sombre green and brown those highlands are, with patches of slate, and in my heightened condition they seem to me to be playing solemn music up there, melodies drifting distantly around Snowdon itself, the home of the gods. Ah, and to complete the scene, do you see, through the gap beside the Moelwyns there, beyond the patch of forest, the first white gleam of the Welsh winter?

  You think I am exaggerating the beauty of it all, and perhaps I am, but the true epiphany of that realization last night was not a physical vision at all. It was not an artistic experience, but rather the burst of conviction, as I stood above the bay there, that all around me that evening, away to the last twinkle of the remotest farmhouse light, there lived a community of generally decent people. There were rogues down there, of course there were, and fools, and no doubt whole-hog villains too; but I have lived a lifetime in this place, among these people of north-west Wales, contemplating such prospects in varying conditions of despair or exaltation, and I don’t believe there is anywhere on earth better endowed with what I believe to be the ultimate beauty: the instinct of kindness.

  Good morning!

  DAY 67

  I overheard a conversation in a café yesterday which pulled me up short. ‘Do you like shortbread?’ said one young man to another, and it was the reply that gave me a shock: ‘Rather!’ With its emphasis on the ‘er’ and its half-mouthful enthusiasm, it sounded to me like a retort from another age, from a P. G. Wodehouse dialogue perhaps. I hadn’t heard it said for ages. And more disconcerting still, I realized it was the sort of thing I might well have said myself, fifty years ago!

  How quickly a language changes, and with it the mores of a people, their tone of voice and their attitudes. In England, it seems to me, what they used to call Standard English does not greatly change, and that’s what I speak myself. It’s certainly not, though, what the Queen of England spoke sixty years ago. In her early broadcasts she sounded ineffably affected, and if her accent has changed over time, perhaps mine has too – we were born in the same year. Did I once talk a little like that? Did I employ usages like ‘wait a mo’, ‘half a tick�
��, ‘you can say that again’, ‘top hole!’ or even ‘hot diggety dog’? Did I really say ‘O rather!’?

  My dear son Twm says nobody says that now, not even me, and he claims that I imagined hearing what that young man said in the shop. ‘O shut your trap,’ I tell him. ‘Come off it.’

  DAY 68

  Here’s a laugh! I used to love the dear old London Times, when I worked for it in the late years of its prime, and I still sometimes send things for publication in its letters page, as a useful medium of debate. They hardly ever get published, but the unused ones are still extant in my computer, and here are a few of them:

  Sir: If schools are really to introduce the study of Atheism into their curricula, may I suggest a short course concerning Agnosticism? Lesson one, on Theological Theory: ‘We don’t know.’ Lesson Two, on Universal Moral Application: ‘Be Kind’.

  Sir: Hooray! At last! Not a single picture of animals in captivity among today’s illustrations!

  Sir: Having lately been bemused by surveys concerning the relative likeableness of cities around the world, I resolved to keep my own register during a recent visit to London. During my two days here I conversed with 28 strangers – hotel workers, waiters, shop assistants, taxi-drivers and a couple of varied officials. Ten were European foreigners, four were Asians and one was a New Zealander. The only one who did not seem likeable, I am sorry to report, was a very English cab-driver, a class of Londoner I generally find delightful: but I was homesick by then and I expect he thought me nasty, too.

  Sir: I am convinced my potted shrimps contain elements of sea-horse.

  Sir: Is this not a moment for rational discussion about the future of the monarchy? We must all agree that we have been blessed by an admirable figurehead in Elizabeth 2, and most of us enjoy the pageantry, tradition and symbolism that attends the throne. However the idea of inherited power and privilege – pot-luck authority – has surely had its day. May I suggest, then, that instead of an all too human man or woman as the allegorical symbol of the State, the kingdom adopt the Crown itself? It can be surrounded by just the same aura of myth and majesty, conveyed in processions in golden coaches, attended by clip-clopping cavalry, blessed by archbishops, marvellous in its ancient meaning, but stripped of sycophancy and burdened by no rash assumptions of virtue or ability.

  Sir: My Norwegian cat Ibsen and I are in love with each other. There is nothing carnal to this lifelong affection, and we already enjoy a very civil union, but we feel we would like to have the relationship given formal divine blessing. Is there any branch of any organized religion which would arrange such a ceremony?

  I got the idea of the sanctified furniture from the Ashanti people, who had been venerating their own sacred throne for centuries, but it has not yet caught on in Britain. Similarly, my dear friend Ibsen died in 2016 without our union receiving any sacred blessing, even in Wales.

  DAY 69

  I don’t want to sound curmudgeonly, but I do not approve of literary prizes. It is true that I would not mind winning one, instead of being a habitual runner-up, and I would not say no to being half a century or so younger than I am and thus qualified to win one of those prizes specifically reserved for young writers. No, it is not just envy that animates me; it is the conviction that art, however elementary, cannot be competitive.

  How can anyone rate the merit of one book against another, or this talent with that – like comparing beauty itself, or goodness, or evil? Which would win the prize, Jane Eyre or Ulysses, Flaubert or Mark Twain? Only a god, an angel or perhaps a genius could judge, and not many are around to preside over the Man Booker or the Pulitzer. I suppose there are, though, writers extant around the world who really are competitive, who are out to be better than the others – not in the matter of sales or even reviews, but out of plain competitiveness, like sportsmen.

  The success of some athletes and chess players, it is true, is sometimes abetted by the elegance of their performances, but their true purpose is to beat somebody else by the rules of their practice. There are no rules to art, though, nobody is offside, and to my mind nobody should be judged a winner. Not even me.

  DAY 70

  One of the pleasures of life, when you reach a certain age and are no longer keen on dinners, is one o’clock lunch. We have long made it a practice to eat it out somewhere, at a different place each day, and there are half a dozen local places we frequent, each with a different allure. There is a grand old pub a mile up the road, for instance, where good whitebait is served at the bar, and there is a decorous tea shop downtown (i.e. in Cricieth, population 1,800), where I enjoy presenting agnostic arguments to its gently evangelical owner. The local fishing lakes serve agreeable waterside snacks; we can conveniently park the car at Tesco’s while we eat toasted tea cakes at the café across the road. There is an original choice of light lunches at a restaurant in the next town along the coast – so excellent that I have twice been fined for parking too long outside its doors – and the restaurant at our local garden centre seems to me an ideal example of Welsh capitalism.

  How many is that? Six? Ah well, the seventh is showier than the rest, so we often skip it, but alas it offers the best lunch of the lot. It is on our local waterfront, with a view of the castle, and the following is my own weekly favourite: a piping hot iron cauldron of local moules marinière, with rough fresh bread, a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and a large cappuccino to conclude.

  I sometimes feel like a second cauldron of mussels, showy or not, but no, I restrain myself for another week.

  DAY 71 (24 NOVEMBER)

  Feeling short of inspiration.

  Here’s my message to the nation:

  If you’ve nothing much to say,

  Put your consciences away.

  You need not work to earn a living!

  Make Idleness its own Thanksgiving!

  See you tomorrow!

  DAY 71B

  I had a jolt last night. I realized that I am not the me I always was. I know, of course, that in my ninety-second year of a lovely quick life my limbs aren’t so lithe as they were, my eyesight is not so keen, my daily exercise has slowed. My handwriting, once proudly bold, has diminished into mingyness, and sometimes my spelling lets me down – even my speech occasionally, when I forget words or splutter.

  I accept all this, though, however reluctantly, as the normal concomitant of old age – senility creeping in. But it was something altogether else that gave me that jolt last night. I had just turned down some enticing propositions from my agent – enjoyable public appearances at home and abroad. The circumstances were fine, the money would be very welcome, and I was just about to pick up the telephone and gratefully accept the offer when –

  I realized that I was not me any more. It wasn’t that I was tired of myself – I would surely have enjoyed those commissions. But I felt I now needed otherness, to inhabit some other, different sphere, to explore some other avenues, to breathe differently perhaps, or think some other way in another kind of existence, in another sort of me.

  If you know what I am yearning for, what sphere or what avenue, what me, do let me know. But hurry, please, so I can reassure my family, or let my dear agent know after all.

  DAY 72

  It is 140 years, I am astonished to realize, since the one true spiritual influence on my life came into this world. The theologian Claude Jenkins was already an eminent canon of Christ Church, Oxford, when I sang there as a child chorister, and so for several years I often received, with the congregation, his evening benediction. The style of it, as he slowly recited it in the gathering dusk before the distant high altar, fascinated me then as it moves me in memory now. So very old he looked up there, so mystical seemed his vestmented figure in the half-light and so lovely did his blessing sound in the words of the King James Bible that he seemed to me a very emblem of simple goodness, beyond all dogma, thesis or even his own theology. The image, like the example, has remained with me ever since.

  Years afterwards, he christened, at the same
cathedral, my second son, Henry (his godfather was Ed Hillary of Everest), and a friend of mine told me he saw the by then venerable scholar unsuccessfully trying to take the hand of the baby in his crib.

  ‘Insufficiently prehensile,’ the dear old boy was allegedly murmuring.

  DAY 73

  There are many conveniences to twenty-first-century life in the capitalist West, and in most ways it is undoubtedly true that, as the Etonian Harold Macmillan once told us in a politically correct vernacular, we have never had it so good. In other ways, though, we have never had it so bloody awful, and one small contemporary misery concerns packaging.

  To my mind there are few more infuriating demands in daily life than the task of getting sugar out of one of those beastly little paper tubes that come with the coffee in most cafés. They are nasty in themselves, and almost impossible to open except by biting their ends off, and when at last I succeed in the task (I have a sweet tooth) I am left with horrid little twists of cheap brown paper, littering my place at the table, for which I can find no polite means of disposal. (Leave them in the saucer? Hide them underneath? Pretend to drop them on the floor by mistake?)

  It is bad enough opening the cornflakes packet, or even just getting a volume out of a parcel from an old-school bookseller (your modern online practitioners, however much you may deplore their effect upon tradition, certainly know how to pack a book conveniently).