The Diaries

Diary 1962

14 May 1962

So here I am. The sun is shining. My abode is little more than a cabana in an area of Los Angeles that can be best described as ‘bohemian’. Vincent promised me a pool and a pool I have – big enough to keep a medium-sized goldfish in. The view is of a dusty road – not too busy - and a load of other pocket-sized apartments with balconies. My breakfast is spoiled by the sight of several paunchy men in boxers attempting some form of morning calisthenics ans the occasional peroxided Marilyn-wannabe emerging blinking into the sunlight with a glass of the vile electric orange juice that seems to be favoured here generally. I am finding it hard to buy any decent tea here – sigh. Still, it’s nicer than Pimlico. And it doesn’t smell of rotten carpet and stewed lamb. I am counting my blessings.

16 May 1962

Today has been a day of meetings. I have at last met my US agent face to face, and to be honest the face was underwhelming. Martin – for it is he - picked me up in a very loud car both in colour and in engine-noise. The plan was to take me round to see various casting agents just to let them know I am now in residence and available for work. Nearly everyone we saw wanted to talk about television rather than film. And nearly all the dramas on television appear to be cowboy stories. I am not one of life’s natural cowboys. I am beginning to think Vincent may have sent me on a fool’s errand.

21 May 1962

I have received a missive from Vincent suggesting a meet up with a man called Hopper. This has led me to a library where I’ve been looking up his notices and credits. I’m nosy that way.

Apparently he is in something of the same situation as I, although I gather from the cuttings and from gossip picked up round various pools (I am trying to socialise and network I really am, as Martin said I should) it seems Mister Hopper was reasonably successful a few years ago but turned out to be rather difficult to work with.

His long march back to the limelight is not quite the same then. I have never been difficult to work with. Perhaps I have been too easy to work with and haven’t got my elbows out enough. Agreeing to parts where I drop off or die in Act 2 has been my downfall. I note that Mr Hopper has died early on in quite few of his movies. So at least we have that in common. He is already signed up as a TV cowboy. Is this where B-list movie actors go to die?


December 1944: 'Off the Beaten Track'

Winter is upon us. There has been high winds and sleet, turning the dusty soil into shit-green-brown slime. We are all inured to the usual smells of rotting food, tobacco, piss and shit, BO, bitter smoke and smog - but now the damp is offering new heady notes of damp goat, soggy dog, wet blanket, unwashed genitals.

I honestly thought I might have been struck by tinnitus, til I realised it was just the constant squash and squelch of men pacing around in the mud. All the coal we have for the stoves is damp. It spits and steams constantly and fills the hut with a bitter haze.

At least the weather has dampened the humour of most people. Cowell and I have been benefitting from a pause in hostilities. Goodman appears to have lost the energy to rouse his troops. He and I are in a deadly competition to see who can spend most time pretending to be asleep in our bunks. He has the rather brilliant excuse that the camp radio is hidden in a secret cabinet built into his headboard, so the more he can laze around , the less likely it is the Goons will discover it.

The Goons are definitely getting more skittish and paranoid. Last week we found one of them under the hut, in the gap where the dogs are usually sent to sniff out any excavations. I don’t know what the poor sod had done to deserve it, but apparently he was under there for hours, trying to listen in our conversations. We all knew he was there, so we chatted about all kinds of bogus operations that were being planned. I’m looking forward to the inevitable search for the mythical glider we said we were building.

They know we have a radio, I’m sure of that. After all, it was the Goons who supplied most of the parts in return for ciggies and blow jobs. We’re hearing a lot of reports about the progress of the Americans – or rather lack of. It’s becoming clear to me that this thing won’t be over by Christmas as I had hoped, and that it’ll be the Russians who are likely to get here first. Poor Cowell is going to be kissing Goodman’s arse on Boxing Day.

===

Rehearsals for the Christmas show are now in full swing. Pleasance is enjoying his role as director, producer, lead actor and general impresario all rolled into one. We are performing a gang show with a lot of silly sketches and songs. It’s more music hall than high drama, although Lilenthal is going to be reciting some poetry, and Pleasance has persuaded me to do a a couple of highbrow Shakespeare scenes with him. He has me playing the gravedigger in 'Hamlet' and Caliban in 'The Tempest'. I haven’t really thought about Shakespeare since school and certainly never had any aspirations to be an actor til now. But I have to confess I do rather like it, and the chaps seem to think I’m quite good, even if I do say so myself.

At least Pleasance is very encouraging. He says that once we get out of here (if we get out of here) he’s going to put in a good word for me with his agent and maybe get me a job in what he calls ‘rep’. I haven’t the heart to tell him I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Besides, if I was serious about acting, I think I’d rather try my hand at film rather than theatre. There’s a part of me that rather likes the idea of seeing my face thirty foot tall on a giant screen. Not my face now, mind, but one improved by a decent diet, creams and unguents, and regular Turkish baths. God can you imagine. There isn’t even any soap here and I douse myself in cold water roughly twice a week, wash my clothes every fortnight. My hair is actually falling out in dry clouts. One of my teeth fell out into my stew the other day. My right eye is so sore and I can barely see out of it. I’ve scraped my poor neck raw with a blunt razor. I can’t even begin to describe the state of my feet. To be honest, the make-up and dressing up for the show is a bit of a Godsend. One can try to cover up the wreckage of one’s own face and body, and even force oneself to put on a smile. It’s the only moment in the week when I don’t harbour some dark thought about doing myself in.

===

Something very strange happened today. The Pole who had been assigned to our hut has escaped! We’d all been rather suspicious of him as it happens. You can’t trust anyone when they first come in – the Goons are known to throw in the occasional spy into the new intake. If they claim to be British it’s easier to smoke them out by asking them detailed questions about their home town, their school and so on. 'What was the name of the butchers on Welland Road in Stockport?'  - that kind of thing.

But with a Pole it’s not so easy. He didn’t speak very good English. In fact, he rather proudly admitted that his German was excellent. He'd been in Britain since 1940 and had trained as a navigator, like me. So at least I could verify where he’d been posted and test him out on some basic knowledge. He passed every test we threw at him, but I can’t say we ever fully trusted him. He was a nice enough cove. And strong as an ox, so pretty useful when it came to lumping heavy things around the camp. The rest of us are rather wasting away. I was never a very strong man anyway but now I get tired out just lugging one sack of turnips from a lorry to the kitchen. This Podolski could lift two at time and probably could have balanced a third on his big flat head.

Anyway, this morning he suddenly produced from within his mattress a rather well put together inky blue boiler suit, and announced that today was the day he was going to walk out of the bally camp! We were all stuck dumb and didn’t quite understand what he was talking about.

It turns out Podolski had been craftily planning his little caper for several weeks and we hadn’t even noticed. He’d paid off Kilminster to forge him some documents and Plunkett had run him up the boiler suit. Somehow he’d scrounged a basic toolbox and once all dressed up, he did a little performance for us - his impersonation of a local German electrician come to check some problems with the power lines . As I said, his German was good and he’d even been to some of the practical classes that people occassionaly put on, which meant he could bluster a bit about circuits and fuses.

He walked out the hut with every intention of simply wandering around the camp for a while pretending to fix things. Then, when the guards had got used to him, his plan was to walk up to one of the towers and tell the Goons there that he needed access in order to fix a wiring problem. Once in the tower he would accidentally drop one of his tools onto the ground between the two fences. The Goons, suitably pacified by his chatty German and casual confidence, would let him go get his tool on the way off to another job. He’d then stroll round to the main gate between the fences, again pretending to be doing some kind of maintenance. Armed with a decently faked worker pass, the Goons at the main gate assumed he must be legit because he was practially halfway out already. So let him go, and off he toddled into the town, never to be seen again. 

I only know this all by hearsay. When he left the hut I just sat back on my bunk with my eyes closed and waited for the inevitable gun shots. But they never came. It just goes to show what a decent costume, a convincing identity and a good deal of self confidence can achieve. He won't last long in the town though. They're Quislings the lot of them, I'm told and more than happy to shop any kind of outsider who turns up on their doorstep. What we do with all those collaborators after the war's ended is anyone's business. We can't put them all in prison. But should we really let them just carry on living amongst us?

===

With the Pole having gone, I have been roped into more kitchen duties. I resented it at first but am realising that the others were right when they said kitchen duty is actually a kushti job. At this time of year it’s even easier than usual given that our own kitchen gardens are not up to much. The rain and sleet has reduced everything to mush, and there are frosts now that kill off anything we might hope to grow. Some wag had the idea of laying down manure to improve the soil, so now we have the joy of yet more more shit smells wafting their way into the huts twenty-four hours a day.

===

Swapped books with a chap called Cordner (we’re running out of decent things to read, soon will be resorting to American dime novels). In passing he revealed a hidden talent for calligraphy. He showed me some pages he’d done, mostly made up of little phrases he’s heard (‘round the bend’) and snippets from other blokes’ letters (‘I’m up the duff by some Canadian fella’). We bonded over his rather beautiful transcription of Coward’s ‘Lie in the dark and listen’ which it turns out we both knew by heart.

Now that I’m working in the kitchen (extra spuds!), Cordner thought it would be a wheeze to dream up a special Christmas menu. None of us need much of an excuse to be talking about food. It’s what most chaps think about round here. That or fucking.

We’re going to start with ‘potage Churchill’ since his fizzog has always reminded me of a turnip. I reckon we can put together enough ham from parcels to create some kind of ‘devilled’ starter so that immediately makes me think of ‘Jambon Stalin’. Perhaps we could match that with a Tito Sauce – whatever that is.

Cordner has come up with ‘Turkey a la Roosevelt’, which leaves us wondering about dessert. A ‘de Gaulle’ Sundae perhaps? Montgomery Pudding?

===

Cowell has been given a song to sing in the Christmas show. Pleasance finally won him round with a load of humble apologies and sycophancy. I wasn’t sure why Donald was bothering really until Cowell eventually did open his mouth and let forth. The voice of an angel. Quite how Pleasance had guessed at that I’ll never know. It’s not like Cowell has ever sang in front of us before. I suppose that one of Pleasance’s gifts – to dig out the hidden talent in people.

I have a hunch that Cowell is going to steal the show. He’s been given the closer in Act 1. It’s a fairly basic tune with some words written by someone in Hut 7. Lilenthal thinks it doggerel but he’s a bit of snob about these things. I’ve heard two rehearsals and, I don't know why, I find it extremely moving. I've asked Cordner to produce a song sheet setting it out in his best writing and using three different colours. I shall keep it as a memento of this Godforsaken place.

It's easy to be nice, boys
  When everything's O.K.
It's easy to be cheerful,
  When you're having things your way.
But can you hold your head up
  And take it on the chin.
When your heart is breaking
  And you feel like giving in?

It was easy back in England,
  Among the friends and folks.
But now you miss the friendly hand,
  The joys, and songs, and jokes.
The road ahead is stormy.
  And unless you're strong in mind,
You'll find it isn't long before
  You're dragging far behind.

You've got to climb the hill, boys;
  It's no use turning back.
There's only one way home, boys,
  And it's off the beaten track.

You've got to climb the hill, boys;
  It's no use turning back.
There's only one way home, boys,
  And it's off the beaten track.


Diary 1962 contd - 1712 North Crescent Heights Boulevard

I have become something of a fixture at Hopper’s parties. We seem to get on well, despite being from very different backgrounds. And he and his wife have an extraordinary talent for gathering together the oddest and most interesting people you could hope to find in California. To be honest I think I find the house a tad more interesting than the people. It is put together most spectacularly with fascinating works of art, eccentric choices of furniture, and mutlifarious nick-nacks and toe-covers picked up at thrift stores.

Most eye-catching of all are the giant clown puppet hanging from the ceiling as you enter the house and a headless mannequin on rollerskates that Hopper refers to as ‘The Quickie’. It rather sets the tone and – a blessing - distracts one from the amateurish and brash tiling that Mrs Hopper apparently likes to do herself, dressed only in her bra and knickers.

In every room, including the lavatory, there’s something challenging to look at, made by some up-and-coming nobody. A recent acquisition in the kitchen is a banal depiction of a stack of soup tins. Three small children roam about the place, seemingly untroubled by any nanny or significant carer. One of them seems to spend a lot of time hiding in cupboards.

Hopper calls me a philistine for not caring about art. “To be an actor you need to know all about art,” he says, loftily assuming that he alone knows what art is. Why can’t he buy some art with actual human beings in it rather than all these cartoon representations of comic characters and consumer goods? What about a Matisse, for example, or a Man Ray? Beautiful people reclining in restful poses. The truth is he can't afford those.

Rather meanly I suspect Hopper of only buying what he can afford, and that he rather hopes he’s buying something that will appreciate dramatically in value once the artist in question has been suitably hyped by – you’ve guessed it – Mister Hopper himself.

===

I’ve been at 1712 several times this week. I am one of the few who never seems to fall out with the Hoppers. I’ve found it to be the easiest and laziest way to meet people.  And the drinks are free.

I agreed to go initially because the idiot agent Martin kept telling me that ‘networking’ is the key to getting on in Los Angeles. I had never heard the word ‘networking’ before, just as I had never seen a full jug of freshly squeezed orange juice or a surfboard. But I am a quick learner.

It is another world. Vincent was all a-flutter when I told him I had an invitation.  He wrote me a postcard with a stark warning - “She is a Great Beauty and he is some kind of Mad Person.” This did not put me off on either account, given I’ve met my share of both sorts since the war, and in some cases the beauty and the madness came together in a single package. But don't get me started on my marriage - haha.

I would say that there are more of the mad than the beautiful at Hopper’s house.

The maker of the soup tins, for example has become, like me, something of a fixture, and there is definitely madness within him. He’s a funny little man  - quite short, with thick hair that he roughly brushes into a parting. He never takes his sunglasses off, even if it’s quite late in the evening. He dresses in what they call a ‘preppy’ style. He reminds me a bit of the Mods that Colin MacInnes writes about, but then he opens his mouth and the most soft, camp, whiny American drawl emerges. Luckily he doesn’t have a lot to say for himself.

He spends most of the time at the house wandering around with a rather expensive camera taking snaps of everyone and everything. I have asked him politely on a couple of occasions not to take any photos of me. I don’t want the general public to see me loafing around too much. I purportedly came out here to work and seek fame and glory - so photos leaking out of me lolling about on a couch with a couple of beatniks and a rum cocktail is not really the image I’m looking for.

= = =

Hopper is full of ideas for what he calls ‘independent’ films. He wants to introduce me to a man called Corman who makes movies that American teenagers like – lots of flesh, fast cars and monsters. Like me, Hopper’s not keen on being third cowboy to the right in B-movies forever. He has aspirations to direct, which doesn’t interest me at all – but it’s fun hearing him talk about it. He’s got hold of this new tiny camera from France plus a very natty portable audio tape machine that he’s worked out how to synch up to the camera. It means he can film just about any time anywhere and he frequently does. He’s almost as annoying as Warhol, with his talk of Breathless and 400 Blows and all that guff.

I thought I might rather put him in his place by showing off my own knowledge of French cinema (confession -  I still keep a cutting of a rather complimentary review from Cahiers du Cinema in my dressing gown pocket, which always cheers me when I absent-mindedly discover it on my way to the bathroom in the morning). It turns out Hopper knows as much as I do if not more. He got all excited about taking me to a showing of something called ‘Chronicle of a Summer’. It wasn’t so much a film as some kind fo academic seminar mixed with one of those news reports where someone stands on a street and asks passers-by about the state of the nation or the price of sausages.

Alarmingly, powders had been taken (by Hopper not me!) so he wanted to talk a mile a minute about how no-one could ever be honest on film, that nothing was natural, everything was in some way an ‘act’, and it was only by ambushing people on the street and not preparing them for the camera to be there that you might actually capture something true.

But even in Chronic Summer, or whatever it's called, there's an element of staginess. Just the setup of asking passers-buy whether they’re happy is artificial. If some stranger stopped me on the street and asked me if I was happy, I’d probably tell them to eff off. In fact, if you ask me, the more genuie ‘performances’ in the whole documentary come from people who walk off or refuse to answer. There’s something much more natural about them than the people who want to stop and be seen and heard.

Anyway Hopper feels very strongly that this is the future. Tiny little cameras and recorders that you take everywhere and no real script, just a collection of captured moments and improvised situations that crop on as you journey through the day to day. And then only later might all these clips be assembled into something that might approximate a movie with plot, character, interest.

I’m beginning to wonder whether coming to America was such a good idea. All the people I meet out here are half crazy and the smart set of the crazies are all drawing their influence from Europeans like Bergman and Godard - films that hardly anyone normal wants to see. Meanwhile, the studios keep making more westerns, war movies and ghoulish tales of alcoholics and criminals. Quite where I fit in with all this is anyone’s guess.

===

I have tried marijuana for the first time and it did not agree with me. I started seeing double almost immediately and had a strong feeling that all the contents of my very hot head was leaking out of my ears. Within five minutes I had fallen fast asleep on a couch - passing out seeming to be the best solution to ending what Hopper et al annoyingly wanted to call ‘the high’.

I was awoken by Hopper’s wife at some godforsaken hour telling me it was time to go home. From behind her a familiar feeble voice protested. It was Warhol. ‘”No, no”, he says, “Let him sleep. He looks so amazing.”

And there is he is with his effing Bolex all set up on a tripod and it turns out he’s been taking several rolls of me splayed out on the settee with my hair all messed up, my double chin on full display and drool slipping down the side of my mouth. I was outraged.

I pointed out it was a private home we were in and not a studio. I threatened to destroy all his film stock and called him several vile names, none of which he seemed to mind.  A taxi was called and I have not been back to 1712 since. I think it is fair to say that I might have fallen in with the wrong crowd. I did not come here to drink and smoke and fart about in art films. I’m meant to be forgeing ahead with my career and sending money back to the family.

I am told that ‘the high’ of marijuana can be followed by a ‘down’ or ‘downer’, so perhaps I am simply feeling effects. I am feeling low. I’ve made some bad decisions in recent weeks and I need to do better.

First, though, I need more sleep and Warhol be damned.


Stalag Luft 1 - September 1944

FRIDAY 1 September

I have now been a 'Kriegie' for the best part of three months and have decided to take up diary writing again. I have been hording scraps of paper for a few weeks and feeling a tad guilty about it, given how desperate some chaps are for the stuff. Dixie’s flunkies are quite often reminding us to hand in any little scraps we find or scrounge, so they can be used for creating false papers, gates passes and wot not. And then every other bloody bugger in here considers themselves to be a Hogarth or a Gillray, merrily scribbling out sketches of us all - pen portraits of us scratching our arses on our bunks, scrapping away at rugger or soccer, lining up for yet another roll call. The more clownish types amuse themselves with caricatures of their mates, or pictures of food we can never hope to eat or cartoonish drawings of pneumatic women in suspenders and stockings.

I am no good at drawing like these other johnnies. And I don’t have anyone at home in particular to whom I feel compelled to write. Knowing my luck, everyone I ever knew is  under the rubble by now. A V2 direct hit probably. From the damned factory we were trying to bomb, I'll wager.

They say you don’t hear it. Everyone else nearby hears it, but if it’s got your number on it, there’s just the silence and then you’re gone.

Must stop talking like this.

MONDAY 4 September

I am stirred from my slumber by an enormous kerfuffle coming from the American wing - the clattering of Klim cans, tootling on home-made whistles and even a couple of screechy fiddles. I sometimes boggle at the ingenuity of some men in here who have the energy and wherewithal to do something madly difficult like craft a violin, publish a weekly newspaper full of news that we shouldn't really get to know, or even bodge together a working wireless set. I find it hard enough to secure my grub and keep myself reasonably clean. I wish I could be more like them.

Anyway, it turns out it is something called Labour Day (or Labor Day as the Yanks call it) which is their equivalent of May Day, I think. So we're all having to endure a rather rackety parade followed by a desultory picnic, which in truth appears to be an excuse to try and keep down that devilish 'kriegie brew' they insist on making over there.

We felt it only polite to join in the collective toast to the workers of the world (the speech of the US C.O. carefully avoided any mention of socialists  - or communists, God forbid), but only later was it revealed that our portion of drink had been brewed in a vat that had previously contained delousing powder. What should have been a delightful prune cocktail had a taste that could only be described as essence of mothballs.  Still, we Brits all grinned and bore it, with a rousing 'Cheerio' and 'Up the Workers'. Right up the workers, I say. Or rather it went right through the workers and out into the latrines rather more swiftly than is normally comfortable.

THURSDAY 7 September

More and more kriegies have been turning up. The camp just keeps getting bigger and bigger. The talk is that a lot of the latest kriegies been transferred from another camp. A number of them appear to be dedicated escape artists who’ll start burrowing at the drop of a hat. They can practically smell Denmark from here when the wind's in the right direction, so it gives them some kind of incentive.

Many of them seem to come with all kinds of nefarious skills  - forging, scrounging, fence cutting, map making and so on. Frankly I find all that kind of thing exhausting, although I’d never admit that I wasn’t interested in escaping. Nobody wants to be thought of as sitting out the war, naturally. But one has to be convinced that the effort to escape is useful – not that one would make it back to Blighty obviously, but the intention would be to tie up a good deal of German resource  for a few days or weeks. I do understand that. But there is also part of me that would be happy to sleep the whole thing out and wake like Rip Van Winkle just as the Americans turn up to liberate us.

These relative newcomers tell me that we kriegies at Stalag Luft 1 are having the best of it. Stalag Luft 3 they say is surrounded by forest so there’s really nothing to look out at but the trees - they talk of feeling very trapped and hemmed in. At least here you have some kind of view of the town and the sea. Yes, the sea makes escape seem less possible given we are on some kind of peninsula. But at least there is a sense of a world beyond, and a society into which one might believably escape. The gloomiest prospect from here is the Russian compound, where they get much rougher treatment than us. The stink from there is often appalling. They certainly don’t get the same food allocation. And the rumour is there’s typhus. So one has to count one’s blessings. Things could be worse.

MONDAY 10 September

Trimble, a member of our hut, rather unnervingly likes to draw images of bottles of poison, nooses and other ways of doing himself in. I’ve asked him nicely not to leave those lying around, pointing out that they do rather dampen morale somewhat.

Not that I blame him. He's been through the mill injury-wise. He told me he thought he was a goner when he crashed. Stupid bugger caught a wing tip in a tree whilst he was strafing a train line. He doesn't quite know what happened, but he must have cartwheeled and burst into flames almost immediately with no time to get out. He was an truly abominable sight when he first got here I can tell you. None of us could face sitting down and eating with him. He had no ears, no eyelids, and his mouth just a gaping hole. Rather cruelly, we started calling him 'prune face' albeit in a cheery way. Even now, when he tries to go to sleep, I see him sometimes actually push his eyes up into his head with his hands.

I wonder sometimes what he dreams about. I have my own nightmares sometimes - flashbacks about the crate getting it and me having to tumble out before the whole thing becomes an inferno. I can hear Curly screaming as I write. Truth is, though, we’ve all got a duty to not think like that and keep buggering on. This war isn’t going to last forever. For my money it could be over by Christmas. Already people here are taking bets on when it’ll be over. No-one is going much beyond the spring of next year, although Goodman wanted to say that we might simply end up fighting the Russians instead of the Germans and the whole bally affair could end up going on forever. Goodman has a remarkably effective way of spreading his gloom. I’m just glad he seems to only rise from his bunk for a few hours every day. I couldn’t bear him talking like that all the time.

THURSDAY 14 September

In order to cheer myself up I have recently decided to take more care about my appearance. I have managed to fashion a rather spiffy cravat out of the lining of a derelict flight jacket. Bright coloured woollens have been turning up via the Red Cross, lovingly knitted by the stout housewives of England. I have managed to purloin a mustard coloured double-breasted cardigan that I am already starting to cherish as if it were a hand-made cashmere from Harrods.

The cardigan actually came with the name and address of the knitter, so I feel duty bound to write a short thank-you note in appreciation. I could do with some decent new boots, but given I have to look at Davis every day with his one foot missing, and the remaining foot with only three toes, I feel it best not to complain too much about footwear.

I don’t smoke, so I’ve managed to use my cigarette allowance to buy some new trousers off an American  called Linenthal, who writes rather good poetry and happens to be a bit more civilised than the average Yank in here. The trousers are plain and scratchy, but at least they fit and, when I can be bothered to go to the washhouse, they wipe down pretty well and dry out quickly.

Hats have become something of an obsession in this place. They’re mainly fashioned from the inner lining of helmets, or from a winter balaclava type thing that the Americans seem to have got hold of in their thousands. It’s become a kind of playground craze to customise one’s hat with folds, stitching, add-ons. The latest wheeze is to cut up Klim tins and bend the metal so it can be utilised as a kind of boning or support. The result is grown men parading around in headgear that’s a cross between something you’d see at Ascot and those ghastly Poseidon crowns one is forced to wear when one first crosses the Equator. Fancy dress, indeed.

Quite honestly this place becomes more and more like a madhouse every day. The increasingly eccentric clothing decisions are a clear marker of that, to my mind. Yes, I’ve joined the club in my own modest way. But, for me, I like to think I’m trying to keep the madness at bay by imposing a bit of discipline on myself. Others here are doing quite the opposite. They’re using their clothes to manifest the obvious breakdown of norms. The next thing we know they’ll be dressed like savages and eating each other. If it wasn’t so comical, it would be terrifying.

MONDAY 17 September

My attempt at keeping up appearances has had some rather odd consequences. Over the last week, I have struck up a friendship with a lad from Croydon who claims to have been a rather successful racing car driver before the war. He’s offering to put on lessons in mechanics for the rest of us, which would make a change from the usual boring lectures. Frankly I've read every book that they have here, so some form of evening class would be a welcome distraction.

The lad's name is Cowell. He’s usually rather a quiet soul, but he got quite agitated this weekend about these repeated arguments about when the war will be over and whether the Americans or the Russians are going to get here first.

He, like me, wants to believe we might be free by Christmas. But as usual Goodman wanted to give us a lecture about how this was all going to take much longer than the rest of us wanted. Goodman rather had the floor this weekend given it was some kind of Jewish festival that brought yet more tuneless tootling on home-made Klim-can trumpets and some rather disgusting attempt at making small crunchy sweets out of prunes, milk powder, water and crushed biscuit. Frankly, I rather worry when Goodman and his sort make a fuss about their Jewishness. I know for a fact that a lot of the goons would be happy to cart them all off to a different part of the camp and treat them even worse than they treat the Russians. 

But I choose to keep my own counsel on that kind of thing, especially when Goodman gets on his high horse. Cowell, I have to say, got  a good deal more agitated and vocal about when the war might end, and wanted to say to Goodman that it was important to have some positive belief about it being over by Christmas, that it was important for morale to have a target, a deadline.

With that I agree. Without something to look forward to, it’s very hard to keep up the energy in here to bother doing anything, frankly. But Goodman wasn’t having this, and in his usual brutal way wanted to put Cowell in his place. “I’ll make you a bet," he said. "If the show is over by Xmas I’ll kiss your arse. If it isn’t, you kiss mine. Do we have a deal?”

Cowell went bright red. How humiliating! What a bastard Goodman can be. But the mob will have its way. They crowed and cajoled, and in the end Cowell had to agree. Deal. On Boxing Day someone is kissing someone else’s arse. How sordid.

FRIDAY 22 September

The bullying has continued I’m afraid to say. Most of these oafs never went to boarding school, but put into a similar environment, they end up going the same way. Cowell  and I have been singled out as victims – in part, because of the way we have chosen to hold ourselves, and our refusal to change the way we choose to dress.

It’s also some kind of feral instinct amongst the mob to react to any small sign of campness or effeminacy in a man. I’ve always known I come across that way, but I'm also hard enough for people to know not to rag me about it. My general demeanour is, in part, a hangover of my teenage obsession with Noel Coward. He's still very much a hero of mine - so suave and clever and well-dressed and I suspect hard as nails. I'd never let on about that in here. Even though 'In Which We Serve' did change a lot of people's view of Coward - and as the months go by more and more men in here could be said to be 'friends of Noel' - the attitude to buggery in here is in no way suave or clever and really is just another form bullying. It was ever thus.

No-one has ever seriously thought I was a homosexual, I don't think. Cowell on other other hand is  a queer - even if he doesn’t admit it to himself. Other people in the hut have taken excessive pleasure in repeatedly using the phrase ‘Home by Christmas. Homo by March’ whenever Cowell comes in the hut. It was  funny the first time, but after the thousandth time the wit has worn a bit thin and now it’s just becoming a pack mentality whereby they sense Cowell is weak – like a pack of hyenas noticing the zebra with a limp.

I wonder if I might have a decision to make soon as to whether I’ll stand with him and try to protect him, or whether I’ll be Judas – without the thirty pieces.

TUESDAY 26 September

Goodman and his gang are preparing for Yom Kippur. I only became aware of this after Lilenthal the poet greeted me today with a peculiar oration - "It is sealed, how many will pass and how many will be created, who will live and who will die, who in his time and who not in his time". 

Apparently the Jews are intending to fast (huzzah more food for the rest of us) but before they do they stuff their faces and - hilariously - they're meant to go around asking forgiveness of those who they've offended. I do hope they form an orderly queue when it comes to Cowell.

Meanwhile us Gentiles are preparing for our own religious festival. Pleasance the actor is leading the charge on developing a Christmas show. Today he’s going round trying to convince various people to dress up in womens clothing. I foolishly admitted to him that I had an interest in acting, and, to be fair, he rather kindly let on that he thought I might have some talent in that area. But when he offered me some kind of Widow Twankey role I flat refused. There is no way I’m putting on a dress in front of a bunch of philistines. Give them any kind of sign that you might be that way inclined and before you know it one could end up being buggered repeatedly behind the latrines.

I advised Pleasance strongly to leave Cowell alone regarding the play, but I suppose he was running out of options, and, as the only person who really knows anything about theatre and casting, maybe Pleasance could see that Rob might be a natural in a dress. When it came to the moment that Pleasance actually suggested to Cowell he might want to take part in the play, Cowell went wild. The only time I’ve seen him really angry. He demanded an apology from Pleasance for even suggesting he might be prepared to wear women clothes.

“Do you think I’m some kind of poof, is that it?’ he said and practically had Pleasance up against the wall. "I’ll smash your face in if you ask me again, and don’t think I won’t. Do you want me to beat you up. Do you?" All very dramatic. I imagine Pleasance has banked that for a future play.

Like everyone else I secretly thought Cowell protesteth too much. But I kept that thought to myself. I’ve decided, in fact, that the best way to stay safe and not become the focus of other people's attention is to stay very quiet, retreat to one’s bunk whenever one can, and not make any trouble. It’s something I wish I’d been rather better at at school, to be honest. Sadly, I fear Cowell is not learning that lesson.


Diary Extracts 62- 63: Granger, Raines, Tierney, Kennedy, Cimino

"It was the fashion of the time, still is, to feel that all actors are neurotic, or they would not be actors."

Gene Tierney

Helen has been sending me photos of our darling little bundle who is now walking and talking. I think she is trying to make me feel guilty for being away so much.

I know some people - mother, for example! - might think me somewhat cold and callous for putting my career over family by baseing myself here. But I like the space and the freedom here. I get to spend a good deal of time relaxing by swimming pools (having checked the perimeter thoroughly, of course) and American Martin is doing his best to ferry me around to auditions and social events so that I get seen. There are few moments when I truly miss home, ringing as it inevitably will be with the cries of an obstreperous toddler  - and the equally loud complaints of Helen.

So many people out here love to parade their little darlings for the cameras. But when the cameras aren’t there, I hear the same people disparagingly refer to their offspring as ‘rugrats’!

I suppose I might not feel so guilty if I was sending more money home. I’m still being pushed way too much towards TV when what I really came here for was to do films and escape the bloody typecasting that was dogging me in the UK.

Once the press decided I was this funny little oddity who could be caught in a scene sleeping, that was the end of it for me as far as London was concerned. Trouble is every leading role for a Brit out here in Hollywood is being taken by Stewart blimmin Granger!

We’re at the same social events sometimes and he always pretends he’s never met me before. By all reports he’s rather difficult to work with, but somehow being an absolute pussy cat as I absolutely am - doesn’t make a dollar’s worth of difference. American Martin has also suggested I get elocution lessons in order to speak more like him. I mentioned this to Vincent (Price) at a party and he hooted with laughter.

===

Never meet your heroes they say. How untrue. I’ve just come back from filming a cameo (not sleeping! awake!) in a long running Western series, and who should be playing a down-on-his-luck drunken lawyer – Claude blimmin Raines!

I think we both caught a whiff of booze on each other’s breath, which rather united us as seasoned pros who weren’t taking this TV thing too seriously. And we both stepped up at the required moment. I think my performance as some kind of ex-Confederate POW (yes, another POW part, I can’t escape) was adequate. Raines was top notch - why wouldn’t he be? He had just the right level of theatrically needed, without forgetting that screen acting needs underplaying with subtle small movements and modulation of the voice.

I stayed around to watch the rest of his scenes and at the end of the day I shook his hand and thanked him for inspiring me for all these years. I complemented him on his little cameo in 'Lawrence of Arabia' and told him I was hoping to work with Jack Cardiff very soon. He looked at me rather quizzically through his one good eye. I think he was pleased to be suitably lauded by a fellow Brit, but not pleased enough to accept my offer of buying him a drink. I suspect he had a bottle of his own in his car.

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I’m not being snarky. There’s plenty of actors who use drink as some kind of crutch. I do it sometimes. But the key is to not let it affect one’s work in any noticeable way. We don’t all want to go the way of Erroll Flynn. Or Veronica Lake  - God help her! I read about her situation in the paper the other day. What a mess, poor thing. Like many others, I was moved to send a few dollars to a support fund for her. There for the grace of God go the rest of us, I say. This business really does eat people up – especially the women. It's the cocktail hour as I write this by the way. Cheers!

[added later] Forgot to note that I also met a young actor who’s got a regular part in the TV western, who Dino tells me is going to be worth knowing. Dino will have him shipped off to Rome in no time, I imagine, to knock out yet more bloody cowboy movies. What is this obsession with cowboys?! Anyway, this chap is very tall and rather soft-spoken – not a great screen actor like Newman or Brando. But then again Martin says those 1950s types are on the way out (his way of explaining why the likes of me and Dennis H are having a hard time finding work). These tall quiet slightly no-name types are perhaps the future, he says!

I hope not!

===

Sometimes things happen here that are frankly very strange.

I was sitting having my lunch at the studio canteen today, minding my own business as an actor in a minor role is expected to do, when who should dump herself down on the other side of the shared table than Gene flippin Tierney!

We had been warned about her and told to steer clear, but, frankly, pretty much everyone on this film is a bit batty - and expected to be given the nature of project. They’re going for Southern Gothic with dark hints of incest and violence, so every actor is being encouraged to be a bit melodramatic. Some are taking this note more seriously than others.

Genet

Gene Tierney turned up on set already quite mad, I think. I’d read about her being incarcerated in an asylum only a few years back, and we’d all heard stories of manic episodes of various sorts. It’s a shame really, given how beautiful and charismatic she can be.

I remember seeing her only a few years after the war, on the set of a rather mean -spirited gangster movie I was helping out on with cars and trucks and general mechanical work. They said she was already a bit wrong in the head even then, but you’d have to say you could forgive pretty much anything, given the way she looked. You couldn’t help staring when she turned up on set.

Cut to more than 12 years later and she’s now staring at me – this rather puffy-faced neurotic lady, puffing away on a cigarette asking me where I got my tinned sardines from.

It took me a few minutes to realise who she was. I’d explained that I brought my own sardines to the set. I always liked to have a tin with me – just a habit I’d picked up after the war. It was when she talked about eating tinned pilchards at Shepperton that I twigged it was Gene. Dear, dear, the years have not been kind. She was obviously in one of her manic moods because she talked ten to the dozen and no sooner finished one cigarette than lit another, whilst pretending to pick away at a salad.

I had the feeling that maybe she thought I was someone else, somebody she was on familiar terms with. We started off by reminiscing about Shepperton and I tried to explained I was just a car mechanic back then. This only got her more excited and she started to list all the cars she’d ever travelled around in and names were duly dropped – Jack Kennedy, the Aga Khan, Howard Hughes. She rambled on and on and I’m ashamed to say that instead of enjoying this brief moment with a screen legend I was wondering how to shake this batty lady off.

I wasn’t very surprised I suppose when she did finally start talking about her mental health. It was obvious she was unwell  - and I think she knew it in a way.

“You ever had electric shock therapy?, she asked me.

“No,” I said, “No I can’t say I have.” (Confession – I don’t even know what it is)

“Don’t!” she said very intensely. And she looked at me with a dramatic expression of intense seriousness, and then within her eyes I could see her trying to mask the kind of agony I’d only ever seen before in Barth. It was her best moment in that whole production so far I tell you. Pity the camera weren’t rolling.

“Don’t ever do it,” she said. She stubbed out the  third cigarette on her salad plate and got up to leave. “You here tomorrow?”

“Yes”, I said.

“Maybe I can get me some of those sardines,” she said almost saucily.

I am on call tomorrow as it happens, but I think I may avoid the canteen. There is something very disconcerting about someone who is genuinely mad. She switches from sad to light to aggressive to charming from nonsensical to rational like quicksilver. One doesn’t know what to say or do in order to try and keep things on the level, and there’s a sense that something truly terrible might happen at any moment.

I may have to go to the local library and look up what electric shock therapy is.

===

I have received two magazines from British Martin in the UK that contain interviews with Helen. I know he is sending them to me to exercise me. He’s still put out that I eloped across the pond and started giving my 10 per cent to American Martin.

There are the inevitable photos of her and the toddler – in the kitchen, in the garden, playing games, dressing up etc – ever the dutiful mother.  

But there are also clues as to the kind of people she’s now running with. British Martin has been keeping me abreast of things on that score too.

Helen hasn’t mentioned anything about this in her letters. She enclosed one cutting of her with Newman at the Venice Film Festival, designed to make me jealous, I suppose. And also to prove she wasn’t stuck at home all the time - as she’d like other people to believe.

Apparently, she’s got pretty thick with those bohemian kitchen sink types that British television seems to be so in love with at the moment.

There’s a lot of bragging rights to be had from moving out of a nice house in Hampstead or St Johns Wood and slumming instead in a terrace in Battersea. Helen has resisted that temptation, at least, but I gather she’s already appeared in one of those TV ‘Plays for Today’ where everyone’s filmed in a pub talking over one another about abortions and unemployment.

From where I’m sitting in the sunshine it all seems rather grim and a bit of a pose given the background of the people concerned. I mean, it’s not as if Helen grew up on the streets. Much as I despise the glossy shallow stuff that I’m currently being offered, I think I prefer it to what I would get in the UK. Can you imagine? Dressed up as some tramp in the rain selling second hand shoes out of a pram or chattering away in a Cockney accent about how beatniks are eating away at the fabric of society. Give me a good old fashioned war movie any day.

===

Kennedy was shot today. Killed stone dead in Dallas by some kind of communist sniper. Knowing how trussed up he must have been due to his back problems, I assume it was impossible for him to duck, which is why the second bullet got him in the head.

I sound as if I’m being hard and unsentimental about it. I’m not. It’s a devastating moment for everyone out here. There’s shock in the face of every person you meet. But I suppose experiences from the war do harden one somewhat. It’s not the first time I’ve seen someone shot in the head. It probably won’t be the last.

Perhaps I have a bit if residual anger for the way I was treated last year. I trogged all the way out to Camelot on a promise from American Martin that there might be a part for me in that silly PT109 movie. I didn’t bother writing about it at the time because it had been drilled in to me that it was all hush-hush and top secret – and nothing was going to come of it anyway. But I imagine every actor and his or her dog is going to come out with a Jack Kennedy story, now the stiff-backed pill-popper has snuffed it (note to self – don’t be quite so irreverent in public – the Yanks aren’t tolerating anything less than sainthood for President Kennedy at the mo).

There were at least half a dozen of us wasting our time on that plane, all due to meet the President and be checked over to see if we might get his approval for a role in his silly vanity project. I wasn’t deluding myself. I knew I wasn’t going to get the lead role – Jack Kennedy the war hero rescuing his pals from the perils of the Pacific. But there were plenty of other parts, and lots of Kennedy money sloshing about.

Kennedy

In the end I got less than two minutes with the great man and his brother and various other members of his entourage. I’m photographed from all angles. Kennedy shakes my hand and says: “Hello Mister…”  pauses to check my name on a clipboard… “Shure.”

“You’re a Brit,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“And it says here you know Gene Tierney!”

“Yes, sir, that’s right.” I lied, but had thought it might help. Idiot.  

He steps back, looks round at his brother.

“Too short and stocky to be you,” said Bobby, like I’m not in the room.

“But he could be in the boat,” says Kennedy. “I’m thinking I could drag him across an ocean with my teeth.” He chuckles at me. “Not now, with my back as it is, but back then…!”

I don’t really know what to say.

“Thank you for your time, Mister Shure.” He shakes my hand again, and flashes his small yellowing teeth. He think he’s beaming at me, but I’m surprised to find he’s rather dead behind the eyes, and all puffed up from whatever medication he’s taking (and he’s rather obviously taking medication..).

“Give my regards to London! And to Gene.”

And that, dear all, is my Kennedy anecdote. Another failed audition. I didn’t even get to be a dead body or a sleeping soldier in that one. I suppose there’s a chance now of me playing Kennedy in the end. The dead president. I could be good at that, I think.

Is it too early to be so irreverent?  Let’s just keep that between me and the diary.

===

I did my first advert today, and though I shouldn’t admit it, it was rather fun. It was directed by a rather talented young American Italian called Cimino, and it involved a bunch of us dressing up as American business types in gray suits and Sinatra fedoras, prancing around in a quite complex Busby Berkely type dancing number.

Quite how this is meant to sell seats on United Airlines is beyond me. I simply do not understand the world of television advertising. This Cimino chappie claims it’s rather a good grounding for aspiring directors, but I can’t believe it’s any substitute for being on a proper film set, in whatever capacity. I told him I went from car mechanic to lead actor in less than a decade, and it did me no harm to work my way up and learn all about the different departments along the way. He seemed unconvinced. He did, though, say he had a spot for someone in a sleeping pill advert that he thought I might be good for. I wanted to tell him I was trying to avoid the sleeping parts right now, but then he told me how much I could earn and I just shut up and smiled sweetly.

Honestly, nobody here is that bothered about what the work is they’re doing as long as they’re working. I thought when I first came out here that the work would be bigger, bolder, better, but that simply is not the case. Many of the really big movies are being made in Italy! Movie producers out here are VERY keen on chasing audiences  - and audiences have no taste. They lust after a diet of westerns, war movies and sci-fi. Even poor old Raines has been roped into sc-ifi.

Oh and horror! I’m up for a part in a minor horror called ‘The Sleeping Dead’. They want me to play some kind of Dracula figure who spends most of the film lying down in a coffin, with various younger film stars plotting how to stick a stake through my heart and prevent me from rising in the night to feast on the blood of virgins. I have to admit I’m getting pretty fed up with this kind of work.

If only to save my liver, it might be time to go home.


Stalag Luft 1: January - March 1945

It’s New Year’s Day. Happy New Year. We are still here and the war is not over.

To make matter worse, a whole army of new kriegies from another camp hundreds of miles away have just marched into the camp. God knows where we’re meant to put them all.

The suggestion is that this is good news. It means the camps these men have come from were about to be overrun by either the Russians or the Americans. I’m not reassured by this.

Does that not mean we might be precisely where Jerry ends up being hemmed in on both sides? And when that moment comes – the last stand as it were - I consider it very unlikely that we’re going to be allowed to simply walk out of here.

I have not expressed this concern to anyone out loud, except to Bob Cowell. Rather generously, he remarked that it could be worse, we could be Jewish! In the meantime, there’s the basic issue of food to worry about. Just how is everyone coming into this place going to be fed?

==

More bad news. The Red Cross parcels have still not arrived. It’s been suggested that the Germans failed to mark the trucks that transport them as neutral targets. So it’s highly bloody likely that our grub and ciggies have been shot up by the bloody Allied air force!

I only know this because amidst all this hardship and lack of resource, somehow the team here are still managing to write fdown British new reports from our radio, and publish it all as a secret newspaper.

I do marvel at the ingenuity of human beings here: food is magicked up from whatever rotten matter one can find; entertainment shows and educational classes continue to be put on; people keep themselves clean enough that we haven’t yet been carried away by typhus or cholera. It’s a miracle really.

==

Today, I have eaten just half a beetroot and the thinnest slice of the plainest bread known to man. We brewed up tea from some very old leaves and some roof water. I try to distract myself from the hunger pains by reading books and pretending to be sleep. I have now read ‘Scoop’ at least six times.

Good God we’re all becoming such skinny beggars in here. Still no Red Cross parcels and the guards have resorted to simply dumping a load of old root vegetables out of the back a truck every now and then and then watching us scrabble around in the mud picking them all up.

Rumour has it that Goodman trapped a cat last night and stank his hut out skinning and gutting it. I’m not sure I will be able to stomach Loin of Tibbles, if offered.

I’m not quite in the state that others are. Perhaps that’s because I still have access to kitchen work so can snaffle little scraps and crumbs now and again. And I’m not as active as many of the other men. I’ve perfected the art of doing absolutely nothing in my bunk for hours. I don’t play cards. I don’t draw. I don’t chat much. All I do is keep this diary and read whatever books turf up. I fantasise secretly about food and sex, of course, like all the men do. But I don’t make a noise about it. Perhaps it comes out in my face as I sleep.

Certainly Donald is curious about what I’m thinking. He tells me I have a compelling, beatific face when I’m flat out in my bunk, but with fascinating twitches that seem to communicate something of what I’m dreaming about. He says I could be the world’s greatest sleep actor when we get out of here.

I tell him about some of the amazing sideshows we used to have at the fairgrounds in London and Skegness: bearded ladies, pugilists and fortune tellers, midgets, a half-woman half-snake, a cyclops, a Goliath, werewolves, mermaids… I’m not sure the sight of me just lying there snoring my head off would compete, but Donald seems to think so!

Quite why we’re thinking about this kind of thing when we staring starvation in the face I don’t know. It’s amazing where the mind goes.

==

There’s been attempt to segregate the Jews. At roll call this morning individuals were called out and placed in a separate group. At first none of us twigged what was going on, but it became clear pretty soon that something rum was going on.

To be fair, the Yanks were sharper than us Brits about it and started to refuse to step out. The word was that they were going to be marched off to the Russian prisoner stockade down the road, which is basically a death sentence given what goes on in there.

There have been trainloads of Eastern European Jews trundling off to God knows where, and I’ll be honest I haven’t really wanted to think about what their fate is. Even before the war I think a lot of us knew that Hitler was intent on clearing Europe of unwanted tribes.

Many of my mates in the fairground business came from Romany stock and they always had stories about what was happening to their brethren in Romania, Czechoslovakia and so on. When you hail from lowly non-churchgoing Anglo-Saxon stock, as I do, one doesn’t really have to spend time dwelling on such matters. But in this hell-hole it becomes all too stark. There’s every possibility we’re all going to starve to death in here before anyone comes to rescue us. And when you’re at death’s door, it becomes all too obvious that we’re all under the same sky, breathing same air, all trying to survive. I’m not wasting my energy trying to step on a few Jews and gypsys just to have a few more hours to myself above the mud.  

==

The lights keeping going off for quite long periods of time now. And yesterday the water supply gave out. Whether it had dried up or had been deliberately stopped up I don’t know. But it feels a bit like the end. I haven’t weighed myself or looked in any kind of mirror, so I can’t scare myself too much, but my trousers are now held up by a bit of spare wire I found, and I’ve decided to wear all the clothes I have all at once, not just to keep out the cold but to bulk myself out so I don’t look so much like a walking skeleton. 

Everyone’s so weak that they’re all copying my trick and just lying on the bunks dozing and dreaming of food. We try and be kind about sharing the water we’ve got, but when you’ve only got a few sips, one can get worried that anything you give to someone else is going to mean death for yourself tomorrow.

Meanwhile, my stomach hurts just to think about any kind of decent food. For some reason I’ve been fixating mainly on pancakes with lots of sugar and syrup and condensed milk. Most men here talk about filet mignon at the Ritz or cakes at some fancy bakery in Soho. But for me it’s pancakes. Perhaps it’s because we’re not that far off Shrove Tuesday and I’m just trying to set my mind on making it that far. I can’t believe any more in getting back to London for a slap-up meal. But maybe when the Russians come we could go into the town and find some flour and eggs and milk. Just writing that down pains me. I’m going to stop now. My fingers are hurting.

==

Red Cross parcels have arrived! Thank God! Yes more kriegies from other camps keep arriving. We’re having to cram more and more men into each hut. I am slightly terrified that they’re bringing in diseases. I’m trying to stay away from anywhere who sneezes or looks vaguely red-faced and sweaty.

We’ve started to hear the boom of large guns in the distance. Expert ears say they’re Russian armaments. So it look like they’re going to be with us before the Yanks. At night, people are starting to enjoy shouting out “Come on Joe!” at the top of their voices, hoping Stalin will hear.

Naturally the Jews amongst us are looking at each other nervously. Whether it’s the Nazis or the Commies, their prospects seem rather grim. I’m happy to say the rest of us have made a pact that we’ll all go down together if they try to split us up. Already there are secret plans being drawn up about how we might take over the camp once the Germans realise the game really is up.

I am assuming they might just try to line us all up, shoot us and bury us in the woods or dump us in the Baltic. But they’ll have a bloody fight on their hands. There are by now a lot more of us than them!


May ‘45: The Church, Barth, Germany

Bob and Don have gone up the tower to see the view. I can’t do it.

I can hear it. I don’t want to see it.

drunken singing – in Russian and English - broken glass - woman shouting - in German - distant gun shots – sick truck engines running off dirty diesel – wheels in the mud – boom of a barrage – panicked cows mooing- a lot of shouting – a woman crying - gulls...

I hope Bob isn’t looking down. Or even across the fields. I hope he’s just looking out to sea – the beautiful brown Baltic. Sometimes I wish I had not developed this diarising habit. Far better not to let anyone know what’s gone on here.

But let me write it down anyway. I’ve managed to hide and keep all the sheets I’ve written so far, so why not end it. Perhaps one day a museum will want it. People should know what's gone on here.

Four days ago, a small group of very drunk Russians turned up at the camp.  When Jerry had cleared out, the Yanks had become our guards. No-one was to leave the camp without the General’s say-so. Opinion was divided about that. Quite a few men just wanted to get out, go into town to find food and booze – and women. I was one of those who agreed it was safer to stay put. Who was to say the Russians wouldn’t just kill us on sight? Who was to say there wasn’t a group of SS in the town waiting for a final showdown?

When the Russians turned up they yelled and shouted in broken English about opening the gates. They rattled off their guns into the air. They told us we were all free. ‘Freedom! Freedom!’. Everyone came out of their huts and crowded along the fence cheering and punching the air.

I watched it through the window from my bunk bed. Without the General’s say-so nobody was going to do anything rash, I thought. I was wrong.

Once some of the rocket fuel those Russians were drinking had been passed through the fence, things got fiery. It wasn’t long before the gate was shoved opened by a mob, and at least a hundred kriegies, maybe two hundred, crashed through like an unruly football crowd and then splintered into gaggles of sprinting men, haring their way to the edge of the wood, then disappearing into the trees, heading directly and desperately for the town.

Most of them I never saw again.

Those of us who saw safety in maintaining some kind of discipline and decorum got together and tried to re-impose some order. We shut the gate, manned the towers and asked the Russians to go away and get us some food, specifically meat given we were surviving mainly on root vegetables and biscuit.

They came back the next day in force. And ahead of them they were driving what seemed like dozens of cows! The cows mooed and groaned their way right up to the gate, and, in order to prevent carnage, we had to open up. In came both Russians and cows. Again, a lot of the Russians were drunk. And armed to the teeth. They shot quite a lot of the cows in the head right there and then in the parade ground and shouted ‘Meat! Meat!’.

The camp became the most basic of abattoirs. Men were stringing up cows from any pole they could find, from the roofs of the huts, from the watchtowers, and roughly gutting them with rusty bayonets the Germans had left behind. Piles of intestine were left to stink and gather flies in every corner. The muddy ground became sticky and crimson. Large open fires were built. The cows were hacked into rough pieces and meat was barbecued on simple spits or roasted between sheets of corrugated iron. Men I had known to be quite gentle and civilised became carnivorous monsters, gorging themselves and then vomiting and then gorging themselves again.

It was the most ghastly scene I had ever laid my eyes on. But then the next day came.

The General had been parlaying with the Russians. It was agreed that things needed to be more controlled. The question was who was in control – and in the end it was always going to be the Russians.

Volunteers were needed to go with a Russian patrol and secure a more sensible supply of food that didn’t turn us all into wild animals. The Russians also wanted people to show them around, given we’d been busy making maps and surveys in readiness for escape for years. They seemed particularly keen to know about what went on at the airfield and some of our boys had been sent out there to work occasionally so could tell them the best way to get in and out without stepping on a mine. It turned out they didn’t know about the other camp, either.

I was desperate to escape the stink of the abattoir, so I stuck my hand in the air. I bigged myself up a bit about how I could tune up their trucks to make then run better, and got myself picked out of the crowd.

First we went out into the countryside and visited a couple of farms. The locals had a pale sick look of death about them, as if the Grim Reaper was about to visit them all. And in a way he was. I wonder if I wasn’t there if the Russians might have just raped and killed as many of them as they wished. They seemed like the sort. Brutish.

Instead we shot a lot of cows and pigs and ordered the farmer to get them to the camp as soon as possible. He had a vast pile of cauliflowers too which we requisitioned. Then it was on to the airfield, mainly in search of fuel I think.

You could smell the camp before you saw it. Men who’d worked at the airfield had told us about it. Truckloads of Russian soldiers and all manner of jews and gypsies had been thrown in there, with very little food or sanitation. They were let out to dig trenches, put up fences, plough fields, mend roads and so on but by all reports they were so weak and feeble they didn’t get a lot done.

My main worry as always was disease. Every time I breathed in near a place like that I imagined some evil bacillus burrowing its way into my lungs. We all knew we could die in this place, but I didn’t want to go like that, just wheezing and coughing in my bed.

Anyway, dammit, these Russians wanted to see the camp. When we got there the gates were open and no Germans to be seen. But lying all over the ground were hundreds of  the thinnest most emaciated men I have ever seen. They were not so much men as skeletons with a thin papering of skin wrapped badly over their bones. Some had ragged uniforms on. Others were naked. Many were already dead. All had dark dark holes where eyes should have been. And all were silent, morose, defeated. The only noise was the crackle of a few open fires. To a man they were all too weak and starving to even summon up the energy to walk out of the camp. It seemed to me they were all just waiting to die. My God.

The Russians told me to stay in the jeep. Two of them got out and started to pick their way through the bodies on the ground.  Quite naturally, a few of the skeletons that were still animated enough reached out to the soldiers or raised themselves in a pathetic attempt to, perhaps, appear dignified. When one of these pathetic cases managed to grab a Russian soldier’s leg, the Russian turned round and simply shot him in the head.

I must have shouted out loud, because all the Russians turned towards me. The one that spoke the best English said to me “They are all dead. You understand? If not today, tomorrow.” My instinct was to say a loud ‘No’ to this, and someone then turned a gun on me.

‘This place will be burned,” said the most fluent one. ‘Everyone is sick’.

Again I found myself saying ‘No’ and I thought the safest thing for me to do was to get out of the jeep and walk rather directly away  into the camp and stand in solidarity within that field of dead and dying skeletons. Yes, they could have shot me in the back there and then but I gambled on the idea I was still useful to them.

‘The airfield, ‘ I said. ‘I show you the airfield’. All the guns were trained on me at that point. All the eyes of the prisoners  – black as caves – were on me. Most of them must have thought I was about to get them all killed or burned alive. By that point I guessed most of them didn’t care. For about five seconds you could hear the lice crawling across their bodies.

‘OK. We go.’

‘All of us,’ I said.

‘OK we go.’

A few garbled commands in Russian and everyone got back into the jeeps and the truck. The camp gate was closed. We drive off. I have no idea what happened there after that. But at least it didn’t happen on my watch. I don’t think I could have lived with myself. As it is, it’s a scene that already visits me in my sleep.

I had been armed with hand-made maps (and no gun!) that allowed me to steer a safe route right into the airfield, where I was surprised to see a number of huge hangars that no-one had warned us about.

Given how frosty things had become between me and the Russians, I wasn’t wildly surprised when they poked their rifles at me and invited me to go first in opening up one of the hangar doors. Everyone else stood back, expecting there to be some kind of trip-wire or a booby-trap, or a horde of die-hard Nazis blasting us with MP40s. Frankly at that point I wasn’t thinking I was going to get back to camp in once piece anyway, so I just grabbed the handle and pulled the damned sliding door as hard as I could.

There was no explosion. Just the echoing of a metal clang. I stepped into the half-dark, tried the light switch but half-knew there would be no power.

The hangar was huge, long and wide. In front of me was an aeroplane like nothing I’d seen before. And stretching out into the gloom were any number of the same planes, some fully-made, others half-built. They seemed like quite short stubby numbers to me. Not quite bombers, not quite fighters. Their noses were mottled gray and reminded me of a shark in their shape. But the most shocking thing was the absence of any propellors. Instead under each wing was something I could only describe as a giant canister with holes at each end. I assumed it was some kind of engine, but for the life of me could not work out how it would function. It felt a bit like entering a Martian lair in an H G Wells novel. Chilling.

Behind me the fluent one shouted ‘Jet! Jet engine!’.

I don’t quite understand how he had an English word for all this before I could even begin to make sense of what I was looking at.  The main feeling that came after the awe, though, was relief, because the Russians suddenly seemed so very jolly at finding these machines. There were half a dozen or so in this one hangar so God knows how many there were across the whole airfield. As the man who had opened the door on all this, I instantly became their friend again and the business at the camp was forgotten.

We crawled around these planes a little bit just to try and make head or tail about what they were about, but then the Russians started to get a bit possessive and I thought it best if we finished our little tour, grabbed as much grub as we could, check that the beef and cauliflower was coming our way and make myself scarce as quickly as possible.

To be honest I spent that evening just shaking on my bed wondering what the world was coming to with death camps set on fire and planes with rocket engines. I hope in my little way I did save some of those living corpses from instant death, but who knows if any of them will survive. And as for those planes, I assume they’ll disappear back to Mother Russia well before we can warn the Americans about them. Probably best for me to keep schtum about my part in that!

And so today I have been sent into Barth with Bob And Don. The beef and cauliflower arrived and the fluent one must have put in a good word for me, so the General trusts me enough to make another recce . The mission is to round up any kriegies that might be lurking in town and try to persuade them to come back to camp. We’re also to report on what resources there are in terms of transmitters, telex, transport etc.

The place is in such uproar that it’s hard to navigate a sensible way around it without being mobbed by drunken soldiers and desperate hysterical locals who want to tell us in broken English that they never supported the German army or the SS in what they were doing. We found any number of dead civilians in the shops and houses we visited. Frankly, at this point I really don’t care. I just want to the madness to stop and for us to go home. I don’t want anyone else to die. There’s been enough.

Don and I have promised ourselves that we’re going to find at least one case of decent wine and then spin back to the camp and never volunteer for anything else again, unless it’s about getting on a plane non-stop back to Britain.

Enough. Don is calling me.

He’s found the communion wine and is wondering whether that will do.


Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

It's so grey in London townPanda car crawling aroundHere it comesEleven o'clockWhere can we go now?
Can't make no noiseCan't get no gearCan't make no moneyCan't get outta here
Big business, it don't like youIt don't like the things you doYou got no moneySo you got no powerThey think you're uselessAnd so you are, punk
 
Remote Control by The Clash, 1977

 

Whilst passing through London I took Chris to see this new film ‘Star Wars’. There were queues round the block to get in. Very strange – given it is a rather childish sci-fi fairy story, and not really about anything real or substantial.

It rather reminded me of being a child building machines in Meccano and creating my own fantasy world in my bedroom. Is this what cinema has become? I am getting old.

==

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Britain has changed since I last spent any decent amount of time here. One notices the dirt, the lack of decent clothes, the whiff of violence just under the surface, the general sense of decline. There’s also a feeling of chaos and insanity in the air.  It’s not just ‘Star Wars’. The Silver Jubilee celebrations are equally strange.

So many street parties block off the roads. It takes a bloody age to get across London. Several times our car was surrounded by ugly looking people in what I suppose they think of as ‘fancy dress’. This ranges from the sporting of simple red and blue sashes, to dressing up in full regalia as Henry the Eighth or Elizabeth the First, in a tatty home-made way. One lady appeared to have constructed the Virgin Queen’s whole outfit entirely from a pile of shopping bags.

Most of the children were decked out as Disney characters, rather than anything national or regal. In one part of town, where we were stuck in an interminable traffic jam in blazing heat, there were literally dozens of Donald Ducks and Goofys buzzing around on rather poorly maintained racing bicycles. I saw one urchin dressed up as Chris Lee-era Dracula with a bin liner for a cloak, a whitewash face, two trickles of lipstick blood around his mouth and vampire teeth fashioned out of what looked like a potato. His party trick was to envelop prams with his ‘cloak’ and pretend to suck the blood of babies. What this had to do with the Queen is beyond me. I really am getting old.

==

I didn’t want Chris to think I was entirely unpatriotic, so I bought him a commemorative coin. He very quickly discovered you could use it as actual coin of the realm and was, at first, keen to buy 25p’s worth of disgusting Cola sweets.

Then, when he came back from the shops, he tells me his sister (with us for half term) had doubled his money, meaning he could afford a 45 rpm single he’d heard about.  Initially I thought he must have caught the Jubilee bug because the record sleeve appeared to be a Union Jack. But on closer inspection there was also a photo of the Queen with her eyes blanked out by a strip  of newspaper lettering, the type one might use in a movie ransom note. It read ‘God Save The Queen’ and then underneath was the group’s name – shockingly called ‘The Sex Pistols’.

My initial reaction was for Chris to take it straight back to the shop and get his money back. I wasn’t even sure it was legal for anyone to sell a 10 year-old something like that. But then it turned out that Isabelle had mischievously gone into the shop and bought it for him  - and relieved him of his commemorative coin into the bargain, so I felt there wasn’t much I could do.

I gave permission for it to be played just the once in my flat. He then had to take it elsewhere if he wanted to hear it again. It wasn’t so different from the general racket people play these days – electric guitar noise, the clatter of cheap drums and some working class kid shouting and sneering rather than singing. I discerned only a few phrases like ‘you’re a moron’, ‘there’s no future’ and the like. All very bleak. To be fair, the music does seem rather in tune with the way this country’s going. I’m so glad we’re just passing through.

==

Bridge

To clear the taste of grubby London out of my mouth and also to give Chris an idea of a Britain that wasn’t just about ‘punk rock’, I took him to see ‘A Bridge Too Far’. I was ready to dislike it, but I have to say it was rather well put together – mainly unsentimental and direct about how war gets played out. The noise of it all was particularly well done, like being back there. Generally, the uniforms were all a bit clean, and understandably it avoided too much blood and gore. God knows where they got all the tanks and other vehicles from.

I like this young chap Anthony Hopkins. Given the mighty cast, he could have got lost in the crowd. And Dirk B was surprisingly convincing as a stuffy upper crust military man. As usual, he played him as something of a creep, which is Dirk’s default. They must have paid him pretty handsomely to make him stoop to playing the part. I’d heard he’d fallen out of love completely with the movies.

When we came out of the cinema I asked Chris if he enjoyed it. He simply wanted to know why I wasn’t in it. ‘Weren’t you in the war?’ he asked.

I didn’t think he wanted to hear the long story of why Richard Attenborough would never use me – even in a film where there were so obviously roles for any number of dead or dying men. So I simply pointed out that being in the war did not mean you automatically ended up being in war movies.

I note with some satisfaction that Attenborough’s politics has softened somewhat since we fell out over ‘The Enemy Within’. I refused to play the sleeping role he and Forbes devised for me – their symbol of the work-shy lefty, snoozing on the job. 

People think of him as this avuncular lovey these days, but they forget about ‘I’m Alright Jack’ and ‘The Enemy Within’, and what an instinctively repulsive union-basher Dickie was in those days – and full of conspiracy theories about how working men were being manipulated by a cabal of posho communists. Really it was snobbery and I told him so. He just didn’t like working class people. When he had to play one, he always turned him into a spiv or a bigot or both. And then he had the cheek to take that role in ‘The Great Escape’ when he’d spent most of the war looking at it through a camera. He never liked being around people like me and Donald who actually knew what it had been like, or who’d had proper jobs with real people before the war. He’s not quite so unquestioningly conservative in his messaging these days, I note. I suppose the Sixties culture was bound to touch him in end as it touched the rest of us.

This isn’t an anti-war movie, though – far from it. It’s still at heart a celebration of the British armed forces and war as a moral necessity - win or lose. I’m afraid I can never really subscribe to that given my own experiences. Perhaps I, like Chris, am something of a punk  - on this matter anyway!

==

I arrived in Rome to be greeted by Helen and her co-producers in startlingly contrasting ways. The co-producers were delighted to see me. Helen not so much. She was immediately miffed that I had jettisoned Chris in Paris, stowing him with the Belovices without telling her. She claimed she was worried about Chris being looked after properly, but really she wanted him there for photo ops and a chance to play perfect mother.

She accused me of deliberately keeping her son from her. I had to remind her that it was her idea for Chris to come and live with me in the first place. ‘We could always do a swap,” I said mischievously. “Christopher for Isabelle.” I was, of course, joking but I fear poor Helen lost her sense of humour many moons ago.

I have to admit it’s rather a nice setup here. I have a comfortable apartment that has a south facing balcony, a decent refrigerator and a record player. There are Bechet and Goodman long player records here that I have not heard for years - and amusingly Ustinov’s ‘Grand Prix of Gibraltar’. It’s lovely to hear another actor talking about racing cars in a funny but loving way. He doesn’t just like racing cars, but has obviously been to the races and talked to the drivers and the engineers. It brings back memories – the smell of rubber and oil, the effing and jeffing, tuning the ear to subtle modulations of each engine, a band of brothers uniting around a common project, to get this damn cart to keep going at all costs!

==

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The director has assigned me a rather handsome gung-ho puppyish ‘researcher’ called Matteo, who is supposedly going to supply me with research material and inspiration for my role. He says he wants to take me on trips to galleries and churches that contain seminal early images of Christ. He also wants to take me to the catacombs.

He tells me firmly not to watch Zeffirelli’s TV series, which I fear has somewhat eclipsed what we’re up to, although Matteo assures me that it simply proved the audience appetite for this kind of film and helped to unlock the final block of finance Helen needed for a green light.

I don’t feel I need to watch it anyway. By all reports Zeffirelli has gone down the traditional route. It’s Max von Sydow, it’s Jeffrey Hunter. Narrow sallow face, often peeking out from an off-white hood, brown beard and long hair, slightly oily, centre parting, electric blue eyes. Always blue eyes.

In my weaker moments I wonder if Matteo - or indeed anyone associated with this production – has bothered taking a good look at me. I am nearly 60. My hair isn’t grey but is thinning. I have small muddy brown eyes not blue. The cross they put me on will have to be quite short and squat like me. I have ugly feet and toes that I pick until I bleed when I’m drunk. My paunch is all too likely to droop over my loin cloth. I have far too much body hair for a messiah, and have clearly enjoyed too many pasta meals.

They should have caught me just after I’d come back from Germany. I would have fitted the bill then. We all would have, to be fair. The plane was full of malnourished, wounded Christs that day.

==

On a whim I asked Matteo this morning if he could dig out a copy of ‘Quo Vadis’ for us to watch. He’d never heard of it, poor child, and questioned why it was relevant. It’s about early Christianity! It was obscenely successful in its time! A classic! And it was made right here in these very studios! What more excuse do you need? Honestly, I wonder  sometimes at how people land research roles in this industry given they know nothing important about film history.

To be honest, listening to Ustinov on the long player made me want to see him on screen – another short tubby narrow-eyed man who did alright for himself. I’m not going to play Christ like Nero, obviously. But there’s something about Ustinov I might try to steal. And that film will give me fuel, I think. I so remember going to see it with Bob when it came out. I remember saying to him – ‘there’s so many people in that film it can’t be that hard to get a job as an actor! They must always be short of people to fill the screen, I reckon’. And I was right! Well, I was right then. Nowadays, of course, I can’t even get a sleeping part in ‘A Bridge Too Far’.

I decided to pass the long hours of waiting to be called by reading Dirk’s memoirs. I picked up a copy at the airport. The coincidence of it being there just after I’d seen the old poof on the screen seemed too compelling. I had to look up what a postillion was, mind. He loves his fancy words now he sees himself as a writer rather than an actor.

It was a rather cosy dreamy book. I think I preferred Niven’s memoir. Felt more muscular and real to me. And funny! But it makes me wonder if all this diary writing I’ve done over the years could be cooked up into something similar to what they do. They have sold a lot of copies. My worry would be that my memories are not quite jolly or funny enough. And let’s face it, I’m not a star. I’ve had an interesting life, I think, but not stellar. I suppose people will think I’ve spent most of my time asleep. Perhaps in a way I have.

Sometimes I wonder if there has been another life happening around me that I’ve never really seen because I’ve been so out of it all the time, so unseeing. Is the life I’ve got just a dream life? Gosh, I must have been drinking too much of the Valpolicella – how philosophical of me.

I suppose I am starting to worry about how my Christ will go over. What I see in all the paintings that Matteo has marched me past this week is a man with his eyes wide open, challenging the viewer to see him there suffering, nailed to a cross, malnourished, dying. But I am always eyes closed, a body at rest. People tell me I make them feel like I’ve gone somewhere else, that I’ve removed myself elsewhere and they find it compelling, unsettling to think I might have gone somewhere they can’t go, to a place they can’t reach.

So maybe that’s what I should be striving for –  to make people believe I’ve gone to heaven, and make them feel like they know it’s there for me to go to, but for them it will always be tantalisingly out of reach.

==

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I had lunch with Helen today to discuss how I’m going to approach the role. She seemed  happy with what I was suggesting to her. Fair play to Helen that she is fighting to do something different, in particular when it comes to our age.

She is no spring chicken and I am – let’s face it – old. It’s a fascinating idea to let older people take major roles that traditionally are played by the young. She talked about another project that would have her play Juliet to Frank Finlay’s Romeo (he’s been a big success on the TV apparently as some kind of uptight wife-beater). I wondered out loud whether I could get away with playing Henry the Fifth and Helen nearly spat out her drink. We guffawed at the idea remaking ‘Chimes At Midnight’ with someone stupidly young playing Falstaff. Maybe a role for Chris, I said. But Helen didn’t think that funny.

Anyway, we’re both quite right to accept our age and play the roles accordingly. Helen tells me Belmondo has just completed a film with Raquel Welsh (!) in which he plays a stuntman. He’s been insisting on showing off – wing-walking and lion taming and so on - and as a result has not only broken many bones, but has had his ear chewed off by a tiger. Serves him right, the vainglorious chump.


Extracts from Peter Shure's Diaries: March 1990

Poll_Tax_Riot_31st_Mar_1990_Trafalger_Square_Damage
WEDNESDAY 28 MARCH

I cannot believe Martin has booked me to do shoot a bloody advert on a Saturday! I have to trek all the way up to London to help sell a bloody breakfast cereal. I’m to be dressed up as Wee Willie Winky or some such nonsense, only to be woken by the racket of a breakfast cereal that somehow pops and fizzles when the milk is poured onto it. This is what scientists spend their time on now – inventing noisy cereals rather than curing cancer or getting us back to the moon.

Is this to be my fate? TV advertisements and ‘advisory’ roles on dreary arthouse fodder? I sincerely thought Martin would do better for me than that. He even considered signing my up for a bloody Butlins Holiday world advert without asking me! He couldn’t see at all why I might balk at that. As if I'd ever go bakc there.

‘If you don’t want the work then maybe you should think seriously about retirement planning,” he said. Then in the same breath presented me with the idea of advising on some ghastly sci-fi film about spacemen who put themselves into what he called’ hypersleep’ ,and then have to wake up and battle aliens. What am I supposed to tell a young actor to do in that situation? Get in your pod, close your eyes and remember the Alamo?

Retirement is a ghastly prospect. What would I do with myself? I hate watching television. I loathe gardening. Reading gives me headaches. I have very few friends nearby who I can abide ,and I certainly don’t want to play bridge with them. Or tennis. Or bowls. I would simply drink and doze myself into oblivion. Perhaps that is Martin’s plan. Drive me into the grave so he can have the house to himself and all that comes with it.

 

SATURDAY 31 MARCH

Got home about 8 this evening and Martin was all in a panic asking if I was alright. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘your blessed cereal advertisement is all done’. He was rather taken aback that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Riots! Looting! Police horses charging into crowds. Cars being set on fire. I had no idea. After the shoot I took off to the Garrick for a rewarding snifter and then toddled off down to Waterloo for my train. Yes, there was noise. There's always noise in London. There were police out and about and a lot of oiks carrying placards, and one or two of them toting large bin bags with god-knows-what in them. But I thought that was normal for London these days. So grubby, so full of litter and unhappy rowdy people. And always a background hum of impending violence that makes one keep one's head odwn as you walk around. Never catch anyone's eye in London, I say. No wonder people like Devon make the films they do . That’s why I want nothing to do with the place.

Martin was appalled that I hadn’t even noticed. ‘You were right there,’ he said. 'What were you doing? Sleepwalking through the place?’

Indeed. Maybe I was. I prefer to think I made a deliberate decision not to notice. I have being doing that quite a lot recently. So much so that I think Martin thinks he can do pretty much anything he likes.  He’s starting to remind me of Dirk in that film ‘The Servant’ – which I suppose would make me the other fellow who comes under his thrall. Is that how it is to be? Me under Martin’s thumb? Dammit, I can’t even remember how that film ends. Not well, I’d wager.

 

WEDNESDAY 4 APRIL

I have decided to get the diaries out of the house. They can’t be here.

The tapes will have to stay. They are as much Martin’s property as mine in a twisted way. Blast it, why did I ever agree to them? He pushes me on things I’d rather forget. Brings up people and places that I haven’t really thought about for years and years – for good reason.

I have ended up saying the most ridiculous things. Some things best not said. I rather wonder if he isn’t putting a dose in my drink to make me loosen my tongue. He keeps me up til all hours, pecking away at something he thinks is so bally important.  I suppose I could have pretended to fall asleep, but after all this time I doubt he would tumble for that. He’s seen it too many times before.

It's my own fault, I’ll admit it. I agreed to the idea that he’d have all this juicy material to draw on for a book after I’m gone. Something he can use for a bit of security. I promised Martin C I’d look after him after all. But how much of me does he need, I ask myself. How much of me have I ever wanted to let slip or hand over to someone else?

At least with this diary business it’s all me, me alone, and whatever has cropped up each day. No side to it. No looking back. I can say what I like to myself.

 

FRIDAY 6 APRIL

I’ve been packing all the diaries up today for the post, knowing Martin wouldn’t be here to see it. I enjoyed flicking through some of the old ones as I piled them into boxes.

The stuff from the Sixties and Seventies is quite amusing in parts, although often it feels like a bit of pose. Not really me. I think in those days I was always asking myself ‘what would Noel Coward do?’ Sit down with a drink and review the day. Add a few catty words about whoever he’d been working with. Drop a few names. Bear witness to a Royal Performance, the private dinner parties, exotic holidays in the Caribbean. Perhaps it wasn’t a pose. Perhaps that was what I was like. Could I have been that self-absorbed?

We’re all writing for posterity in the end. Something to fill the coffers of the estate when we’re gone. So perhaps I was trying to be more entertaining and egotistical as a result – the epitome of the vainglorious B-movie actor!

Not so true of the war diaries. Wretched suff. But in a way much more straightforward. It was nice to see it there on those old scraps of paper in my most basic of handwriting. I’ve played those scenes over in my head a thousand million times. The stuff of nightmares. But reading it now, it doesn’t touch me quite as much. Maybe because I know where it ends.

Funny really. My stomach turned when I picked up the ’45 diary. Felt a bit shaky. But I have to say in the end it was a calming experience, meeting my younger self in such dire straits. I was quite a plucky little blighter! And a pretty decent bloke, I’d say. There I was thinking it would be a ghastly tale of horror and death, but of course it’s about survival. I’ve been a silly sod not to have dug it out sooner. It might have helped me calm down about it all, rather than letting it haunt me all this time.

I remember when I first started driving fast cars and hanging out with Bob and Mike and the rest of them, I used to use the memory of Helen’s face to keep me calm. In the middle of a tight tennis match or a difficult shoot, I could stop myself from blowing up or hyperventilating by imagining Helen looking at me with her serious face, warning me not to go over the top, telling me with her eyes and pursed lips to breathe and be my better self. Nowadays I can't think of Helen without getting wound up and annoyed!

In a way, though, reading back through it all again today had the same effect as Helen did then. I feel much calmer. I sense I shall sleep well tonight.

I haven’t kept any of them with me though. I don’t want Martin reading any of that. It’s just for me. At least until I peg it.

Off to Skegness with the lot!