Writer-insighter – Page 49 – Maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. So long as you believe it is.

Off the rails

I think it’s my age. I’ve been thinking about delinquency. Just a phase I’m going through, probably.

Reading Not Your Heart Away poses some problems for God-fearing folk who saw England as a land where laws were supposed to be upheld, where decent girls didn’t, where the consequences of pre-marital sex were not just pregnancy and disease but much more importantly to some, shame and ruin. Alongside the “moral” issues (who decides on morality? Oh anyone, don’t worry about that, so long as they can say with a straight face that that’s what God meant) there is also a measure of straightforward criminality.

Under-age drinking. Landlords tolerating (or pretending not to know about ) it. Drug-taking. Being drunk in a public place. Having sex ditto. Possession of a controlled substance. Possibly (pending the outcome of luckily fictional) blood tests, drunk driving.

The victims of crime were variously unhappy. Theresa was in tears realising not only that Ben was never going to put a ring on her finger but also fancied someone else a lot more than her. Ben himself, who tended to blame Claire for messing his life up for ever when really, he did it to himself. Liz, but only in the sense that she was just pissed-off with Ben being an idiot, poncing around with rich girls. Poor Claire seems the most damaged, her whole life in free-fall after her parents decided provincial pettiness about who puts what where belonged with steam trains, the Home Service and rationing, all of which they remembered.

Some characters’s lives changed hugely for the better in the same atmosphere. Poppy, for example, who might once have faced a cloistered life, bursting exuberantly out of the closet with no apparent harm to herself or anyone else. Liz herself, who was mostly just irritated with Ben and waiting for the revolution she thought would topple the likes of Claire and her kind forever. Bad luck Liz. There was going to be a revolution but you didn’t know it would do exactly the opposite of what you hoped.

Talking About A Revolution

Another revolution is going on now. One where part-time policemen can decide whether you should be allowed to say things they object to in public not just then and there (Ben’s generation were just told to shut up and piss off home) but for up to three years. If you don’t like it you can go to prison. Think I’m making this up? Sadly, I’m not. It’s all over the news, or it would be if the BBC didn’t feel the Royal Baby (capitals to match its divinity please) was more newsworthy. Maybe it’s the same revolution that was starting back then.

It certainly isn’t the one Ben and his friends had any idea was going to happen. Back in the days when Tina Turner’s We Don’t Need Another Hero, (‘a bit political,’ as Ben Elton used to say) Adam Ant (Thatcherite motto: your money or your life, although in the Falklands in 1982 she wanted both) and Haysi Fantayzee (John Wayne – bad. Anal sex – sorry, the jury’s still out on that one) were political voices in the land, in retrospect John Otway much more than Billy Bragg captured the true spirit of the 1980s revolution when he sang about the ongoing oppression of the rural poor by the bourgeoisie. (“Louisa said: Get me a saddle boy, and go and mount my horse. You and me together are going for a ride”). Gleefully, a whole generation grabbed its Ray-Bans and jumped into its Volkswagen Golf.

And what a ride it was. In a very few short years Ben’s generation dumped the leftover trappings of an alternative society founded on strawberry cigarette papers and patchouli, love, peace, unrestrained sex and gentle law-breaking. They swapped all of that for mortgages within a few years of graduation, silly spectacles, red braces and AIDS. A lot of them became seriously better-off in the process. A lot of them still mourn the freedoms that were lost.

Our Daily Mail

I love croissants. Always have. I’m not talking about the powdery cold pretendy left-overs wrapped in plastic (bread hates plastic. It’s entirely mutual) that grace supermarket shelves. Real ones. Fresh ones. When I lived in North London there was a bakery about 200 yards up the road from my flat. When some poor Lynne or Tansy or oh-so-wow Miguette (yes, I know. Result and so on) had been inveigled into visiting what was on inspection so definitely not my very groovy pad, at least she got fresh croissants and strawberries in the morning, to add a really uncomfortable sugar-rush to the four pints of Stella hangover and the bone-adjusting discomfort of the futon I’d made.

In some ways sadly, Time moves on. The bakery closed because people who liked croissants moved out and the parking was a nightmare. I sometimes got them in hotels, but mostly they were disappointing. It never really struck me that I could make them myself. I knew there was steam involved somewhere, but putting aside visions of exploding bricks shattering all over my kitchen I thought what consumerism encourages you to think: it’s too difficult for me, I’d better buy it. And then this week a strange and disturbing thing happened from which I may never recover. I read something useful in the Daily Mail.

Read All About It

To be fair, it wasn’t the actual Daily Mail, but a tiny supplement specifically about baking breads someone who cares gave me. Early on in the little book there was a croissant recipe. Yeah, right, I thought. Diana was murdered by MI5. And Cameron’s got soul. It wasn’t even 200 words but it was a revelation. Like most baking, most of it is waiting, not actually doing anything. Actual doing stuff time, maybe 10 minutes at the outside. Time overall, a day and a half, one way or the other. The longest bit was just mixing the dough right at the beginning. About three minutes and like all baking the quantities are important. Not to get all Heston Blumenthal, but baking is one area of cooking where you can’t just use the ‘some’ principle (as in ‘peel some potatoes.’ How many? Well, how many do you want? That many.) Roll out the dough to about 1cm thick and put five ounces of butter in it. No, it’s not unhealthy. If you were going to eat this every day it would be. You’re not. So don’t get precious.

Fold it on itself then do it again. Stick it in the fridge overnight. Next day, roll it out and fold it again. 20 minutes later do it again. 20 minutes after that, do it again. Forty minutes after that, roll it out thinner than I did, cut it into triangles wider than I did and roll them up, so the pointy bit is last. Now the technical bit.

You know that wonderful crunchy thing the very best croissants have? That’s mostly because they’re fresh. That salty undertone to the rich taste? The glaze. Oh how very technical that sounds. Beat an egg in a bowl. Add a pinch of salt. Brush it over the rolls while you’re waiting until they’re starting to push their folds apart and the oven gets hot. Do the steam thing, preferably in a proper French steam oven if you’re Mme Poilane, one of the very realest food heroes, or by chucking a cup of cold water into the roasting tray you left in the oven while it gets hot if you’re me and your daddy didn’t have a helicopter, forgot how to fly it and left you a bakery.

Twenty minutes later you can say “Croissants? With maybe some honey, or perhaps some gooseberry confiture? Baby?” Use the only two decent matching coffee cups and saucers you have. And of course, don’t forget the strawberries.

Heston Services

If you shop at Waitrose (and dear reader, it is a truth universally acknowledge that one does not admit to shopping anywhere else) you’ll have seen Waitrose Weekend, the free newspaper-style magazine with cooking tips and as they would never say in public, so much more.

This week along with the butterflied lamb with fig glaze (What? No, if you’ve got something to say then just say it. I’m waiting….) there’s a feature on how utterly crap, damaging to reality, truth and a genuine business culture The Apprentice actually is along with a thing about Aggers and cricket. So far so excellent. Cricket, and in particular Radio 4’s surreal commentaries on it where the on-air appreciation of cakes baked by deranged listeners and sent to the men in their 80s broadcasting as they chortle over a cup of tea at world-class schoolboy humour (“the batsman’s Holding, the bowler’s Willy”) is far and away the best athletic sport, chiefly because sloggers like Botham aside it doesn’t look very athletic. Sitting in a deckchair it all looks so gentle any spectator can think ‘I could do that. If I could be bothered to stand up. Maybe I’ll have another cup of tea first.’ I once tried to introduce a Scottish woman to the serene loveliness of an English village cricket match. It was the first time I’d really appreciated how much Lewis Carrol had put into the game.

‘Why’s that stupit man with all the hats wearing a dress?’

The umpire had decided to wear the hat of everyone who had decided their hat was too hot or got in the way and handed it to him. He’d also decided to wear shorts, a deplorable practice in cricket but let’s face it, they weren’t playing at the Oval. He’d then worn his white warehouse coat, as umpire and the hem of the coat was longer than his shorts. Not a dress. But it did look as if the local transsexual had branched out with a multiple hat fetish, to be fair. The next comment was much more damning.

‘If they put their back intae ut this could be over in haffanoor.’

I tried to explain that running when you hit the ball, well, that was really for professionals on TV, and that running was antithetical to cricket, where the cucumber sandwiches and the gossip around the pavillion, where the tea-urn is probably more important than the urn the Ashes are kept in, is all much more important than the crass vulgarity of actually winning the game. Cricket is – well cricket is for sitting on a deckchair in the sun and languid clapping, reflecting on the inanities of sports that involve strenuous effort like cheering. The Zen contemplation of the red, white and green. If the Rastafari flag is gold for the sun, red for the blood of the martyrs and green for the green fields of Ethiopia (notwithstanding that Hailie Selassie, the Lion of Judah, spent a fair bit of time in a nice early-Victorian stone villa in Bath) then cricket’s iconography symbolises the red of the ball that hit you in the side of the head on a playing field when you were fourteen and looking at Teresa Powell playing volleyball instead of fielding properly, (if you kept your eyes open Bennett this wouldn’t have happened. You’re letting your team down. There’s nothing wrong with you…), white for the colour the knee pads used to be, the only pad you could find that had buckles on all of its straps and green for the grass stains you hoped you might get on your whites when volleyball was over in a summer long ago. The smell of long-dead bowlers and boyhood and loss and the wheel of life anthem for doomed youth that gently haunts every cobweb in every village Pav. I tried to translate this into Scottish but I think it lost something along the way.

No. What irritated me about Waitrose Weekend (and let’s face it, so far so lovely) was Heston Blumenthal. To be fair, either of those two words irritates me intensely, let alone both together. Heston Blumenthal is a self-consciously ‘wacky’ (no, there really isn’t an N in the word, officially) celebrity chef who looks like a dick and plays with food. You won’t hear anything about provenance or terroir or grass feeding or ethical standards in Heston’s cooking. Or the food poisoning that sent literally hundreds of his customers to the bathroom all night that the local Environmental Health Officers in Bray felt shouldn’t close his restaurant but one hundredth of which would have shut a burger van for good. All you ever hear about “Heston’s” food is exactly that – how he’s put his own unique stamp on it. Because that’s obviously the most important thing.

“In his Heston from Waitrose Salted Caramel Popcorn Ice Cream the chef manages to contain everything that’s great about the movies.’ Does he? Does he really? He combines the burning, corrosive madness of the English Patient with the whimsical fun of banditry in Butch Cassidy and the seen-it-all Bogart and the beautiful-and-dead appeal of James Dean and the institutionalised crushing brutality of The Hill in a bag of popcorn? Not bad going, Heston. Maybe next time you could add a soupcon of Bad Wives from the Vivid studio. That might lend a little ‘ow you say, piquancy.

“In a television advert for Waitrose… the chef is shown being inspired by popcorn-like meteors on a trip to the cinema.” I think Waitrose will find they’ve actually paid for an advert for the chef, not for themselves at all, notwithstanding that after The Triffids a lot of people look at meteors with a distinct unease. But that could just be the popcorn, of course. Exactly what a popcorn-like meteor is, or how it inspires anyone is quickly brushed aside.

“The chef, who is famous for molecular gastronomy” (like every other chef on the planet, but let’s put that aside too, along with food poisoning, which is obviously now officially in the Rude To Mention It category) ‘reveals…he had this idea. Why not take my love of ice-cream and my childhood love of cinema and just stick them all together?”

No Heston. Just stop right there. The real question is why do that, not why not? Let’s ignore the fact that corn is one of the very worst things you can eat, in terms not just of the economics of its production but also what it does to you. Corn syrup, anyone? With a side order of Type Two diabetes? Coming right up.

It’s the sheer mind-warping inanity, the look-at-me-look-at-me playing with food I object to. Why not take my love of Biggles books and rice and um, eat it on an airplane? Oh wait, that’s been done. Ok, here’s one. Why not take my love of Gerry Anderson’s puppets and sandwiches and er, make a balsa wood sandwich with a string filling? Yeah baby! Behave! Now we’re cooking with gas. Molecularly. Like no-one else does.

Next week Heston shows us a protein shake any man can make in five minutes with an old copy of Penthouse. As Waitrose Weekend hopefully doesn’t say.

The backstory

The screenplay of Not Your Heart Away went off to a proper, professional script-editor a few weeks ago. For flattering but still unknown reasons despite doing this all of a very long day for a living she wanted to have a look at my attempt at a screenplay to see if Ben’s longing for Claire’s jeans and their contents might be visualised in a format conducive to people paying £10 to eat popcorn in the dark.

Several people have said the beginning of the book is confusing. So did the script-doctor. Not because it was, in a Donnie Darko sense. (Come on, that whole film was confusing). But because unlike the book, you don’t get any time to explain things. You can’t say what a character thinks, unless he says it or sees it, so you can hear it or see it too. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but only if you know what you’re looking at. So the backstory needs filling in.

Where are we now?

Why is Claire where she is? I think that’s explained as the film unwinds, but why is Ben the way he is? And Liz? And Pete? And Poppy? Again, Poppy, being essentially anyone (yes, as in anyone would do, and if they’re funny and into Ben then so much the better, but let’s not kid ourselves about him. He might be the romantic lead but he’s not a romantic hero. He’s 19, for heaven’s sake. What were you expecting, Lord Byron in Levis?) she doesn’t need so much explanation, but the three main characters, they certainly do if we’re ever going to find out why they act like that.

Only one person reviewing the book has commented on Liz’s love for Ben, which I certainly intended to show when I wrote it but no-one has picked up on at all, save one of the most forthright reviewers. So even there, in book form, the backstory isn’t complete.

I’m finding the same with a new screenplay I’m trying to write, (School Lane) about a German boy who I met in a pub when he was an old man. Every time I start writing it I get the first scene down and then think: ‘that’s not the first scene. We need a first scene before the first scene, to see how they got there.’ That’s four times, so far and I don’t think it’s any nearer being the first scene yet.

Maybe that’s the secret. Start at the end and work backwards. Then at least I’ll know how it turns out.

Liz speaks

This is the review from the person whose voice I stole for Liz’s character:

Now that I have worked out the title of Not Your Not_Your_Heart_Away_Cover_for_Kindle Heart Away is taken from the wonderous A E Housman, I like this even more, except for the first bit which didn’t float my boat any more than it did Mr Bennett’s. And the end bit, which could do with tweaking. But the rest of it is really rather far out (as I am sure that Ben and Liz would have said in late 1970s, although probably not the posher Claire).

In so far as the writing is concerned, the style is journalistic and leaning towards being impressively taut; there’s a sort of “dashed off” Fitzgerald / Capote / Hemingway thing going on which makes you want to keep on reading notwithstanding your aggravation with one or two of the characters and the rather mesmeric plotlessness; all so resonant of late teenage years. As other reviewers have said, reading this book took you back to 1978, when so many 18 year olds lived lives dramatically different from their parents; when sixth formers had dreams and vagueish plans rather than A*s, focus and resumes, when you were allowed to drink illegally in pubs on the basis that the landlord kicked you out if you couldn’t at least pretend to be grownup.

Mesmeric Plotlessness

And what an insight into the mind of a boy / man – able to care about the rather uninspiring girlfriend who provided sex and wanted an engagement ring, whilst lusting after various others just because they were there and all the time being romantically obsessed with the vacuous posh totty. Which brings me to another Fitzgerald similarity – the way in which Claire drifts around carelessly in the manner of Daisy in Great Gatsby, oblivious to harm she causes; not least to the narrator by taking his heart away.

Loved the Salisbury Plain bits – anyone who was brought up in Wiltshire will confirm the night driving and Cradle Hill watching are truly evocative. And Peter was a beautifully drawn cameo role. Liz was absolutely fabulous and what a shame Ben didn’t listen to her sound advice – but what boys ever do listen to their good girl friends when dreamy posh girls are drifting by?
This book has a definite filmic quality – get the script written, Mr Bennett! And for the next book follow Ben on his adventures wherein a 1970s teenage boy becomes a man ………………..I just hope he keeps his fancies free from entanglements with vague, dim posh girlies, although somehow I rather suspect not.

Fourth of July

It’s a cold, blustery Fourth of July in England, American Independence Day. The day the middle-class revolutionaries from Cromwell and the Pilgrim Fathers onwards came up with a new world order based on democracy and reason, a republic free from the tyranny of kings and the right of a militia to bear arms in order to keep the government in check.

Yeah, right. Good luck with the project.

Like most social experiments it didn’t turn out quite the way the disconnected, well-off theorists thought it would. The same way it didn’t for the unemployed stacked in concrete brutalist tower blocks with piss-smelling broken lifts who bafflingly failed to appreciate the exciting statements in post-modern architecture they were stacked in against the day someone would want shipbuilders again, or find enough estate agencies to re-train them into.

Say goodbye, it’s Independence Day

I took a walk around my own not very urban manor today as the wind buffeted and only now and again brought warm gusts of wind smelling of the spice of summer trees. Someone who’s just reviewed Not Your Heart Away asked if there was going to be a sequel, a future past world where Ben goes to America to find Claire, in a fictional world where he doesn’t know he’s looking for her, except he always would. It made me remember another Independence Day very nearly thirty years ago, a summer so hot by a lake in Wisconsin that no-one could believe the thermometer by the basketball court, way over a hundred, when it was still hot when the PA system blew Taps and we hauled down the Stars and Bars for the day, the same way we did every day that summer on summer camp. It wasn’t quite like the Springsteen song but it was pretty close. We just didn’t believe nothing we could say or do wouldn’t change anything now. We were all a lot younger then.

The heat bent the light and weighed so heavy on us we could hardly get the energy to pile into my old Chevrolet station wagon and go down to Gene Fleck’s Meadow Inn bar to see if Nancy-Jean and the other girls from the nearby summer camps were suffering from the heat too, after work, and how many clothes they’d be wearing to deal with it.

It was a long, good summer, a long time ago.

Customer Service

What a pile of utter BS.

I haven’t been online this week because OneBill’s idea of resolving customer disputes is to cut people’s phone line off if they don’t do as they are told.

A few years ago I signed up with OneBill when they promised £10 a month line rental and inclusive phone calls.

The last time I bothered to look at the bill it was £25, month after month. Which isn’t a lot, but I hardly ever use the phone given I’ve got an all-the-calls-you-can-eat package on the mobile. Well, on the new mobile. Vodafone had the same approach to customer service OneBill has. I told them I couldn’t get any signal and it had got worse over the past few years.

No problem sir. We’ll cancel your contract.

But you’re investing millions of pounds a day. Your website says so.

Not to worry sir, we’ll cancel your contract.

Why can’t I have the service I’ve paid for?

Don’t worry, we’ll cancel your contract.

I appreciate these people on the end of the phone don’t have any autonomy and they’re only doing their jobs. Actually I don’t. I don’t care what their problems are. I am paying their wages, and they’ve got a job this week, which is more than I have. If “I was only following orders” didn’t cut it as an excuse at Nuremberg I don’t see why it should now.

Consumer Units

We are being treated not even as consumer units, but disposable ones. Not by all companies, by any means. But some of the biggest, EBay, who simply don’t deign to answer queries, Amazon, more talking to a wall, the Post Office, so farcically over-priced and unproductive and so stupid they actually show a graph of the decline in postal volumes on the same page as a graph showing the increase in the CEO’s salary, all the way down to the ‘we’ll cancel your contract’ approach displayed by Vodafone and OneBill, it’s the same message: there are plenty more customers where you came from. Think yourself lucky. If you don’t like it, go somewhere else.

It’s nice to be thought of as disposable, isn’t it? How many earnest young marketing executives do you think there are there, brightly debating customer churn and retention strategies, right this minute? The really dangerous thing is this: these companies employ lots of people. They’re some of the biggest employers in the UK. Just like the banks, when they lay people off and entrust them to the tender care of food banks and repossession sales, the way they’ve treated other people just makes most people think ‘good.’

Luckily for me there’s wifi at the local pub, 200 yards from my house, until I get another provider sorted-out. In state-of the art England today it takes an entire working week to push a button and connect the line. Honestly, it does. BT told me, with a straight face, not even crossing their finers behind their back and smirking while they said it. This isn’t a Third World country. In the Third World people treated like this would start burning down office blocks.

All of us

I’m starting to do some background research for the story School Lane, a true story about a man I met who was had been in the Hitler Youth and objected to being called a Nazi. hjgirls I wanted to find out more about German villages and the Eidelweiss Pirates so I turned, as you do for everything these days, to Google. All I wanted to do was find some pictures that would show me a German village, so I could imagine the mood of it in my head. Richard Curtis played one song over and over again when he was writing films, so I thought I could allow myself this one small indulgence. I don’t do this a lot. Honest, guv. It was just the once. For research. For this book and that. To see what was there. That’s the only reason I was looking at pictures like that, straight up, as they used to say on The Sweeney.

There were, as you might guess, a lot of photos of Aryan maidens. I presume they were, anyway. They put me in mind of a story I heard from a man who used to fly P51 Mustangs out of Leiston airfield in WWII. After the war he got a job as a press photographer on a newspaper, back in the days when things in small American towns were much the same as they were in James Stewart’s film Harvey. I know this country. I drove around the MidWest in a Chevrolet. I didn’t watch attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, it’s true. But I did see Nancy-Jean practising on the football field with the squad in the rain, one Saturday morning in Indiana. That was a long time before anyone had the idea they didn’t want to be one, like Ms St Vincent. Still, she was 30 when she sang that and the other girls were getting a little embarrassed.

You need to focus

One day he had an assignment to go and photograph at some girls High School out in the nowheres for some sporting event or other back in the mists of time. All the girls lined up outdoors, some twenty or so cheerleaders asked to stand stiff and straight in the Florida sunshine. Being young girls they started fidgeting and chatting to each other and he couldn’t get exactly the picture he wanted. It was just turning into one of those days.

Eventually he had to ask the teacher if she could ask the girls to please stay still so he could just click the shutter and get the job done. Pleasant though it was looking at cheerleaders that fine morning he had other stuff to do. Certainly, the teacher said.

“Stand still girls, the photographer wants to focus.”

No-one ever owned up to being the cheerleader who said, “What, all of us?”

Ghost stories

If you’ve read Not Your Heart Away (and if you haven’t then you can just click here and let me know what you think when you’ve read it), you’ll know it’s got a ghost in it.

Claire’s house, the imaginary house in the story, (based on but not exactly like a real house and ditto a real person I knew lived in, but with bits borrowed from other houses, other people’s stories) was haunted, she believed. The real house I had in my head when I wrote it wasn’t, not that I ever heard. But the ghosts in the book were all told to me about other places, by people I didn’t think were fools or liars.

In Service

Claire’s ghosts in the book manifested themselves in three separate incidents, the scattering of flowers, the servant’s stairs and the naked woman on the landing that Ben is never sure is real or not or Claire’s mother or not.

When my grandmother was about twelve years old she went into service, working at the local Big House, Ashton Court in Bristol. It wasn’t about choice. Her father was an alcoholic and when he wasn’t drinking he had things to do at home which resulted in eight or nine children to support, which he couldn’t do. In exactly the way David Cameron and his privileged friends think is appropriate for those of lowly station a twelve year old girl had to do it for him because there was no state support system, the same way there won’t be one again.

This was back before 1914, and in true Downton Abbey style the people who owned it liked to have flowers arranged throughout the house. Except in one room. It ought to have a name, the Green Room or something, but while I’m sure it did I don’t know what it was. Flowers were never put there. On the rara occasions they were then the next day the windows would be standing wide open and the flowers scattered all over the floor. It wasn’t Hugsy the dog. It wasn’t in the same house at all.

The back stairs

The servants stairs was a story from another house too. Claire’s house had two staircases, like most of those big old houses; one for the family and one for the servants, back in a time when almost everybody had servants, skivvies, maids or boys. I suspect at least half of it was simply charity and the other half the need for help when there were no washing machines and gas-fired boilers or hoovers. Whatever it was, if you had a big house you certainly didn’t want to bump into the staff on the staircase so they had their own stairs, the back stairs, cheaper, steeper, narrower.

A girl who used to work for me told me about a trip to a friend’s house which had exactly the same kind of arrangement. They thought they had a ghost there and thought it generally confined itself to the back stairs, so the family didn’t use them. Another friend showed me her own back stairs, as it were, and given the choice you would’t use stairs like that anyway. They were incredibly narrow, the treads were short and the steps seemed to be in the wrong place, apart from which there was no handrail or bannister. They had the look of something made for a slight teenager, or maybe like the clothes from long ago that you see in museums, they were made for people who were just smaller in those days. But uncomfortable, not because of any sense of spookiness, but because the staircase was hemmed-in, claustrophobic and it felt as if it would be easy to miss a step with my big modern feet and end up haunting the place myself. Predictably, the first friend had a party and the boys decided to be brave, despite being told not to use the back stairs. Four of them did, deliberately, with a great show of taunting the ghost. All four ran out in tears. None of them would say what happened. It put a bit of a damper on the party.

A girl on the stairs

The naked woman on the stairs story happened to someone I used to know in Portscatho, in Cornwall. In one of my more excruciating memories from a fairly extensive catalogue of embarrassing events, I went down there with a girlfriend one summer when the world was young. Claire’s prototype just happened to be working nearby, but that was not part of this story. I did say it was a bit cringy.

One of the early pioneers of the gentrification of Portscatho, my friend’s father had retired from the Navy as a Commander and bought himself a house overlooking the harbour, just about a hundred yards from the Plume of Feathers and the village square. Mark was a good-looking boy with a convertible Triumph Herald and a future beckoning after he graduated from the School of Mines so he lived there instead of on campus. One morning his father demanded a quiet word.

Why for god’s sake, if Mark had to invite these bloody floosies back, could they not at least have the decency to put some clothes on before they paraded around the landing? It’s not me, Mark, it’s your mother. I don’t see why she nor I should have to put up with this in our own home. I don’t want to have to have this conversation again.

All very well, pops, as Mark said. Except he hadn’t invited anyone home. So far as he knew, he was on his own that morning. We all, Claire’s human form, my girlfriend, me, Mark and his local mate Johno hung around the house for a day or so while his folks were out. I was reading the paper in the front room on my own. Claire came in and sat down. I wanted to be cool, so I read a couple of pages of the newspaper before I put it down to talk to her. Except there was nobody there at all. It happened a lot there, Mark said. It was no big deal.

I’ve said before. I’m not very creative. I just steal other people’s stories. But I’ve been wondering about the truly fictional Claire and her ghosts at her fictional house and whether they were ghosts of the past, as she thought, or ghosts of the future, that what was haunting her wasn’t the past at all, but the fright of her world crumbling underneath her feet, as it did for so many people in the 1980s in so many different ways. Our legacy. Our times.

For years I had a recurring dream about a flat I was going to buy. I’ve never seen it except in my dream. It was decorated in a heavy, dated way, white paint and green walls, the kind of place Jason King would have been happy in, but cheaper, much more Barons Court back then than Kensington. Every time I went there in my dream I could hear people doing everyday things, having a meal, washing up, talking to each other as they did it, but faintly. I could never see anyone.

I always called it the Haunted Flat dream. I can describe the layout of the place to you still, if you like. The stairs were just like the landing in the old Boys block at school.

I always assumed I was looking at the flat to buy it, at different times. I could tell by the leaves on the trees I could see through the window and I would have bought it, apart from the fact it was haunted. But then one morning when I woke up I wondered if there was a real flat, one I’ve never seen. And whether the people who’ve lived there over the past twenty years and more sometimes wake up convinced something has visited them in a way they can’t explain, that they share their place with something else from another time, past or future.

School Lane

In a scene from Not Your Heart Away Liz and Peter, Ben and Claire visited their very first grown-up restaurant on their own, in an imaginary Stratford on Avon in an imaginary time, based on imaginary people who bear absolutely no resemblance to the younger selves of a respected barrister, a local newspaper editor, me and a California schoolteacher whatsoever it is submitted m’lud, where their dinner was interrupted. For the idiot Ben, who constantly deluded himself that the sexual revolution meant that 18 year-old girls would do the asking (oh Ben, think how much more fun you could have had…) that dinner was one of a string of humiliations and disappointments that we look back on and describe as a good preparation for life before we turn away and silently curse the wall when no-one’s looking. Or maybe that’s just me.

For the old man with the accent who interrupted their dinner and apologised for spoiling it, the man who was indignant at being described as a Nazi just because he’d served in the Hitler Youth, it was something else. I’ve said before, I don’t think I have an awful lot of imagination. I listen to stories. I jumble them up and glue them together into another, bigger story, but everything I’ve ever written happened to someone real. Just not usually one person, or one person at one time. Something I saw or heard or someone else’s story. That old man’s story for example.

It happened one summer’s afternoon in Kings Langley, just outside Watford. I didn’t have much to do. We were either between jobs or more accurately part-way through one, where everything that could have been done had been done and now we had to wait until other people had done other things so more things could be done. We locked the doors and got our mobile phones and walked down through the fields, across the river, across the canal, over the footbridge over the M25 and up the hill to the pub at the top of Kings Langley, near the Rudolf Steiner school.

A short, thickset, shaven-headed man was having an argument with a much older, white-haired, aquiline-looking man with an accent. Look, I said wittily, that’s Rudolf Steiner. I know. It just pours out of me, doesn’t it? It hardly ever stops. But I was wrong. The old man’s story was much more interesting, because here he was, here and now, the way most of them aren’t now, because this was fifteen years ago and all flesh is grass.

The old man was furious at being called a Nazi, just because he’d been in the Hitler Youth. He was conscripted. He had had no choice. Every single German boy was conscripted into the Hitler Youth. No-one had ever heard of the Eidelweiss Pirates, or the few that had didn’t talk about them. I’ve since met an Army Major who had dinner with one of the survivors, but I only heard about the boys who skipped out of the Hitler Jugend a few years ago. The old man I met thought it was great. His eyes were shining as he remembered the songs and the campfires, the flags and bugles, the friendship and the pure fun of the big rallies in the woods. He wasn’t the boy who sang Tomorrow Belongs To Me at the end of Cabaret. He didn’t have to. Millions of people felt like that, before the guns began again.

He went to school in a little German village in the hills and one day in April 1945 the SS arrived in a big car. They took all the boys from the school up the lane to a field where they’d dug a bunker, where they handed out oily new machine guns and helmets and grenades and told the boys to defend their village and the Fatherland. The American invaders would arrive to spoil and loot within the hour. Meanwhile the SS felt they had pressing business to attend to the other side of the hill, in Switzerland. Can’t stop. Love to. See you soon. Oh actually, we won’t. Take care.

The schoolmaster was as he usually was, the leader of this troop of Hitler Jugend. He marched them down to the playground and lined them up on parade to inspect them and their brand-new factory-fresh MP40s and Panzerfausts. Then he beat them senseless. He made them throw every last gun, grenade and bullet in the ditch then sent them home weeping. He saved all of their lives. As the old man said, when the Americans arrived standing in jeeps behind .50 calibre Brownings, a gun so powerful that that if you get one pointed at you there is nothing on a city street it will do you any good to hide behind, they would have shot everything and anything. ‘They looked like they would poop their pants,’ he said.

A friend’s father landed in Normandy on D-Day. He walked to Germany from there. He would never talk about the German he killed. He only talked sketchily about the German boy in uniform who tagged along with his regiment for food and company, after they’d checked his pockets thoroughly. He left two pictures, both of them young German boys in uniform, both way under 20. I don’t know which is which, or whether either of them are those two boys, nor what became of them.

Soon there will be no-one left to tell these stories. They will still tell them in other places, in future times. But the tellers won’t be people like us. We won’t understand. We’ll say oh, that’s what they do in these foreign places. They always have. It’s tribal, isn’t it? But we’ve done this too, not so long ago. That’s what School Lane is about. Now all I have to do is write it.