The Light's on at Signpost (31 page)

One thing I have not learned: what, precisely, is the British film industry? The films I’ve worked on, while they’ve usually had
American directors, and often continental producers, have had largely British casts and crews, and have been made for the most part out of Pinewood and Twickenham. Where the money to make them has come from, I don’t know, but I suspect that it has not been raised in the United Kingdom, and that, I rather think, disqualifies them as “British” productions. None of them has had government finance, thank God, for that seems to put the kiss of death on projects with almost unfailing regularity. I suppose movies like the Musketeers and
Octopussy
should be called international productions, but I would like to be put out of my uncertainty and hear an authoritative pronouncement on what is, and is not, a British film.

A
nd that
, for the moment at any rate, is that, so far as the
film business and my manly rage against the bludgeonings of
fate, change, decay, politicians, political correctness, etc., are concerned
—at least until some optimist asks me to do another screenplay
(unlikely) or some new evil or folly needs to be smitten and scorned
(all too probable). Thus far it has been a fairly rambling, eccentric
sort of book, no doubt intemperate on occasion, though not without
good cause, and I make no apology for it: the polemical stuff needed
saying, if only because I’m shot if I’ll go silent into that good night,
whenever it falls, and I couldn’t leave my memoirs of the wonderful,
crazy, enchanting world of movies unwritten
.

But it’s not the whole story by a long chalk, and it strikes me that
if ever there was a convenient space for G.M.F. His Life and Times,
this is it. I haven’t the inclination or patience (or conceit) for a pukka
autobiography, so what follows is just a backward glance at a life
which I must not say has so far been happy or lucky, because if I do
the Chinese gods will fix my wagon. So I record it without comment
.

Unlike P. G. Wodehouse, who confessed to having spent the first five years of his life “just loafing, I suppose”, I may well have decided at the age of three to become an author, and taken the first tentative steps in that direction. It seems that at bedtimes I
would frequently excuse my parents from telling me a story, and insist on telling them one about myself and a fictional companion, Georgie Henderson. I don’t remember this, or any details of the stories themselves, but I have my parents’ word for it that I would recount lurid adventures of Georgie and myself; whether this sent them to sleep or not I have no means of knowing.

Perhaps this was something in the blood. My ancestry is entirely Highland Scottish, Celtic-Norman-Viking mostly, and they have always been great story-tellers; my own grandmothers, one a Glencoe MacDonald and the other a Hebridean MacNeill, used to hold me spellbound with their tales; for that matter, everyone in the family told stories, usually of a quite sensational nature, which is right in the Celtic tradition—as witness the names of Scott, Stevenson, Buchan, Ian Fleming, J. M. Barrie, Conan Doyle, and many others. Romance and adventure are at the heart of Scottish literature—or rather, since literature is a pretentious word, at the heart of their storytelling. Anyway, for whatever reason, the bug of the
senachie
, the Highland teller of tales, seems to have bitten me early, and has never let go.

My father was a family doctor, the son of a grocer in the village of Cardross, near Glasgow. Grandpa Fraser had left his people’s croft in Sutherland as a boy, walking south to Glasgow to find employment, and sustaining himself on his southern journey with oatmeal and water mixed in his shoe. He prospered, and two of his four children, my father and an uncle, graduated in medicine at Glasgow University, thanks to the “Carnegie money” which Andrew Carnegie provided for young Scots who couldn’t afford the tuition fees. At Glasgow Royal Infirmary my father met and married a nursing sister, Anne Struth Donaldson, in 1916, and then went off to war in East Africa where he became Captain William Fraser, Royal Army Medical Corps, serving briefly with the Legion of Frontiersmen, a remarkable group of adventurers too old for normal military service, but enlisted for their irregular experience and knowledge of rough service.

Having come out of the war with a wound and a Mention in Despatches, my father, like many another young Scottish doctor, came south after the war, and settled in Carlisle, the Border City which had been England’s northern bulwark in the old days. My sister Ila (named after my Hebridean grandmother’s island birthplace) was born in 1920, and I followed in 1925, on April 2, a birthdate which I share with Hans Andersen and Casanova, and that piece of irrelevant information is typical of my talent for accumulating trivial and utterly useless knowledge which I will share at the drop of a hat. (What did Claude Rains drop in a wastebasket at the end of
Casablanca
? Who were the quartermasters on
HMS
Bounty
? What was the name of Tarzan’s ape mother? These things remain, but don’t ask me what exegesis means.)

My birth took place in a house built on the site of a medieval leper colony (my mother claimed that she suffered from a sore throat all through our occupation), but when I was two we moved to a house which my father had built on a hill in the suburbs, where the ancient Britons had had a fort, or
curragh
, hence the district’s name, Currock. And there I had a very happy childhood, climbing trees, playing football, killing pirates and redskins in the woods nearby, being chased off railway property by gruff men in big boots, and running in gangs with like-minded urchins. My education began in a small private school from which I was once sent home in disgrace for saying “piss” (female teachers were easily shocked in 1930) and was continued at Carlisle Grammar School, a foundation of immense antiquity—officially it was twelfth century, but it traced its history back six hundred years before that, to the days when Christianity came to the Border country.

Like the dear old red city itself, the school had survived more than a thousand years of siege and battle, of invasion by Norse sea-rovers, medieval Scottish armies, Cromwell’s Ironsides, and Prince Charlie’s Highlanders; its boys had helped the townsfolk man the city walls against Bruce’s besiegers after Bannockburn, and played
football under its castle wall for the entertainment of Mary Queen of Scots. School and city had endured those turbulent centuries when the Borderland had been dominated by the terrible armed bands of pillagers known as the Border reivers who created a lawless noman’s-land between England and Scotland in Queen Elizabeth’s time—and the surnames of those riding brigands were identical with the names of the boys in my class at school, if not with mine, for I was a Scot, “an outman and forroner”, and I learned much about racism and race rivalry, if not about race hatred, in those early years under the chestnut trees of the old school, with its strange traditions and catchphrases which Chaucer might have recognised.

It was officially what was called a “public” school, which in England conjures images of exclusive, privileged education of the kind provided by Eton and Harrow, from whom it could not have differed more dramatically. The old grammar schools carried the cachet of “public” simply because of their age, and Carlisle Grammar School from time immemorial had educated, without social distinction, the cleverest boys in the city, who entered it annually after competitive examination. I was not among them; I was one of the few whose fathers paid the annual £10 fee, and was consequently in danger of being swamped scholastically by the flood of talent that poured in from the elementary schools each year. I languished miserably at the bottom of my class in French, Latin, maths, and the sciences, but perplexed my fellows by coming first in English and history. Not that that mattered, any more than it mattered whether you were a fee-payer or a free scholar; the leading brains with their eyes on Oxford and Cambridge scholarships might compete with a ferocity worthy of their bandit ancestors, but for the rest it was games that counted, and I could hold my own at cricket and rugby, and aspire to championship at fives, that brutal and ancient fore-runner of squash which left you with red and swollen palms after an hour of thrashing a hard and tiny ball with your bare hands.

It was a strange, wonderful education, in much more than book learning. That old school took you in, whoever and whatever you were, and wrapped you up and absorbed you in a tradition that went back almost to the time when King Arthur sat in “Merrie Caerlile” and Childe Roland set off on his mythical pilgrimage. You wore the black and gold jacket and the cap with its odd hollow star as though they were robes of honour (which, of course, they were) and sang the school song, which naturally, unlike any other school anthem, was a blood-thirsty war-chant about the city’s desperate past, with an intense but only half-understood pride. Children who grow up in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, and invade the city museum to sit in its ancient punishment stocks, and scramble over the very chair in which Bonny Prince Charlie slept, and view the graffiti scratched by prisoners of war in the battered old Cathedral where Cromwell stabled his horses, and play on the battlements where Edward I and Richard III once walked—such children tend to take history for granted and give it little thought. Perhaps I was different; outman and forroner though I was, the Border City left its mark on me, and on my voice (for I can slip with perfect ease into that strange snarling dialect that is the Cumbrian speech).

The Grammar School has gone now, a millennium and more of incalculable worth and tradition swept away by socialist reformers to whom competitive examination seems to be anathema; what Bruce couldn’t subdue has been destroyed in the name of “progress”. It taught me more of life than it did of learning; my education, such as it has been, was founded on ten volumes of Arthur Mee’s
Children’s Encyclopedia
which my parents bought for my sister and me in a moment which I can only count inspired. Hour after hour I seem to have spent, prone on the carpet on summer afternoons when sunlight fell on the pages, and winter days with the rain lashing the windows, lost in those marvellous volumes.

I went for the stories, at first, the tales and fables of every land on earth, but the genius of Mee’s work was that to get from one
section of stories to another you had to leaf through pages of poetry and painting and natural history and science-simply-explained—it was just one dam’ thing after another: coloured pre-Raphaelite paintings and verses by Shakespeare and Browning and pictures of volcanoes erupting and proverbs and puzzles and How To Make Your Own Telephone With A Tin Can And A Piece Of String (which didn’t work) and How To Blow Over A Brick (which did, oddly enough—you use a paper bag) and photographs of Italian statues and French churches and Albanian peasants and snakes and Turkish janissaries and spiders (“Little Many Legs” was the caption to a tarantula, so help me) and illustrations of famous people’s autographs from Erasmus to Oliver Wendell Holmes, and stuff about Greek philosophy and Egyptian burial rituals and religion and history and you-name-it, it was all there—and some of it stuck. Haphazard, no doubt, disorganised and random, but if there is a name that I thank God for, it is that of Arthur Mee, whose books influenced me more than any other.

It was, by modern standards, hopelessly reactionary, being thoroughly Christian and British Imperial, preaching values which are now thought outmoded, and inculcating lessons which are no longer taught. It was strong on duty and responsibility and discipline and good manners; it was not, repeat not, politically correct, for it was honest and true. Not that I imagine I came away from it a better and wiser child; I was only there for the information and the pictures and statues and stories and Six Easy Tricks A Boy Can Do With An Empty Matchbox. And I have seen to it that my three sets of grandchildren have the
Children’s Encyclopedia
. Who knows, they too may be entranced by the picture of some emperor or other picking up Titian’s brush for him, and Michelangelo striking the rock and bringing out Moses, and even Little Many Legs, when their computers and electronic games break down.

But if Arthur Mee was the bedrock, the icing on top were the prizes my father had won at school—books by R. M. Ballantyne
and his like, telling tales of high adventure far away, and Hawthorne’s
Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales
(which I know I was reading at the age of five, for it was a Christmas present with the date inscribed), and Norse Legends, and Kingsley’s
Heroes
, and the children’s writers of the time, Grahame and Milne and, inevitably,
Alice
, and the “tuppenny bloods”, those boys’ weekly magazines like
Wizard
and
Hotspur
, packed with stories about cowboys and buccaneers and secret agents and defenders of the Empire—no wonder I finished up writing the same kind of stuff. Nor was comedy neglected—that immortal work,
1066 And All That
, had just come out (and I maintain that there is no better starting point for a serious study of history than that book), and when I was eight I encountered a writer who was my humorous hero then and still is: Stephen Leacock. When I borrowed
Nonsense Novels
from the grammar school library a lordly prefect assured me that I wouldn’t understand it; the finer nuances may have escaped me, but I laughed myself sick over it nonetheless. No writer surely was ever so funny with so few words.

And then when I was ten the thunderbolt struck. His name was Sabatini, and he opened up the past for me as he has done for millions—many of them writers. His great art was to present history not as a dry chronicle of names and dates and treaties, but as a real drama, an unending adventure story that far outstripped fiction, related in an elegant, sophisticated, half-cynical style that bore the reader effortlessly along. Critical opinion has not been kind to him, probably because he sold in vast quantities and translated easily to the cinema—that was another formative experience, watching open-mouthed as the curtains parted and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s trumpets came thundering out over the credits of
Captain
Blood
.

The cinema, to my generation, was what television is today, discouraged by teachers and parents, but caviare to the general. We patrolled the North-West Frontier with Gary Cooper and Victor
McLaglen, went hand in hand through Sherwood and across the Spanish Main with Errol Flynn, sauntered nonchalantly through the dungeons of Zenda and the sands of Algeria with Ronald Colman (and learned much of courtly behaviour and imperturbable style from that hero); mimicked the wisecracks of Cagney, and fell about at Laurel and Hardy. Tom Mix and
Barrack-Room Ballads;
soccer stars and the poems of Henry Newbolt, Alfred Noyes, and Walter de la Mare; Edward G. Robinson and Drake going west; Cecil DeMille and Tchaikovsky’s
Chanson Triste
and Mendelssohn’s
Spring Song
(scraped out execrably on the violin my parents had insisted on my learning); vague names like Hitler and Mussolini in the background—it was a strange, mixed culture into which algebra and Latin verbs and Archimedes’ principle hardly intruded; no wonder my parents, despairing of school reports which included remarks like “A strict neutral in the battle for knowledge”, decided I needed a proper education, and a Scottish education at that.