My flat was on the ground floor. My bedroom at the back of the house had a flat roof above it, and in the summer I could go out there and talk and drink with friends. I decided to have a flatmate and found a ‘nice Jewish girl’, Rosalind Stoll, who has remained a dear friend. The rental was twelve guineas a week, which was £12/12s. Imagine living in central London now for twelve guineas a week!
I was never part of Swinging London. If I had been part of the West End set, going out in Soho at night, that would have been thrilling and fun, but I was always someone who read books and went to the theatre. I knew the whole scene was going on, but I never had anything to do with it — I didn’t like fashion and I didn’t like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, and I didn’t like pop music. I disapproved of it. I also hated the mods and rockers and the violence and Teddy boys: Swinging London left me cold. Apart from Dusty Springfield, that is. Even then, she was my girl. Such an astonishing talent and such a tragic life, all because she came from a Catholic background. She was gay at a time when you couldn’t be.
However, I relished the loosening up of the sixties towards gay people. The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 decriminalised homosexual acts between two men over twenty-one years of age in private in England and Wales. In 1965, I had joined a group called the Gay Yids and wore my Gay Yids badge when I went to the BBC. People found it rather shocking. I quite liked that, because I thought that being gay was something that could make me more interesting. For me, it was a plus, a feather in my cap. I held Gay Yid parties at the flat and it was during one of them that Saul Radomsky, the great South African theatre designer, met Israeli chef, Oded Schwartz. I loved being a matchmaker for real.
Heterosexual swinging London seemed much less fun. It was harder to help people. One night, I was walking home to Gloucester Terrace from the theatre when I saw a woman lying in the gutter, sobbing her heart out. My sympathies immediately aroused, I went over and asked her if something was wrong. She sat up on the pavement and wailed, ‘He threw me in the gutter! He threw me in the gutter!’ She was quite a pretty woman in her thirties and she was crying, her hair in a mess and her eye make-up smeared all down her face. I said, ‘Look, it’s late now and I think you should go home. This is my card. I live in Paddington. Come and see me around eleven tomorrow morning. Let’s have a chat about this because I’m sure it’s not as bad as you say.’
The next morning I looked up her boyfriend in the phone book. I didn’t think about it, I just rang him and said, ‘Hello. You don’t know me, but I met a friend of yours last night who was in a very miserable state. I don’t exactly know the background of the story, but you really can’t treat women like that, you know. It’s not right.’
His reply was eye-opening: ‘Oh, I know who you’ve been talking to but you don’t know the full story. I met her in a gambling club. She was the pretty girl dealing out the cards, and I fell for her and we had an affair. I’m a married man, and I know that I shouldn’t have done it. I just lost my head and I fell for her, and she fell for me, and she got obsessed. One night she climbed up the drainpipe at the front of my house, and my wife and I were in bed, and she banged on the window and gave my wife a rotten fright. She’s lost her marbles, this girl. She’s gone so bonkers that I had to take out an injunction to stop her from coming round. She won’t leave me alone. I used to love her, but I can’t stand her now. I don’t want her anywhere near me.’
Just then, there was a ring at the doorbell and I thought, ‘Oh Jesus! It’s her! What have I got myself into?’ I took a deep breath and opened the door, and there she was, looking perfectly calm and normal. I brought her in and made us both cups of coffee.
I really thought I was helping. I thought that she deserved to know the truth. So, speaking tentatively, I said, ‘Well, you know, people fall out of love — it happens.’ She wasn’t having any of that. ‘No, no, he’s in love with me, I know it. He hasn’t fallen out of love; I know it. It’s just that everybody tries to make him get rid of me.’
‘Listen, you’re a pretty girl. Wouldn’t you be better off forgetting about him and finding someone else, starting a new life?’
‘No, no, I don’t want that,’ she cried.
I decided to bite the bullet. ‘Look, darling, I’ve spoken to him.’
She went nuts. Her eyes widened, and she started to wail and thrash about, as if I’d pressed a button: ‘What, you’ve spoken to him? What did he say? What did he say?’
‘I think, to be quite honest, that it’s really over,’ I said, gently.
Then the dam broke. Her pain and neurotic rage burst its banks and drowned her. She ran round and round the kitchen, screaming. Then she snatched my bread knife from the counter. She came close to me, the knife held high, her voice at scream level, her eyes mad and wide, threatening: ‘Don’t you say that to me! Don’t you dare say that to me!’
Well, now I was scared. I realised this woman was off her head and dangerous and I had to get out of there. I ran to the kitchen door which had a lock on it. I put the snib down and got out of the door in a desperate panic. My phone was just outside the kitchen door: I phoned a friend: ‘Michael, please come NOW. I’ve got a lunatic in the flat and I’m scared.’ He promised to come straightaway but didn’t turn up for another two hours. That was Michael all over!
After a bit, I couldn’t hear anything when I pressed my ear to the door. Very carefully, I opened it. There she was, crouched and sobbing, the knife on the table. I said, ‘Look, I’ve made a mistake. I thought I could be helpful, and I’ve made it worse. So, I’m asking you, please, please, just go home. Try to forgive me. I meant to do well by you but I haven’t.’ She didn’t say anything; she just took her handbag and left. I leant against the door, breathless with relief.
Most people, if they see a woman crying in the gutter, make sure that she’s not injured, and then they go on their way. I tend to rush towards the situation and tackle it head-on. I can’t help it. I am fuelled by curiosity and thinking that I can somehow be a shining light, a good Samaritan and help. But in this instance I made things much, much worse. It was a real lesson. And it was yet more evidence that Swinging London wasn’t nearly as much fun as everybody said.
The Importance of Voice
My world has always been about speech. Voice is vitally important to me. My professional life is often based on understanding and replicating voices: identifying the subtle nuances of geography, time and class; searching for a character’s background, and then mining that rich seam to create them, using speech as my starting point.
Listening to the radio as a child, I remember hearing Dylan Thomas intoning in his sonorous, South Walian voice, pulling me into his world; the particularity of his vision excited me; he was a magician. That’s why I chose his reading of an excerpt from ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’ when I was on the radio show Desert Island Discs. Kirsty Young told me I’d chosen more speaking records than anyone in the history of the programme.