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The Trench is my attempt to provide the answers to those questions. It is not a film about conflict—the Battle of the Somme only begins at the end—but about waiting to go into battle and the pressures of that wait—two days, with the clock clicking remorselessly down—on very young men.
For the novelist, writing a film, let alone directing one, represents a great social opportunity: suddenly from being in a state of creative solitude you are a member of an exclusive club that numbers 100 or so members. And, as a corollary, the novelist discovers that the one great advantage of making a film, rather than sitting alone in your room, is that your overwhelming desire to “get it right”—to make it as authentic and true-to-life as is feasibly possible—is one that you share with all these fellow workers.
I looked on it as a good omen, just before we started filming, when a package arrived through the post. One of my uncles had unearthed a whole mass of material about his uncle, my great-uncle, Sandy. For the first time I saw a photograph of him, learned a little of his life before and after the war. He was a teetotaller and by coincidence I had written the part of the sergeant in my film as a teetotaller also.
The fact that he had fought and been injured at the Somme was also a curious benediction on our enterprise, it seemed, and Mouquet Farm, where he had been wounded, was in the same sector of the battle front where I had placed my notional platoon. Great-uncle Sandy looked very much like my late father (after whom he had been named) and, as we worked on through the film, if there was any ghostly presence haunting our trenches (and they were spookily evocative, especially in the early morning before the lights were switched on), I imagined it as being that of Sergeant Alexander Boyd, DCM.
I look at his face, as I have looked at countless other faces of soldiers of the Great War, and wonder what kind of a person he was and what his experience must have been like. We say, casually, that life in the trenches of the Western Front must have been “unimaginable” but the challenge of art, surely, is to try to imagine it, to set the imagination free and to try to bring that bizarre, terrifying, boring, filthy world to life.
In the citation that accompanied uncle Sandy’s DCM it says, “when all the officers became casualties, he took charge, and extricated his company with great skill. He set a fine example of coolness and determination.” The bland vocabulary of military bureaucracy is literally meaningless. A padre wrote from a military hospital to Sandy’s mother. “I visited your dear boy this afternoon. He has several wounds, but none of them of a severe character. The doctors and nurses have good hopes of his recovery.”
Again, a dead wall of decorum and cliché. From what little I know of him and the ups and downs of his postwar life, he seems to have been a doggedly principled, determined, simple sort of person. There are passionate letters after his death to his mother from a woman who loved him and bore his child saying what a kind and good man he was. What stories lie there? The imagination starts working again, questions form, possible answers spring to mind.
Who was this young Scotsman who left his native country to travel across the globe only to be sent back to Europe to fight in the meadows of northern France? Close to home, but so far away. And a brother serving too, perhaps not far off. The questions form, but I think I’ll leave them unanswered; I’ve done my own time in the trenches, now, in a novel and a film, and I don’t think I’ll be going back there again.
1999
Oxford
Saturday afternoon. Summer. Oxford, 1980. In Bonn Square—a patch of grass with a few trees that faces the Westgate shopping centre—there is a war memorial commemorating some remote colonial campaign at the tail end of the nineteenth century. On one side of the stunted obelisk there is an inscription: “Killed by mutineers in Uganda, Brevet Major A. B. Thruston.” Beneath it, on the three steps at the base of the obelisk, loll a pride of fourteen-year-old skinheads, boys and girls, their cap-sleeved T-shirts revealing pale arms bruised with self-inflicted tattoos (biro ink and a safety pin). Three of them, like aged barflies, raise inflated plastic bags to their noses and leisurely inhale the fumes from the glue that congeals in the bottom. One fat boy, his face unnaturally red and shiny from the chemicals, rolls his eyes in simulated gourmet delight. You can practically see the damage being wreaked on his numb fist of a brain.
A few yards away around the maw of the shopping centre a group of sandalled young Christians sing modish hymns to the beat of a guitar and tambourine. Bearded, glossy-haired Iranian students chatter and gesticulate. Shirt-sleeved coppers stroll through the harassed mobs in Queen Street and Cornmarket. Three hundred French and Italian schoolkids assemble noisily at the foot of Carfax Tower. Coaches clog the bus station and bulk in every side street. The pavements are dark and sticky from the residue of ice-cream cones and abandoned lollies; waxpaper wrappers and polyurethane hamburger cartons form brittle drifts in shop doorways. Every step seems to connect with an empty Coke can. The city reels in a hot, jammed stupor, stunned by the heat and the perspiring shifting populace thronging its streets.
And yet … And yet the colleges somehow preserve their peace, effortlessly—it seems—maintaining a world that Brevet Major A. B. Thruston would have no difficulty in recognizing. The college lawns are cropped like cricket squares, unbadged by weed or daisy; someone practising the piano in an upstairs music room runs off an appropriate arpeggio. Everywhere there is new, spanking clean sandstone. The colleges receive their regular face lift like placid Palm Beach crones. The rechis-elled cornices and gargoyles are suddenly in sharp focus again, as if a lens has been twitched by an alert projectionist.
It is all, in fact, unsettlingly like an elaborate show. On my first visit to New York, within fifteen minutes of my arrival, I passed Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sauntering and chuckling down Park Avenue as if doing a retake for Annie Hall. I found this curiously sinister because it’s exactly what the mythology of Manhattan makes you inclined to expect—before you get there. Oxford imposes a similar doubt. The University buildings, the colleges, are so close to their imagined forms that I felt I was being inveigled into some unwitting cameo role in a monstrous cinematic project. It affects everybody in this way, as the undergraduates so readily demonstrate with their arch self-consciousness and Brideshead Revisited pretensions. These antics—the braying voices, the paraded neuroses—are harmless irritants on the whole, but the perfection of the backdrop now seems to me to be Oxford’s greatest attraction and—for its inhabitants in the University—its most insidious and damaging influence.
I came to Oxford five years ago to write a PhD thesis on Shelley. I had just got married and we lived in a large but inconveniently designed college flat on the Woodstock Road. It was inconvenient because the occupants of the upstairs flat could only reach their front door via our hall so we—perforce—got to know them quite well. Our neighbours over the next three years were a taciturn ginger-bearded chemist and his clog-wearing wife and, after them, a couple of timid American organ scholars. This couple, whose demeanour gave new resonance to the epithet “mild-mannered,” treated their flat with all the respect of H-block inmates and managed in the course of a year to wreak more damage on their abode than the most anarchic squat. As the rubbish began to tumble off the landing and creep down the stairs we began to feel like participants in a J. G. Ballard novel and hastily moved out.
We now live half a mile up the road—in a flat above a dentist’s with no noise and no neighbours—but still in north Oxford. The houses around are large, Victorian and brick. Their walls are freighted with ivy and wisteria, the gardens are long and capacious, there are lots of trees. There is a smug air of self-satisfaction about this particular suburb, as if we all sense our luck in being able to live here. It used to be a kind of dons’ ghetto and most of the houses, some of them enormous, were built in the last half of the last century when the colleges first allowed their Fellows to marry. The larger houses in north Oxford hover around £100,000 and today’s Fellows, if they can afford a house at all—in many respec
ts Oxford is more expensive than most districts in London—live in tiny terraced boxes in west Oxford—Jericho, Hinksey—or off the Cowley or Iffley roads to the south. West Oxford is undergoing radical class-surgery as its incredulous lower-income-group inhabitants sell-out for sums that must have seemed beyond their wildest dreams to the young academics, University Press editors and the “new” middle-class professionals: designers of every shape and hue, folk-art manufacturers (original wooden toys, pine-furniture restorers, personalized roller-blind creators, etc.), management consultants and the like. Every third house these days has the obligatory skip parked outside as interior walls are battered out, old fireplaces revealed and basements are renovated. Now, tiny two-up, two-downs fetch prices in the mid twenty-thousands. The walls are so thin you can hear your neighbour cleaning his teeth.
East Oxford—Old Marston excepted—is bland and unremarkably modern in character. To the south lie Cowley and the British Leyland works.
Auden’s poem on the city perfectly captures the spirit of the place, the
Stones in those towers … utterly
Satisfied with their weight.
And, in the next verse, fixes Cowley in so far as it impinges on the minds of the University’s population:
Outside, some factories, then a whole green county.
“Some factories,” a meagre parenthesis for such a significant portion of the city and whose inhabitants probably supply 90 percent of the “town” in the famous Oxford polarity. Indeed town and gown seem as irredeemably divided as ever, almost as if some secret treaty has been signed, sectioning the city into discrete no-go areas almost as effectively as Derry. The Broad, St Giles and the Turl remain sedate and studenty on the most frantic Bank Holiday, while Cornmarket and Queen Street bulge with shoppers and garish consumerism.
Yet Cowley has developed its own character regardless, and the Cowley Road is probably the most heterodox and interesting thoroughfare—from a sociological point of view—that the city possesses. Its punks, rude boys and rastamen populate the edges of the University’s hallowed precincts and occasional epidemics of “student-bashing” provide more potent reminders of the “town’s” virile existence. And, nowadays, from the lawns of Garsington you can see the BL gasometer heavy on the horizon.
In the street where I live the graffiti on the walls says “Ordine Nuovo,” “PCI” and “Autonomia Operaia”—the lunatic extremes of Italian politics come to north Oxford. This year has definitely belonged to Italy, edging out France in Oxford’s huge floating population of language students. Near my flat there’s a school which runs summer courses for foreign students and from the window of the room where I work I can see them trooping up and down the street—vivid, lissom teenagers, smoking and lounging, the boys crass and arrogant, the girls sticking together, arms linked, eyes full of suspicion, or else dragging their feet, carrying their bordeom like rucksacks.
Every Friday the school runs a discotheque and for an hour or so in the evening an astonishing transformation occurs in the nearby side streets. The disco throbs away in the gym and all the boys disappear—waiting inside, I assume. Hesitantly, the girls gather in the quiet roads in small groups, affecting indifference, but undoubtedly lured by the occasion. The T-shirts, running shoes and jeans have been abandoned for jumpsuits, lurid boob-tubes, high heels and make-up. There is little conversation, just an elaborate nonchalance as they gather, and an astonishing frisson of pubertal sexual tension charging the air. And then, as if on some silent signal, they are gone, and the gymnasium booms to the music. I’ve no idea what happens at the disco; I assume, like all adolescent experiences, that it’s nothing like as exciting as the anticipation. It goes on well into the night and sometimes I ring up to complain about the noise.
When I first came to Oxford I was—as I think everyone is when they arrive—in awe of the place and its occupants. Starting a thesis proved harder than I thought and like most baffled post-graduates I convinced myself things were going well by drawing up reading lists of staggering erudition and irrelevancy. Cautiously peering round the upper reading room in the Bodleian it seemed to me that everyone else there knew exactly what they were doing. Most of my companions seemed tense, humourless types, immersed in their work with a kind of obsessive ascetic fervour which was not a little depressing. Still, in the endless summer of 1976 it wasn’t too hard to forget them and the frontiers of scholarship I was meant to be pushing back. The daily heat was as heavy as a glass door and the quadrangle lawns were parched and ochrous. I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream in St John’s College gardens, cycled about in my shirtsleeves, went punting. The Emperors’ Heads around the Sheldonian were renewed, Magdalen Tower hadn’t yet assumed its mantle of scaffolding and the excellent Browns Restaurant had opened on the Woodstock Road to wild acclaim as the queues of Oxford’s bright young things testified.
Steadily, remorselessly, I got to know more and more about Percy Bysshe Shelley and the first faltering chapters of my thesis were set down and a fascination with my subject began to grow. I came some way towards understanding the blinkered vigour of those scribbling away around me. I also got to know Shelley a lot better than I ever expected when I discovered a hitherto unremarked and unpublished piece of Shelley marginalia. Sandwiched between some speculations on Democritus’ age and a rough draft of “The Colliseum” in an uncatalogued folder of loose holograph sheets I came across a curious sketch, the significance of which was not immediately apparent. I turned the folder upside down and there it was: a page-sized phallus drawn with all the attention to detail of a bog-door graffitist. Such are the more arcane insights scholarship provides.
It wasn’t until I came to Oxford that I met my first real writers, though none of them actually lived in the place. I did some work for Isis in my first year and in the course of this had the good fortune to meet and interview Gore Vidal, Martin Amis and Frederic Raphael. All were genial and encouraging, and thus encouraged I entered a short story for an Isis competition judged by Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. I came third. The next year I entered another—this time judged by Roald Dahl—and came second. I wisely didn’t go in for a third, thinking the upward progression in itself a sufficient sign. I started sending stories into magazines. I felt that my big break had come—and that first truly public acceptance is a vital confidence booster—when London Magazine agreed to take a story for its summer double issue. That was in 1978.
A lot of writers live in and around Oxford, quite a few of them novelists—Iris Murdoch, A. N. Wilson, Susan Hill, Brian Aldiss and John Wain, for instance. There are probably many more but I don’t know of them. Novelists, it seems to me, keep themselves very much to themselves and exhibit none of the solidarity and establish none of the social relationships that the poets do. There are many more poets in Oxford than novelists, and most people who do any form of imaginative writing here write poetry, I would say. Indeed, all the writers I know or am acquainted with in Oxford are poets. And of all the writing forms it is the one currently flourishing here. Several highly regarded poets live in the city or teach at the University and the “poetry scene,” such as it is, appears fairly active—lots of readings, a successful festival, encouragement for young writers and so on.
I have done all my writing in Oxford. My first novel and my story collection were written here, and, so it seems, my second novel will be too. But none of them has been about, or set in the city. Just why this should be so, I’m not exactly sure, because generally the place has a strong inspirational effect on writers. It’s not so much a question of prudence but is rather, I think, a lack of curiosity. Perhaps it’s also because when I started to write the rush of blood to the head that Oxford supplies had more or less spent itself. And again, the things that make Oxford special—its attractions and advantages—are so self-evident, have been so frequently described, eulogized and written up in all manner of ways that it doesn’t take all that long for Oxford to seem terribly familiar. It’s the Manhattan syndrome again: everything you expect
of the place is here, right down to the last cliché. A deadening air of predictability settles over the city. Some views and buildings retain the occasional power to enchant, but—with rare exceptions—most of the people you meet about its streets can be categorized with a frightening swiftness, to such an extent that latterly what have come to engage my attention more and more are the exceptions to its magic lantern image. There are the glue-sniffers in Bonn Square; there’s the Madam who controls the tarts in Jericho, the witty nutters patrolling the coffee bars cadging money off terrified tourists (“If I wasn’t mad,” I heard one bellow at a horrified couple, “how would you know you were normal, eh?”); and the thirteen shabby drunks I once saw—including a gap-toothed young woman—passing round a sherry bottle in unconscious parody on the Radcliffe Camera lawn …
Two or three months ago I was walking down Brasenose Lane—the alley that cuts between Turl Street and Radcliffe Square. There’s nothing special about this featureless passageway. At the Turl Street end people park motorbikes in it and your hair is likely to be ruffled by gusts of Mazola-laden air from the Exeter College kitchen extractor fans. A bit further down it gets cool and dark where it’s bounded on one side by the high walls of Exeter’s garden and on the other by Brasenose and is overhung by thick plane and chestnut trees. I quite like Brasenose Lane, it’s badly lit and at night can be quite spooky and evocative. During the day it acts as a kind of shadowy prelude to the more evident splendours of the Rad-cliffe Camera, the Bodleian, All Souls and the University Church which confront you at the end of your gentle descent from the Turl. On this occasion I was about halfway down when I spotted three soggy heaps huddled together at the foot of the Exeter garden wall. They were three derelict drunks—Oxford has a sizeable population—sleeping off their midday soak into oblivion, cider and sherry bottles scattered about like shell cases round a gun emplacement. One of them saw me coming, hauled himself to his feet and lurched towards me. “Hey. Hey, peace man,” he yelled, weaving up, an exceedingly filthy Scottish hippie, bombed out of his skull, about twenty-four or twenty-five. “Hey, man,” he breathed. “Ah’ve written a pome. Wantae read it?”