An unpublished autobiography.
In the closing years of his life, my father began writing ‘The Book’. With the ending of Dad’s Army, his life as an actor was coming to a close, but he could still write. At my mother’s prompting, he began tapping at the stained keys of the beige, soft-touch Olivetti — an ash-flecked, ill-willed machine with a slipping ribbon — and the pages began to fill.
My mother had great faith in THE BOOK which I’m sure she thought of in bold black capitals. For me — pedantically insisting that a book wasn’t a book until it was published — ‘The Book’ remained in limbo between equivocal inverted commas.
It was my mother’s belief that Dad’s Army could be persuaded to lay one final golden egg and that Private Godfrey’s autobiography would find an eager audience. Did she have in mind some frothy show business concoction filled with snippets and asides? If she did, she must have been disappointed. My father had no gift for gossip, no talent for scandal or tittle-tattle. But her chief frustration with THE BOOK was that it took so long to write. She recognised that television fame is particularly fickle; that the moment would pass; that it would soon be too late. But in fact it was already too late for the book I had hoped my father would write.
The first five chapters paint a picture of my father’s family, his early childhood, schooling and youth, and provide a bleak, brief personal history of the Great War and its bitter aftermath. We read about the life of a young actor whose career is seemingly ended by a series of undeserved reverses, who turns to writing plays and then – at the end of Act One if you like – after a haphazard history of raised hopes and draining disappointments, the scene is transformed and his life is changed for ever with the first West End production of The Ghost Train. The writing is good – my father couldn’t write badly – and the tone is his; unadorned, self—deprecating, gently humorous.
The Interlude, which follows Chapter Five and ends the first part of ‘The Book’, is a flash forward and shows the successful playwright, producer and film director lifted up and dashed against the rocks of misfortune.
I’d often wondered how a man felt when he was told out of the blue that he was ruined. Now I knew. I was penniless, in debt and out of work ...
And then? The hard truth is that The Train and Other Ghosts runs out of steam. Whereas the memories of childhood, youth and early struggles have been bright and alert, the account now becomes muddied, muddled, rambling. The chapters, which have given the story its shape, are discontinued and the pages which follow — numbered and re-numbered — start to lose their way. The narrative stumbles on in a colourless cloud from which — tantalisingly — sketchy characters and odd events occasionally emerge only to fade away before they can be properly grasped, examined or understood. Pronouncements and opinions begin to pepper the text and lighter moments now become leaden. It is unsatisfying, frustrating, wearisome. You can sense the writer aching for the end; you can feel his fatigue.
I have the typescript here in front of me. Or, more precisely, what I have in front of me is a poorly executed photocopy of the typescript. Odd lines are missing at the top or at the bottom of the page where the original has been misaligned on the machine. Where is the original? Who has it now? Sadly it doesn’t really matter. The Train and Other Ghosts, my father’s last laborious product, wasn't publishable.
Not that this stopped my mother. She was entitled to ignore my advice and she did. THE BOOK was sent out again and again to publisher after publisher. Again and again — as I knew it would be — ‘The Book’ was returned. Did my father sense the humiliation? I don’t think he did. He had done what he could and he let it go. But I felt it keenly. It seemed so pointless — so hurtful — at this stage of his life to invite further rejections. He had fought the good fight. He had finished his course. There was nothing more he needed to do.
After my father died, I made certain that ‘The Book’ stayed at home. My mother lost all interest in it, as she did in most things in the years that followed his death.
My father will accept what I have done with ‘The Book’. He will approve my selection, my editing, my re-writing. He will understand. The father protecting the child. The child protecting the father. My father will trust me to do the best I can.
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