Michael Frayn joined the Guardian as a reporter in September 1957 and two years later began writing the satirical Miscellany column in which he developed a cast of imaginary characters. In 1962 he left the paper for the Observer, but returned to write a column for the Guardian between 1994 and 95.
Manchester peeks behind the iron curtain
9 October 1957
Manchester lifted the iron curtain an experimental inch or two yesterday, and was disconcerted to find something like the first dress rehearsal of an Ionesco comedy going on on the other side.
The city’s Commercial Library chose yesterday to test the recently established Telex link between Britain and the USSR by an experimental greetings call to Maschinoimport, Moscow. Telex is a teleprinter service connected through exchanges; there are 75,000 subscribers in the world – 20 or so of them listed in Moscow.
The experiment started with quiet commercial efficiency at 11am sharp when the Telex operator at the library asked the exchange for a line to Moscow. For 20 minutes nothing happened. Then the exchange said that the Moscow operator was repeatedly replying “MOM” (the “wait” signal), and added that the Moscow end “now advise London that the Moscow subscriber has gone to lunch.”
The Manchester exchange asked courteously if there was any other subscriber who would serve the purpose. Not to be thwarted, the library selected from the list of Moscow subscribers Moscow 1010 – the Telex Information Office. Moscow 1010, it seemed, had no appetite for lunch that day, and tapped out slowly: “Hat do du wish?”
Encouraged, the library fired off its greetings message, explaining that it was one of the most important centres for commercial information in northern England, and would be pleased to help with any information that might be required on the import and export of industrial goods. This was too much for Moscow 1010, who sent “MOM please”, and paused for reflection. Then, relieved perhaps to find it was all so unsubversive, replied gaily: “Oh we very glad to meet you on our Telex we shall cu connect you with the subs who which will interest you. Please tell me what number are interested you??”
The library asked for Moscow 1086, which the list gave as the number of Maschinoimport. Maschinoimport, now back from lunch, were given the prepared message. It was 11.30am.
There was a pause, and then Moscow 1086 replied testily: “I am not information service of Moscow.”
“Are you Maschinoimport?” asked Manchester.
“No,” said Moscow 1086 coldly, “I am Maschino export.”
He switched the call to his import twin, who turned out to be much more cheerful. “Hi,” said Maschinoimport, “this sub is open today.”
The greetings were transmitted once again. This time there was no reply at all. It was 11.37am – about time, it seemed, to throw in the sponge.
Aunt Effie and the earwig bards
2 January 1959
There have been many books written to encourage young writers, but here is surely the most encouraging of them all – The Worst English Poets, compiled by Christopher Adams (Wingate, 8s 6d). If there are any shy poets who are modest enough to think that their poetry is not good enough to publish, let them read this selection and take heart. There is always somebody somewhere, it seems, who will publish anything.
The great majority of these gems are Victorian. That very eminent Victorian M’Gonagal, who blazed the trail in Unpoetry, is not represented in this little treasury, presumably because Mr Adams felt he had already reached the wide public he deserved. We can, however, console ourselves with less well known but more spectacular names like Leopold John Manners de Michele, Pownoll Toker Williams, and Aunt Effie (on Temperance). Perhaps the nicest thing about these Victorians is that they remained so refreshingly unaffected by that arty-crafty humbug which declares that some subjects do not look too good in verse, and that some sentiments are a shade too pedestrian for poetry. They write about earwigs –
“First of walkers come the Earwigs,
Earwigs or FORFICULINA.”
And geology –
“The science of Geology
Proves the earth’s great antiquity.”
Nor do they hesitate to give us the sort of practical information which a modern poet might shirk. Of Southport they tell us:
“Its streets are mudless after copious rains.”
Of a castle: “It was erected fifty years ago;
The cost exceeding forty thousand pounds.”
(TJ Ouseley, the bard who penned these last two lines, was destined, according to a contemporary journal, “one day to fill a niche next to Shelley.”)
Not that they fight shy of the old poetic standbys like Love and Death, and so on. On Death, in fact, they are particularly rewarding. George Barlow writes, in Dead Men’s Song:
Half-eaten eyes
With no purpose
We see: that sort of thing
Is common here
And John Stanyan Bigg says very prettily:
Death writes the fearful legend up “no More”
Over the mantlepiece, and on the floor.
But perhaps the nicest poem of all, and one which casts an interesting light on the way these poets went about their business is Pownoll Toker Williams’s:
O Muse of Poetry, who didst erewile
Inspire the gentle soul of Lamartine,
Please tell me what to say, and how to say it,
I’m going to try and sing the Lake at Aix
Hot and cold war against Manchester grime
19 November 1959
The sauna has come to the provinces. In Finland it is regarded as so indispensable, they say, that a family builds the sauna first, and then, if money and material last, a house to go with it. England has managed to scrape through her history without any saunas at all, until the Finns installed one in London this winter. Now Manchester has got one as well.
The real Finnish sauna is usually a wooden building in the garden, and the steam is produced by throwing water on to hot stones. The Finns beat themselves with birch twigs, and afterwards rush outside to roll in the snow or hurl themselves into a freezing Finnish lake. “Beware of primitive sauna baths without chimneys,” warns the guide-book. “They become full of smoke.” Rolling naked in the snow in the centre of Manchester is discouraged by the police, and there are no lakes. But Manchester’s sauna does have genuine birch twigs, and there is no nonsense about smoke, for everything is done by electricity. You take off your clothes and sit yourself in a little metal cupboard with your head sticking out of a hole in the top.
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Mr Khrushchev outshouts the riff-raff
18 May 1960
It was an amazing performance. Mr Khrushchev’s press conference was probably the biggest and the most unpleasant that the world has ever seen.
It opened with prolonged booing from most of the 2,000 journalists present, and went on for two and a half hours. Battle raged through the sweaty afternoon in the Salle des Pas Perdus of the Palais de Chaillot, a triumph in its way for the brutal and indefatigable spontaneity of Mr Khrushchev’s methods, and a rather shameful day in the history of international affairs.
Mr. Khrushchev’s performance bore no relation whatsoever to what goes by the name of diplomacy in the West – or indeed to human behaviour since the days when warriors taunted their enemies into battle by bawling insults at them from the top of the ramparts.
The press – which normally falls over backwards to be respectful even to the seediest statesmen – took its cue from him, and shouted back.
In a way, the honours of this gutter-battle went to that skilled old Ukrainian fishwife on the platform. Only once did he really lose his temper – when he described those who had booed him as German riff-raff and sent specially by Mr Adenauer, imperialist lackeys who should have been killed when they invaded Russia during the last war.
Then his gold teeth flashed in the arc lights, and the pudgy right hand pounded the table and lacerated the air. His neck grew redder and redder as he shouted above the increasing roar of protests.
He drew the familiar homely analogies from his youth. His mother, he said, could only afford to buy cream rarely. Sometimes the cat would steal it, and his mother would take the cat by the scruff of its neck, shake it, and rub its nose in the cream.
Should they give the Americans a shaking to teach them aggression was wrong? In the Donbas, when they caught a cat in the pigeon loft, they would pick it up and bang its head against the wall. He advocated similar treatment for the Americans, caught red-handed in Soviet airspace.
Two hours after the press conference had started, the power supply failed. Mr. Khrushchev shouted on into the enormous hall without a microphone, drowning the jeers of the correspondents with a joke about the shortcomings of technology.
He wound up with another jaunty joke about reaching the end of his interpreters’ working day. As his car disappeared beneath the Eiffel Tower on the way back to the Soviet embassy, and the tide of journalists came out of the Salle des Pas Perdus, the world looked a slightly nastier place.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover cleared in obscenity trial
5 November 1960
So we – and our wives and servants, too – are going to be allowed to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Coming less than a week after the pope’s decision to remove The Origin of Species from the Index, the news may well intoxicate and madden some of the weaker parlour-maids. It will perhaps help sanity to prevail if I point out that at Yeovil, after complaints from women readers, the local librarian is putting white spots (“a sign of purity”) on the back of books which contain “no reference to objectionable or violent sex”.
I have been following the Lady Chatterley case with bated breath. I and most of the people I know use plain Anglo-Saxon words in private to discuss sexual matters and to swear. But, unlike Lawrence, we don’t try to use them in public. People seem to accept this taboo without question, as if it were one of the given conditions of the human theorem.
Fort Sex is the last stronghold of taboo in our society, and already the outer fortifications are starting to give way before the assault, and then there won’t be any more taboo subjects left. Or will there?
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The Guardian starts printing in London
11 September 1961
The Guardian started printing in London today. Have you heard? These very words, if you live in the south of England, were impaled on the paper in London. Did you realise?
I labour this point because I’m not sure that we’ve bored everyone enough yet to drive it home. When BBC Television opened a new regional station in the old days they would devote a whole evening to bashing the fact into the viewers’ tiny crania. Everyone would be very jolly, as if it was Christmas, and speak in the appropriate regional accent. There would be an opening ceremony. And they’d have a monster regional variety programme (apparently produced for about £75 including the hire of bagpipes), with local baritones bellowing I’ll Tak Ye Hame Agin, Kathleen or whatever and dialect comedians with kilts and knobbly sticks (did I see only the Glasgow programme, or do all dialect comedians look like that? All I can remember is a thousand knobbly sticks and two thousand knobbly knees), and rows of chorus-girls wearing very short kits over their fishnet stockings and hopping about with fearful grins to a medley of old Harry Lauder tunes.
(Did you see, incidentally, that at the Edinburgh Tattoo one of the Highland dancers lost his tartan shorts in mid-reel? This elicited a great piece of military spokesmanship from Scottish Command. “The soldier,” they said, “dealt with the situation in a proper military manner.” The only thing one can regret is that the spokesman restrained himself from adding that the shorts had fallen back on prepared positions.)
Anyway, to all you new readers of the paper in the London area, a world of welcome in your own language. Wotcher. That make you feel at home? If there is sufficient demand I will go to tell a cockney joke or two, and render a few of the old music-hall favourites on the spoons. No? Oh, all right.
But we certainly ought to have had an opening ceremony, with reporters and leader-writers wearing their BA hoods, and everything bulled up to shine with a high moral tone. We could have got some influential people along – Lord Fudley of Dudley, for instance, the well-known industrialist, or Archibald Spratt, critic and man of letters – perhaps even Lady Frigate, who had a stranglehold on the nation’s good causes.
I see the distinguished visitors passing decorously among the typewriters, artificial cherries bobbing, Adam’s apples rising and falling followed by echelons of editors, or assistant editors, deputy editors, and directors, to a raised platform decorated with a motif of crossed pens. There is a great deal of sitting down and standing up again, and mumbling and pointing and coughing. Ah, Lord Fudley is going to make a speech, Lord Fudley, of course, is much sought after as a speaker on these occasions, and it is his proud boast that he has never once had to refer to a written text or notes.
“It gives me very great pleasure,” he is saying, “to be present here today, on this happy occasion, when we are gathered together to celebrate an event which has been long and impatiently awaited, but which, at last, we are celebrating today, and at which I have great – very great – pleasure in having been invited to say a few words to mark the occasion – and in saying this I am sure, I shall not be giving anything away – not letting the cat out of the box, as we say in London – if I tell you that it is an occasion here today which gives me very great pleasure indeed.”
Afterwards the distinguished visitors are shown over the works, where they see the machines that scrape the varnish off the truth, the vats where fact and comment are separated, and the great tower cranes that lift the lofty ideals into place. Half an hour of that and even Lady Frigate will be glad to sit down in the canteen and watch 20 long-legged chorus girls dressed up as Grenadier guardsmen and costermongerettes dancing the Lambeth Walk to the tune of Maybe It’s Because I’m a Londoner in front of an ancient backdrop of Piccadilly Circus. “Wot a luvverly bunch o’ cokernut’s” comments the compere humorously in the local argot. Not arf they ain’t.
Sardinian sherry
2 February 1962
One of the principal benefits that matrimony confers on the young professional class (which is where my hideout is located) is that it enables us to give up that tiresome pretence of being interested in spiritual and cultural matters – forced on us by our education and our courtship rituals – and lets us settle down to a frank and total absorption in our financial and material circumstances.
When, for instance, you call on the newly married Crumbles – formally socially-conscious Christopher Crumble and sensitive, musical Lavinia Knudge – do you talk about the problems of secondary education, or English choral music of the 16th century, as you would have done back in the good old days of Crumble and Knudge? You do not. Because Lavinia says …
LAVINIA: Before you do anything else, you must come and look over the flat!
CHRISTOPHER: That’s right, just take your coat off – I’ll hang it on this automatic coat-rack …
LAVINIA: … which Christopher made himself, didn’t you, darling?
CHRISTOPHER: Got a kit from Rackkitz of Wembley – costs about half the price of an ordinary automatic coat-rack…
LAVINIA: … and it’s fire-resistant, too …
CHRISTOPHER: … now this is the hall, of course …
LAVINIA: … which we made ourselves by partitioning off part of the bedroom …
CHRISTOPHER: … with half-inch Doncaster boarding, at a shilling a foot, if you know the right place …
LAVINIA: … Christopher got it from the brother of an old schoolfriend of his, didn’t you, darling? Now – mind your head on that steel brace – this is the bedroom …
CHRISTOPHER: … we picked up the bed for a song in a little shop I know in Edmonton …
LAVINIA: … and fitted it out with a Dormofoam mattress. They’re so much the best, of course. In fact there’s a waiting list for Dormofoams, but we had tremendous luck and got one ordered for someone who died …
CHRISTOPHER: … and this is the kitchen opening off the corner here. It was really the handiness of having the kitchen opening directly into the bedroom that made us take the flat …
LAVINIA: … you should have seen it when we first moved in. But Christopher had the brilliant idea of covering up the holes in the floor with some special asbestos his uncle makes …
CHRISTOPHER: … so we got a discount on it. We’re frightfully proud of that stainless steel boot-rack, by the way. I don’t know whether you saw it recommended in Which? last month …?
LAVINIA: … it’s so much more practical than all those silver-plated ones you see in the shops. According to Which? they pounded it with 140 average boot-impacts an hour for 17 days before it collapsed …
CHRISTOPHER: … I’d take you out to show you the lavatory, but it is raining rather hard. Remind us you haven’t seen it next time you come, won’t you, and we’ll make a point of it …
LAVINIA: … and here we are in the living-room …
CHRISTOPHER: … have you seen this Plushco plastic carpeting before? We think it’s awfully good, don’t we, darling? Half the price of ordinary carpet and terrifically hard-wearing. We’ve had it down, what, two weeks now? Not a sign of wear on it …
LAVINIA: … I see you’re looking at all those old books on music and education. You won’t believe it, but we had those shelves built for five pounds – timber and all …
CHRISTOPHER: … by a marvellous little man we found by sheerest chance in Muswell Hill. Remind me to give you his address …
LAVINIA: … though I think he did it specially cheaply for us just because he happened to take to us …
CHRISTOPHER: … by the way, would you like a glass of Sardinian sherry?
LAVINIA: … we’ve developed rather a thing about Sardinian sherry, haven’t we, darling?
CHRISTOPHER: … we get it by the gallon from a little shop in Sydenham. Found the place by sheer chance.
LAVINIA: … Tremendously practical, and it works out at six and four a bottle …
CHRISTOPHER: … incidentally, what do you think we pay for the flat? No, go on, have a guess … Well, I’ll tell you – five pounds a week …
LAVINIA: … it’s an absolute bargain, of course. We only found it through a friend of my mother’s, who just be sheerest chance happened to be …
CHRISTOPHER: … I say, you’re looking rather groggy. Lavinia, darling, run and fetch him some Asprilux. I don’t know whether you’ve tried Asprilux, but we think it’s much better than any of the other brands of aspirin … No, sit in this chair – it’s got a rather ingenious reclining back – we just got the last one to be made. Comfortable, isn’t it? What do you think of Lavinia, by the way? Such practical, easy-to-clean hands and feet. You won’t believe it, but I picked her up by the sheerest chance at a little bookshop I know down in Wimbledon …
Miscellany: The televised parliament gameshow
26 February 1962
THE SPEAKER: Hi folks! Welcome to another edition of TV Parliament, the party game programme for the family. Remember – the side that gets the highest rating wins the debate, and the member who is elected most pleasing TV personality by the audience gets a luxury holiday. So away we go with the first Bill – Planning (Special Measures).
Mr CHRISTOPHER SMOOTHE: (Minister of Chance and Speculation) (West Wittering, C.): Let me kick off by admitting that I’m in favour of the Bill.
Mr JOHN BOLSOVER (Screwe, Lab.): What Chris is too modest to mention is that this is Chris’s very own Bill. Let’s give him a round of applause.
(Applause)
Mr SMOOTHE: John was too modest to mention – it’s his birthday today.
(Mr Smoothe leads the House in Happy Birthday to You.)
Mr BOLSOVER: Thanks, Chris. But to be serious for a moment, Chris, perhaps you’d like to tell us something about the Bill.
Mr SMOOTHE: I’m glad you asked that, John. You see, I believe you’ve got to have a bit of planning here and there. But no one likes arbitrary planning – being told what’s good for them by some so-called expert. So we’ve approached the matter in a different way. There’s nothing your average chap enjoys more than a bit of a flutter, and so we hit on the idea of adapting Ernie (the premium bonds prize computer), that friend of every sporting Englishman, to cast random statistics and target figures for our economic plans.
Mr WALTER SPOWTE (Leeds Crematorium, Lab.): Let’s give the lad a big hand.
Mr SMOOTHE: Thanks, Walter.
Mr NIGEL SHARPE-GROOMSMAN (Twicester, C.): The most vital economic question of the hour is whether we are producing enough British-made espresso coffee machines.
Mr HERBERT GASWICK (East Shields, Lab.): I think you’re being unfair, Nigel. Christopher has an extremely good record on coffee machines.
Mr GASWICK: Christopher Smoothe, this is your record. Almost alone, ignored or laughed at in the House, you set out to persuade the government to give the manufacturers a generous price support.
Mr SMOOTHE: I don’t know what to say
(he is overcome with emotion. Loud sympathetic applause.)
THE SPEAKER: Do you want to quit, Christopher, or will you go on to the £64,000 question?
Mr SMOOTHE: I’ll … I’ll go on.
(Prolonged applause.)
Mr GEORGE SNUGG (Isle of Dogs, Lab): Will the Minister give the house the names of the first six kings after William the Conqueror?
Mr SMOOTHE: I am looking into that question … and it would be wrong to anticipate my findings.
THE SPEAKER: That’s the correct answer!
(Wild applause.)
That’s all, folks, but we’ll be with you tomorrow night for “Juke Box Select Committee.”
I say Toronto, you say Topeka: Michael Frayn returns to the Guardian for a new series of columns
14 September 1994
Flying, I gather, is not such a high-stress occupation as it used to be, because the stress is being shifted from the aircrew on to computers. But it’s increasingly a wrong-stress occupation, as the stress is shifted off the significant word in cabin announcements on to the auxiliary verb.
It used to be just on American airlines. But now even British cabin staff are telling us that the plane will be landing shortly at London Heathrow. Passengers will be disembarking from the front of the aircraft, they insist. We are requested to make sure we have all our belongings with us.
I used to think this was because airlines were hiring actors or theatre directors to coach their cabin crew in diction. Actors and directors who perform the classics have to find new ways of stressing the lines, to stop themselves going crazy. Or rather, they have to find new ways, they have to find new ways, new ways of stressing, of stressing the lines. They are acutely aware that this is not the first time in history that someone has gone on to a stage and said, “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” They know that at least 27 other actors are going to be saying it somewhere in the world at that very same moment. Their soul revolts! “Oh, what a rogue!” they find themselves gurgling. And a new reading of the part – the prince as queen – has come into being even before they’re halfway through the line.
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Michael Frayn on writing
12 April 1995
Writing a novel, as any novelist will tell you, is hard. Writing a short story, as any short story writer will be eager to add, is harder still. The shorter the form the harder it gets. Poems are hell. Haiku are hell concentrated into 17 syllables.
Until finally you get down to the shortest literary form of all, which is the title of whatever it is you’re writing. Long-distance novelists who can happily write several thousand words a day for months on end then go into creative agonies when the time comes to compose the two or three words that will go on the spine. Battle-hardened samurai of the haiku take instruction from Zen masters before they attempt to extract an odd syllable out of their hard-won 17 to go in the index.
This year, for various reasons, four different works of mine will have reached the point where they need titles, and I’ve reached the point where I need hospitalisation. It’s not that I can’t write titles. I’ve written far more titles than anything else in my life. For one of these four projects I have 107 titles. For another – 74. For the third – 134. 134 titles! For one short book! 134 pretty good titles, though I say so myself. The trouble is, you don’t want 134 pretty good titles. You want one perfect title.
No titles at all so far for the fourth project, but this is because I haven’t written the thing yet. Though after the agonies I’ve had with the other three I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t write the title of this one first, then dash down a few thousand words to fit it.
One of the troubles with a list of 134 titles is that it offers odds of at least 133 to 1 against getting it right. I’ve got it wrong many times in the past. There’s only one novel of mine that anyone ever remembers – and for all practical purposes it’s called The One About Fleet Street, because even the people who remember the book can’t remember the title I gave it. I wrote another book called Constructions. I think I realised even before publication that I’d picked a dud here, when my own agent referred to it in the course of the same conversation once as Conceptions and once as Contractions.
Late night final: Towards the End of the Morning
24 June 2000
Michael Frayn first worked in Fleet Street in the 1960s, when newspaper culture pervaded its lanes and pubs. As his comic novel of the era is reissued, he recreates a lost world of thundering presses and gentlemen journalists
No one, for some reason, has ever been able to remember the title of my novel Towards the End of the Morning. By the common consent of almost everyone who has mentioned it to me since it was first published in 1967, it seems to have been rechristened Your Fleet Street Novel. What surprises me a little is that anyone can still remember what the phrase Fleet Street once signified. Fleet Street now is just the dull, busy thoroughfare that connects the City to the West End. When I first arrived to work in it, in the last few months of the 50s, it was synonymous with the newspaper industry. It referred not just to the street itself, but to the whole close-packed district around it – to a way of life with its own style and philosophy; a world that has now vanished as completely as the Fleet Ditch that gave the street its name. (The notoriously foul stream was incorporated by Bazalgette into the sewerage system, and concealed in a culvert that runs beneath Ludgate Circus, at the eastern end of the street; certain parallels with the newspaper industry, however, continued to be visible to its critics.)
It even had its own characteristic smell. Just as Southwark, where my father worked, on the other side of the river, was immediately identifiable by the delicately sour smell of the Kentish hops that were warehoused and factored there, so the alleys and courts of Fleet Street were haunted by the grey, serious smell of newsprint. I catch the delicious ghost of it in my nostrils now, and at once I’m back at the beginning of my career, struggling to conceal my awe and excitement at having at last arrived in this longed-for land.
By that time, actually, Fleet Street was coming towards the end not just of the morning, but of the afternoon as well, and the shades of night were gathering fast.
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Michael Frayn on writing Spies
9 June 2012
The ideas for some of my novels and plays have arrived as suddenly and unmistakably as the police breaking the front door down. Spies, though, insinuated itself more like the vague unease at the back of your mouth that you often don’t even recognise as the first signs of a cold. Only much more slowly – over the course of many years.
I suppose it started with my beginning to think about my childhood, the way people do as they get older. I’d been rather lucky with the timing of it. Even while the second world war was destroying so much of Europe, it was preserving our little outer suburban world in a kind of magic bubble. There was no traffic on the roads, and we were allowed to roam wherever we wanted. The war had halted the apparently inexorable outward spread of London, and the countryside began exactly where it had in 1939, just round the corner from where we lived. It had left building sites as unfinished wastelands and opened further no man’s lands where bombs had fallen – playgrounds where we could vanish from adult eyes and build a world from our own imagination.
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