This Much Is True

Clive and Germaine were mammoth personalities: opinionated, confident and untrammelled. They were not having any of the Great British Empire; they were not going to be cowed or made to feel small by Cambridge. They knew that they were bigger than all of it, and they were. Clive was a member of the Footlights: I liked him a lot. I didn’t much like Germaine. I didn’t see her often, because although she was at my college, she had quickly switched to the PhD programme. There was always a slight edge to our relationship. She was competitive and I got the impression that she didn’t like me because I was the competition. She was quite spiky and still is: she likes a good scrap. As a Shakespearean scholar and a teacher of English, she is extraordinarily gifted. We’ve never become friends and I’m sorry for that; I would have relished it.

Clive and I knew each other up until the time he died. He was gravely ill, but still writing — and better than ever. When I wanted to perform his poem ‘Japanese Maple’ in The Importance of Being Miriam in 2015, and asked permission, he replied, ‘With pleasure.’ Many years earlier, Clive gave me my first good notice in 1974 when he was TV critic of the Observer, and it helped. He liked my work in The Girls of Slender Means. I like people who give me good notices — can’t help it.

Australia always seemed to be a far-away country, filled with endless possibilities. It’s much grittier than America: Australia is hard and sun-baked, threatening and on a grand scale, whereas America to me represented a kind of soft entertainment. After falling in love with Heather, it became clear that Australia was a country of impressive people, different from the English; tougher, unadorned and somehow — as Heather indicated — more honest. Some Australians think of England as the home country, and that they belong to England, but many other Australians feel that England has exploited Australia long enough and the time has come to pull the plug. Heather is definitely in that category — the ‘blessed Commonwealth’ was not at all the way she saw things. I realised that Australia could be quite a ‘bolshy’ place, a nation of people with unusual attitudes, possibly slightly uncouth. They had a different sheen from the English: Australians don’t bother with superficial politeness. They dislike ‘bullshit’. They provide more honest social encounters, although you can find the most absurd pretensions in the suburbs.

I made my first trip to Australia with Heather to meet her parents in 1980. She has a sister, Sandra, who had disappeared from the family. This was a source of sadness for Heather. There had been a rift: Sandra had been going to get married, but, at the last minute, she called it off because she’d fallen in love with somebody else. Heather remembered Sandra throwing the wedding cake out of the car window; it rolled down the road in front of them like an iced spare tyre. There was a huge row, Sandra didn’t want to be in touch with her family, and so she left the continent and went to live in California. I was curious to see where Heather came from, who her people were.

My first greeting on landing in Australia was when the immigration clerk said to me, painfully slowly, ‘Can… you… read?’ I looked at her, and thought, ‘What the fuck is this all about?’ I said, ‘Y-e-s,’ quite slowly. She had in her hand some documents and, pointing to one of them, she said again, ‘Can you read?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, again slowly. ‘Can you read this?’ I looked at the document and said, ‘Yes!’ Then I got a bit irritated and said, ‘Look here, is there a problem? I’ve actually got a degree in English from Cambridge University!’ The woman took a step back and said, ‘Ahh, sorry, miss. You haven’t signed your form. I thought you was an ethnic.’ That was my welcome to Australia. And of course, she was right, I AM an ‘ethnic’.