Morning:
10°c
We clapped the captain on his way in. 'Cut that out,' barked Pinter, 'it's meaningless'
Ronald Harwood27 May 2009
Fellow playwright Ronald Harwood recalls a friendship forged through a shared love of sport...
Harold loved sport. Cricket, as is well known, was his great and abiding passion. Did he really say that cricket was the only proof he knew for the existence of God?
Many of the characters in his plays are named after cricketers dead and gone. His hero was Leonard Hutton, which is a clue.
For precision and economy - hallmarks of the playwright's style - no batsman of Harold's formative years equalled Hutton. If anyone argued for Compton or Graveney, as I sometimes did, he would glower and say: "Yes, but Hutton" and, with one of his crooked smiles, mime an approximation of a cover drive.
He was not a gifted player, as I think he would have been the first to admit. But he always looked the part, impeccable in his whites, boots spotless.
There is a magnificent photograph of Harold, padded up and in his whites, just after a forceful cover drive, left leg well down the wicket, the bat upright over his left shoulder.
The photograph was displayed at his 72nd birthday party at Lord's in 2002, when his plays were listed up on the electric scoreboard.
It was taken in a photographer's studio. You can tell from the blank, cloth studio background. He's in the part. It's a fine performance. I played under his captaincy on several occasions, the Harold Pinter XI v The Guardian.
Once, when our team was in the field, we greeted the Guardian captain coming in to bat with a round of applause, as was the custom in our class of cricket. "Cut that out," barked Harold. "It's meaningless."
Our friendship was cemented by the game of squash. We had first met working for Donald Wolfit's Shakespeare company in 1953 and then lost touch, seeing each other only occasionally.
But in 1968, the late Penelope Mortimer gave a dinner party for us. We soon discovered that we had both just begun to play squash and were members of the MCC, which entitled us to play at Lord's. A match was arranged and for the next several years we played several times a month.
We were neither of us very good but, my God, the games were brutal. For 45 minutes or thereabouts we grunted and groaned, puffed and panted, collided with the walls and with each other until, all passion spent, we retired to the bathrooms where our baths would be drawn and our towels laid out.
The bathrooms were divided by a thin wooden wall, the tubs either side of this flimsy partition. Both being heavy smokers (Harold later gave up but I didn't), we could hear each other coughing our lungs out while we wallowed in the warm water.
After each game, we would have a badly needed drink at the small bar at the back of the Real Tennis court, then repair to a restaurant to sate ourselves with food and more drink thus rendering useless all the good the squash was supposed to have done us.
It was while having the first drink after one of our games that Harold told me he had met Antonia Fraser the night before and had fallen in love with her. I made a ribald remark. "That was quick," I said. He became motionless, drew on his cigarette and said with great intensity and by way of reprimand: "It was very beautiful."
Later still, he telephoned one night and said: "Look here, I want your advice." This was unusual and flattering. "I'm thinking of writing a play," he continued, "about my affair with Joan Bakewell. I'm going to call it Betrayal."
"Good title," I said.
"There will be a squash match."
"Oh, good," I replied fatuously.
"Not about us."
"Oh."
Silence.
"So, Harold. What advice do you want?" I asked.
Long pause.
"In short, do you think I should write it?"
Another pause.
"I'm not sure I know what you mean."
"To be precise, do you think it would cause too much distress?"
"To Joan?"
"Yes, of course, to Joan!" he growled irritably.
"Harold," I said, "I think it will bestow immortality upon her."
"Yes," he said and that was that.
When we were both in our forties, we decided squash was a touch too hectic. Tennis was the game we turned to next, a game Harold came to love largely, I think, because Antonia also played, a good, solid game, reliable on the base line and with a cunning, accurate lob.
Her one slight drawback was forward impulsion so, when playing in a mixed doubles against the Pinters, I used rather often to play a drop shot which Antonia inevitably found difficult to reach.
Harold became infuriated. "Is that the only shot you can play?" he growled. To which there was no answer.
After a game, he would flop down on a bench in the men's changing room, legs outstretched, sweat pouring from him. "Oi, gevalt!" he would sometimes moan, an economical Yiddish expression which may be roughly translated as: "Lord, have mercy, I'm done for!"
Ronald Harwood's plays, Taking Sides and Collaboration, open at the Duchess Theatre tonight.
