DIARY KEITH WATERHOUSE
Ihave gone through life believing, and telling anyone who cared to listen, that I was born in a condemned hovel, one of the notorious back-to-back terrace slums in which the inner city urchins of Leeds slept three to a bed. We were shipped to a coun- cil estate when I was two and a half, and I have always been hazy as to whether this was because the house was pulled down or fell down about our ears, or whether we were rehoused because of overcrowding. To clear up the point, in the course of research for a book on growing up in Leeds which I am about to embark upon, I wrote to one of my brothers. So it comes about that I have just learned, at the age of 63, that far from being a slum my first home was a substantial double-fronted house with a walled garden, the former residence of a doctor, and that far from our being overcrowded there were rooms to spare, in which my mother installed electric meters with the idea of taking in boarders. None came, and so we had the run of the house, and the surgery was our playroom. The only reason we had to move, apparently, was because the council planned to pull the house down for a road-widening scheme. Thus no longer can I claim to have been a scabby-kneed slum-dweller — instead, I seem almost to have stepped out of the pages of E. Nesbit. Suddenly I feel under- privileged.
hen the Society of Authors publishes the results of its periodic survey of its mem- bers' whinges against their publishers, I shall be surprised if the ineptitude of mar- keting and publicity persons isn't some- where near the top of the list. My own pub- lishers excepted (but 4 would say. that, wouldn't I, especially since they have promised me a nice book launch party next month?), I have never been much impressed by the breed. I am regularly for- warded catalogues and bumph addressed to me at the Daily Mirror, a paper I haven't written for since 1986. From time to time, a book party invitation will be redirected from the Daily Express, which I have never written for in my life. Occasionally a couri- er will roar up to the door brandishing a fat do-not-bend envelope stuffed with glossy photographs, its covering letter targeted at a column which has never used pho- tographs. And there must be some kind of competition between the PR ladies of the publishing world to see who can send me the most useless and unsuitable book. A week or so ago it was People of Surrey, pub- lished by Debrett's (and lavishly so, at £32.50), a real-life version of Beach- comber's List of Huntingdonshire Cabmen, consisting entirely of the names and bio- graphical details of prominent and not-so- prominent residents of Surrey. I do not live in Surrey, know nobody who does live in Surrey, and have no connection with the county. Perhaps the thing is a practical joke. But here I am, anyway, giving it a plug. And at least they are giving the book exposure. The most infuriating thing a pub- lisher can do to an author is to despatch him hundreds of miles to fulfil a punishing media interview schedule only for him to discover that there is not a single copy of his book in the town. One of my previous publishers (and this is one reason why they became previous) sent me to a radio studio where I found myself being interviewed, live, by someone who had not only not read my book, he had never set eyes on it and did not even know the title. He began hopefully, if desperately, 'Now, Keith Waterhouse, you've just had your latest book published. What's the next step?' 'The next step,' I said firmly, 'is to publicise it.'
Said book launch party is in aid of a novel in which I examine the propensity of the English for sitting in baths of pig-swill, engaging in crisp-eating contests, suffering themselves to be anointed with custard, and suchlike 'wacky' activities, all in the name of charity. 'You can't even hop into bed in this town,' I have one character exclaim (although she expresses herself rather more pungently) 'without making a donation to Ethiopia.' Last week, under the headline 'Sex romps help for heart charity', one of the tabloids ran this story: 'Pauline and Gordon Beavis have been dubbed Britain's champion lovers ... for raising charity cash. The passionate pair beat off competition from more than 300 other romantic duos who put money in a bedside "love box" every time they had sex...' Truth isn't stranger than fiction — it just parallels it.
Ido not go along with the view often expressed by media pundits that the absurdly large damages awarded by libel juries indicate the low public esteem in which 'certain sections of the press' are held. I believe they indicate the inclination of juries to be guided by precedent, in the absence of any other yardstick — save per- haps, these days, a hint from the judge that the Royal Mint is not theirs to dispose of. While libel juries do seem to enjoy playing at surrogate pools winners, the public at large, it seems to me, are by no means so generously disposed towards the plaintiff. It is characteristic of these actions that, regardless of how big the circulation of the transgressing organ, it will not have been read by the great majority of people, and so they will have no view on the matter until it is brought to their attention by the offend- ed party (who, in turn, may have had it brought to her attention not by her friends but by her hairdresser). When they do form a view, it is not always favourable — not necessarily because they go along with the words complained of, but because they sim- ply will not accept it as right and just that the plaintiff does not have to prove damage commensurate with the large sums award- ed in these cases. My impression — per- haps I mix with too many journalists — is that popular opinion is reflected more by the irreverent newspaper cartoons that always appear after the result than by the size of the jury's award — for instance, the irrepressible Jak's Evening Standard car- toon last week, where he had a gratified bank manager beaming, 'Goodbye, Miss Keays, it's always a pleasure to see you!' It is a mystery that popular opinion never seems to serve on libel juries.
The Wall Street Journal's stinging profile of Hartlepool and, by projection, much of post-industrial Britain (`No Expectations: Working Class Culture Erodes Britain's Rank in a Unified Europe') has predictably drawn blood, with Peter Mandleson, the town's prospective Labour candidate, reporting that locals 'concluded that the author had stepped off the train complete with metropolitan prejudices'. I am remind- ed of a circulation stunt by Punch years ago, when regular contributors were sent to report on various cities and later to defend their findings on local television. My own report, on Manchester, was on the whole favourable. The irascible Stanley Reynolds drew Newcastle-upon-Tyne and found it wanting. Unknown to him, his television inquisitor had had him tagged, and the first question was, 'Mr Reynolds, how can you condemn a city in which you've spent less than a day?' 'Listen,' snarled Reynolds, 'I've condemned cities I've only flown over!'
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