The Senecans Read online

  Soon our great brick ‘plant’, the dull red squatter outside my sixth-floor Wapping window, will itself be dead, the one over which so many fought so hard in the Thatcher high days. Even when the fighting was over, Fortress Wapping remained its name. It is soon about to be razed and replaced by flats that will have other gentler names, or so the developers hope.

  I can tell the kind of people that the new owners want, the men and women on the posters, men with laptops, women holding hands with women holding phones, the young with £2-5 million to spend, not, I suspect, Miss R. I am beginning to miss that plant already, unlovely and unloved as it always was when it was alive. Its walls have not fallen yet but the time must be close.

  There are the ghosts here not just of the people who came, who worked here, who lobbied and plotted, but also of the players who brought us here, who set the scene. Margaret Thatcher never came to Wapping herself but she so often seemed to be here. She seems to be here now. No. I must not get beyond what I saw.

  Here on the emptying shelves I have a note of most of what she and I ever talked about, most of the times that we met, fewer quotes of her exact words than a historian would like, more usually the gist of what she said. I have notes of her rages and notes, as long as I can find them, about the men who tried to calm her – with flattery, gossip and theatre trips.

  I must not make assumptions. I need to prepare myself. Miss R has already asked questions about the towers in the landscape, old Wapping blocks of flats built to house the men and women bombed out of the slums by Hitler. She seemed disappointed that I knew so little, the names of a few pubs on the ground, nothing in the sky apart from some heavy Hawksmoor churches, even those names being a bit blurred, a George in the East and a St Anne’s being less distinct than I would have liked.

  Her displeasure came not, I think, because she cared about churches or concrete but because I might have been damaging myself as a witness to what she does care about. Mine are more bookish times now. Miss R is not concerned about the controversies of my new life. She cares about what happened in recent history, always the most forgotten kind.

  10.4.14

  When Miss R arrives today she is most pleased by her own notebook, smug I would say but don’t. This is not a new electronic device. She holds it so that I can see the printed name, with a stamp from Foyles bookshop, SENECA, its cover page orange and the next page lemon, both colours faintly silvered. The printed letters of the name are blue-black, the colour of her nail varnish. SENECA belongs to one of the bookseller’s SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT.

  I make no comment. I don’t know whether she is prodding or mocking. Eventually she pushes it across my desk. There are few of her own words in it yet. Most of the pages are still blank. But the publisher’s words are succinct: ‘Seneca (c. 4BC–65AD) wanted to keep his integrity and flourish in treacherous times. He directed political reforms while trying to keep Nero, the most volatile of emperors, under control’.

  ‘Is that fair?’, she asks.

  ‘Yes’, I reply, ‘fair as far as it goes.’ I cannot keep back that always irritating ‘as far as it goes’, favourite of those who dislike issues of long study reduced to a single word.

  ‘I want to talk about your Senecans. Were they “trying to control”?’

  ‘Not in every case. David preferred Margaret Thatcher when she was out of control. Seneca was the first political speechwriter. That was his main attraction to Ronnie. A writer is often in a position to control the ruler for whom he writes.’

  She raises a pale plucked eyebrow. ‘Seneca is also praised in the notebook for his insight that “immediate pleasure is an unreliable guide to living a good life”. True?’

  Seneca and Socrates

  ‘That is certainly what Seneca said’, I reply. ‘He used to write it often and in many ways. Margaret Thatcher instinctively agreed with him. She was a Stoic in that and many respects. She thought that too many of her predecessors had indulged the public love of immediate pleasure. The Senecans, of course, like all good courtiers, liked to find respectable support for every view that she held.’

  Miss R continues to read aloud. She speaks at a higher pitch and volume than our office space requires, as though these were slogans to be etched on the glass walls.

  ‘“Seneca was interested in making money but knew that it couldn’t guarantee security. He hardened himself against the natural fear of losing what he had by regular bouts of voluntary frugal living”. Is that true too?’

  ‘That is how Seneca wanted people in the future to see him. But the three points are not quite the same.’

  ‘So first: making money?’

  ‘By owning silver mines and lending at high interest. Yes, he did like to make money although taking money was easier and left him more time to think.’

  ‘And natural fear?’

  ‘The natural was good. Anything that he deemed natural was the virtuous thing.’

  ‘Voluntary frugal living?’

  ‘His chest heaved every day of his life. His throat was a cave of coughs. His stomach ached at the slightest provocation. He made wine on an industrial scale but drank in moderation – or that is what he claimed. He enjoyed sex and cold baths whenever and with whomever he liked. Does that count as frugality or not?’

  Miss R frowns. She closes the book. Her purchase from Foyles may not explain everything about Seneca. It misses the tough, practical thinking about politics, the contrariness, the appeal to first principles that were so prized at Margaret Thatcher’s court and so missed after she had gone. It misses the mechanics of exchanging favours, the problems of giving benefits to all when all will not deserve them. It misses much that was to become important to all of the four men on her list.

  The publisher of SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT does, however, explain one big thing about Seneca. The teacher’s son from Cordoba wanted to help. He wanted to be a help to himself. Miss R reads aloud in her glass-etching voice again.

  ‘“He encourages us to be tough with ourselves so that we can cope with life and make the most of bad circumstances. Dampening hope or preparing for adversity liberates your energies”.’

  I have nothing to say about the liberation of energies. But this self-help Seneca from Foyles is, quite correctly, a man who intended to do good.

  ‘Virtuous intention was important to him. He aimed high while recognising that he might never match the best of men.’

  ‘Seneca did not become Emperor of Rome himself’, I add, ‘despite being the candidate of virtue in some men’s minds.

  He thought anger was the greatest evil. A man had to stay cold and calm, a ruler most cold and calm of all.’

  ‘Passion was not a part of sound reasoning but its most pernicious enemy. He never had the chance to test his thoughts on the biggest political stage. A hundred years later his successor Stoic in your plastic packet, Marcus Aurelius, did succeed, the so-called “last of the Good Emperors”.’

  She takes her notebook back, complains about the confusion in my office and leaves the room. Five minutes later I see her walking out the back way eastwards towards the plant that is about to fall, down the road beside the rum store to the end. I watch her until she turns left towards the pale, purple columns of The Old Rose, the pub, long closed now, where the Senecans used once to study Stoicism and learn their verbs.

  18.4.14

  Cranes are arriving like dinosaurs for breakfast in a swamp, a rain-swept convention of diggers and dumper trucks. This is a scene with few people and much machinery, just like the world that is departing. The Wapping print-production lines, so dramatic when I saw them first, were bright blue. The colour for demolition is yellow.

  When Miss R arrives she has no raincoat. Perhaps she has a friend here who drives her into the basement where the service lift begins, where security is not so strict. She sweeps back my half-formed question and joins me at the window. We watch the show.

  Does she enjoy this sort of meeting? It is hard yet to say. Doubtless she is talking to dozens of people
. I hardly look fit for a big part in her history. She writes down some of what I say, but not enthusiastically, merely with a dogged purpose, like a student seeing an examination answer through the verbiage of a lecture. Sometimes I must have something she needs.

  I want to help her if I can. I am not sure why. Because a few facts ought not to be forgotten? Because I am flattered to be asked?

  Maybe I would be more persuasive if I were better dressed, wearing one of my old blue suits chalked with a thin stripe, made by the only tailor I have ever had, a maker of fox-hunting kit in York whom I met by chance and kept by habit.

  From the evidence today of the packed box on my floor marked ‘Peter’s photographs’, those suits did not fit my body well. The jackets were double-breasted, at least double. The trousers were equally full, held by yellow braces I cannot imagine wearing now. But they were the uniform for being heard then.

  Those suits long ago went to moths and Oxfam. When I saw Miss R last week I was wearing the same grey-pink cotton jacket that I am wearing today, bought a decade ago in Rome when I was a thin man, and some pumice-grey trousers, creased from their time in the back of my desk drawer beside shoe polish and sugar cubes.

  The instruction from on high in the company is that all desks must be emptied within three months. In September I am going to the Roman city in Spain where Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born. Before I go to Cordoba, everything of mine must be out of here. I need to take special care of the contents of the case closest to me, David Hart’s Renaissance erotica (photocopies only), his Sons and Lovers (David Lawrence was his favourite alias), Ronnie Millar’s Roman tragedies (all by Seneca), three Booker Prize-winners, one of them a bribe from Woodrow Wyatt, and various black novels by Beryl Bainbridge, who never won the Booker Prize but was all the more loved for that by Woodrow.

  Beneath these are various relics of my own in Latin, Greek and what the memoir-writing politicians of my own time claim is English. Every day this Spring is a removals day although nothing yet has been removed. I have enjoyed this TLS office, the last of dozens where I have made newspapers, my very last it seems, before the absolute new era of ‘open-plan’. My past is filed here in a solid form.

  As well as paper of every age and colour there is a small brass grinding pot which my mother used to call ‘the middle thing’ when I was a Chelmsford child on our armament-makers’ estate, a blue school cap with my senior school’s motto, Incipe, an injunction to Begin!, an Oxford tie from a time no one wore a tie, two cracked pillboxes, one showing a whiskered Victorian with a copy of The Times, the other a Roman empress spreading her legs on a throne. Miss R strokes the school cap and ignores Messalina. There are files of letters, brown ink pages tied with rusting wire, a thousand books at least, novels, histories, memoirs of every kind including mine.

  Miss R today is less like a historian’s assistant, more like a mother in a teenager’s bedroom, intolerant of the filing on the floor. She trips. She swears. There is no place to put her mid-heeled shoes, not white this time but two-tone blue with a bow, right foot and left foot eventually secure but further apart than she would have liked, small stacks of Latin staring up in between. She is coming to resent the boxes that are waiting to be taped and moved, all twelve of them. I know the number because I watch her write it down, XII, as though denoting a Roman poem or a Pope.

  She stands rather than risk the seat of books. She turns down the offer of a chair from the main office outside. She leans against a cabinet. She slides on a slippery plastic file. Only while she settles do I properly note what she is wearing, the blue skirt ruffled shorter over her left thigh than the right, the white plastic bangle on her wrist. Her shoulders are wider than would be normally seen today in Thomas More Square, power-dressed as we used to say in the 80s, dressed in period for her research as I am tempted to say now.

  It seems more important today for her to be near the window than to be comfortable. Together we admire the cranes. I ask her again if she wants a chair. There is room for another behind my desk if I disturb a small part of my soon-to-be travelling museum. But the remains from my fifty years as student, reporter and editor do not have to defend their ground. Instead she takes two halting steps and scans again the line of sky, the cloud-clinging concrete blocks, the slate and marble churches, the bricks of what were once the London Docks, the red-brick cube of the plant and the black-brick cylinder beside it for The Times.

  ‘You must be sorry to be leaving here’, she says, looking again at the boxes as though to check once more that she has counted them correctly. ‘We can both see so much of what we need to talk about.’

  May

  It is fourteen years since I joined your campaign and eight years since you became Emperor; in that time you have piled such honour and wealth upon me that nothing is missing for my happiness except moderation in its enjoyment

  —SENECA’s resignation attempt,

  reported by Tacitus

  9.5.14

  When I left Thomas More Square last night it was almost midnight, a common departure time for a reporter or an Editor of The Times, less so for an Editor of the TLS. A searchlight was hanging in the sky, drawing circles on the ground, hung from a helicopter, I presumed, although behind the Level Six glass I could not hear it. A bright metallic pool of light made an ice-rink of the gatehouse car park for the old plant, the ground immediately below. Slowly the beam found the long, low line of brick behind, the dockland Rum Store that once housed The Times, suddenly gold instead of black.

  Then the light hit the red cube built for the Sun and the News of the World, for the managers, the lawyers, the accountants, the print machines themselves, six stories high and newly spot-lit as though for a conjuror’s trick. Finally it traced a bright white line between The Old Rose on the Highway and the river before sweeping on again to the steeples and tower blocks beyond. A manhunt? A preparation for a visiting president?

  This morning there is only hard, horizontal rain against the warehouse opposite the plant gates, low cloud propelled by wind around the large white letters, A, B and C, that are stencilled on the black-painted brick. This windowless break against the storm carries the name of Thomas Telford, a Victorian master of brick. The next wall celebrates a Mr Breezer. Neither of these names was visible last night, nor in 1986 even during the day. So much was obscured then.

  There is also a deep pit down below me that was not there in 1986, not there yesterday either, newly dug by a yellow machine behind the gate, just inside the gate that last night was an ice-rink of light, where the battles of Wapping were fought and where the destruction of the main building will soon begin. The straight-cut sides of what will perhaps be a pond are some six-feet wide and twelve-feet long.

  This was only one part of the battlefield, not a part of great significance at the time. The pit is simply in the part that I can now see from my window, something that I can show Miss R if she asks.

  When the newspapers first arrived this was the eastern corner of the car park, though not a place where any sane man or woman would park a car. Wapping was a genuine battlefield, not a metaphorical one, not a football match. The only metaphors were the ones written by the journalists inside, the same tired phrases day after day as Frank Johnson complained. When the Socialist Workers came among the pickets, or when the police came among the International Marxists, this pit was where the missiles were thrown and thrown away.

  So a battle with weapons? Yes. Bitter and brutal? Yes, sometimes it was both. The print union leaders knew that if newspapers could be made without their members at Wapping, their power would be over in Fleet Street and everywhere. And so it proved.

  ‘But how bitter and brutal?’ That is the first question from Miss R this morning who arrives with a copy of the Daily Mirror and the London Review of Books, both competitors from the Left to the papers of Thomas More Square. ‘Was it as bad as the battlers on both sides made out? Missiles? How many and how often? Weren’t you exaggerating as newspaper people do?’

 
‘Well, yes, probably more weapons were thrown away than thrown. That was what David Hart used to insist, always with sadness. David was a devout fighter in the Thatcher army. He wanted the battles to be as bitter and brutal as possible.’

  ‘Why? What did he want?’ She wrenches the subject from politics to people. I am coming to expect this now.

  ‘Where did David come from? Where did the rest of the court come from?’

  ‘Certainly not all from the same place.’ She makes a note.

  ‘I wondered often about David. I occasionally asked him. There was an official story – about a Jewish banker’s family, some trouble with a gardener’s daughter at Eton, a little film production, a larger bankruptcy, a life of property speculation, military procurement and the mind. And there was a story of a different kind of intelligence, Mossad and the CIA and even sometimes our own.’

  ‘When did you see him first?’ Miss R’s second question today is one of her stock questions.

  ‘In David’s case the time of seeing and meeting were, in fact, the same.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘It was a year before the night at the Greenwich Theatre. He had first written me a note while I was still at Shell and pushing stories through magazine doorways. He was curiously well informed. I should have seen the oddity in that. He found me when I barely knew where I was myself. He asked me to lunch and I accepted.’

  ‘What did he look like then?’ Miss R asks without waiting to hear any more.

  David Hart

  ‘Well, he had a head that I most certainly did not want to be hit by.’