ESCAPE
Jonathan Aitken (60) sits in a large armchair. He has a bottle of red wine and a glass on the table next to him.
JONATHAN: When I was living in Lord North Street, it was not odd to find photographers on the pavement at 6.30, or waiting in their cars. What they were after was today’s picture of the ‘beleaguered minister’. I would come out of the house, and there would be a sort of convergence…a score of flashbulbs kicking off; they were after a grimace, looking gloomy… ‘Gloomy Aitken’…something like that. They would shout…the shouts would be straight out, and they would be a snippet of something they’d got from the Guardian or The Independent that morning, which I didn’t know about… ‘What about the BMARC meeting on June 15th?’ ‘Did you approve guns for Singapore?’ ‘Did you procure girls for the Saudis?’ Sometimes the Press Officer from Number Ten would phone to say, ‘There’s a story on the front page, it says such and such. I thought you should know before you go out and face the barrage.’
I did escape by a back entrance very early one day. It was five o’clock, a lovely sunny June morning. In the night I had had a dream about my father…everything very disturbed… and suddenly, after waking, I had the idea that I might go to the Suffolk churchyard where he’s buried. I looked out the window and saw these two bulky guys, heads back, mouths open, asleep in their car. I couldn’t risk going out the front door. In Lord North Street my mother’s flat adjoined the house; I got into her flat and slipped out the back door, got to my car without being seen, and drove out to Playford churchyard. I hadn’t been for ten or fifteen years, and…um…I had a bit of trouble finding the grave. And then there it was… ‘Sir William Trevor Aitken, KBE, Member of Parliament for Bury St Edmunds, Died Playford Hall January 10th 1964’. He was a marvellous man, a real ‘Knight of the Shires’ MP…a war hero with an impeccable record. He died of his wounds really…he’d been really badly burned and shot up; in hospital he’d had 142 operations, and this at a time when anaesthetics were fairly primitive. I wasn’t unhinged, but I suddenly found myself sobbing and sinking to my knees on that gravestone, and saying, ‘I’m so sorry, Dad, I really mucked it up. I haven’t been the sort of son you wanted or deserved.’ And there was above me, in that cloudless blue sky, there was a lark in full flight and singing absolutely full throttle, and the cottage next door with the sunlight dancing about on the roof-tiles, and a lot of childhood memories came flooding back.
Only a moment’s respite…then it was back to the metropolitan jungle, the media jungle, and the barrage of flashbulbs.
PRISON
So there I am in prison, with this chap more or less permanently up a tree with his telephoto lens, and this other guy hiding in some clumps of long grass with another long lens. There were gains from this media attention…the prison community warmed to me because of it… ‘This guy’s just like the rest of us, he’s fucked up his life, doing his bird, and along come all these shits from the media’…especially after the first recorded instance of someone breaking into prison. I was approached one day by a prisoner who I hadn’t seen for a while…which, with hindsight, wasn’t surprising…he’d been released the month before, and had been paid by the Daily Mirror to break back into prison. Three accomplices on the third floor had also been paid, five grand, to winch him up to their window. He came over to me looking very uncomfortable…he was wearing his green prison overalls, but also, rather oddly because it was a hot day… um…a…um…a black woolly hat, and a bulky windcheater sort of thing, and he…um…came over to me… ‘Can we go over to that tree over there?’ ‘Okay.’ ‘How’s Lady Aitken?’ ‘Fine.’ ‘How are your daughters?’ ‘Fine.’ ‘Is it true Margaret Thatcher’s coming to visit you soon?’…this rather mad dialogue. We went to the corner of the canteen, he didn’t eat his lunch, and I was beginning to think he might be on drugs, he was behaving distinctly oddly; then he said, ‘I must talk to you somewhere private, can we continue this conversation in your peter?’…that’s my cell… so we headed towards my cell…by then one of the accomplices had shouted his mouth off about the five grand, and the Irish boys rumbled what was going on, and we were just reaching my cell, with this guy saying, ‘Tell me about your problems’, when Mickey came running down the corridor… ‘Look out Jonno, this guy’s a wrong ‘un.’ I said, ‘We’re all wrong ‘uns in here Mickey.’ Big Jim shouted, ‘He’s got a camera stuffed up his front, and there are wires sticking out his back, he’s wired up for sound.’ This guy started to run…Big Jim unsuccessfully tried to rugby tackle him. Mickey said, ‘We’ve got to grass him up.’ We found Prison Officer Rook, who said, ‘What’s his description?’ Mickey said, ‘He’s got wires sticking out.’ I said, ‘He’s wearing a black hat.’ Rook thought I said, ‘He’s as black as your hat’ and with all the prison bells ringing and officers pouring out of everywhere, every black prisoner in the place was put up against the wall rather ferociously; meanwhile our friend was being lowered out of the third floor window with the Irish shouting, ‘He’s escaping, he’s escaping’…and one officer, the fattest in Stamford Hill waddled after this man who scaled the perimeter fence and sped off in a waiting car.
The spirit of the prison was entirely for me… ‘Jonno, this is a bleeding liberty.’ Black guys thought it was a terrific joke; one of them gave me the high fives cos he had drugs on him, but the officers were so busy looking for wires sticking out, they missed the drugs.
ELIZABETH: (60, head round door.) Jonathan?
JONATHAN: Yes?
ELIZABETH: We’re getting rather peckish. Are you going to be much longer?
JONATHAN: I’ll be with you any second.
ELIZABETH: Shall I start getting it ready?
JONATHAN: Yeah. I’ll do the eggs.
ELIZABETH: I’ll do the toast. (Goes.)
JONATHAN: (Calling after her.) Try not to be Queen Alfred. (Getting up.) Right at the end of my sentence I was in the office being searched and processed after Christmas leave, and I was asked to go upstairs to see the Deputy Governor, who said, ‘There’s been a serious plot against you. Three of the prisoners have been overheard making the arrangements.’ Apparently a well-known tabloid had offered them forty thousand quid to put a drug called Rohypnol in my tea, which leaves you awake but totally immobilised. They were going to put me in bed naked with another naked guy, take photographs and then run the story, ‘AITKEN TURNS GAY IN PRISON’.
There’s an art to scrambled eggs…the secret is to cook them slowly. You can’t hurry them.
5
HALA JABER
While we are on the subject of cooking, there can’t have been many more bizarre meals prepared than the one Hala Jaber cooked for the group of insurgents she was staying with during the second bombing of Fallujah, in Iraq.
This is a story which clearly demonstrates the difference between journalism and playwriting. As she was the only Western journalist in Fallujah that night, the Sunday Times accorded her the single honour of devoting both the first and second pages to her story. Yet in all that verbiage, there is no mention of the two key elements I chose from her interview when she came to talk to us in Max Stafford-Clark’s old office at The Royal Court Theatre. I suppose very roughly the Sunday Times concentrates on news, fact and opinion; I am more interested in the complexity of the human condition, self-knowledge through
