Not According to Lady Bracknell
“You Want to Put Bond in a Gorilla Suit?”
The Perfect Premier
“Forget Fellini!”
This Unsporting Life
The Ones that Got Away
On the Isle of Man, where I am lucky enough to live, we have a saying: “The Light’s on at Signpost”. I’ll explain it presently; sufficient for the moment to say that it’s a catchphrase about the island’s famous TT (Tourist Trophy) race, the blue riband of world motor-cycling, and the nearest thing to the Roman circus since the hermit Telemachus got the shutters put up at the Colosseum. Riders come from the ends of the earth every June to compete on the thirty-seven-mile course, hurtling their machines over mountain, through town and village, round hairpin bends, along narrow, twisting stone-walled roads where the slightest misjudgment means death at 150 m.p.h., and on straights where they dice for position with each other and the Grim Reaper.
Inevitably there are deaths. Never a year passes but the TT or its companion races claim their victims, but still they keep coming, for it is the ultimate test of the road racer’s skill and daring, and the man who wins it, be he an Italian six-times victor with a mighty organisation behind him, or a humble garage mechanic, has nothing more to prove. He is the best in the world, and needs his head examined. But there it is: the TT will last as long as there are crazy men on machines – Germans, Italians, Irish, Swedes, Japanese, and every variety of Briton, including of course the Manx themselves.
That the race was world famous I had always known, but I was astonished when the late Steve McQueen, of Hollywood fame, who had never been to the island, talked of the TT course with the familiarity of old acquaintance. He was motor-cycle daft, to be sure, and even kept a bike, an old Indian, in the living-room of his penthouse in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and at some time, somehow, he had plainly informed himself about the course and its more celebrated features and hazards – the Verandah, Ramsey hairpin, Creg-ny-Baa, the Highlander where the bikes touch 190 m.p.h., and the rest – and I was properly impressed. He must come to the island, I said, and ride the course for himself: thirty-seven miles in less than twenty minutes.
He considered this in that calculating blue-eyed silence which captivated audiences round the world, smiled his famous tightlipped smile, and shook his head. “I’m forty-eight, remember. You can drive me round.”
I never had the chance. The light was already on for him at Signpost – and it is time to explain the saying. The TT is six circuits of the course, and each time a rider passes Signpost Corner, about a mile from the end of the circuit, a light flashes on at his slot on the grandstand scoreboard, to let spectators know he has almost finished a lap; when it lights up on his last lap, they know he is nearly home, the end is in sight, as it was for McQueen that afternoon when I said good-bye to him in Beverly Hills. Not long after, he was dead, and the movie in which he was to star, and which I had written, was never made. But whenever I hear that saying, which the Manx, with their Viking sense of humour, apply to life as well as to the TT, I think of him, chewing tobacco and spitting neatly into a china mug, making notes in his small, precise writing as we went through the script.
But that’s by the way for the moment, and I have dropped McQueen’s name at this point because I know that nothing grips the public, reading or viewing, like a film star – and we shall meet him again, and many others, later on. And another reason for introducing that fine Manx saying is that it applies to me, too; at seventy-seven, my light is on at Signpost – mind you, I hope to take my time over the last mile, metaphorically pushing my bike like those riders who run out of fuel within sight of the finish.
So I’m turning aside from the stories with which I’ve been earning a living for more than thirty years, to tell something of my own. In itself it may not interest more than a few people (those kind readers of my books and viewers of my screenplays who have written to me, perhaps), but apart from telling a bit of my own tale there is something else I want to do, not just for myself, but for all those others whose lights are on at Signpost, that huge majority of a generation who think as I do, but whose voices, on the rare occasions when they are raised, are lost in the clamour of the new millennium.
We are the old people (not the senior citizens or the timeously challenged, but the old people), and if I am accused of lunatic delusions of grandeur for presuming to speak for a generation, I can only retort that someone’s got to, because nobody has yet, not in full, and if we’re not careful we’ll all have gone down the pipe without today’s generation (or any other) getting a chance not just to hear our point of view, but perhaps to understand how and why we came to hold it. (Very well, my point of view, but I know that countless older people, and not a few younger ones, share it, for whenever I’ve had the chance to express it, in has come the tide of letters*, their purport being: Thank God somebody’s said it at last!)
It’s not a view that will find much favour with what are called the chattering classes, or the politically correct, or the self-appointed leaders of fashionable opinion, or so-called progressives, or liberals in general. (Actually, I’m a liberal myself, as well as a reactionary. I’m often surprised at just how liberal I can be; I’ll have to watch it.) It is a view that would have seemed perfectly normal and middle-of-the-road in my childhood, which makes it anathema today, when mis-called “Victorian values” are derided, and the permissive society has turned a scornful back on so many things that my generation respected and even venerated.
Such elderly hand-wringing is not new. Old folk in every generation since the Stone Age have seen huge changes, for better or worse, but none in Britain has seen the country so altered, so turned upside down, as we children born in the twenty years between the great