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Mummy’s sister, Auntie Gusta, died young in April 1950, at just fifty. She had married an absolute shit of a man, a timber merchant called Ben Tosh, originally Benjamin Toshinski.
Mummy often quoted her grandmother’s warning, spoken in a German accent: ‘Never trust anyone until hair grows in the palm of their hand.’ As we all know, hair never grows in the palm of your hand. It’s a shocking lesson to teach a child, and sadly it is one that I have accepted. I trust everyone until they let me down, and then I never trust them again.
As Brutus in Julius Caesar, my toga kept slipping off, revealing rather more bosom than Brutus was normally expected to have; some parents in the front row showed alarm. On another occasion, in the junior school, when I was Bottom in ‘The Dream’ I forgot my words, but I didn’t crumble or hesitate – I just made up some nonsense and carried on.
But Mummy had a Dickensian solution for period pains – gin.
I saw a completely naked man walk across to the showers – in profile, with his dick sticking out in front. I think that was probably the first time I’d ever seen a penis, and I didn’t like it. And I never have.
it is the vulnerabilities in people, rather more than their strengths, which allow us to love them.
When I first arrived at Cambridge, my Exhibition to Newnham College was for Anglo-Saxon. About three weeks into my first term, I realised that Anglo-Saxon was not a language anybody spoke. I thought, ‘What am I doing here? What the hell am I doing reading Anglo Saxon? That’s bollocks. I want to communicate with people.’ I don’t even know why I’d plumped for it in the first place. I think I imagined it was special and different, whereas English seemed a rather predictable subject, but I was wrong.
When I see a wrong, I will confront it; I strongly believe in sticking up for what is right. Injustice offends me, deeply. And, nearly sixty years later, I haven’t forgotten.
I jumped down into his boat. It was quite a big drop down to sea-level from the mooring place. When I landed in the little wooden vessel it very nearly upended with the force of my significant bulk. Once it, and I, had regained equilibrium, I sat in the stern and he started to row.
They picked me up in a VW to go to the film; being the fattest, I sat in the front and showed off noisily all the way there, talking about cock-sucking and farting.
Life’s like cheesecake: you want to have as much as you can.
In the Handforth house was also a repellent girl called Isobel Stuart, who played another of Tevye’s daughters, Hodel; actually, she was a fucking nutcase. Her stage name had been Sylvia Jewison, but she changed it; no one quite knows why. She travelled with her cat (nothing wrong with that) but she and I had a major fight – and I mean an actual physical fight. I was clearing out the fridge at the end of our tenancy and I threw away some yoghurt cartons that belonged to Isobel. She lost her temper and hurled a knife at me. I don’t think she meant to hurt me – she was probably slightly
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During the tour I had been learning to drive. I took my first test in Birmingham, and I failed: I remember my knickers fell off as I opened the driver’s door. It wasn’t a ploy to distract the examiner: the elastic gave out.
The noisy munching of sweeties and incessant chitchat of some audience members is another bugbear. Once I was in the audience of a show in New York. I don’t remember which show it was, but there were people talking and volubly snacking on a shared box of Maltesers. They talked and rattled and crunched all the way through the show. In the interval, I couldn’t help it: I burst out and said to them, ‘You are barbarians!’ They looked at me, and I said, ‘You’ve been talking and chattering right the way through the show, spoiling it for everyone else. Have you no manners? Did your mother never tell
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For the record, I still know nothing about marijuana or any drug, and don’t want to. My drugs are chopped liver and cheesecake – probably equally damaging, but they taste better.
When people say to me, ‘Oh, I never talk about money, religion or politics,’ I say, ‘What the fuck do you talk about, then? Those are the things that matter!’ Money is one of life’s essentials and there’s no point pretending that it isn’t. It matters how you earn money, what you do with it, and how you spend it.
We all should try to make people feel good: if you can’t say something nice, then shut up and don’t say anything at all. Of course, sometimes I can’t help saying horrible things about people I don’t like, but it’s not, on the whole, to their faces.
We are all scared. We are all secretly shaking with fright inside, uncertain of what we should be doing, saying and thinking; anxious about what our lives are going to be.
Everyone I’ve known leaves footprints on my life. Thank you. Friends bring out the best in me, and that’s what I cherish: they make me feel that I am worth knowing. Maybe it’s a good idea, as Shakespeare said, to bind your friends to you with hoops of steel. They certainly are my armour and my fortress.
My fart, having gathered momentum during the wait, finally burst forth like a bullet from Big Bertha, the wartime gun. I promise you it came unaccompanied, but it was fierce because it had been constrained for too long. It exploded gloriously with such a gigantic boom, I fear the security guards thought it might have been a terrorist attack.
America does not like, cannot deal with, and is afraid of failure.
Sometimes I went too far. There was one occasion that I particularly remember. The part was for the secretary of a detective, who was the lead role in the TV series. I was called in and as usual there was a panel of producers facing me. They told me a bit about the series and then asked if I knew who would be playing the lead role. ‘No, I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘Oh, it’s James Woods.’ I blinked. ‘James Woods. Oh, I see. He’s a bit of a cunt, isn’t he?’ You should have seen their faces. (Because he is!) I didn’t get that part.
knocked at the door, he said, ‘Come in.’ He then looked at me up, down, up, quite slowly and said, ‘Do you fuck?’ ‘Yes, but not you,’ I replied. ‘Why is that?’ he asked. ‘Because I am a lesbian,’ I said. He grinned and said, ‘Can I watch?’ I replied, ‘Pull yourself together and get on with the interview.’
My main and most lingering memory of being in that film, however, is of Schwarzenegger’s bottom. My character was killed by having my throat sliced by a glass table at the end. The scene ended – and Schwarzenegger farted right in my face when I was down on the floor, trying not to move. It was such a noxious cloud I shouted, ‘Fuck you, Arnie!’ I think he did it because I’d farted on set and he felt a tit for tat was due.
he was just a handsome boy who didn’t always wash; he was quite smelly in that very male way some young men are. Sometimes he wore a dress. I said to him: ‘Leo, I think you’re gay.’ He burst out laughing and said, ‘No, I’m not, Miriam. I’m really not gay.’ I insisted, ‘I think you’ll find you are.’ But I was wrong. He did it to be talked about – much as I did when I smoked my pipe at Cambridge.
The goal of life is to end up wiser. But more importantly, I think it should be to end up kinder, both to yourself and everyone around you (unless, of course, their surname happens to be Johnson).
I know I swear too much and I’m constantly being reminded to keep it clean. I regret I offend – it’s a bad habit I got into very early. But saying ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ and ‘cunt face’ isn’t as bad as racism or selling drugs. Get real!
I won’t have anything to do with Twitter, though. Limit myself to 280 characters? Ridiculous.
Best of all, my beloved Heather, has remained my rock and anchor throughout the roller-coaster ride of my life. Now you’ve read the stories (those the lawyers have allowed me to retain) of my adventures across the last eighty years – you might be as surprised as I am, that she has chosen to stick by me. I have been blessed. This much is true.
