This Much Is True

His reply was eye-opening: ‘Oh, I know who you’ve been talking to but you don’t know the full story. I met her in a gambling club. She was the pretty girl dealing out the cards, and I fell for her and we had an affair. I’m a married man, and I know that I shouldn’t have done it. I just lost my head and I fell for her, and she fell for me, and she got obsessed. One night she climbed up the drainpipe at the front of my house, and my wife and I were in bed, and she banged on the window and gave my wife a rotten fright. She’s lost her marbles, this girl. She’s gone so bonkers that I had to take out an injunction to stop her from coming round. She won’t leave me alone. I used to love her, but I can’t stand her now. I don’t want her anywhere near me.’

Just then, there was a ring at the doorbell and I thought, ‘Oh Jesus! It’s her! What have I got myself into?’ I took a deep breath and opened the door, and there she was, looking perfectly calm and normal. I brought her in and made us both cups of coffee.

I really thought I was helping. I thought that she deserved to know the truth. So, speaking tentatively, I said, ‘Well, you know, people fall out of love — it happens.’ She wasn’t having any of that. ‘No, no, he’s in love with me, I know it. He hasn’t fallen out of love; I know it. It’s just that everybody tries to make him get rid of me.’

‘Listen, you’re a pretty girl. Wouldn’t you be better off forgetting about him and finding someone else, starting a new life?’

‘No, no, I don’t want that,’ she cried.

I decided to bite the bullet. ‘Look, darling, I’ve spoken to him.’

She went nuts. Her eyes widened, and she started to wail and thrash about, as if I’d pressed a button: ‘What, you’ve spoken to him? What did he say? What did he say?’

‘I think, to be quite honest, that it’s really over,’ I said, gently.

Then the dam broke. Her pain and neurotic rage burst its banks and drowned her. She ran round and round the kitchen, screaming. Then she snatched my bread knife from the counter. She came close to me, the knife held high, her voice at scream level, her eyes mad and wide, threatening: ‘Don’t you say that to me! Don’t you dare say that to me!’

Well, now I was scared. I realised this woman was off her head and dangerous and I had to get out of there. I ran to the kitchen door which had a lock on it. I put the snib down and got out of the door in a desperate panic. My phone was just outside the kitchen door: I phoned a friend: ‘Michael, please come NOW. I’ve got a lunatic in the flat and I’m scared.’ He promised to come straightaway but didn’t turn up for another two hours. That was Michael all over!

After a bit, I couldn’t hear anything when I pressed my ear to the door. Very carefully, I opened it. There she was, crouched and sobbing, the knife on the table. I said, ‘Look, I’ve made a mistake. I thought I could be helpful, and I’ve made it worse. So, I’m asking you, please, please, just go home. Try to forgive me. I meant to do well by you but I haven’t.’ She didn’t say anything; she just took her handbag and left. I leant against the door, breathless with relief.

Most people, if they see a woman crying in the gutter, make sure that she’s not injured, and then they go on their way. I tend to rush towards the situation and tackle it head-on. I can’t help it. I am fuelled by curiosity and thinking that I can somehow be a shining light, a good Samaritan and help. But in this instance I made things much, much worse. It was a real lesson. And it was yet more evidence that Swinging London wasn’t nearly as much fun as everybody said.

The Importance of Voice

My world has always been about speech. Voice is vitally important to me. My professional life is often based on understanding and replicating voices: identifying the subtle nuances of geography, time and class; searching for a character’s background, and then mining that rich seam to create them, using speech as my starting point.

Listening to the radio as a child, I remember hearing Dylan Thomas intoning in his sonorous, South Walian voice, pulling me into his world; the particularity of his vision excited me; he was a magician. That’s why I chose his reading of an excerpt from ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’ when I was on the radio show Desert Island Discs. Kirsty Young told me I’d chosen more speaking records than anyone in the history of the programme.

Growing up, and well beyond that, BBC voices were almost universally RP (received pronunciation), different from the beloved imperfections of the voices of my family. In my parents’ push to choose the best education they could for me, a big part of that education was ensuring that I shouldn’t speak like Mummy — or like Daddy, who never lost his Glasgow accent.