According to the agent’s brochure, Sir Arnold Wesker’s home in the Black
Mountains enjoys “a private location”. Savour that, because it’s one of the
most magnificent examples of British understatement you will ever read. This
is “a private location” in much the same way that postwar Dresden was “in
need of renovation”.
Here’s a rough idea of how you reach the home of one of Britain’s most
prominent living playwrights: first, drive so far along a narrow, winding
lane, you wonder whether you’ve quite understood the directions. It then
becomes a one-track moorland road. In vain, you scour the countryside for
signs of habitation - there’s nothing but sheep, fields and looming peaks.
Yet all the time you keep Wesker’s advice in mind. “When you think you’ve
gone too far, and that nobody could possibly live out here, don’t turn back.
Just keep going,” he said.
Follow this guidance and eventually you drive through a farmyard, across a
field, then, if my experience is anything to go by, you hit a concealed tree
stump. Congratulations. You have arrived. With a bit of luck, Wesker will be
waiting to greet you, and you’ll know how HM Stanley felt when he first
clapped eyes on Dr Livingstone.
It’s an especially long way from Stepney, in east London, where Wesker grew up
in two attic rooms above a tailor’s shop. His parents were Jewish immigrants
from Ukraine and Hungary. They were communists and argued constantly.
Best known for Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots and I’m Talking about
Jerusalem, known collectively as the Wesker Trilogy, he was one of the
so-called Angry Young Men of the 1950s, writers whose gritty, real-life work
shook the genteel, drawing-room world of postwar theatre. Not, as he says
now, that he ever felt particularly angry. “It’s been an anchor round our
necks, that label,” he admits. “Certainly around my neck. Angry is such a
silly word. I was writing about things that happened around me. In fact, I
could only write when I was happy.”
Much of Wesker’s work - more than 40 plays to date - has been written here at
his 18thor early-19th-century cottage, Blaendigeddi Uchaf, in the Brecon
Beacons National Park, near the bookish town of Hay-on-Wye. He bought the
house in 1966 for £2,500 (gazumping a woman who had offered £2,000). “It was
very, very dilapidated,” he says. “We couldn’t live here without a lot of
work being done. The kitchen has been virtually rebuilt.”
He spent £10,000 on renovations. A cowshed, attached to the main building, was
converted into the bedroom-cum-study where he now sleeps and works. On his
desk is a draft of The Rocking Horse, which he wrote for the BBC World
Service and is now adapting for the stage.
In the early years, this was a place for special occasions and holidays, as
well as somewhere peaceful to work. For the past 20 years, however, he has
lived here full time after separating from his wife, Dusty. In the past, he
has enjoyed the solitude - time to think, time to mull over a line. Now, at
the age of 76, he’s not so sure, and the cottage is up for sale for £850,000.
“I’m beginning to feel cut off,” he says. “I haven’t been able to go to the
theatre, and I want to be nearer to my children, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren.” Not to mention his wife. The couple are reconciled,
and Wesker will move in with her in Hove, East Sussex. It will save her
phoning every day to check that he’s all right.
The cottage looks small, but packs a lot in. From the front door, you enter
the main living room, which has a low ceiling and a large fireplace. On the
mantelpiece is an Evening Standard Theatre Award, given to him in 1959 as
“most promising playwright” for Roots. On the wall opposite is a Royal Court
poster advertising the trilogy.
Three of the bedrooms - there are four in all - are upstairs, and come with
even lower ceilings. The entrance to the attic bedroom must be barely 5ft
high. Before he moved to the ground floor, this was Wesker’s main bedroom.
He installed the wood panelling here, using skills he picked up when he
worked briefly as a carpenter. It now houses his stamp collection and the
papers he has amassed over the years.
“I am rather a hoarder,” he admits. Books seem to line every available wall.
Several well-known writers have stayed here: Margaret Drabble, Rose Tremain,
Doris Lessing, the late John Fowles and Salman Rushdie.
“I invited Salman, and he came with dozens of policeman,” he says. “I
suggested it would be a safe house for him, but they said absolutely not.
It’s so exposed. Somebody could come over and lob something.”
Assassins would have no trouble hiding in the garden. Wesker was a keen
gardener, but now finds the work too much. “I used to plant a lot, but it’s
overgrown now,” he says wistfully. “It needs someone with more energy.”
He takes me for a look at his old study, an outhouse that was poorly converted
and is damp and dismal. On the wall is a plaque, a souvenir of a job as a
writer-in-residence. It reads “Mr A Wasker”.
Doesn’t he worry that something might happen to him, out here on his own?
“Everybody else does,” he says. “I’m used to being on my own. It’s good
because I’m self-sufficient, but bad because you lose a facility for
conversation and sociability. I used to be a gregarious person, always
surrounded by people. I’m quite surprised, and impressed, that I can spend
time on my own.”
Our conversation over, we hang over the garden gate in the sunshine and enjoy
the colours of the field in front of us - buttercups and lavender. “It’ll be
a wrench leaving here,” Wesker says. “But if one of my plays takes off,
well, who knows?”
Blaendigeddi Uchaf is on sale for £850,000 with Jackson International;
01432 344779, www.bill-jackson.co.uk
