Interview: Nigel Williams Essay, Research Paper

All roads lead to CroydonHalfway through lunch, which, this being Nigel Williams, is a very convivial event, he looks up and says: ‘This is the first interview I’ve done since I left the BBC, and now I kind of know what I am, which is a writer. For years, it was really difficult. I didn’t see any dishonesty in it at all; I tried to do my job as conscientiously as I could, and, in many ways, I was upset when they said there was no more work for me. But I never really thought of myself as a writer. I thought of myself as a BBC man first and… it says nothing about the books, really.’This last part may be disingenuous. Williams joined the BBC from Oxford as a general trainee and produced programmes (latterly as editor of Bookmark and Omnibus) for 32 years. In his spare time – though he is concerned not to make this sound too casual, insisting that it was more like having a family than some hobby in a shed – he produced a dozen novels, half-a-dozen plays and assorted other writings.His new novel, Hatchett and Lycett ( Viking £10.99, pp 422 ), is the first on which he has worked full time, which means between eight and 10 hours a day for more than two years, through ‘four or five drafts’. To have produced such funny, charming books as The Wimbledon Poisoner or Fortysomething on the side, as it were, is an achievement, so his first full-time novel was bound to be of interest.The first thing to note is that, at 420-odd pages, Hatchett and Lycett is his fattest book by far. It is also the most ambitious, appearing, at moments, to be a murder mystery, wartime love story, adventure yarn and social comedy, yet ultimately aspiring to wriggle free of these genres to say something about what it means to be English.The Hatchett and Lycett of the title are childhood friends, catapulted into conflict with one another by the outbreak of war in 1939 and the need to declare themselves to Norma, the woman each of them loves.Hatchett, as described by Norma, embodies many of what I suspect Williams thinks of as crucial characteristics of Englishness: ‘His cleverness, his cheek, his peculiar mixture of crudeness and delicacy, his respect for authority and his natural insubordination.’ Meanwhile, staff at the grammar schools where all three teach are being murdered like characters in an Agatha Christie novel (Williams is a big Christie fan).Acknowledging the larger ambition of this book, Williams says that one of the starting points was a remark Salman Rushdie made about White Teeth. ‘He said, “It tells us how we got from there to here.” And I thought, “I love the book, Salman, but it doesn’t tell me how I got from there to here.” I’m a white, English, middle-class person and how I got here is a different story, and one I think is worth telling.’English society – and what we are in England – is a thing that completely obsesses me. My generation grew up in the Fifties, totally conditioned by the events of the war, which we don’t understand and have tried to come to terms with all our lives.’Hatchett and Lycett is set slightly beyond his usual territory, in Crotchett Green, a fictional village on the edge of Croydon. But in common with Wimbledon, Crotchett Green is a place where the city begins to fray out into the countryside. Williams is, as usual, content to let the comedy of the place just lie there. He doesn’t play his settings for laughs; he writes about suburbia without any intellectual sneer.’I remember flying in from Sweden a year or so ago, coming over the coast and seeing all these houses, all the way from Southend to Heathrow, realising what a small island this is, how absolutely tiny. And how that invasion of our rural identity, or collision between our rural and urban identity, has made the English psyche. To me, the suburbs are what England is.’I'm obsessed by the idea of literary territory. Years ago, we were decorating the spare-room and I remembered something some novelist had said about his territory being the whole world, and I wrote on the wall, “My territory is a very small area bounded by Tibbet’s Roundabout, South Wimbledon Station, the bottom of West Hill and East Sheen.” All that’s happened in this book is that I’ve broadened that slightly.’Hatchett and Lycett was conceived as the first part of a trilogy, although Williams’s wife suggested he should wait and see how this one is received before launching on others. (He has been successfully married for 32 years to Suzan Harrison, a story editor in television, who, he says, made a handful of observations about this book – after it had been sold – that were so acute that he realised he needed a couple more drafts.)’It’s a total gamble for me, every book. People still know me as that bloke who writes about Wimbledon, and I am naturally perverse, and also I thought I just don’t want to churn this stuff out. I’d be bored. And then you’d be bored.’So he followed the successful Wimbledon trilogy of the early 1990s with a ‘horrid, shocking thriller’ called Stalking Fiona, which was widely disliked. Hatchett and Lycett is more than a return to the form of The Wimbledon Poisoner. It has the big set-pieces, the witty one-liners and deliciously worked-up jokes that detonate pages later. But its range, the way that the jokes ambush you out of the darkness, is better than anything he’s done before.The scene of which he is proudest involves the death of a young boy on an English beach after Dunkirk. The writing is moving without being sentimental, the action shocking but restrained, and it lurches over the page straight into farce. It took him, he says, six months to get from the pathos into the comedy.Over an entertaining and, on his part, erudite lunch, Williams talks at length about different historical readings of the Battle of Britain and the history of atomic fission. All the war events in the book, he is keen to point out, are carefully dated and meticulously researched. And so, although Croydon ’sort of wandered into the book’, it had significant consequences for the plot, because it was the first place in Britain to be bombed. It is a neat conceit, this business of Croydon and its consequences, because such processes are, in a sense, what Hatchett and Lycett is about.Williams quotes an American Indian observation: ‘A very small inaccuracy in truth is like an arrow: if you aim just an inch away from the target, the further the arrow goes from the bow, the wider the discrepancy between arrow and target -and that’s a profound thing to say about history, where one tiny decision can completely distort; I am fascinated by the moment in which people decide to make their lives together, and by those who make the wrong decision.’Personally, I have my fingers crossed for Hatchett and Lycett, because I want to read the next two. Not long ago, Williams wrote a film about George VI and the Queen Mother, and he talks about how fractured is our sense of community now, and how much he regrets its loss: ‘Maybe that’s what the book is about – where the unity of England has gone.’ This regret for a more ordered past comes strangely from a former communist, even one who has ended up as ‘a sort of Orwellian, Cobbett-like radical Tory individualist’.Not least because I think he may be wrong about this community thing – not that it’s lost, but that its loss is such a shame – it will be fascinating to see where this arrow will end up.· Nigel Williams was born in 1948. He is the author of many plays and novels including My Life Closed Twice and The Wimbledon Poisoner.

339