By Eva
It is October 2021, I am in Spain, and I am troubled.
The weather is lovely, but I have a very important article to finish on newly discovered ancient water sources in Clerkenwell, London, and I don’t have everything I need.
An external drive has lost its ability to connect with my computer, it’s a busy Miguel de Cervantes week in Alcalá de Henares, and a Waitrose bag with some USB sticks in it was stolen from me on a bus from Madrid. Those sticks had my latest work on them. It’s no joke.
Also in the bag was a tin of Coke, a half-eaten tuna sandwich, and a rather-too-heavy ‘Rough’ guide to Spain. And two small Nokia-type phones (don’t ask). There was someone in an Oscar Wilde play who left a baby in a bag in a station waiting room, wasn’t there? Hmm… Police in Madrid know about this.
The other day, in the Cervantes Birthplace Museum on the Calle Mayor, my Pembrokeshire ‘Two Red Dogs’ back-back fell too suddenly from my shoulder with a thud on the courtyard floor. It had my computer in it. And as I tried to switch it on this morning the thought crossed my mind, well what would Cervantes have done with a computer? He only had one hand working after the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Luckily it was the left hand. All he needed was his right hand, a quill pen and he was away.
My father, Kenneth Griffith – the subject of this article – born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire a hundred years ago on 12th October this year, and an actor-friend, not unfamiliar with how a world can be unkind to Quixote-like adventurers, took a dim view of the modern age – the internet – and its belongings. I remember them sighing about it in corners, never quite revealing the facts they knew. Today I understand where they were coming from and wish they’d told me all about it.
It’s October 2021, I am in Spain, and another day I awoke to the sound of bells from a little church just across the way. I rushed to get dressed and crossed the road to mass at the church of Carmelite nuns there. It was the 7th of October, a special day for the rosary, and I am moved to hear singing beyond the grille and be among people counting beads and hoping for the best. We are coming up for Spain Day, also on the twelfth, and I knew I had to be here – although I have no idea of Daddy’s opinion of Christopher Columbus. During the war, on his twenty-first or twenty-second birthday – I think – a bomb descended on Tenby (there weren’t many), obliterating my father’s birthplace room at back of the house where he was born. Luckily for me he wasn’t in the house at the time, but other people may have felt differently over the years. He was an extraordinary person.
It is October, I am in Spain, and I am conscious that some people don’t like me going to church. I see the empty foil packets of contraceptive pills on the street, and I hear the young women think: “Don’t you know we are subjugated by these places, these people?” Spain has changed a lot since Franco. We live in an imperfect world. What is for sure is that ‘subjugation’ is not a word in my language of Hope. Freedom is – somewhere in my head. And that is Daddy’s fault. And I can see him smile at me – with one side of his mouth at least. It could have been both sides if I had been an ‘activist’. My father was an actor and controversial filmmaker who died in 2006. Whenever the BBC would introduce one of his films they would make it clear that his was a: “personal view”. While he lived, and with his dying breath, he would love those who stood up, made a fuss about their life, their culture, and would not give up until someone heard what needed to be said. He was cross when I became a Catholic, not because he had any problem with me having a faith – far from it. But because he said: “You will never be able to fight for those people again.” By which he meant: “I stand up for people who are not like me. I can do this because I have a background in Methodist Wales, far removed from those I support, and can stand up for people who are not like me with a distance between us, so people listen, because I have no vested interest.” It’s like assessing a work of art, not close-up, but from several steps back so you can take in the composition properly. And then stepping closer to see the brush strokes and feel the passion of the thing. And take on the length and breadth of the medium. And, in a sense, become it, but never be wholly it. Because that wouldn’t be helpful.
“Well done, God!” as Turner said when he saw a stormy sky over pitching waves and so painted it. Daddy liked William Turner.
I hear a squeak of someone’s shoe underfoot, and oddly it sounds like a cuckoo. Well, I thought it was somebody’s shoe. It could have been somebody’s communication device – you know – they make all kinds of sounds. I am reminded of my father’s cuckoo clock in his dining room which would sound at the oddest of times. We wondered why he kept it, as it used to wrong-foot him every time. It was supposed to chime on the hour, as is traditional, but it went peculiar after a while and fired off at will. We, the family, would be relieved to hear it, just as he got his most impassioned about the things he cared about (“Cuckoo! Cuckoo!”) which we didn’t necessarily understand or care about too. It broke a Turneresque mood which was received gratefully. Eventually the mechanism broke, and the birdsong was no more, but he kept the clock on his wall. Dying from Alzheimer’s (curse it), the family moved him into the basement dining room for easier access to arrangements without too much need of a wheelchair. It was then Daddy told me that Jesus stood in corner of the room underneath the cuckoo clock spot. Daddy had been very cross with Jesus because of the then Pope’s attitude to same-sex relationships. I didn’t try to defend the then Pope (we have a different Pope now). According to Daddy, neither did Jesus. Strangely, however, I could imagine Christ standing under that clock. It would have been an appropriate place to be while Daddy struggled with Death.
Jesus: “Don’t get too serious, Ken. People like it when you are funny – when you tell funny stories. Do you know what Kenneth? I think I will stand in the cuckoo clock’s corner. Now tell me about the Pope.”
When an actor, my father leaned towards comedy. A type of straight man for Peter Sellers – but always funny himself – he was in films like I’m All Right Jack and, most appositely, before Sellers was huge, Only Two Can Play. Much later, he performed a cameo role in the much-loved comedy-romance, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and followed that with another Hugh Grant film, The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill And Came Down A Mountain. Other people remember, fondly, the parts he played in the 1970s-80s Euan Lloyd films: The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves and Who Dares Wins.
Whatever he did he would tremble with the passion of it. Daddy always trembled. Nobody knew why. He didn’t drink. He didn’t have Parkinson’s. It was just part of him. Trying to get it right. Doing his best. And shaking, preacher-like, with the effort.
A story Daddy told about this, concerned a meeting he had with the Revolutionary Committee in Iran – just after the Revolution there – when he was looking to make a film about the Magi, or Three Wise Men of Jesus’ fame. They were believed to have come from the Iran/Persia area. On my father’s passing, a journalist confirmed to me in an email (I precis wildly) that Daddy flew into Tehran around about the time when everyone else was flying out. Some sub-committee of the Revolutionary one agreed to meet with Daddy concerning his wish to make a documentary film in their hard-won territory. Knowing he lived in England, they proffered him tea. Daddy, the Welshman, accepted. Trembling, as usual, he recognised his mistake when he noticed these men take in the nervous-sounding clink-clink of cup-on-near-saucer as he brought the tea to his lips. The group visibly curdled before him, hearing something sounding like fear, and they responded, quickly, that as much as Daddy wanted to make a film about the Child Isa in Iran (Jesus is regarded as a prophet in Islam, going by this ‘Isa’), and as much good as such a film might be for the ungodly outside their country, they didn’t feel he should do this at this time.
It’s now the 9th October, the day they celebrate Cervantes’ baptism here. And as I am given to thinking about water these days – because the planet is in trouble and the subject of water is a primary one for those who care about the world – I am put in mind of a visit to the River Jordan undertaken with my father in Israel. This was when he was forced re-think how to approach the Three Wise Men film, turning it (in fact) into a life of Jesus. We were accompanied by a military gentleman. At this time, the site where Jesus was said to be baptised by John the Baptist, was surrounded with barbed wire, as far as it could be when the location involved a river. You didn’t have to look for long to see evidence of previous pilgrims – small glass water bottles lay on top of the sand in the desert-like territory, abandoned, I imagined, in fear of life-threatening danger. I don’t know how it is now. I just remember the sand, the glass, the barbed wire, and something glinting on the bank of the river on the other side. “What is that?” Daddy asked our guide. “If we are lucky,” the gentleman said, “it’s the army looking at us through their binoculars. If we are unlucky, it’s their bayonets glistening in the sun.” This was everything my mother never wanted for me, but Daddy wanted it. I also remember a reggae song called ‘Living on the Front Line’ being a popular one played on the radio channels in our car. I’d hear it again and again travelling from possible filming venue to possible filming venue. I liked it. And recognised the lyrics’ value in this beautiful if troubled country.
Daddy was tremendously pro-Israel, believing that after the Holocaust, the Jewish people needed a homeland. Being Daddy, he would talk to anyone about it. I was sixteen, very earnest, and happy to be visiting the sites that meant so much to me for that film. We took an evening walk down the Via Dolorosa – the site of Jesus’s final walk with his cross – in Jerusalem. It was then a place where the Palestinian community sold interesting things in the many cave-like shops. Daddy struck up a conversation with Islamic young men selling fabrics who, on hearing his opinions expressed in no uncertain terms, ushered us further in to the shop. They got a tape-recorder out. I remember thinking “Ah, there we are, then, I am going to die. It was a nice life. Sorry I didn’t experience much, have children and all, but there we are.” I imagined the guns coming out, being hustled into a car, and a summary execution in some Jordan-like wasteland. This didn’t happen. My father repeated what he had said into the tape recorder with his best Shakespearean theatre actor annunciation. The young men looked serious but quietly appreciative, listening to what Daddy said.
And then, when all was done, they let us go. I mean they saw us to the mouth of the cave and waved us goodbye.
These are just random memories. There is much more I could say. But perhaps it should wait for the long-promised book: Dr. Griffith and the Rabble-rousers as it has always been called – in my head. About me, Daddy, and anyone I met – mostly men – mostly from the entertainment industry – who made the kind of fuss nobody makes these days. There are different kinds of fuss to be made today.
If anyone knows of anyone who could supply an advance for such a book, please tell me. I have a few trips around Europe to pay for, you see…
My computer is still working. And everything is doable. The hotel where I have been staying has found me a room every day while I have been waiting for the authorities to help with my losses. But today is the second day of the Mercado Cervantino de Alcalá de Henares, I don’t have Spanish really, and I sense I may be dreaming an ‘Impossible Dream’ when it comes to staying here for the twelfth. But I remain positive.
Always remembering the cuckoo clock, Quixote-like, I may be less of an idealist and more of an activist than I think. In a few weeks’ time, I hope, I will have journeyed, suitcase rolled along unrelenting cobbles, to the south, being me (because I can only be me) and learning as I go. For I am using the excuse of the water sources to expand my knowledge, so I can communicate about the subject, urgent and essential as it is, in the context of today’s spiritual and environmental issues – always with my entertainment roots close by my side. I’d like to go to the Glasgow conference, to interview people and learn some more about water and the environment. But I am wary of the Scottish cold, warm as the people are, and because my knees hurt from a torn meniscus (I’ve been told) and too much walking. But I keep walking. I will keep going, as far as I am able, taking what looks like the best path.
Here are the words on my father’s gravestone from a favourite poem of his by Robert Frost. He used a phrase from it as a title for one of his films for India:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And I see my father’s eyes glinting like a bayonet across the water. He is standing not far from a cuckoo clock in the too-hot sunshine. And he says: “Tell us about it then, Eves. Tell us about a Cervantes-time entertainment world – and the World’s Water”.