The Ploughman’s Lunch Read online

  Ian McEwan

  METHUEN

  LONDON • 1985

  ©1985 by Ian McEwan

  First published in Great Britain in 1985 as a Methuen Paperback original by Methuen London Ltd, 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

  The fragment of poem in Scene 32 is by Christopher Reid.

  Printed in Great Britain

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  McEwan, Ian

  The ploughman’s lunch.

  I. Title

  791.4372 PN1997

  ISBN 0-413-58420-8

  CAUTION

  All rights whatsoever in this screenplay are strictly reserved and application for performance etc, should be made to Deborah Rogers Ltd, 49 Blenheim Crescent, London W11 2EF. No performance may be given unless a licence has been obtained.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  by Ian McEwan

  THE PLOUGHMAN’S LUNCH

  Production Credits

  THANKS TO

  Christopher Reid (for Edward’s poem)

  Christopher Hitchens

  Francis Wheen

  and

  The Women’s Peace Camp,

  Greenham Common

  INTRODUCTION

  Early in 1981 I had some preliminary conversations with Richard Eyre about the kind of film we wanted to make. For me at any rate, our notions were usefully vague. Our film was to be set in the present and to be somehow ‘about’ the present. We wanted the textures of everyday London—the Underground, Brixton High Street—stylishly done. We hoped Jonathan Pryce would play an important role. I had read and admired F. P. Thompson’s collection of essays, Reading by Candlelight and Milan Kundera’s novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I thought our subject might encompass the uses we make of the past, and the dangers, to an individual as well as to a nation, of living without a sense of history. We had been impressed by Wajda’s film, Man of Iron, especially by the pathetic, sweaty alcoholic at its centre.

  I gave myself a year to research and write the film, a leisurely schedule by film standards. In a twelve year old notebook I came across a reference to an item on Woman’s Hour which described how the pub snack, the ploughman’s lunch, was not an English tradition but an invention of an advertising campaign mounted to persuade people to eat in pubs. The Ploughman’s Lunch became a working title and then, imperceptibly, a controlling metaphor for self-serving fabrications of the past. For many months I thought the film’s action would take place against the background of the Royal Family and the pressmen who follow it about. But by the end of the summer and the Royal Wedding, I was wearying and finding it difficult to maintain a keen anthropological interest in the subject.

  About this time I asked to spend a day watching the television news being made and through a benign error found myself in the BBC radio news room. The BBC news, at least the solemn Radio Three and Four versions, is about the closest we have to an official version of events. It carries great authority. And yet the news room itself, with its dusty spider plants and well-established rituals, resembled the cosy staff room of an old grammar school; the early morning news briefings were like school assemblies, wearily conducted, dutifully attended. It seemed to me a perfect setting.

  To a generation the Suez crisis of 1956 appeared to speed the collapse of the idea—by that time an illusion anyway—of Britain as a world power. The government of the day had acted deceitfully while trying to appear virtuous. Our subservient role to the Americans was dramatised, and the crisis initiated a long period of national introspection. I had my own reasons for wanting to write about Suez. I was eight years old at the time of the invasion and living in Libya where my father was an officer in the British Army. Anti-British feeling was naturally strong among the Libyans and Army families were herded into armed camps for protection. My mother happened to be in England at the time, and for some weeks I lived in a tent with other children not so very far from a machine-gun nest. My father was a remote, organising figure with a service revolver strapped around his waist. Suddenly everyday routines belonged to a distant past and I understood for the first time that political events were real and affected people’s lives—they were not just stories in the papers that grown-ups read.

  In 1981, with the liberal consensus and political idealism generally in retreat, it seemed plausible to imagine how an ambitious writer might set out to rewrite the Crisis in terms of the steely pragmatism being promoted now by the government of Mrs Thatcher. The past would be re-interpreted while the amateur historian unconsciously acted out in his private life a sequence of betrayals and deceits which would parallel the events he was distorting in his history.

  I watched television commercials being made and attended the Labour and Conservative Party Conferences. By this time it was clear that the main characters of The Ploughman’s Lunch were all involved professionally in shaping our concepts of ourselves as citizens and as a nation. These principal characters were an editor, a journalist, a television researcher, a commercials director and a historian.

  By the time I gave Richard Eyre the first draft of the script in March 1982 the Falklands affair was beginning to unfold. The Fleet set sail while we were still tinkering with our second draft. The Falklands War was not, of course, a re-run of the Suez crisis. The Egyptians had a legitimate claim on the canal that runs through their territory, while the Argentinians had little more than an emotional claim on the Falkland Islands. However, the connections between the two events were striking. A large task force was to be despatched and lives were to be risked to regain territory which successive British governments had been trying quietly to unload on the Argentinians. The Islanders themselves had consistently been denied full British citizenship. It was not clear then, and it is even less clear now, that the Government conducted negotiations in good faith to avoid armed conflict. The eruption of jingoism, the thunderous Churchillian rhetoric which was so readily available to politicians of all persuasions showed that this was less a matter of real territorial ambition, or a desire to protect ‘our own’; but, like Suez, more an affair of the heart, of who we thought we were, who we wanted to be.

  The Falklands War gave James Penfield a clearer motive for wanting to re-write Suez. At last we were acting independently of the Americans, we had ‘found ourselves’ and it was time to undo the embarrassment and breast-beating that attached itself to 1956. I made small adjustments to the script to keep the Falklands quietly and steadily in the background. There were some odd surprises. In the first draft a reference is made to the resignation of an imaginary Foreign Secretary. By the second draft, a real Foreign Secretary had resigned. In the first draft the historian, Ann Barrington, mentions how her late husband fought to preserve the BBC’s independence during the Suez crisis. By the time I was writing a second draft the BBC was under attack once more and she is able to comment that ‘he would be useful to them now’.

  More important changes, however, came at the instigation of the director. When Richard Eyre asked to know more about James Penfield’s background, I added the visit home, his refusals over the phone to return to his mother’s deathbed, his denial in front of Susan, the girl he is pursuing, that his parents are alive and the funeral scene at the end when Penfield glances at his watch. While government Ministers responded painstakingly to the demands of the script that they deliver in their speeches ‘invocations of nationhood and historical mission’, it was Richard who gave the Conference scenes their narrative as well as visual coherence. In many other ways he suggested or prompted changes, not in order to put his own directorial stamp on the material, but, generously, to enable me to articulate more clearly what was already there.

  In The Ploughman’s Lunch most of the chara
cters are unpleasant—though I do like to think they have a certain residual charm. They start out bad, and get worse. Among those whose job it is to pretend to know what the cinema-going public wants, there is a widespread assumption that audiences must have characters with whom they can ‘identify’. Serious novelists and playwrights may find this insistence quaint; moral values can be as easily, if not more plausibly, embodied in a narrative structure as in any right-thinking or suddenly reformed character. This nursery tale aesthetic (‘but where’s the good guy?’) pervades mainstream cinema investment and it has been left to film makers working with small budgets raised with extraordinary difficulty to demonstrate over and over again that there is a sophisticated and commercially significant cinema audience looking for more than mere escape.

  During the editing of the film, a number of changes were made to the order of the scenes. What appears to be a satisfactory narrative sequence in script form often needs rethinking once the scenes are shot. I have kept to our final edited version here. In a number of places I have retained lines or parts of lines that were lost during filming or editing, but mostly I have followed the post-production script.

  The name of Channel Four appears nowhere in the credits and it therefore seems right to end by saying that it provided a substantial part of the budget. Without this participation it is unlikely that we could have made the film.

  Ian McEwan

  Oxford 1985

  THE

  PLOUGHMAN’S

  LUNCH

  1. Interior. BBC radio newsroom. Late morning.

  We are in close as a story arrives on a press service teleprinter. A hand tears away the sheet. The camera tracks as we follow the story. It passes through the copytaster’s hands and is passed on down the room to the summaries desk.

  This is a time of steady activity. Journalists move about the room to consult. Others are writing in longhand, and several are dictating copy to typists who are all women. One or two people—newsreaders—sit about doing nothing. Much movement of paper.

  Over the sound of typewriters and the murmur of dictating voices we hear a woman’s voice over the PA announce, ‘The Leader of the Opposition on five’. A few journalists pick up headsets, but they do not stop writing. We establish the atmosphere—laconic but efficient, and a little down-at-heel.

  At the summaries desk we find James Penfield. He stands to the side of and a little behind a seated secretary, dictating in a laconic deadpan voice from a sheet of scrawled longhand.

  JAMES. Between fifty and sixty scrap metal workers are . . .

  The phone rings. James snatches it up and answers without breaking stride.

  Hello. Newsroom.

  The secretary waits, her face totally inexpressive.

  Who? Paul Dean? He doesn’t work here anymore.

  ANOTHER JOURNALIST (calling over his shoulder as he passes). Went to IRN.

  JAMES. No. No. Sorry. Try IRN.

  He drops the receiver and continues. The secretary reactivates.

  . . . reported to have landed illegally on the island of South Georgia in the South Atlantic. The Foreign Office reacted sceptically to reports that the Argentine Government was planning . . .

  2. Interior. Newsroom. Late morning.

  James and a newsreader (one of those we saw earlier doing nothing) stand together by the photocopier. Walking with controlled haste and carrying the news sheets, they head towards the studio. A clock behind them shows two minutes to twelve.

  3. Interior. Studio. Late morning.

  James and the newsreader sit at a table in the studio, fairly close together. The newsreader settles himself behind the microphone. James sits back, professionally bored, rolling a stub of a pencil between his fingers.

  Through a large loudspeaker we hear a Radio 4 programme winding up. Theme music.

  The newsreader has a plummy, authoritative voice and is a year or two younger than James. He stares down at his news sheet.

  From the Control Room a woman announces ‘One minute’.

  JAMES. How’s Mary?

  NEWSREADER (stung, then recovering). Oh, she’s well. Jolly well. Thanks. Very well indeed.

  From the Studio Controller’s point of view we see the Newsroom behind James and the newsreader, who chat soundlessly.

  WOMAN’S VOICE. Before the news at twelve o’clock, there’s just time to tell you about Woman’s Hour this afternoon. Commander Freddy Bracknell will be talking about his four years as a German POW in Stalag Three, and mountaineer John Clayton will be reliving the thrills and perils of Everest. Also, Polly Morrell will be finding out from the historian Professor John Gerty how the governments of Eastern Europe distort their recent past in history books to suit their present policies and allegiances. That’s Freddy Bracknell, John Clayton and John Gerty, all on Woman’s Hour just after two o’clock this afternoon.

  The six pips. The sweep hand of the clock. The red light.

  NEWSREADER. BBC News at twelve o’clock. There is cautious optimism in Brussels that a formula may be reached to break—

  4. Exterior. Brixton. Late afternoon.

  James hurries home through the din of rush hour Brixton.

  5. Interior. James’s flat. Late afternoon.

  James’s flat is one floor of a large Victorian house. Two decent-sized rooms knocked together make a very large bedsitting room. Tiny kitchen and bathroom off. Bare boards, junk furniture, but elegant. Heavy stereo stack, a lot of records, a lot of paperbacks.

  In high spirits, James prepares to go out. He chooses a shirt, begins to undress.

  The TV is on.

  6. Interior. James’s flat. Night.

  An hour later. James is dressed to go out. The big room is now in darkness except for a light by James’s armchair. He is talking on the phone to his friend Jeremy Hancock.

  JAMES. C’mon, you promised . . . tell her you’ve got to finish a piece . . . I know . . . I know, but it’s my big night . . . yes she’s going to be there . . . C’mon! All I want you to do is introduce me to her. And remember, build me up . . . good man.

  7. Interior. Publishing house. Night.

  A high-ceilinged room in a publishing house, Bloomsbury. A launch party. About forty guests. Waiters take round trays with glasses of wine. By some large double doors is a display of school textbooks. Most prominently featured is the book being launched today—Goldbooks Schools Series No. 5, The Cold War, edited by Professor J. Gerty.

  James is led by a Personal Assistant through the crowd to meet Gold, who is surrounded by attentive young men.

  GOLD. . . . took him by the elbow, steered him into a quiet corner and said, ‘Where do you think you are, young man? Fabers?’

  From the circle polite laughter. Gold extends his hand towards James.

  Glad you could come.

  PERSONAL ASSISTANT. James Penfield.

  GOLD. Good, good. Now is someone getting you a drink?

  PERSONAL ASSISTANT. Wrote the Berlin Airlift chapter.

  Job done, PA fades.

  GOLD. I know, I know! Gentlemen, let me introduce you to one of our most talented contributors to The Cold War. James Penfield. He wrote the opening chapter, on ‘The Berlin Airlift.’ One of the best chapters in the book.

  JAMES. Hello.

  GOLD. I won’t introduce you all by name. Basically James, this is our UK sales team. What was I saying? Yes, these graduate trainees . . .

  Twenty minutes later.

  Jeremy has just come in and is surveying the room from the doorway. He takes a drink from a tray, notices James across the room and smiles ruefully.

  Jeremy Hancock is a journalist, same age as James, good-looking and well-dressed. A faintly corrupt look about him, despite this. He is intelligent and intensely self-regarding.

  James makes his way through the crowd towards Jeremy. They stand in the doorway—a position which affords them a good view of the guests in the room and of those guests who are still arriving by way of a grand and ornate stairway.

  JERE
MY. My dear James.

  With mock solemnity, he kisses James on the cheek.

  JAMES. Not here.

  JEREMY. To the airlift.

  JAMES. The airlift.

  JEREMY. Any sign of the goddess Barrington?

  JAMES. Not yet. Do you know any of these people?

  JEREMY. One or two. A grey lot. Some social democrats. Some diligent anti-communists. A political section man from the US Embassy. And this exquisite Californian wine, courtesy of the CIA.

  JAMES. Nonsense.

  They look across the room at Gold being listened to.

  JEREMY. By the way, I hear that your Mr Gold is about to become very rich. I hope you told him that most of the ideas in your Berlin airlift chapter came from me.

  JAMES. Fuck off.

  SUSAN (off). So it’s all worked out perfectly . . .

  JAMES. That’s her.

  The two men go to the head of the stairs to watch Susan come up.

  SUSAN. She gets the house, he gets the cars. And the baby is still in Switzerland with the au pair.

  Susan Barrington is in her late twenties. Flamboyant, effortlessly confident, she inhabits that special world—with its different rules—of the truly ambitious. James’s fascination owes as much to the certainties of her class as to her looks.

  An attentive young man accompanies her up the stairs.

  Jeremy makes a sound. Susan glances up.

  SUSAN. Jeremy!

  She waves and her elbow catches a tray of champagne being carried downstairs. Glasses fall about her feet. While apologising, Susan does not take her eyes off Jeremy.

  SUSAN. How stupid! I am sorry.

  The butler and the young man drop to the ground and set about picking up the glasses. Susan regards them for a moment, then steps round them and hurries up the stairs.

  Jeremy and Susan go into a clinch, with kisses. James stands a few feet off.