Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook - Twentieth Anniversary Edition by Antony Sher

and vegetables, calls up to them. One appears to be shaking her
head, the other beckoning with her hands. The hawker is nonplussed.
Dad acts this last bit out and then starts to cry with laughter, tries to carry
on speaking but his voice is a helpless falsetto. The more he tries the
more we laugh. He takes off his heavy black glasses - his face is softer,
gentler - and wipes his eyes with the side of his hand. It is an image
of him I will always remember.

Saturday 24 December
    Hermanus grew up a resort for the British officials when South Africa
was still a colony. Hence it's like Frinton-on-Sea; hence Mum loves it
and I hate it. It's hardly like being in South Africa at all. Cute bungalows
with trimmed lawns. Little gift shops selling sachets of pot pourri.
    Even the weather is English - grey and windy. I sit on the lawn in
swimming trunks, clutching a bottle of sun oil, grimly waiting for snatches
of sunlight, sulking that we've come here.
    Refuge in Peter Hall's Diaries. Why have people been so rude about
this book? It seems to me full of honesty and wit. Makes me warm to the
man whom I never saw once (never mind met) in my seven months at the
National. The portrait of Ralph Richardson is beautiful.
    Another entry (5 October 1979) about John Wood's Richard III: `He's
the first actor since 1944 to have challenged Olivier in the part on his
own ground. He hasn't unseated him yet, but he might next time.' Wood
tells Hall he feels a complete failure and later Hall confides to his tape
recorder, `The trouble with John is that he has a too acutely developed
sense of history. He looks forward a hundred years and wants to see his
Richard III written there.'
    Have to stop reading. Too close for comfort.
    In the late afternoon the sun finally comes out and we go for a swim in
Fick's Pool. You climb down steeply into a gorge. Descending shelves of
rock and sand with cascading plants giving it a Babylonian feel. People
stand along the top among trees looking down as if into an arena. At the
bottom there is a tidal pool flushed by waves breaking over the sea wall.
    Randall, Joel and I swim over to a patch of sunlight on the water - the
only part the late afternoon sun can reach. This is one of the happiest
times of the holiday. A feeling of warmth and pride in our brotherhood.
We must look rather handsome, us three, with dark wet hair, glowing with
suntans, gleaming in the water.
    Mum and Dad sit high on the steep bank, perched like two old birds
looking down on their young - Dad no doubt wondering, `Which one is
that?'
Christmas Day
    Car-loads of family arrive from Cape Town. The adults slip effortlessly
into their roles and relationships. Dad and Joel are best at making the
braai, Randall best at mixing the drinks, Mum best at nagging the men
about drinking too much, Verne and Yvette make salads, Ashley sprawls and chats to anyone passing. It's like they've played the scene a million
times in a long running comedy. The jokes are delightful, the timing
second nature, the rapport effortless, but complacency threatens to settle.

    The children don't enjoy it half so much. They lounge around under
a tree, bored, limbs just sprawled any old how, like puppets tipped out of
a toy box.
    In the middle of all this a little old Coloured man arrives. The gardener
come to water the plants despite the fact that it rained heavily during the
night. Actually, he's come for his Christmas box. He is very drunk, and
stands with the hose drooping, watering his shoes. Everyone ignores him;
no Christmas box offered, he staggers away.
    In the evening we drive into town. In the dark this place loses its
Englishness and looks like something out of Mid-West America in the
Fifties (I'm thinking of Last Picture Show). There is only one shop open,
Princess Cafe, a little oasis of glaring neon on the main street, selling
everything from vegetables to videos and doing a roaring trade in computer
games as well.