The reason we love Noises Off, he avers, is to do with the feeling we all have that things might go wrong at any moment. \u201cBut we keep that [feeling] below the level of consciousness,\u201d says Frayn. \u201cSo it can be nice to watch other people struggling to keep chaos at bay.\u201d<\/p>\n
I ask him which work he\u2019d most like to be remembered for, expecting him to pick Noises Off, or Copenhagen, or even his Whitbread Prize-winning novel Spies (2002). But without hesitation, he plumps instead for My Father\u2019s Fortune (2010), a moving account of his wartime childhood in Surrey, full of memories of his mother and asbestos-salesman father, Vi and Tom.<\/p>\n
He relives one of the most memorable incidents in the book: the night one of the first doodlebug bombs came directly overhead then exploded near their house. \u201cIt brought down the ceiling, and blew in all the windows. None of us were injured but it killed everyone in the house beyond,\u201d he says. \u201cIt must have been awful for my parents, dealing with the mess, but being children it was quite fun \u2013 lots of twisted window-lead to melt and make things out of.\u201d<\/p>\n
A year later, in 1945, tragedy stuck when his mother died of a heart attack; he was just 12. Some of the most poignant lines he has ever written concern the way he and his sister, Jill, were kept away from the funeral, and how his mother was never mentioned again. (His father remarried in 1949, and died in 1970):<\/p>\n
We had had a name for her when she was alive, of course. We had called her what most English children call their mothers. Somehow, though, we could no longer say the word. I\u2019m not sure I can even now, even to myself. I\u2019m not sure I can write it down \u2026 Yes. She was Mummy. It was Mummy who had died. There \u2013 done. For the first time in sixty-four years\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
Did brushing so much under the carpet cause anger? \u201cNo. I think children then accepted that a lot of things in life were closed to them, that they were to be disciplined in lots of ways,\u201d he replies. \u201cIt didn\u2019t occur to one to ever challenge it, to say \u2018Why can\u2019t I go to the funeral?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n