In 1974/5 when I was a busy actor, learning a thousand lines each week, rehearsing the next play in the day time and performing the current one in the early evening then drinking the pubs dry for the rest of the day, the director of those plays was a good friend of the Pinters – Harold Pinter and the actress Vivian Merchant. They would each take it in turns to go to this director’s London flat and pour their hearts out to him. Harold being the clever one would ask lots of questions at dinner – there were other guests when he went – and one evening he asked people in depth whether they washed their hair before they got into the bath tub, washed it as they were in the bath tub or when they got out of the bath tub; if they did happen to wash it in the bath tub he wanted to know if they shampooed it before they introduced soap to the water for their bodies or before the water was soaped or after the water was soaped?

This was Harold Pinter asking the questions; so guests at dinner would answer in depth telling how they avoided the nasty soap till their hair was clean, or whatever they did, and then Harold asked if they rinsed their hair again under the tap or in the wash basin when they got out of the bath, just to make sure it was clean, and when they answered they hoped they got the answers right for this was, indeed, Harold Pinter – not yet Sir but Harold Pinter all the same; blessed or cursed with that incredible talent.

Harold looked out of the window: “Bolsover” he said “I like the name

of that street – Bolsover” – he used the name of that street, Bolsover Street, in his next play “No Man”s Land’ which Ralph Richardson and John Geilgud starred in at The National Theatre.

The director I was working with had an old boy friend and he worked

at the National Theatre at the time. The director had a bald head and Harold’s interest in whether Bill, his name was Willard but everybody called him Bill, shampooed his bald pate before or after his bath was non-existent.

“What do you do Harold?” said Bill.

“When?” Said Harold.

“Do you shampoo before you get in or when you get out?”

“I shower” said Harold.

At the time Harold was enamored with an aristocrat called Antonia Fraser, don’t cha know; the wife of Sir Whatshisname Fraser a high placed tory so she was, in fact, Lady Antonia Fraser who wrote big bastard biographies of Oliver Cromwell and Mary Queen of Scots; Harold, a cockney from the east end and a socialist, must have had some misgivings about taking a member of the ruling class as a lover – a class that was betrayed by her plumy accent.

“Harold is besotted by her” Vivian would tell Bill on the nights when it was her turn to go to the flat in the street with the strange sounding name and Bill would give her another gin and tonic as she told him everything that was driving her to distraction and, eventually, an early death.