This autumn began with me feeling rather terrified. I had not been on a plane for 10 years and now I was going to have to get on one. I have been a nervous flyer since my adolescence, when a friend of the family died in an air crash. Over the years I have gone to great lengths to avoid flying whenever possible, until, after a particularly bumpy flight back from Boston in 1999, I just stopped. But in the late summer my movie Glorious 39 was selected for the Toronto Film Festival and I was told I had to be there to introduce it. If I wanted my film to have a good world premiere, I had to fly the Atlantic.
For the past two decades whenever I’ve needed to go to a film festival, like Berlin or Venice, I’ve gone by train. The rest of the British film industry hop on a plane and get there in two hours and I hobble on after them, taking 24 hours to arrive. Unfortunately, there is no other way to get to Toronto (a cargo boat was investigated but it would have taken two weeks). I have to confront my fear.
Getting me to the airport is made as painless as possible; I am accompanied by two of the stars of the film, Bill Nighy and Romola Garai, who are flying with me. The airline staff greet me almost tenderly: “We understand you are an infrequent flyer,” they say in hushed tones. Somehow I manage to get on the plane.
The take-off is almost as terrifying as it has always been but not quite. I grip my seat tightly in an attempt to steady the plane all on my own, trying to transform it into an old bus trundling up the motorway. Before the flight I had talked to more and more people about flying and was startled to discover how many owned up to being nervous flyers. There seemed to be an awful lot of fear swishing around the skies.
To stand a chance of getting on a plane at all, I had been persuaded to try hypnosis. I am a natural sceptic and felt it was extremely unlikely that it would make any difference but I was willing to try anything. As it is for many people, my image of hypnosis is derived from stage acts where people crawl around on all fours squealing, having been persuaded they are now piglets, so I approach the hypnotherapist’s house with some trepidation. He is a man in late middle-age, immaculately dressed like a solicitor from my 1960s childhood.
A friend of mine had told me that when he tried hypnosis to stop smoking, he had the extraordinary sensation of swimming through liquid concrete while he was in a trance. When he left the session he couldn’t stop himself from jabbering to complete strangers in the street for many hours afterwards. He never touched a cigarette again. I am, therefore, anticipating a dramatic hallucinatory experience. Instead I find myself in a gentle hazy world, like the state between waking and sleeping. I am not convinced I have allowed myself to go very deep into a trance but I still find myself visiting a series of intense landscapes. It is like experiencing an 8mm film of one’s childhood, various memories lapping gently, and yet there are no startling revelations that could throw light on my phobia.
There is a surprise, however, waiting for me after I come out of the trance. As I am leaving, the hypnotherapist asks if I am related to the Poliakoffs who had built railways in tsarist Russia. When I say I am, he proceeds to tell me how his wife’s family had been befriended by some Poliakoffs in Biarritz in the 1930s. During the war these relations of mine had been rounded up and sent to their death in the camps. After the war, their villa was inherited by an American branch of the family who decided to allow it to become a ruin, so that it would serve as a reminder that could not possibly be ignored of what had happened to the family. For more than 50 years it remained an accusatory decaying wreck in the middle of Biarritz.
Until meeting the hypnotherapist I had no knowledge of this story – my parents had never mentioned it – and I leave the first session absolutely electrified. In subsequent sessions I am taught self-hypnosis and, gradually, the feeling of dread about boarding the plane begins to lessen.
During the flight I am rather chaotic in adopting the various strategies I had been given but I am on a plane flying the Atlantic, something I had never thought I would be able to do again.
Although I make no attempt at self-hypnosis while in Toronto, all film festivals have a hallucinatory, dream-like feel. You meet a lot of different people for a few minutes in tiny press rooms, and then suddenly you’re walking down a red carpet into a vast cinema and told to address a waiting audience of 1,500 people. Fortunately, the Toronto audience embraces Glorious 39, a thriller set on the eve of the second world war which reveals a conspiracy by the political elite to do a secret deal with Hitler. A passion for cinema is almost palpable at the festival and in the past one would have felt humbled by this in comparison with what happens in Britain. But in recent years the London Film Festival has really grown and is now incredibly well attended. When Glorious 39 had its European premiere in London last month, Leicester Square was packed and it felt as if the whole city were bubbling with an interest in film. Yet the British cinema faces a turbulent future. Our film industry is always in a fragile state, buffeted by changes in the tax system and the American market blowing hot and cold. Somehow it always bobs back. This time, though, the attitude of an incoming Conservative government, if that is what is going to happen, will be crucial.
On my return from Toronto, I sit at my desk and start work on a new project. It is the usual writer’s day, a great deal of staring into space and a secret longing for some massive distraction. This is not long in coming: a police helicopter hangs directly above the house and I feel I have to investigate. It is the day of Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time, and since I live quite near Television Centre I follow the helicopter until I reach the small but vociferous demonstration at its gates. I am deeply uneasy about the decision to allow the British National Party on Question Time. When I watch the broadcast I am even more troubled. Instead of a range of subjects, the entire show swirled around one individual. Here was a freak edition of Question Time that achieved a thoroughly freakish audience of eight million. Did they tune in merely hoping to see a dramatic television confrontation or were they disturbingly interested in what Nick Griffin had to say? Nobody knows yet and we will only find out at the general election.
The activities of the extreme right are much on my mind at the moment and not just because of the movie. Every weekend I go to visit an old lady who is one of the last connections with my long dead parents. Linda arrived here after the war from Austria and worked first as my parents’ cleaner, then their nanny and, finally, just became their close friend. We always sit and talk in her small bedroom in the old people’s home she now lives in, with Songs of Praise often playing in the background. The past and present constantly flicker together in her conversation, overlapping and entwining.
She is interested in Glorious 39 because she was imprisoned by the Nazis as a young woman. She had handed little pieces of bread to some starving Russian prisoners-of-war as they were marched through her village and was instantly arrested. Linda’s lover was disappeared to a concentration camp and she never saw him again. History explodes into life as she relives her youth and all the real adversity she had to overcome.
Listening to her, my pathetic anxiety about flying is put into sharp perspective and I realise that, as well as the hypnosis, it is Linda who got me on the plane.
Stephen Poliakoff’s ‘Glorious 39’ opens in London cinemas from November 20 and nationwide from November 27
