In 1986 Derek Jarman started filming THE LAST OF ENGLAND, one of his most original and innovative films. It is also his most personal work, with the strongest autobiographical content. Shortly after filming began Derek Jarman started work on this book, which contains diary entries, interviews and notes from the script. Jarman writes of his extraordinary childhood and his kleptomaniac father; the process by which he came to terms with his sexuality; his early work as painter and designer; and finally his debut as a film director. Throughout, however, the reader will follow Jarman at his most fervent, as he writes of the corruption of the cinema industry, of the moral and personal consequences of the AIDS virus, and of the evils of Thatcher’s Britain.
Derek Jarman was born in London in 1942. His career spanned decades and genres, from painter, theatre designer, director, film maker, to poet, writer, campaigner and gardener. His features include Sebastiane (1976), Jubilee (1978), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), Edward II (1991) and Blue (1993). His paintings – for which he was a Turner Prize nominee in 1986 – continue to be exhibited worldwide, and his garden in Dungeness remains a site of pilgrimage to fans and newcomers alike.
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Epub ISBN: 9781473559042
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VINTAGE
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Copyright © 1987, 1997 by The Estate of Derek Jarman
Derek Jarman has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain as The Last of England by Constable, 1987
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
I am grateful to the following for allowing me to use their photographs in this book: Mike Laye, Mark Plested, Isobel Schneyder, Ray Dean, Bridget Holm, Alastair Thain and the Anthony D’Offay Gallery. The photographs on the following pages were taken on location during the filming of The Last of England by Mike Laye and are copyright 1987: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. The pictures here, here, here and here are by Ray Dean.
And thanks to Keith, Shaun, Nick, Mike and Stephen for all your help.
I 
The Last of England started filming in August 1986.
These diary entries, interviews and notes for the script were written during the following weeks.
The book starts with my original ending for the film – The Ship Sails – and takes us on a journey back in time and forward into an uncertain future …
Elizabeth II’s boarding Britannia. Flunkies with greasy ill-fitting wigs hold bunches of freeze-dried flowers, souvenirs of a thousand royal occasions. Lilibet brandishes her riding whip at the photographers.
‘Fucking carrion crows.’
The words are drowned by the mournful siren of the departing ship. The cold March wind blows a patter of freezing hail. The siren wails. ‘Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!’ The Earl Marshal wheels on his charger, glowering under frosted eyebrows. Threadbare dukes and duchesses lugging mangy cabin trunks with fading stickers: Thomas Cook, P and O, Capetown, Sydney, Hong Kong and Singapore, struggle up the gang-plank. A jet screams overhead, Lilibet stumbles and her crown rolls into a thicket of barbed wire. A rocket flashes like lightning through the cold black clouds and explodes in the iron grey waves with a dull thud. A horse bolts and tramples a lady-in-waiting.
‘Northumberland and Leicester, Dorset and Essex, all down Maam.’ Lilibet, eyes blazing, whips the stragglers, kicks the unwilling corgis into the dock.
‘Left, right, left, right,’ barks the Earl Marshal. The ship sails over the horizon with its geriatric cast. Hell-bent for a rendezvous with their assets in Laguna, far in the jammy West where the Imperial sun has not yet set. Leaving the rotting shires to rot.
After they have gone, in the deathly silence a small boy dances on the quay, throwing a last stone for England and St George.
He returns home later.
‘Where yer fucking been Johnny?’
‘No one got killed in that film Mum. It’s a con. Can’t wait to grow up and get into Star Wars.’
The editing of The Last of England is going well. We clocked up 55 minutes of film this afternoon. Angus and I assemble the film as we go. Video editing, unlike film editing, is sequential, you go from A to B. It’s very hard to hop around as each time you recopy the image you lose quality and eventually sync as the time code deteriorates. 55 minutes in two weeks is good going. We start at around ten in the morning and check out at about 5.30; six hours of watching the time code is exhausting and we start to slip like the edits in this simple machinery.
The machines also warm the room, so by tea-time it’s suffocating. We edit about five minutes a day, the watershed was last Friday when we pieced together a disco sequence, cut like a pop promo. I brought it back home in the evening, and showed it to Shaun who up to this moment had been polite but rather indifferent; he lit up and said it gave the work an epic quality.
Music video is the only extension of the cinematic language in this decade, but it has been used for quick effect, and it’s often showy and shallow.
The images in the disco are not arbitrary, although there is an element of chance in the way they rattle along. The cutting is staccato, and aggressive. It would not be possible to cut film this way, although theoretically you might attempt it. 1600 cuts in six minutes. The sequence crashes into the film unexpectedly, the pace is relentless. It should wind the audience. Why do I want to do this?
Now every high street had a disco, people danced in the empty factories and warehouses. There was nothing for them to do, drink was abundant, the music grew louder and louder, it was better that way. Better the young should down cocktails than throw them, it was cheaper to invest in alcohol than jobs, it was an intelligent form of control. Johnny thought when all purpose had been forgotten the world would end this way, with a dance. He slumped back in a corner, drew his knees up to his chin, and watched.
Everyone had gone to bed hours ago.
The sensible ones.
As they slept, he’d passed through all the nine circles.
Now, the music was going to end.
The last song and dance.
Positively.
The last song and dance.
The lights came up, the cockroaches swarmed for cover in the cracks of the cancerous sweaty walls.
Stunned faces dissolved into the ashen dawn.
Johnny staggered to the gents. The last numbed boy moaned, as he was buggered by his mate in the cubicle, his dulled mind barely registering orgasm.
The boy turned, and looked at Johnny with bloodshot eyes.
‘You wan’ doin’ too?’ He spat onto the floor, dropped to his knees, and put Johnny’s limp cock in his mouth. Johnny came as if fulfilling an obligation, evaporating like the last gaseous bead in the warm flat beer, he buttoned up. As he walked back home he passed the weary researcher, picking up The Times with his milk. ‘What new diseases will he invent today?’ thought Johnny.
On the empty dance floor the cleaners make rival plans for their summer holidays. Johnny picks up a discarded paper, ‘Virgin Boss To Clean Up London’.
The young doctor who told me this morning I was a carrier of the AIDS virus was visibly distressed. I smiled and told her not to worry, I had never liked Christmas. I had put on my dark black overcoat I love so much to walk to the hospital. Wearing it at my father’s funeral a few weeks ago I looked more sombre than the undertakers. It gave me confidence for this meeting. As I walked up the freezing street against the tide of Christmas shoppers I thought it was inconceivable I could have avoided the virus, though I had avoided the test for as long as was decently possible. Earlier this year the doctor had suggested I took it; at the time I was coping with the furore that the showing of Jubilee on Channel 4 had stirred up, 4 am death threats on the phone. I felt insecure. I saw the news leaked to the Sun and the Star with visions of ending up as part of the daily diet of terror that sells these malevolent and jaundiced newspapers.
It was almost with relief that I listened to the doctor’s catalogue of do’s and don’ts—shaving, hairdressing, all the little details (soap and water it seemed eliminated the virus outside the body)—but for all of medicine you might as well just wash your mouth out with carbolic. The sword of Damocles had taken a sideways swipe, but I was still sitting in the chair.
Walking back down Tottenham Court Road from the hospital, I thought how fortunate to be forewarned so that one can wind one’s life up in an orderly fashion. The finality of it seemed attractive.
As I joined the crowds at Oxford Street, I thought—could my perception of all this change, could I fall in love with it again as I did when I left home early in the 1960s?
The sun came out briefly, the thin wintry sun, so low in the sky it blinds you. The wind seemed colder than ever. I stopped at the stationers and bought a daybook for 1987 and a scarlet form to write out a will.
I’m reading about Ezra Pound in the ruins of his dream Italy, writing the Cantos caged in the Pisan prison camp at the end of World War II. I’m fascinated and repelled by him: mad, bad Ez and the usury business. Declared insane by doctors and politicians perjuring themselves to save the S.O.B. from the firing squad. 11 years in the St Elizabeth’s asylum until back in Italy he gives the fascist salute as he docks at Naples; up yours!!
Meanwhile in Rome another poet and film maker, Pier Paolo Pasolini is being tried for armed robbery, the first of many trumped-up cases which will be brought by the Italian state. Old Ez fascist and young Pier Paolo communist share a common foe, the disease consumption: not TB, something more deadly.
For Ez it is the Roosevelt-Rothschild connection, a criminal banking system hell-bent on destroying value, with Benito his Saint George; but the dragon wins to consume Pier Paolo’s Italy with its allies, the Christian democrats. Never trust a Christian. The Egyptians had scarabs, they have the death-watch beetle. These corrupters lay waste the mental and physical landscape of dear Italy in a sea of rubbish tipped all over the place, driving the autostrada del sol ever southward to its rendezvous with the Mafia, and Italy’s most lucrative post-war industry: the heroin trade.
Old Ez and young P.P. allies: a nice conundrum to sleep on.
In 1946 my father was posted to Italy. Overnight home was transformed from the bleak wartime married quarters with their coke stoves and mildew to a villa on Lake Maggiore. Villa Quessa had beautiful gardens. There I chased lizards among the enormous golden pumpkins that grew along the gravel paths, played hide-and-seek in alleys banked with camelias, or crept off to the gatehouse where a little old lady in the blackest mourning fed armies of silkworms on trays in the gloom of her front room. She would give me caterpillars and cocoons to take home, and I would be driven back through the woods by her grandson Davide on the handlebars of his bike. He would stop and hoist me on his shoulders to pick a particular flower. Davide was my first love and the love was returned. He rowed me on the lake as storms blew in from the mountains. This love was my great secret, if only this innocent idyll could have continued. But after a brief summer we left for Rome.
My first confrontation with oppression was in the cold dormitory of a British preparatory school a few years later, and the terrible battle with family virtue was on. My crime was prosecuted by the headmaster with more violence than any other misdemeanour in the school. I had crossed over the dormitory and climbed into the bed of another nine year old; the action was quite innocent, neither of us could have foreseen the consequences. An older boy reported us because of the noise we were making, laughing and giggling, to the headmaster’s wife who descended on us like a thunderbolt from a clear blue sky. In a welter of oaths she tipped us out of the bed onto the floor. We were beaten, hauled up in front of the whole school, threatened with expulsion, and the terrible consequence our actions would have on our families if they were revealed. This public exposure gave me an incredible shock and opened wounds that will never heal. The violence of the attack drove my heart into the shadows, where it remained buried. I became detached and dreamy, spent hours alone painting or watching the flowers grow, had a physical aversion to chumminess and sexual innuendo, organised games, and school showers. I was set apart, a childhood observer who never joined in. The boys ragged each other: so-and-so’s in love with so-and-so, and so-and-so is queer. From thirteen to eighteen I had no form of sexual expression at all. All my energy was devoted to painting while the other boys learned their four-letter vocabulary on the rugger pitch.
Do you think that odd? People would expect public schools to be a hive of sexual activity.
No. I’ve heard people had different experiences, but my school was puritanical, ran on muscular christianity punctuated by alarm bells. We lived in communal rooms, there was no privacy, we spent most of our spare time polishing our shoes.
How aware were you of your sexuality, it must have been in the background?
It couldn’t be expressed, I just gave up. I wasn’t attracted to any of the boys, if anything I was repelled by the all-male environment, the possibility of temptation made it worse. Many young men I talk to are aware of their sexuality from childhood; the attitude of their peers and their early encounters mark their development. There is no accepted pattern to growing up, you are at the mercy of chance. In my childhood there were no accessible patterns that were positive, everything was negative. It affected me deeply, I became a very backward kid, uncertain, terribly shy. I knew I was ‘queer’, and I knew that was totally unacceptable. None of my friends, either in school or in the austere world of the RAF stations were as far as I know in the same predicament. This would not change much at King’s College, London.
After I left school in 1960, I had to commute up to the Strand each day from home. There was, however, one handsome young man who I used to see in the dining room; I used to hang around hoping we might get talking, but of course this never happened, and by 5.30 I was back on the Metropolitan Line.
One evening a business man exposed himself in the carriage—in my state this did more harm than good, and that summer, hitch-hiking back from Switzerland, I was picked up by a very unpleasant middle-aged man who drove right off the road and attempted to assault me. I was quite tough enough to resist, but he had locked my passport and money in the boot of his car, and threatened to turn me in to the police saying I had assaulted him. I was very frightened: after four hours of battle, he threw me out of the car as I was crying uncontrollably. It was hardly an auspicious beginning, but I don’t think it was unusual.
In 1962 I moved to London from home. I was twenty, and out on my own. Things changed quickly. At King’s I read my tutor’s copy of Howl, and learnt of William Burroughs. The Drama Society put on The Maids and the first British performance of Blood Wedding for which I did the sets.
It began to dawn on me that there were others, if only I could find them. The first person I confided in was a theological student from the college who was working in Bethnal Green. I walked from Bloomsbury to Bethnal Green and back each Sunday to see him, until one day I plucked up the courage to tell him. To my surprise he wasn’t upset, just a little mystified. He said he had met some guys in New York, but none here. We didn’t speak about it again.
A few months later I met an old school friend of mine who was living with his girlfriend and an older man, Michael. Michael seemed very eccentric to me: he would sit at his piano singing the songs he composed for unperformable musicals about buggery, and brewed home-made wine. I would sit on the sofa quietly, and every now and then he’d spin round on his piano stool and rag me. I would blush and he would pounce: ‘Blushing, you’re blushing.’ But I never gave my secret away, though I was round there nearly every evening that year.
Just after my twenty-second birthday in 1964 a young Canadian lad Michael had met came round expecting to find him in. Ron asked if he could stay the night as it was late. There were no night buses, and my friends suggested I stay the night as well. As I was falling asleep Ron crossed over and got into my bed. I had reached the age of 22 without contact of any kind. It was explosive. Next day, when I woke, Ron had disappeared. I was unable to find him that evening, and in desperation downed a bottle of whisky without realising what I was doing. I poisoned myself so badly I spent the next two days in bed after a traumatic evening in which I slashed all my paintings in the flat and threatened to turn the scissors on myself. I was in tears for 24 hours before everything stabilised.
Alasdair is homeless again, staying at St Mungo’s with the dossers. At first he refused to accept Christopher’s invitation to stay for Christmas. He arrived here in the afternoon, but returned for a shower. At 11 we went out, after he had promised to move to Christopher’s in the morning. Christopher had said, ‘You’re taking up a valuable bed at the worst time of the year, you have to move.’ This did the trick.
Alasdair is now 35 and has never had a room of his own. He falls asleep on floors, or stays awake all night in the clubs. He retains all the sparkle he had years ago when he was a boxing blue at Oxford. I worry as he is not well.
We were in immense high spirits as we walked to Charing Cross. He remarked that I was crossing the roads with a reckless disregard for the traffic. ‘Not like the old days when you crept about so cautiously.’ I noticed immediately he told me. As the evening wore on a great calm descended. I’d crossed over and was untouchable. For the first time in months I was free from the tangle of fear that had grown up like poison ivy. Alasdair laughing and dancing through the night gave me courage. I left sensibly early to have a night’s rest before our journey to Shropshire.
The bells that welcomed us to Ellesmere Church pealed out of tune; old and exhausted like the faithful, they seem to have lost their way. The midnight mass progressed like a VAT form with its sections and subsections written by many hands in some ecclesiastical tax office, watermarked HMSO, its purpose to dissuade the curious. Now, if you are like my friend Christopher, well ordered, you need a sense of mystery. Mystery is of course for those who cannot believe in their heart of hearts, ‘Christ be with you’. Here in this church, coldly scrubbed by the Victorians, the new form of service is conducted at snail’s pace, each section and subsection repeated and underlined by a gaggle of bri-nylon priests, who chase up and down their patch honking about the stable at Bethlehem. Four times we were invited to join in carols so impossibly high and halting—‘Hark the Herald’, ‘While Shepherds watched’—that only those deaf to their own voices can sing.
Christopher has frozen to the glumness of a gargoyle. I prod him into action; we’re singing something about ‘his wings’, was he a fairy also?
Christopher grinds into a basso that vibrates the boys and girls playing at bad manners in the pew in front.