Agreatwriterwhoheraldedchange

ARNOLD WAS a great man, but he didn’t act like a great man.

We arrived on the scene — Arnold, Harold Pinter and myself — around the same time. Before, theatre had been a very upper middle-class adventure. There was suddenly this emergence of new playwrights from the working class; why we happened to be mainly Jewish, I don’t know. Maybe it was the war that gave us the fire.

I remember, after I wrote my first play in the late 1950s, I was living very frugally with my wife. There was a knock on the door: it was Arnold, who had also just written his first play. We got together immediately.

It was absolutely necessary that we did our own thing, but we were always in the same tent. We supported one another on this great adventure. We put the foundations of change in place.

He and I held a great affinity, but Arnold was much more political than me; I was more anarchic in many ways. He did an amazing thing by getting money from trade unions in the 1960s to take music and plays into the provinces. One of my plays was featured, so we were constantly together.

I knew he was dying for well over a year. I often phoned him and read new poems I had written for him — he loved my poetry.

Arnold was a wonderful man. When you are a sort of comrade, with the same push, the same dreams and the same desires, these things cement your friendship. It really brings tears to my eyes thinking about it. It is a terrible, terrible death.

His legacy will continue and prove to the world that we had things to say, and we said them. In a sense, we created change. Working classes were no longer stupid fools. The world changed; our world changed.