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Could you follow me around? Just jot around?

Yeah, just see here. Yeah, look at me. Here, around to the corner. That's it.

The Cúirt Festival is renowned for risk,

but do the daredevils of Galway know what it means to invite John Healy,

the author ofThe Grass Arena?

On first publication in 1988, it was a sell-out sensation,

and Mr Healy threatened Faber with violence to secure a reprint.

The Browser advises all concerned to ensure appropriate protection.

-Make straight for the table. -Okay.

I'd be pushing them off.

All right.

-Right, okay. -Yeah.

So just start off with you, just tell us, tell us your name.

-My name? -Yeah.

My name is John Healy and, uh…

I was born in London in, uh, 1942.

My parents were Irish. They came from Sligo.

And I had a very violent childhood, and I started drinking when I was about 15

and in the end I ended up drinking on the street.

Well, drinking on the streets, then it wasn't like, um, drinking now.

All winos were muggers. There was robbery and violence.

I was there 15 years, in and out of prison,

and the burglar known as the Brighton Fox taught me to play chess.

It's a mental opiate, chess, and it altered my life.

Actually, I started to play in chess matches and tournaments,

so I never took a drink after that.

I've got this desire to write something.

And gradually after a year, I had a, a book.

It sold nearly 20,000 copies.

Then it was made into a film, and it won the Best British Feature Film

and the book was suddenly taken out of print.

How did that happen?

I don't know. Suddenly, the, the book just, uh…

Faber's took the book out of print.

So the book has been out of print for 15 years.

Fifteen years, yeah.

Anytime your name appears in print now,

it seems to be associated with violence.

Yes, I-- every time I'm invited to a literary festival around the world,

something comes out in a paper,

say The Observer or something, like sniping at me, running me down.

What actually happened?

Did you-- Did you feel like you said the wrong thing to the wrong person?

No, I don't--

I don't think I said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the time. I…

I've thought about it over the years and, uh, I'm penniless

and everything, but, um…

Um…

It had to be said.

Well, what did you actually say to them?

-Bah. What? Do you want me to… -I mean, you know…

I don't wanna say that I threatened him with an axe, do I?

You know, it's, it's like…

If we're going to address it, we need to address it head on.

But otherwise we just don't do, you know, the fact is that--

It makes your program better if I say the mad axe-man, yeah.

-Please welcome Mr John Healy. -Welcome please John Healy.

John Healy…

John Healy is now a celebrated novelist, and autobiographer.

Although he says he was better off on the dole.

The Grass Arena is a one-off book. It's phenomenally special.

It's one of the sort of as it were top-10, top-15 books

that I've ever published.

This book is, you know, one of the best autobiographies that I know of,

you know, written over the last 20 or 30 years.

What struck me when I first read it was how well written it was.

I really thought it was a masterpiece.

Few people could come from where he came from

and write with such passion, such vividness.

Like thousands of others,

I'd readThe Grass Arena in the early '90s.

It had been a touchstone book for many of my generation,

and the sudden disappearance of its author had puzzled me for years.

I wanted to find out what happened to John Healy.

I had a lot of trouble here 20 years ago.

Just getting, you know, the truth told now

on a documentary they're making.

I've got put out of print here.

It's not 'cause of my writing, it's just 'cause I got put out of print

because of class by Fabers, and the others took it up.

It's like hitting, uh, hitting a screw in nick,

or they say you did.

You're tarnished forever, your record, you know, so…

But I'm just slightly getting back now.

Though the basic facts about what had happened soon became clear.

The reasons why were infinitely more interesting.

I soon discovered that John didn't like being on camera

and sometimes being interviewed seemed to cause an actual pain.

Let's get a shot of this.

If you flip through the pages, then I'll get a shot of them.

Yeah, but I don't wanna do that.

You're supposed to-- This is supposed to be spontaneous,

even the both, both of you--

filmmakers think there are guys talking about it

and then he sits behind here. I mean, that's just pony.

He also made it clear that there were some areas

he didn't want the film to go into.

-I don't want to answer that. -Okay.

That puts me onto a barbed hook, you see, some of these questions.

See, I don't wanna say things on camera. Turn it off for a minute.

But I don't wanna get on a camera saying this

-and get-- You know what I mean? -No, what I--

It don't look right. Just a minute.

This is supposed to be a documentary, isn't it?

-This is a part-- -Not a feature film.

No.

Let me see. I'm not sure about this.

But when conversation turned away from personal matters,

when it stopped being an interview, he was immediately himself again.

-It's all right.

You're very photogenic. Anybody'll tell you that.

Yeah, he looks good in the sun.

-Oh, fuck off.

Boring old fart seeks new bonne, young 18 year old

for romps on his Mediterranean-based yacht.

Do you actually have a yacht?

Not a yacht, a squat?

I told myself that eventually I'd capture that side of him in the film

if he let me.

So what is it you're working on at the moment, John?

I hope to get some of my other book published.

I've got a novel called The Metal Mountain and Streets Above Us.

What is it you're actually reading?

I'm reading The Metal Mountain, just checking it, you know?

And when did you first start writing The Metal Mountain?

Oh, years ago, a long time ago. I can't remember now.

I've been… I've been working on this about I don't know, maybe ten years.

Do you work on it every day?

I used to yeah, when I was writing it first, yeah.

And how often now do you?

Oh, very sparingly, you know, only if I think of something.

It's ready, like for publisher to take a look at, yeah.

There's a big historic element in the documentary, this documentary.

And I was thinking it's some official voice

needs to authenticate some events.

Otherwise, witless, witless critics will keep calling it harmlessness

and equating it with today

instead of explaining that the laws, the vagrancy laws,

uh, created a subculture, a place to live…

one more day in the face of death.

Whereas homelessness allows them to deflect attention

from the state of terrorism against chronic alcoholics at the time,

and it's hatred of Irish immigrants…

…especially when the trouble started in 19…

What was it? '68. Boy, oh, boy, did they used to get beaten up then,

and they weren't even doing anything, just alcoholic Irish.

In the last couple of years, you were on the street yourself?

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, well, getting towards but a year is a long time there.

I mean, you can't compare it really, can you? You can meet with anything.

My mind wandered back to the years I spent on the streets

with The Dipper, The Jockey, Big Con, Mack the Knife,

Scarface Mick, Hogan, Long John Flynn, Fenten, The Spiv,

Scotch Genie, Big Greta, Belfast Mary, Liverpool Lille.

Roaming around like starving jackals.

Even when sick, shuffling along, heads bent, we were always alert.

Ever aware, like half-tamed animals.

We looked at people with only one thought in mind.

How can we get the price of a drink out of them?

Do you remember the first time you came here?

Do you remember your first arrival in this park?

Nah.

What age would you have been when you came here?

Oh, I don't know.

I was hopping in and out. I used to…

I used to…

drink with winos then.

You think, "Well, you know these, these guys…

These people are mad, they're barbarians. They're crazy."

You couldn't live with them, and I'd be able to hop out, you know,

'cause I looked-- I was young and I could go thieving

and drink in pubs and get away with it.

Then eventually I couldn't drink in pubs.

They wouldn't let me in. I was too violent,

and then I ended up permanently with the winos.

I couldn't leave them then and I was one of them.

So I became one of them. And…

-When you were in your 20s? -So, in my 20s, yeah.

Probably I was about six years older than John,

so I'd be kind of a, more of a seasoned drinker.

More of a park drinker, you know.

But I thought it was a bit odd for Johnny.

I thought, "You're a bit young." Probably at that time

I thought he should be away to a disco or something.

'Cause he was very fit and very active, you know.

He had boxed, he told me,

for the Saint Pancras Boxing Club, you know,

and he'd been in the army for a while as well, you know.

And he used to walk Hampstead Heath up and down for exercise, you know,

keep fit, like, you know, I didn't…

But I thought, "It's a bit strange." But next thing, he joined us completely.

John came from a regular family, you know, like us all.

Oh, my mother would give him a few quid.

Clean him up a bit, you know.

But what can you do with a crawling alcoholic?

He's going to go where he wants to go anyway.

He's gonna do what he wants to do and a lot of them died.

But a lot of them come out of it to tell the tale, you see.

That's the other side of life, isn't it?

The other side of life.

How did you find your way here?

Well, you get to know the haunts.

When I was young I started off in Houston Gardens

and you know where, where people go.

It's like, "How do you get to learn to talk?"

These emptying jails.

You thought there was that kind of conviviality there.

You could feel normal with us, you know,

but he didn't feel much normal outside of that, you know.

There was fun in it, you see, there was laughs in it.

There was fucking hunger in it.

And there was a lot of violence and thanks be to God I can take it.

Many are called to this thing, you know, but few are chosen.

For over a decade from 1960 to 1971,

John Healy slept rough, stayed drunk, and fought for survival

in the barbaric wino subculture of Kentish Town and Houston.

You're out at night, you're drunk,

-you're looking for a place to sleep. -Yeah.

What would you be looking for?

Somewhere to get in off the street where…

you know, because it was illegal to be skippering

or to be on the street, vagrancy law.

-Yeah. -So…

you just want to get somewhere where you can get… get off.

I woke up in a skipper in Highbury not a penny in my pockets,

freezing cold and dying for a drink.

Woke up lying in a puddle of water at the bottom

of some iron stairs in the basement of a house.

I woke up on top of a pile of earth and stones,

the workmen that had dug out of a trench at the side of the road.

You awake, rise, look for a drink,

or fall asleep again staring into darkness,

seeing nothing, hearing nothing,

feeling nothing. Time passes nonetheless.

See? Get through there.

-Anyone if that was out like that… See? -Yeah.

…if that was out a bit more

you'd get in there and lay there. That'd be a skipper, just laying there.

Because of the vagrancy laws.

Tell us what you do to get in there.

Well, if you were sober enough, you'd push that out

and get to see what he could or pull some of that out

and get in and pull it back after you.

Pull the stuff back after you for camouflage.

-So, you'd be hidden? -So you'd be hidden.

I mean, you wouldn't care, would you?

You've had a drink and that, it gets you out of the way.

-No one sees you. -Jesus, that's…

So would you actually have slept in a place such as…

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, about here, this hill went up like that.

There was a circular…

dip.

Similar to an ancient amphitheater or collis-- arena,

but it's all been filled in now and tidied up.

Fights used to start in here and as mon-- amongst other things and…

Very, sort of…

dirtiest of weapons and broken bottle and that. Very primitive.

So it was like an arena.

There was people killed here, yeah.

Yeah, with a bottle in the neck.

People you knew?

Oh, of course, yeah.

Do you know any-- Do you remember any names

of the people that you knew that were…

Uh…

Davey Stone was one guy that was killed here, yeah.

-Who was he? -He was a jock. He was a pimp.

Uh, by another pimp, he was killed.

So I never heard the bottle smash above the gritty patter,

but he shoved a broken bottle right into… Davey…

Stone's neck there.

Davey just keeled over with a hoarse, broken sort of sigh.

I wanted to help him lay down,

but I-I was frightened to getting blood smeared. Evidence.

I mean, they could fit me with it, and so I jumped up and got the bench

between us and he had his hands out like that, coming like that and…

And he was going around in a circle.

And I was drunk actually. And then I was kind of…

Well, I was well-drunk, really, a bit,

and I couldn't make out whether he was drunk

or I was drunk in the end, and it was comical, really.

He was wandering around and he was gurgling and blowing awful bubbles,

you know, and then he started to wander

into the road and…

Yeah, then I didn't see him. After that he was gone.

Everyone and everything is full of tension.

There are no tomorrows.

Tomorrow can't be relied upon to come.

Each day, you have to prove yourself anew,

stealing, fighting, begging and drinking.

Violent acts quickly punished by further violence,

deteriorates mind and body more and more

until eventually the supreme cycle puts the final boot in.

Have you ever come back here before, John?

No, only the once, when they were making the film, you know.

This is only the second time

-you've ever been back? -Yeah.

Does it make you think about things you'd rather not think about,

or is it better if you not care?

Oh, mostly I-I…

don't wanna think about it. You know what I mean? Sometimes.

And sometimes you don't care, you know.

Next station, ladies and gentlemen, will be Hove.

This train continues to Worthing and Littlehampton.

Tell us a bit about, about Erwin,

How do you get on with him? What's he like as a friend?

Well, if you walked in a room and you said to someone like,

"Pick out the ex-lifer or in this room," you wouldn't pick Erwin.

Was kind of like a gentleman or something.

No, you know highly educated, not more educated than I am.

I'll tell you one thing,

what I still can't get over is looking at distances

'cause in prison you never see distance, you never seen a distance.

Whenever I see a skyline like that, you think, "My God!"

It's unbelievable, 'cause when you're in those places--

this is a fantasy, just to sit and look at an ocean.

-Yeah. -Okay.

It's only the English Channel but, you know.

I first came across about the book I was in prison.

I think I was six years into my, my life sentence.

I went to prison in 1984 for murder,

and it was a probation officer outside sent me the book in.

I read it in one sitting.

And it had a massive impact.

I lived in the places that John had lived.

I slept in bus shelters, slept on Brighton Beach,

slept on the streets, and lived like a rat.

It gave me a sense of…

that it was possible to recover

from the worst place you could possibly be, you know.

For 15 years after reading his book,

I was preoccupied with my own situation.

But as soon as I realized

that he hadn't had the life that I imagined he would have had,

it bothered me that he hadn't had the recognition.

I spoke to my agent about him.

Actually I said, "Look, is there anything you could do with John's work?"

And he said, "John Healy has written a classic."

He said, "Why doesn't he talk to someone at Penguin Classics?"

I was sitting at my desk one day, and I had a phone call from Erwin James

um, and he said to me, um,

"I gather you're considering the book The Grass Arena

for Penguin Modern Classics."

And I said, "What? I'd never heard of the book,

um, and I don't know what you're talking about."

Um, and so he then told me about the book,

and I said, "This sounds very, very interesting." Um…

And he promised to send me a copy, which he did.

Um, and…

I started reading it.

And I couldn't put it down.

In 2008, The Grass Arena was brought back into print

by Penguin Books as part of their Modern Classics imprint.

What's that one smell like?

It smells like…

…paint stripper. Probably dear perfume.

Once upon a time, you would've drunk it.

I woulda drunk it, yeah. This one smells like…

mentholated spirits.

I'm often rediscovering books from 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, um,

that are out of print, and usually I have to champion them

to all my colleagues, and they've never heard of them

or they vaguely might know of the author or the title,

and very, very rarely have they read them.

With this book, I found a lot of people in their late 30s to late 40s,

who all said, "Of course, The Grass Arena."

"We remember that we read it 20 years ago when it came out. What a book."

Um, and that was really striking and, and kind of confirmed my sense

that this was a book that deserved to be back in print.

-Is there many down there? -Loads.

Here we go then.

For me, this book is, you know,

one of the best autobiographies that I know of,

you know, written over the last 20 or 30 years.

They waited.

Just dropped my lucky medal.

Six months later

in the depths of a particularly harsh winter,

I visited John to find out if having The Grass Arena back in print

had made much difference to his life.

Haven't made a lot of difference.

In a sense, monetary, I didn't get a big advance.

The publishers are quite pleased that it's selling steadily.

So…

Publishers are rich people.

Won't affect their life one way or the other.

I'm, I'm looking forward to filming the simul with you.

I think that's-- Have you done one of those in a long time?

No, I haven't done for a long time.

Yeah, but I mean…

Yes, the last one I had 30 players.

I forget when it was now. It must be 12 years ago.

And, uh…

And lucky enough, I managed to win them all.

In an attempt to get publicity

and to draw attention to his unpublished work,

John is playing 14 people and one computer

in a demanding type of chess display known as a simul.

It's not something I really want to do.

You're-you're isolated for long periods at a time,

and suddenly, you're thrust into the limelight,

it… facing crowds. It's very strange experience,

almost schizophrenic.

And why put yourself through that?

Because I've got no other way

of letting people know about my work.

-Steven, this is John. -Hi.

-Nice to meet you, John. How you doing? -Oh, yeah.

-Beautiful room. -Lovely, yeah.

Yeah, it's better than some of the skippers I've been in.

I've been out of print for 20 years, and now I'm back

and I want to try and make people aware of my works, my writing.

They're not about chess, this is just…

another talent I have, and I-- it's the only thing I can exploit

to try and get some publicity.

I don't play chess now…

much.

And…

every few months I might play with some--

when coming back from a tournament, a couple of games,

but other than that, I don't play.

But you know, are you not a bit out of practice?

A little. A little.

In 1971, in Pentonville Prison on what was to be his final sentence,

John shared his cell with a burglar named Harry Collins,

otherwise known as the Brighton Fox.

It's hard to describe him, really.

He had sort of a longish face and the longest nose.

He probably looked like a fox.

He said to me,

"If I was to tell you about a game, Oliver,"

he used to, he used to call me Oliver Twist.

"And if I told you of a game, Oliver,

that if you were playing this game,

you can do all that you're doing on the street now on the chess board

without getting nicked for it."

He says, "What is it but breaking and entering

when you break into your opponent's castle position,

steal his queen,

mug his king, rob his pawns."

So it was intriguing.

So I started to learn chess from him. I didn't take me long.

I thought, "Well, this is my answer and this, this is life."

"You could get kudos from this."

"You could get a Grand Master, you get paid and…"

"You've got a peer group, and you've got a set of rules,

and it's kind of like a life."

This belief stayed with me for about, um, five years.

I was 30 years old

and had become besotted with chess, ate it, drank it, dreamed about it.

It had replaced everything in my mind. What would I need to do?

Chess is a jealous lover, would tolerate no other,

especially in the form of too much drink.

I gave myself to her completely, body and soul,

and for the first time in my life

I began to live without the constant, nagging desire to drink.

The one thing about all chess players is

they're obsessive.

You have to be completely obsessed by chess to play it well,

because it-- it's a total detachment from the real world.

The amount of calculation, the amount of pattern recognition,

concept formation, it's all the high-level mental skills.

This was the surprising thing about John Healy,

that he actually had these enormous mental abilities that chess demands.

He was winning tournaments. He was…

He was he could play four games at the same time, blindfold.

He-- It was, it was an unbelievable talent.

To see him at not having not started playing until he was about 30,

suddenly outperforming people who'd been playing all their lives.

It… It's impossible.

Everything was going more or less smoothly until, um…

I kept getting…

more stress…

from… the chess.

It's very stressful subject to play professionally

and in tournaments.

Just once in a while he could, you know, flare up

and, and, and, and really show he felt insecure

and I-I had a personal example of this.

One Saturday night, and I was just working away.

And I'd had, you know, quite normal relations

with John up to there,

and I got this, this call,

and then I think, you know, I'd done something I'd…

I'd turned down one of his positions or something,

and-and he, he said, "Hey, I'm going to come over and--

I'm going to come over and kill you."

And I thought, "Well, this has…

this has never happened to, to me quite, quite before,"

so I was very, very concerned.

I rang up-- even rang up the local, local police station.

And they said, "No, don't, don't worry, sir."

"We, we get these death threats or all the time."

"They-- you know, most of the time, they-they never happen."

And so I just let it slip, and the next time I spoke to John,

he was very normal and you know, we got… we got on fine

and-and we neither of us ever-ever referred to this-this matter-matter again.

Chess is a blood sport, because it's a hunt for king,

and if you face 15 opponents at a blood sport

and this time blow on the flank,

sudden breakthrough in the center,

a piece offside--

small things, but all these things can cost the game,

cause defeat, and defeat is always waiting.

In that world, I had no real friends.

The game of chess is about competition, not friendship.

Each time the chess game was over, I was back on the street.

Tension was back,

chess was like the drink,

and it was going to be a big wrench to get out of it

-since I had nothing to take its place.

I realized, I had to realize then that these…

Masters, and they learn when they're five,

and I was 30 when I learned the moves, so I began to realize that…

Pfft. "Oh, this is too…

I'm not going to conquer this."

And…

it took me another year to accept it.

John gave up tournament chess in 1975

and never went back.

I thought you weren't going to film in taxis.

It's not my image, is it, in a cab. Hey, we don't want a cabs, do we?

Hey.

Take me cap off.

I don't want no cabs, no. Limousines, yeah, well…

Right, Christine. Who is she?

She's a friend. She's a…

A friend. I've known her a long time. She's a yoga teacher.

John's an extreme character.

Everything he does is extreme.

When he took up chess, he became a champion.

He became a boxing champion,

um, and he then took up yoga, made it a way of life.

I first met John in 1976,

in South London at a meditation evening

where he was giving a talk on his life.

I think there's a shared connection through an understanding of yoga,

of being aware, if you like, of the transients

of things in a worldly sense.

Because John isn't worldly. He's very ambitious, but he isn't worldly.

Since early childhood,

physical pain caused by stress had been a constant in John's life

and alcohol had been his escape route.

Now meditation was his savior, but how did he come to it?

I was kicked in the mouth by a chief screw.

Kicked my front teeth in, so I was charged with disobeying an order

and I got 14 days solitary confinement.

There was nothing in the cell, in the solitary cells,

and I lay on the floor and my breath started to slow down.

Well, I had to concentrate on it,

because I didn't have anything else to think about.

I was in pain, and became aware of my breathing

and gradually it was easing, and I was getting calmer and calmer,

and it went on for a few hours.

I didn't think any high philosophy about it or anything like that.

I just thought, "This, this is all right. I just-- it's all I can do."

I didn't think so--

I didn't attach anything else to it, except it was doing me a favor then.

After I come out, of course, I didn't need it. I forgot about it.

When I was playing chess,

I realized that I wasn't familiar with the word "relaxation,"

but I knew I was lacking something

compared to the other people, all those chess players.

They were more calm.

But then I happen to find a book in a library.

It was called the Art of Relaxation.

It said screw your hands around like that, very simple.

And screw that and screw your leg, and I was doing this.

I was doing this for about three months and nothing happened.

And I thought, "Oh, well, this is rubbish."

"This is middle class stuff. It may work for them."

"It ain't working for me."

And one night, I was laying in bed and my body shot up straight,

and I started laughing and crying and everything

and it was hysterical, really.

But the-- that was a there was a lot--

that must have been a lot of tension being released.

It just sprung like that.

I must have been full of it, and the-- so after that I was hooked.

I've had many talks with John about yoga.

We used to go together to meditation groups in the early days.

And most people go to a yoga class once a week,

but for John, it's a way of life.

Yes, I do it daily, but sometimes it's deep

and most times it's not, because of the unsatisfactoriness

you feel of life.

Depression and anxiety disorder. Stuff like that.

All the stuff that gets in the way?

Well, because of the life I've had it's--

it's like a little bit-- Most people would think it was a bit extreme.

He has a destiny, and we believe-- through the yoga,

we believe in karma and completing karma in a lifetime

is important to be able to then move on clear, in a clear sense.

Move on from your karma that you've had in this life

and the belief system is that if you haven't completed your karma,

you then have to come back and…

re-- redo what you've missed out on.

-That's me, that's my mum. -Yeah. Of course.

-That's my brother, Terry. -Mm-hmm.

That's my sister Bernadette.

You know, that's Dermot,

the youngest, he was the baby, and that's my sister Philomena.

Terry lives over at manor house,

And, um, Dermot lives in Essex.

And Bernadette and Philomena are in Australia,

married and got grown-up kids.

This is where our house used to be.

Just there, they're the flats over there,

where on the top, I used to go at that nursery.

There was a slide

and when I got on the top of the slide I could see my house

and I wanted to go home so…

But you couldn't get out-- I couldn't open the gate,

for somehow they had a shield across it.

But one day, I'd seen one of the teachers coming,

so I knew what I would do then, so I…

When no one was looking, I put my hand through and got out.

And I was wandering around, and I was found by the police,

you know, brought to the police station.

And my mum come frantic with worry to collect me, yeah.

So they put a lock on that door proper then,

so I could never escape my childhood.

My father didn't look like he would harm anyone.

He had nice brown eyes

and when he laughed you could see all of his perfect teeth.

He never laughed with me though.

Instead, whatever I did or said, he would tell me to shut my mouth.

Well, we'd come down here,

me and my dad, when I was about six or something and he had a puppy

on a bit of string, and um…

it started to snow.

Um, we took shelter under the bridge here.

And a policeman come by.

His helmet and tunic all white with snowflake, and he made as if to stop,

uh, then nodded curtly at my father and walked on.

And I looked at my father. He looked worried and…

At six years of age,

it's difficult to know what adults are thinking,

so I asked.

I said, "Haven't you got a dog license, dad, or something?"

And his eyes turned back on his head.

I looked at my father's face, and he drew back and hit me in the face,

knocked me to the ground.

I was full of blood and snot and slobber and even crying.

He pulled me back up, he said,

shoved a hanky at me, and said, "What are you crying for?" He says…

"Pack up that crying now," he says,

"or I'll tell your mother what a tyrant you-you are."

I didn't know what a tyrant was or how I'd become one.

Yeah, that was a long time ago. It was a fucking cold day.

I think it was 1947. I'm not sure, and that was a bad winter.

Ireland had long been a place of refuge for John.

First as a child escaping from the London he hated,

and later as an adult fugitive from justice.

Going a ways a bit. This road goes to Boyle.

So this is the road we would have come when I was a kid.

Yeah, with the coster's car.

We used to come home and spend all our school holidays here.

But the thing was you didn't want to go back to London.

You know they used to drag us to the train screaming.

Because none of us wanted to go back to London.

We felt safe here in Ireland, secure, you know.

Christ, it didn't used to look like this.

-The gate open for us. -Oh, that's neat.

Look at the side, at the ditches, eh.

Like the olden days. Look at the old--

What we've got to do is find out where he's hidden the money

and get the shovel and start digging.

Never mind that. I wanna see the chickens.

What chickens?

It's just the same. Welcome to Brougher.

The last time John saw his Uncle Dominic

was when he was in his teens,

AWOL and on the run from the British Army.

Hello.

Hello, Dominic, how are you, man?

-Welcome home. -All right, man.

-Welcome home. -Oh, boy.

Are we going out?

You go in, Dominic.

-I'll just show you-- -Push you along--

No, no, I just want to show them the buildings.

Oh yeah.

From the age of two, I'll be brought over

and left with my grandmother in Ireland.

There's a sort of calmness that seems to come out of the grass,

and the ditches and the mossy banks.

Everywhere was so green.

I used to walk about slowly.

My back still pained me, but not nearly so much as in the city.

My God.

What was it like coming here from being in the middle of London, being in Camden?

Well, it was like coming to a dream place, wasn't it?

I suppose you'd call it now like to a, a theme park

or an adventure playground.

Did you have to do jobs around the place

-when you were a kid here? -Yeah, you always have to do work.

A bit of work when you're a kid. I mean, on a farm.

You do it because they're clever at getting you to do it.

You know, they keep praising you up

and telling you you're a great man and a strong man.

And then you want to lift more and do everything,

and "I'll leave you the land."

And think, "Oh, wow." When there's someone tells you

they're going to leave you a vast lands at the age of seven,

you work harder.

Well, it's very straight.

-God bless all here. Hello, Jimmy. -Hello.

Of course, I have got no headaches.

I remember we were rationing.

When was the last time you saw each other? It's a while?

It was about 45 years ago when-- yeah.

Was John much use around the farm?

He rather did, had a great interest in it.

-Was he interested in? -Getting the land.

Did you ever think of staying here for good and living here?

I would have liked to. When I was young, I wanted to.

That's my dream, but of course it couldn't work out, you know.

You should have found a girl with a dowry.

Everybody was after that. I don't, I don't think the girls.

would get the land.

There was always some brother involved.

Oh yeah.

-You have to get rid of the brothers. -Actually…

-Oh, my God, now we're…

Now we're building up the crime so…

I got 20… I got 20 serious previous without that, without murder.

When you had to leave, that was a savage, heart-breaking thing.

I didn't want to leave it. Just screaming, crying and everything.

And they used to pull tricks, you know, my aunties,

and that, trying to get me to-- get me to go.

And then you'd find out you was kidnapped. You'd be back in London.

I was brought up to believe

that bravery was the essence of everything.

And so you just fought and drank

and slept rough and didn't complain about it.

But when I learned that I was an alcoholic

and I'd seen a better life

I thought, you know, I'd rather have a normal life then,

where I could think and not be drunk.

At first I was living in a bed and breakfast.

I was living there for quite some time and then eventually I went back home.

When John went back to live with his mother,

it was for selfish reasons. He wanted, he needed somewhere to live,

and she was delighted to see him.

She thought he'd been dead for 10 years.

She was certainly shocked when she opened the door to see me,

and of course, had to be a certain amount of, um…

suspicion that I-I-- had I really given it up?

After a while, she sees that I was off the drink.

I mean, she was delighted, that she thought was a miracle.

My mother got ill.

She got Alzheimer's, and I was…

looking after her. I was looking after her for a few years.

He said to me that, um,

he felt that that was his duty to look after his mother, but also…

he said at one point that he loved his mother,

which he'd never ever--

I never heard him say that before. He'd never…

expressed that he could love, in a way, love anybody.

She died from the Alzheimer's and…

soon after that I started writing.

John completedThe Grass Arenain 1986.

He was doing manual labor at the time

and his only connection to the literary world was a woman he met

while cutting grass at a cancer therapy center.

The photographer, Jo Spence.

I just reminded me that I brought something to show you.

It's a book that I found.

Oh, Jo Spence, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Is that Jo when she was ill? That was lymph cancer.

Christ almighty, death, eh?

Well, have you seen the photographs before?

-'Cause I never saw them until I saw that. -I have seen them before, yeah.

Oh, no, I couldn't have seen… I've seen these photos in the front,

but I never seen the end ones because she was…

This is when she deteriorated.

It's a pity.

That's Jo, eh?

How did you meet her?

I was doing the garden for these therapists, actually…

and she used to speak to me going in and out.

I told her that I got a bit of script of, you know,

The Grass Arena, and she said, "Let me see it."

And she thought it was the…

best thing she's ever read. It was terrific.

Jo was working at the British Film Institute,

and she put the manuscript into Colin McCabe.

He was the head of the British Film Institute at the time.

I remember she handed me this huge typed script.

I remember taking it home one weekend and I started reading it,

and I just read the first page, which is that incredible account

of his father's brutality to him.

And the… Well, I didn't stop.

Colin McCabe was on the board of directors at Faber and Faber

He brought the manuscript to them.

The manuscript was physically, as it were, a mess.

Um, I mean, it looked like it had been sleeping rough as it were or…

Uh, maybe John had been putting it inside his underwear to keep warm

and he'd been sleeping rough.

What struck me when I first read it was how well written it was

for someone who was doing it from scratch.

It was really out of this world.

It was edgy. It had an immediate impact.

It absolutely deserved to be published.

The Grass Arenawas published by Faber and Faber in 1988

to immediate acclaim.

There's a bit of a surprise. It's a shock, really.

You see-see a book and your name on it and all that.

It's quite, it's quite, it's quite exciting. Very exciting, yeah.

The Grass Arena is a one-off book.

It's phenomenally special.

I'm phenomenally proud of having published it.

Um, you know, and that's from somebody who published hundreds of books.

It's one of the sort of as it were top ten, top 15 books

that I've ever published.

One of the things that runs through your book

is that you're looking for a woman all the time.

I mean, how is that aspect of your life today?

-You happy? -Yeah, yeah.

…to describe is, is a world of violence.

How close have you personally…

Drink and petty crime soon reduced John

to a life of living rough in London.

…national press to his credit.

-He became an alcoholic at school. -You did not love?

Don't think so.

He had a hangover.

That's the least that they could do.

The book went from curiosity to phenomenon, selling in its thousands

and winning Britain's top prize for literary autobiography.

I got a phone call. A posh voice asked me if I was…

John Healy,

and said it was, she said, "You'll be pleased to know

that you are this year's winner of the JR Ackerley Award."

I thought this might be someone having a joke with me,

so I said-- I thought I said, "I hope this isn't a Mickey Mouse prize."

She said, "Oh, good gosh, no."

She said, "Anthony Burgess was last year's winner."

She said, "You're in good company."

So I said, "I hope it's a lot better company

than the last lot I was in."

The book was filmed in 1991, winning several prizes,

including the Michael Powell Award for Best British Feature.

For the first time in his difficult life, John Healy was a success.

I was just writing, writing. I had a relationship with a woman…

And life was just kind of a…

There was some semblance of normality.

John's publisher, Faber and Faber,

had never really been known for having ex-winos on their roster.

It must have been for him an even bigger culture shock,

meeting me and my colleagues at Faber

than it was for me meeting him.

I mean, we thought that we were kind of cutting-edge, radical, new voices,

but actually we… when-when the new voice showed up,

we didn't know what to do with it, actually.

He was an angry figure.

He was an embittered figure,

and he was somebody who felt the system was against him.

Well, it wasn't against him actively,

but it was sort of by definition very foreign to him.

As far as I was concerned, it was a-- It was a marriage made in heaven,

and then it turned into a divorce made in hell.

But I didn't really understand the-the process

by which one turned to the other.

What happened next ended John Healy's writing career.

But no two people seem to agree on what it actually was that happened.

I went in there, threatening with an action,

and they pulled me out of print.

They said, "Oh, that cunt's gone back to his old roots.

"He never changed at all, eh? That girl that was with him is lucky

she never got her head rolled up, presented with her head in the morning

in the carrier bag."

Having read the story, knowing that that was his story,

I was before the first meeting, undoubtedly wary.

I mean, it is 20 odd years ago, but I can certainly remember that.

When he arrived, I felt I had reason to be wary to some extent.

He would occasionally re-enact

some of the events that he was describing in the book,

and some of them were fairly violent events.

And I remember I had a long narrow office

and my desk and my chair were down the window end,

so he would be sitting between me and the door

uh, and from time to time that did actually cross my mind

when he would, as it were, jump up and say,

"Uh, you know, and I was up at the Whitestone--

"Whitestone Pond, and I had a hammer in my hand

and I hid behind the tree 'cause they were coming after me."

And he would be jumping up

and running around my room re-enacting this.

And it was fantastically vivid

and to some extent, I have to say, pretty alarming.

I left Faber in 1990

and had very little of a sort of ongoing connection with the book.

What are your memories of the conflict that arose with Fabers?

Well, none, actually.

Haven't I told you this before?

I have no memory of it at all, because I mean--

I mean, apart from the fact it became this kind of--

My only recollection of it is it was a joke.

An in-house joke, there was a man who wanted to--

Well, there was a writer, and then this is what got into the papers.

There was a writer who wanted to kill the chairman,

which you can see, it could become an office joke.

But I have no other recollection of it.

Robert McCrum was editor-in-chief at Faber and Faber

from 1979 to 1995.

We had a policy of having the door open,

you know, the house was very open to people

to come in and, and talk to us about their work.

So anyone could come in

and there was a kind of tremendous traffic of people come in and out.

And he was-- I think he had been encouraged to come in.

I couldn't get near them, they wouldn't speak to me on the phone.

They never used to speak to me or meet me.

He was very angry with the place, and he came in

he-- and he caused a scene, that's my recollection,

um, in the foyer.

But I wasn't there when it happened,

and I just I think what must have happened was he demanded his money to be paid,

and he-he was told he couldn't have the money

by somebody quite junior downstairs.

Now the head of fiction at Osborne Books,

Megan Larkin was just starting out in publishing

when she went to work at Fabers in 1989.

I suppose when I found you, out of the blue and said,,

"Do you, mind, you know, speaking about John Healy?"

What was her first reaction when, when you heard that?

The first thing was an immediate rush of memory of that one phone call

and that, that particular situation, and I--

Suddenly, very strong memories came flooding back.

You know, it was a major experience for me now.

Now, 20 years on, it suddenly felt very fresh and real.

I can picture where I was having that phone conversation

and just getting the feeling

that no one else would talk to him on the phone.

So I was, so to say, his sort of last port of call.

I was talking to the translation rights woman

who was a fr-friend, friend to me, and I told her,

I said, "I'd like to chop their heads up with an axe,"

and she said, "Don't say that, John, you know."

I said, "Yeah, do say that." And I was quite…

I was quite stressed out at a time.

I probably was having a breakdown, like a ment-- you know,

and I was fighting it.

I felt that he was a man sort of at the end of his tether almost.

He was very…

very aggressive.

I mean, sort of ranting, I think.

And I was, I think, just making soothing noises and trying to…

sort of calm him down.

She said, "Don't say that," and I said, "No, no, tell him,"

and I insisted and the poor woman, you know, she-she-she liked me,

but she was trying to protect me, obviously.

But she-she went and conveyed the threat through her to them.

Probably deep down, I didn't think he would do it.

I felt that this conversation was probably his way of dealing with these feelings,

but obviously you know, knowing the sort of background

that he came from and his whole attitude,

you had to take it seriously.

So that's when they called the police.

From our point of view

the rights department, he started questioning things

and asking, you know, where his money was.

Or, you know, just trying to understand, I think, what was going on.

Because of his demeanor and his way of going about things,

I think they probably found it quite threatening

and didn't know how to deal with him,

so they just sort of closed the, the shutters, closed ranks on him.

With my publishing experience now,

I say I don't think his actual concerns and questions

were anything out of the ordinary, really,

so I think they should have been able to be dealt with in a…

you know, yeah, in a more sort of calm and open way,

but that, that's where I felt, uh,

the sort of social gulf came into force and-and was the problem.

It appeared on the front page of The Guardian.

The next morning.

They put the elitist publisher or something and lowlife author,

they seemed to be the dream team, had a falling out and what a falling out!

Their answer was to immediately put me out of print.

From being a genius, the week before, I was a smiling psychopath…

…the next week.

Quickly how-- Shows how quickly they can change,

and so then no publisher in Britain would touch me.

We have 1,422 copies of The Grass Arena in stock

and with the exception of 500 copies, these should be destroyed

and the book answered out of print.

As a magnanimous gesture, we are giving 500 copies to John Healy.

The Grass Arena was to remain out of print

and unobtainable for more than 15 years.

The row that grew up between John and Faber

was incredibly damaging to his future as a writer, because, um…

it promulgated the myth

that he was someone who was impossible to work with.

But a lot of the accusations that were made

about his behavior made him look like a very scary person.

My recollection is that it was an embarrassment.

It was awkward.

And it was upsetting.

This is a story that was created by the media in 1980, whatever it was.

and time has passed and here we are again. You know, we're eating our, our tail.

And that's what it's really about.

John keeps an archive of things

that that he remembers, and that was something

that he showed me that I thought was-- that I was very touched by.

"I hope you find a brilliant publisher for your next book.

"What I really mean is

that I'm very pleased for you to be free from Faber,

but I can't put that in a letter which will go in our files. Megan."

Oh!

Wha…

Right?

Do you remember writing that?

Interesting, no, I don't, but, um,

I'm pleased that I did.

Uh, confirms that…

we had a sort of personal connection.

And that's-- Yes, he, he and I…

did-- I said I'd always sympathized with him and felt that I was on his side.

Um…

And I'm glad that we sort of followed that through

and maintained that connection.

I-I think that John's exclusion from the literary world

was entirely about class.

He went straight from prison to a lauded autobiography,

and he didn't have any of, of the rest of the grammar

about literary writing or about, uh, social mores.

In 2004, Robert McCrum wrote an overview of his career at Faber

for the Observer's Book section.

The Observer ran, I think, a piece by you,

which was a review of your career with Faber. Do you remember?

Yes, I do, yes, yes.

And do you remember the lead into that piece though?

No.

Because the opening paragraph was about this actual event.

-Really? -It just led into it.

It was with reference to the fact that "John Healy

had threatened myself and Matthew Evans."

-Right, yes. -Signed it under your bylaw.

Well, that's, I mean, artistic license.

I don't, I mean, I mean, I don't--

I mean, that was, that was, what was described in-in-in the Guardian.

-Mm-hmm. -Um, so I was really just quoting the--

so here what I was doing was responding to the press story.

I don't recall…

I mean, neither of us were ever threatened physically,

except in words.

April 2007, and The Observer newspaper's Browser column warns

that 65-year-old John Healy is still potentially dangerous.

The column is edited by Robert McCrum,

but neither he nor The Observer can confirm who wrote the piece.

I can't stress too strongly that this was a tiny, tiny episode.

I mean, it really was a minute episode

in my mind, in the mind of the business,

um, and obviously, not for, not for The Guardian but--

and clearly for John, it was very important.

But I think it's something which is almost apocryphal actually…

So there you are.

It's a kind of little-- It's almost like an urban myth.

Though his first book had been a runaway success,

no other publisher in Britain would agree to take on The Grass Arena

or any of John Healy's unpublished books.

From now on, he was to be an untouchable.

I was very angry at first, and then despair sets in and…

In the end, we just…

I packed up trying, so, eh, I was finished.

Despite his best efforts from 1992 to 2007,

not one word written by John Healy was published.

He went into this barren period.

Everything just went dead for about 10 years.

I think he gave up. I think he almost gave up.

Post-traumatic stress is usually associated with, um, combatants,

but I wouldn't be considered that or anyone

that was in The Grass Arena or any grass arena.

We're combatants, but not military combatants or soldiers.

We were fighting for ourselves,

and I suppose all through the-- all the previous life, fighting against--

I suppose drink is fighting against depression, really,

when you're young and that.

All through life, say 50 years or more of it,

it comes with a head in the end.

You can't just fight all the time, and it sort of had a detrimental effect.

It sort of went in, and I was getting depression.

You lose interest in everything and nothing works.

You can't see any future. That is basically it.

You can go on and on about it,

but basically there's no future, and there's a fear that you can't grasp.

It's like… Isolation brings it on bad.

I don't come out on top of it.

It completely debilitates you,

and it's hurtful and painful, and I suffer from it.

There it is. Right, it'll be written off…

-Yeah. -…from Jo, Jo Spence.

She writes, "When the only tool you have is a hammer,

"all your problems look like nails.

Jo."

In 1992,

the woman who had first brought The Grass Arena to attention,

Jo Spence, succumbed to cancer.

She wouldn't see me for a few years.

When she found out about the other woman, Linda, she puts…

I don't remember, do I?

But she did speak to me towards the end on the phone,

yeah, and she said, "Look after yourself."

I thought, "Look after myself?" And she's dying, so--

And she said, "You've-You've crossed unfamiliar galaxies

to reach this-- to get this far," she said.

"But you know," she says, "you're in with the middle class

and they are the most--

you'll find they are the most dangerous enemies

you've come up against yet."

"Be careful," you know.

But I-I agree with her. She was right.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds like…

I mean, the fact that she didn't talk to you for a long time.

I mean, it obviously meant a lot to her

if she's going to call you from her dying bed, you know.

It's a time in your life when you think about the people

that are important to you, so you were obviously important to her.

Yeah, and I said-- well, I was told by other people

and you can cut the details.

"You'd be alright to come to the funeral. You can come to the funeral."

But I didn't wanna go to the funeral because…

When someone's dead, that's-that's the end of it, you know.

Sounds like she had a lot of time for you.

You know that's all I'm saying.

Oh, yeah, we were very close, yeah.

-In the beginning. -Yeah.

But, um…

What about, um…

This, I was thinking…

Oh, yeah, well, this was what I was on about.

Uh…

We were nearly at the end of filming.

And at times John seemed just as difficult to communicate with

as he'd been the first day I met him.

There was sometimes the sense you were walking on egg shells around him,

no matter how well we knew each other at this stage.

I do feel like I'm intruding on your life, you know, sometimes,

you know, when I'm sitting here when I'm talking to you.

With the camera on and off,

you're two different, very different people.

Yeah. Well, I suppose…

it's-- I've been in so many interrogation rooms.

I've-I've-I've got a technique

for not committing myself.

And so it's very hard to get out of that.

-Wait, why do you? Why is that?

Well, I suppose it's the life I've led.

You was like completely outlawed.

You could be arrested for anything, um, fitted up.

Fitted up for, you know, life even

with anything and… …accused of anything.

And, um…

so you become defensive, suppose.

And…

It's just something I can't help.

That's-That's how I am.

Well, in the four years that I've been sort of filming with you,

a lot has happened.

I mean, who knows what's going to happen in the next year?

-Yeah. -If there's one thing

that you wanted to happen more than anything else, what would it be?

Uh…

I'd like to get recognition for my work and get it all published.

John had nothing, then everything, then nothing again.

How does anybody deal with that?

I began to realize

that his spiritual beliefs were a major part of the puzzle.

I was reminded of a conversation I'd had with him

in the snow two years earlier.

Since I've been practicing meditation for a long time,

I'd like to see how far you could go in…

maybe transcending the mind if you-- if you, you know,

if you had no hassle or anything like that.

What? Where would that get you?

Well, the states of bliss that we try to achieve

through falling off and jumping off a mountain right, right, or a plane.

Well, playing there, a split second, the mind has stopped.

With the fear or… Fear stops it or anything.

All these or drink or drugs or LSD or acid or whatever. All these things

are just… artificial ways, they don't last.

They're not-- They're not true.

The last question I'd wanna ask is when--

Remember when I came over when it snowed,

and you said something that really struck me,

which is that your-your aim is to transcend the rational mind.

Yes.

I would like to, but I'm holding myself up, though.

How's that?

-Is that on? -Yeah.

Well, fancying them birds, you know?

-No names, no petrol. -Yeah.

And on the way then you start,

that-that-that holds you up, takes you away.

You-You gotta be totally centered when…

like in the meditation to-to-to still the mind

for it to still, you've gotta be totally centered.

Even the thinking, all the thinking, that's a problem too.

Thinking, because the thoughts are just like clouds going

and they correct… they're nothing.

They're just taking the energy.

It's in the silence, like in the meditation.

You transcend the thoughts, and there's beauty in the stillness.

Actually, there's ecstasy in it.

This is surprising, really.

There's nothing that you want.

Till you come back out of it, of course, with a bang.

Then you want everything.

That's 'cause you haven't transcended, of course.

So what-what was it? Was there something else?

-No, I think that's it. -Oh, yeah.