Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  In the photograph he is wearing puttees. At what point private soldiers ceased to wear these long bandages wrapped round their legs I don’t know. It is certainly gaiters by 1939, ‘anklets webbing khaki, pairs two’ when I am called up in 1952. But the puttee survives (along with many of the attitudes that go with it) in that stagnant military backwater the Army Cadet Corps. No school I ever attend runs to one, but in the short time we are in Guildford my brother is a pupil at the grammar school there and in a uniform identical to that of Uncle Clarence goes on manoeuvres at Pirbright. I watch him as he winds off these muddy brown bandages to find his legs ridged like those of the common house fly, pictured one thousand times life-size in the Children’s Encyclopedia.

  I never remember anyone mentioning Uncle Clarence’s grave. There is no photograph of that in the dresser, only a picture of the war-memorial tablet in St Mary of Bethany, Tong Road. If he has a grave, no one visits it. My grandmother never goes abroad, nor do my parents for that matter, and, though they think of themselves as women of the world, Aunty Kathleen and Aunty Myra only take to globe-trotting late in life. So, knowing only that he had died at Ypres in 1917, in March 1986 I write to the War Graves Commission at Maidenhead, curious to know if he is just a name on a monument or whether he enjoys the luxury of a burial place. It turns out to be more than one and less than the other. For the records say that, though he is commemorated by a special memorial in Larchwood (Railway Cuttings) Cemetery and is thought to lie within that cemetery, the exact location of his body is lost. So now it is a wet Friday morning and we have come over on the hovercraft and are driving through Saint-Omer and north to Zillebeke, a village south-east of Ypres, or since we have now crossed the Belgian frontier, Ieper.

  The guidebook says there were three battles at Ypres. The first, in 1914, ended in stalemate and marked the beginning of trench warfare. The second, in 1915, saw the first use of gas. The Blue Guide calls ‘Passchendaele’, the third battle, in 1917, ‘tragic and barren’, as if that distinguished it from the previous two. The ground gained or lost in each case amounted to a few kilometres. The dead, not noted in the Blue Guide, amounted to a quarter of a million.

  So now the cemeteries are everywhere, some one hundred and seventy in this salient alone, neat and regular, with their gates and walls and entrances like Roman camps, much neater and more orderly than the suburbs and factory farms they now find themselves among, as if the dead are here to garrison the living, with the countryside not caring, though the place-names aren’t hazed over at all, and each location is immaculately signposted. The cemeteries are so thick on the ground that we can’t find Larchwood and eventually end up down a cul-de-sac at Hill 60, the slight vantage point south of the town that changed hands many times during the fighting. Now it’s a bare, muddy common with a stone telling its history and a memorial to the dead left entombed in its burrows. There is a car park and a home-made museum-cum-café with vases made out of shell cases and a pin-table. Bungalows back on to the common, with garden sheds. One has a car-port and a Peugeot in the drive. Rustic wooden seats denote this desolate place a picnic area, though nothing much grows, grass the permanent casualty, the ground as brown and bare as an end-of-the-season goalmouth. Was it for this the clay grew tall, for the plastic flowers in the picture windows, the fishman with his van, and a boy riding over the ancient humps of trenches on his BMX bike? Well, yes, I suppose it was.

  Unable still to find our cemetery, we give it up and drive back into Ypres and eat a waffle in a chocolate shop, where plump businessmen dally with the proprietress while choosing pralines for the weekend. They go back to the office, tiny boxes of chocolates dangling from one finger, while we drive out on the Menin Road in the rain. Eventually we spot the tip of a cross across a sloping field. There is a railway and there are trees which may be larches and here is the signpost, broken off by a tractor and lying in the ditch.

  The cemetery is over a crossing on the far side of a single-track railway. There is a gate, a long finger of lawn alongside the railway, another gate and the burial-ground proper: Uncle Clarence’s stone, the stone which is not his grave, is in a row backing on to the railway.

  Known to be buried in this cemetery

  C7/044

  Rifleman C. E. Peel.

  King’s Royal Rifle Corps.

  21 October 1917

  †

  Their Glory Shall not be Blotted Out.

  To one side is a Gunner Hucklesby of the Royal Field Artillery, to the other a Private Oliver of the Hampshires. It is like seeing who is in the next bed in a barrack room. Many of the names are from Leeds: a Pte Smallwood, a Pte Seed from Kirkstall Road, some with family details, some not. Uncle Clarence’s not. A Second-Lieutenant Broderick from Farnley, at thirty-five a bit old for the war, like Waugh’s Crouchback, another Uncle. Sergeant Fortune, a character out of Hardy. Pte Ruckledge of the Wellingtons, Pte Leaversedge of the Yorkshires: rugged names, which, had their owners been spared, one feels the years might have smoothed out to end up Rutledge and Liversedge. Many Canadians ‘known only to God’.

  The low walls are sharp and new-looking, unblurred by creeper. There is no lichen on the gravestones, the dead seeming not to have fertilized the ground so much as sterilized it. This is April and too soon to mow, yet the grass is neat and shorn. Standard at the entrance to each graveyard is a small cupboard in the wall, the door of bronze. In it is lodged the register of graves in this and adjacent cemeteries. Larchwood is a modest example, with only some three hundred graves. The register begins by describing the history of the place: ‘On the NE side of the railway line to Menin, between the hamlets of Verbranden-molen and Zwarvelden was a small plantation of larches, and a cemetery was made at the north end of this wood. It was begun in April 1915 and used by troops holding this sector until April 1918.’ The tone is simple, almost epic. It might be a translation from Livy, the troops any troops in any war. There is a plan of the graves, drawn up like an order of battle, these soldiers laid in the earth still in military formation, with the graves set in files and groups and at slight angles to one another, as if they were companies waiting for some last advance. All face east, the direction of the enemy and only incidentally of God.

  I sit in the little brick pavilion looking at this register. The book is neat (so much is neat now when nothing was neat then); it is unfingermarked, not even dog-eared. It might be drawn from the Bodleian Library, not from a cupboard in a wall in the middle of a field. Of course if this foreign field were forever England the bronze door would long since have been wrenched off, the gates nicked, ‘Skins’ and ‘Chelsea’ sprayed over all. The notion of a register so freely available would in England seem ingenuous nonsense. I sit there, wondering about this, never knowing if our barbarism denotes vigour or decay. Across the hedgeless fields are the rebuilt towers of Ypres, looking, behind a line of willows, oddly like Oxford. At which point, with a heavy symbolism that in a film would elicit a sophisticated groan, a Mirage jet scorches low over the fields.

  For all the dead who lie here and the filthy, futile deaths they died, it is still hard to suppress a twinge of imperial pride, partly to be put down to the design of these silent cities: the work of Blomfield, Baker and Lutyens, the last architects of Empire. The other feeling, less ambiguous here than it would be in a cemetery of the Second War, is anger. Nobody could say now why these men died. The phrase ‘Their glory shall not be blotted out’ was a contribution by Kipling, who served on the War Graves Commission. This is the Friday after President Reagan’s Libyan venture, and to assert that there is anything under the sun that will not be blotted out seems quite hopeful. We instinctively think of the conflict between East and West on the model of the Second War, the one with a purpose. The instructive parallel is with the First.

  Dinner at Noon

  I have had unfortunate experiences in hotels. I was once invited to Claridge’s by the late John Huston in order to discuss a script he had sent me. The screenplay was bulky (that was what he wanted t
o discuss) and looked like a small parcel. Seeing it and (I suppose) me, the commissionaire insisted I use the tradesman’s entrance.

  On another occasion, during the run of Beyond the Fringe in New York, Dudley Moore and I took refuge from a storm in the Hotel Pierre, where we were spotted by an assistant manager. Saying that there had been a spate of thefts from rooms recently, he asked us to leave. A small argument ensued, in the course of which an old man and his wife stumped past, whereupon the assistant manager left off abusing us in order to bow. It was Stravinsky. We were then thrown out. I have never set foot in the Pierre since, fearing I might still be taken for a petty thief. Dudley Moore, I imagine, goes in there with impunity; the assistant manager may even bow to him now while throwing somebody else out. Me still, possibly.

  Dinner at Noon was a documentary about the Crown Hotel, Harrogate, which Jonathan Stedall and I made for the BBC TV series ‘Byline’ in April 1988. Up to that time I had never embarked on a TV programme without carefully scripting it first, but this was obviously neither possible nor appropriate when making a documentary, particularly a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ exercise such as this was intended to be. I was accordingly a little apprehensive.

  The film was also meant to illustrate some of the work of the American sociologist Erving Goffman.* Goffman’s first field study was in a hotel in the Shetlands, and much of the research he did there was incorporated into his pioneering book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, though other insights gleaned at this eccentric and sometimes hilarious establishment crop up in all his books.

  In the era of Fawlty Towers it might seem folly to try to say anything more on the subject of the roles of staff and guests in a hotel, and certainly it became plain in the first two days of filming that a respectable sociological study of hotel life would take much longer than the ten days we were scheduled to film. The early material we shot was also pretty stilted and banal, and I became even more apprehensive about the end result. Documentary film-makers, of course, must often find themselves in this predicament, but it was new to me, and so, feeling slightly panic-stricken, I scribbled some autobiographical notes which I could deliver either straight to camera or as a commentary over footage of the various functions and goings-on in the hotel.

  Thus the finished film ended up having not much to do with Goffman and a lot more to do with me; it certainly wasn’t the film we set out to make, but this must often be the case with documentaries, and even with feature films. I hadn’t intended Dinner at Noon to be as personal or as revealing as it turned out to be – or perhaps the intention had been at the back of my mind and this was just a roundabout way of getting there.

  What follows is a transcript of the documentary, with notes to indicate who is speaking and where. Though the voice is only one element in the spoken word and a transcript wants both gesture and inflection, I’ve made no attempt to supplement the dialogue, clean it up, or make it more coherent and grammatical. This occasionally makes it hard to read, but it’s a reminder that one cannot overstate the untidiness of human speech or reproduce it accurately on the page.

  (A hotel bedroom.)

  I was conceived in a strange bedroom. My birthday, like my brother’s, is in May, and, though three years separate us, we were both born on the same date. Counting back the months, I realize we must both have been conceived during the old August Bank Holiday, in a boarding-house bedroom in Morecambe, or Flamborough, or Filey – oilcloth on the floor, jug and basin on the wash-hand stand, the bathroom on the next landing. Nowhere like this, anyway, a bedroom in the Crown Hotel, Harrogate.

  (An hotel corridor. A young boy walks past a chambermaid.)

  That said, though, I might be expected to feel at home in rented accommodation, but for years nowhere filled me with the same unease as did a hotel.

  (Opening titles.)

  Town of teashops, a nice run-out from Leeds – Harrogate, where hotels abound and always have.

  (Reception desk.)

  RECEPTIONIST: Crown Hotel, good morning. Can I help you? I’ll put you through.

  (Dining-room: breakfast.)

  Once, visitors came to take the waters; now it’s a ‘Leisure Break’ or a conference, a mecca for the businessman. Nowadays I like hotels, at any rate in small doses; they’re a setting where you see people trying to behave, which is always more interesting than them just behaving. When people are on their best behaviour they aren’t always at their best. But I wasn’t always so relaxed. For years, hotels and restaurants were for me theatres of humiliation, and the business of eating in public every bit as fraught with risk and shame as taking one’s clothes off.

  What it was – when I was little my parents didn’t have much money, and when we went into cafés the drill was for my Mam and Dad to order a pot of tea for two, and maybe a token cake, and my brother and me would be given sips of tea from their cup, while under the table my mother unwrapped a parcel of bread and butter that she’d brought from home, and she smuggled pieces to my brother and me, which we had to eat while the waitress wasn’t looking.

  (Lobby. A chambermaid polishes the revolving doors.)

  The fear of discovery, exposure and ignominious expulsion stayed with me well into my twenties, and memories of that and similar embarrassments come back whenever I stay in a hotel. Not that this is an intimidating establishment at all: it’s comfortable and straightforward and caters for what the marketing men call ‘a good social mix’. I hope that’s what the film’s about – not class, which I don’t like, but classes, types, which I do; and a hotel like this is a good place to see them.

  (Lobby.)

  Behaviour’s a bit muted, but that’s part of the setting. The foyers of American hotels are like station concourses or airport lounges, they’re really part of the street, so you don’t expect people to behave in any particular way. Here, with the sofas and the fire, we’re still visibly related to the hall of the country house, and people try to behave accordingly. For some, of course, this isn’t too big a jump.

  (A sporty young couple reading Country Life.)

  HE: … boring. Is yours boring?

  SHE: Mine’s riveting.

  HE: Mine’s thoroughly dull.

  SHE: That’s what they’re for. Oh, look at that! Isn’t it gorgeous?

  HE: … country houses round here, going to lots of the people moving out of London – sell their three-bedroomed flat in Notting Hill and buy a huge country mansion …

  (An elderly couple, he studying the racing page.)

  HE: … the Thirsty Farmer.

  SHE: The what?

  HE: Thirsty Farmer … Oh – Rattling Jack.

  SHE: That would be a good one. That’s sure to be all right.

  I’ve never been able to get worked up about class and its distinctions, but then I’ve never felt the conventional three-tier account of social divisions has much to do with the case. What class are these?

  My parents would have called them a grand couple.

  SHE: Is it sweet enough for you? Sweet enough for you?

  HE: Yes. It never worries me.

  My mother’s scheme of things admitted to much finer distinctions than were allowed by the sociologists. She’d talk about people being ‘better-class’, ‘well-off’, ‘nicely spoken’, ‘refined’, ‘educated’, ‘genuine’, ‘ordinary’ and – the ultimate condemnation – ‘common’.

  (The elderly couple are still poring over the racing page.)

  HE: I wonder if I could trust you.

  SHE: What, to pick one?

  HE: No. Very Special Lady.

  SHE: Oh well, well I am at the moment, aren’t I? I don’t know how long you’ll keep me that way, but …

  HE: Oh we’ll have a bit of fun while we’re here.

  SHE: Your pencil’s upside down.

  (Reception desk.)

  RECEPTIONIST: Can I book you a paper for the morning, or a morning call?

  GUEST: Daily Telegraph, and what about a morning call?

  RECEPTIONIST: Righ
t.

  GUEST: I get up at half past five normally.

  PORTER: The lift’s round the corner. Shall I take your bag for you?

  Right, this way.

  (Upstairs corridor.)

  I always carry my bags myself-avoids the tip. It’s not the money: like catching the barman’s eye, it’s a skill I’ve never mastered; but then my parents graduated from boarding-houses to hotels when I was in my teens and at my most thin-skinned.

  PORTER: This way.

  Hope the weather’s going to perk up a bit for you. Here we are then.

  GUEST: It’s been lovely for the last couple of days.

  PORTER: That’s right.

  (Bedroom.)

  Arriving at the hotel, like leaving it, was fraught with anxiety: there was always the question of ‘the tip’.

  Dad would probably have his shilling ready before he’d even signed the register, and when the porter had shown them up to their room would give it to him, as often as not misjudging the moment, not waiting till his final departure but slipping it to him while he was still demonstrating what facilities the room had to offer – the commodious wardrobe, the luxurious bathroom – so the tip came as an unwelcome interruption.