by Alan Bennett
Once the potentially dangerous procedure of arrival had been got through, the luggage fetched up, the porter endowed with his shilling, and the door finally closed, my parents’ apprehension gave way to huge relief – it was as if they’d bluffed their way into the enemy camp, and relief gave way to giggles as they explored the delights of the place.
‘Come look in here, Dad. It’s a spanking place – there’s umpteen towels.’
(A boy runs down the staircase.)
Every family has a secret, and the secret is that it’s not like other families.
(A maid cleans a bathroom.)
In a new refinement of gentility, the maids these days plait the ends of the toilet roll. It’s a good job they didn’t do this when I was a child or I’d have imagined this was standard practice throughout the land, our family’s toilet roll unique in its ragged and inconsequent termination.
This was long before the days of trouser presses and hair-dryers, and even kettles in the rooms came in just too late for my parents. That would have been the ultimate, though. With a kettle and the wherewithal to make some tea, they could have fetched some stuff in from outside, been free of the terrors of the dining-room, and never needed to stir out of the room at all. When we stayed in boarding-houses we didn’t actually board but took our own food: screws of tea, packets of sugar and corned beef cushioned by shirts and socks and bathing-costumes, all packed in a bulging cardboard box, cat’s-cradled in string and fetched on the train from Leeds. So when we were on holiday there was no romance to the food: we ate exactly what we did at home. Come six o’clock, while the rest of the clientele at The Waverley or The Clarendon or The Claremont would be wiring into ‘a little bit of plaice’ or the ‘bit of something tasty’ which the landlady had provided, the Bennett family would be having their usual slice of cold brisket and a tomato. It was home from home.
(Reception desk.)
GUEST: Can we just register, please?
(Lobby.)
GUEST: And she’s lovely legs, beautiful legs and lovely face, hips like that, she shows you, you know; it’s just like a leg of pork.
So, what’s on the agenda for today, then?
(Hotel notice-board: ‘Dr Barnardo’s Fashion Show’. Ballroom: two girls practise modelling.)
Although these are amateurs, fashion shows seem brisker than they once were. Gone the languid elegance of Barbara Goalen – not even a name to Janet and Tina, cavorting on the cat-walk.
(Grosvenor Room.)
ANDY: … because York has this lovely sewage problem that we all know so much about, and in fact Tracy’s … Tracy’s got more to spend on sewage than you have, Mike.
TRACY: Well, they wouldn’t have delivered any toilet rolls as yet.
What is new in hotels is the meetings. In the Grosvenor Room the manageresses of some roadside eateries are being grilled by Andy, the local representative.
Tracy has sewage problems, which Andy will want to talk her through before reporting back to District, where he will be grilled in his turn – another meeting.
ANDY: OK, because the budgets are out but they’re not out in computer form at the moment, so, in order to help you …
(A table of customers’ complaints on the blackboard. Top of the list (with o) is Thirsk. Bottom (with 9) is Rainton North.)
Steer clear of Rainton North seems to be the message. Discerning diners go to Thirsk.
ANDY: It doesn’t need an awful lot doing to it, so consequently he’s paying the money for other restaurants to benefit …
Yes, but then eventually there’ll come a time when Tracy needs special maintenance – probably on drainage – in which case she doesn’t pay for the drainage, you see, it comes back …
(Melbourne Room.)
LECTURER: Of these volunteers, at least one half – and it can be more if you can do this – are going to be what we call ‘starters’; that is, they have not been using hormonal contraceptives in the previous two months.
In the Melbourne Room the doctors wrestle with birth control. And the topic is not confined to the Melbourne Room either. In the lobby begins a muted saga from the same department.
(Lobby.)
GENTEEL WOMAN … she wouldn’t tell me where it was she thought he might be, and I said, ‘You just pass this message on to him and tell him that’ – I’ve a bit of experience because I’ve gone through this – I said, ‘that you can’t be haemorrhaging like that.’ He says, ‘You’ve got a very good friend, Mrs Birmingham.’ So that was nice, wasn’t it?
FRIEND: That’s her about the … wasn’t it?
GENTEEL WOMAN: And he said, ‘I’m glad she did.’ He was going to leave it while Monday.
Anyway, he’s coming now so he’s made a fourth. And, you see, the receptionist – you don’t listen to these receptionists. I mean, they’re … always so … I don’t know.
The coffee’s not very hot.
(Lobby.)
My parents liked this side of hotel life, and they would have liked this kind of hotel: weddings, dinner dances, functions galore. Not that there’d ever be anything in which they’d dream of participating, only there’d be more to see, more types, more going off. They’d station themselves on the sofa and watch what went on, other people leading their lives, and envying the accomplishment with which they led them. And, without realizing it, my mother would make up stories about people: ‘You see that woman over there? I think she’s the owner of the hotel, and that fellow with her must be her nephew.’ And when the woman came in next day by herself she’d say, ‘Oh, I see the owner’s here. She must have quarrelled with her nephew,’ forgetting it was all invention in the first place.
GUEST: Did you have a slice?
GUEST: Yes. Thanks very much.
(Montpelier Room.)
PRESIDENT: … the responsibility for private-sector housing … health and safety, noise and air-pollution control and caravan sites. Quite an impressive list.
(Applause.)
CHAIRMAN: Mr Mayor, Mr President, thank you for those kind words, and, friends, today I feel very proud to stand before you all as Chairman of the General Council of the Institution of Environmental Health Officers. To have that honour this year is the highlight so far of my professional career, and today for me is perhaps the ultimate memory that I shall hold for the remainder of my life, for today, Mr Mayor, there is that ultimate recognition from the two organizations that I hold dear, the Institution and Harrogate Borough Council, both of which have had such an important influence on my personal and professional life.
(Lobby. Children arriving for a party.)
While in the Montpelier Room the apotheosis of a sanitary inspector reaches its tail-end, some chic little five-year-olds head for another function in the Brontë Room.
RECEPTIONIST: How old are you?
CHILD: Five already.
RECEPTIONIST: Five already? …
There must be Brontë Rooms all over Yorkshire – venues for discos and parades of beachwear, demonstrations of firefighting equipment and new lines in toiletries, all brought under the grim umbrella of those three ailing and unconvivial sisters. Today it’s jelly and a conjuror.
(Children shouting as the door of the Brontë Room opens.)
More treats, an outing, the old people slowly trek towards the Grosvenor Room.
(Corridor.)
HELPER: Are you following?
OLD MAN: By the right, quick march.
(Grosvenor Room.)
OLD MAN: We’ve been here though once before, haven’t we, Anne?
OLD LADY: Thank you, love. Can I have the plate?
HELPER: Would you like me to put jam on your scone for you?
Do you want me to put the jam on for you?
OLD LADY: No, it’s all right.
One more tea in a lifetime of teas. They’ll have had teas all over in their time. Tea in Hitchen’s in Leeds and Brown Muff’s in Bradford. Teas in Betty’s and Marshall & Snelgrove. Teas when they were courting; teas after they got mar
ried. Tea now.
OLD LADY: It’ll never come back.
OLD MAN: Well, they’re trying their best to do so, you know. That’s what it is.
I like ladies like Mrs Baker and Miss Wood – and don’t think of them as old people. Just as Paris is geared to thirty-five-year-old career women, so is the North to women like these. In London they’d be displaced and fearful; here, accomplished pianists and stylish ballroom dancers, they still help rule the roost.
OLD MAN: Well, we’ll be having another meal at 5.30. I thought we were just having a drink of tea now 0but …
OLD LADY: There’s no need to know …
OLD MAN: I don’t, I’m not used to this sort of thing. What’s that?
HELPER: Just chocolate.
OLD LADY: Just chocolate. I’ll have a wee chocolate … No, thank you, that’s quite enough – that’s a record for me anyway.
I love anything chocolatey. Thank you.
OLD MAN: … have something like that in all the songs, you know. We think they’re old songs, but that’s what I remember about …
OLD LADY: Harrogate. I used to come in my youth to Harrogate, to the Majestic and – what do you call the one that’s closed now – the Grand …
HELPER: The Grand Hotel.
OLD LADY: … and dance there a lot. It was lovely.
OLD MAN: … remind me I did a sword dance in the Albert Hall in a wee kilt when I was twelve years of age as a Scout – a Caledonian, you know. A sword dance, with crossed swords. Aye, Ged, you can do that when you’re twelve, but you daren’t do it when you’re fourteen.
OLD LADY: I’ve been here when I was twelve.
OLD MAN: It’s a funny thing this puberty business when you think of it, isn’t it?
(Music. The Crown Bar.)
Puberty long since behind them, the nicely-off members of the Boston Spa Tennis Club have said farewell to embarrassment and are whooping it up at their annual disco. Never having been able to dance, watching it generally fills me with envy and melancholy; but all this disco does is to convince me of the ultimate charms of the Zimmer frame.
(Exterior of hotel Night.)
RECEPTIONIST: Reception, can I help you?
Yes, you can have both English and Continental in your room, if you just put the card that’s on your bed, if you put it on the door, and the night porter will pick it up in the night for you and then we’ll have your breakfast there in the morning. All right?
(Dining-room.)
The pound is twitching this morning, the radio says, but it doesn’t seem to be upsetting the business appetite. Breakfast as a meal never occurred in our house, and with our motto of ‘Let’s pretend we’re like everyone else’ this was another fact we concealed from the outside world. We imagined that every family except us sat down together to a cooked breakfast – an assumption a hotel seems to confirm.
It lives on as a myth in television commercials, but I can’t think anybody’s taken in. Still, it’s the business of hotels to be one step behind the times – hotels, like colonies, keeping up a way of life that is already outmoded.
(A chambermaid in the corridor.)
Beverley goes hoover hoover outside the day’s first meeting – this time a meeting about how to hold meetings.
(Melbourne Room.)
LECTURER: The discipline of the meeting is very important, and I’m sure that most of you have had an enormous amount of experience when thinking of some of the meetings that you’ve had and … that lack of discipline has caused a considerable waste of time. The person has got to have the ability to be able to present himself, he’s got to be competent and present the … the company.
OK, any more … any more questions?
(Lobby.)
Meanwhile, the lobby swarms with amateur gardeners off to the Harrogate Flower Show. Hobbies were another thing our family never managed. Dad played the violin and Mam went through a lampshade-making phase, but nothing ever got them in its teeth, not like these nice, gentle people; they are fanatics. ‘In the context of ground cover, dare one mention the humble myosotis?’, and off go the gardeners to the flower show. Lucky them!
(Melbourne Room.)
LECTURER: … may well be the same people who supervise the doing of the work …
But no truants among the businessmen, who have another lesson before playtime.
LECTURER: An owner who starts his own company may well clear his dining-room table in the evening and do this part – and to a great extent this as well. In all sorts of ways companies operate in different means. As we get bigger, of course, we have establishments, we have departments, we may even have office blocks of people who are doing that.
Oddly touching I find these middle-aged schoolboys – still wanting to learn, still convinced they can do it better, wives left at home, whom they’ll go up and phone later to tell them how well their group did in the test.
LECTURER: … and in fact what we ought to be doing is dead simple – just keep taking pound notes from people and keep them smiling as you do it. It’s as simple as that.
(Brontë Bar.)
TOASTMASTER: Hello sir, Mr Mayor.
Hello, Lady Mayoress. How are you?
MAYORESS: Fine, thank you.
GUEST: Good. Drinks are here, are they?
The Flower Show Committee are having drinks in the Brontë Bar, flowers flushing out a lot of what my mother would call ‘the better class’.
GUEST: … awful conditions, and the winds come straigh off Ilkley Moor …
GUEST: And all I say is a lot of things grow jolly well on it.
GUEST: But you do grow everything?
GUEST: I usually come on the second day; I always think it’s rather a nice day to come.
GUEST: Yes.
GUEST: … that’s what I’ve been saying: let’s walk today …
GUEST: Did you?
GUEST: Yes I did.
GUEST: I’m so glad, because you can do the Valley Gardens, which are lovely, and then have a Pinewood walk, then come to our seventy acres.
GUEST: Have a cup of tea or something and there you are …
GUEST: Yes.
GUEST: No, I liked Australia better than New Zealand simply because New Zealand’s more like Europe …
My parents never went to – still less gave – a cocktail party. The education they always regretted not having would have had cocktails on the syllabus, and small talk, and the ability to converse, and the necessary accomplishment of saying things one doesn’t mean.
GUEST: … yesterday we thought, ‘Oh gosh, we’re in for an absolute soaking.’
GUEST: I know – pouring at home when we came up …
GUEST: Our timing was pretty good …
GUEST: I say he could …
GUEST: Hello, Max. How are you?
GUEST: Very well, thanks.
GUEST: Good.
GUEST: Do you know the Mayoress?
GUEST: No, we haven’t been introduced yet.
(Lobby.)
The real solvent of class distinction is a proper measure of self-esteem, a kind of unselfconsciousness. Some people are at ease with themselves so the world is at ease with them. My parents thought this kind of ease was produced by education: ‘Your Dad and me can’t mix; we’ve not been educated.’ They didn’t see that what disqualified them was temperament, just as, though educated up to the hilt, it disqualifies me. What keeps us in our place is embarrassment.
GUEST: Mind you, it’s getting to the stage where it takes a bit more out of you every year, doesn’t it?
GUEST: That’s right.
(Ballroom.)
Not that there’s much embarrassment in the ballroom, where the road hauliers’ wives are also having a do. Less refined these ladies – some of them (dare one say?) a little common – but jollier by a long chalk. What do they talk about? Youth? Trysts in long-gone transport cafés, marriages that began in lay-bys, or even in a long tailback on the M6?
How at seventeen and soaked to the skin, one stoo
d for hours at the Wakefield turn-off when suddenly Mr Right, ferrying a load of minced morsels from Rochdale to Penzance, slowed his juggernaut to a halt beside her and now they’ve got a fleet of six and a son at catering college and she’s having her lunch in Harrogate?
(Brontë Room,)
The Mayor of Harrogate has collared the Brontë Room this lunch-time to entertain his fellow mayors. The party includes a French delegation and the Mayor of Harrogate’s twin town, Luchon.
FRENCH MAYOR: (A long speech in French.)
LADY GUEST: Ye-es.
FRENCH MAYOR: (More French.)
LADY GUEST: … that’s right, yes. (Laughs.)
FRENCH MAYOR: (Still more French.)
LADY GUEST: Well, I’m very glad you came.
Oh! Charlotte and Emily – nothing has changed. A Mr Heathcliff is calling you from a Haworth call-box and wishes you to pay for the call.
(Lobby. Guests arriving for a wedding reception.)
Mr and Mrs M. C. Dakin request the pleasure of your company on the occasion of the marriage of their daughter Susan Margaret with Dr Robert Frederick Logan at St John the Divine Parish Church, Menston, on Saturday 23 April 1988 at 4 p.m. and afterwards at the Crown Hotel, Harrogate.
(Champagne poured into two glass slippers.)
The slippers are a bit of tradition invented by the hotel. ‘Do you want the slippers and champagne? People seem to like them. It’s a little touch that we do – makes it a bit classier.’ Do they go in the dishwasher now, the slippers – difficult, one would have thought, to get a tea towel into the toes.
(Corridor, outside the ladies’ loo.)
GUEST: Yours is round the corner.
