Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  Searching the van, I was not just looking for the envelope; sifting the accumulated refuse of fifteen years, I was hoping for some clue as to what it was that had happened to make Miss Shepherd want to live like this. Except that I kept coming across items that suggested that living ‘like this’ wasn’t all that different from the way people ordinarily lived. There was a set of matching kitchen utensils, for instance – a ladle, a spatula, a masher for potatoes – all of them unused. They were the kind of thing my mother bought and hung up in the kitchen, just for show, while she went on using the battered old-faithfuls kept in the knife drawer. There were boxes of cheap soap and, of course, talcum powder, the cellophane wrapping unbreached; they too had counterparts in the dressing-table drawer at home. Another item my mother hoarded was toilet rolls, and here were a dozen. There was a condiment set, still in its box. When, amid such chaos, can she have hoped to use that particular appurtenance of gentility? But when did we ever use ours, stuck permanently in the sideboard cupboard in readiness for the social life my parents never had or ever really wanted? The more I laboured, the less peculiar the van seemed – its proprieties and aspirations no different from those with which I had been brought up.

  There was cash here too. In a bag Miss Shepherd carried round her neck there had been nearly £500, and peeling off the soggy layers from the van floor I collected about £100 more. Taking into account the money in various building societies and her National Savings certificates, Miss Shepherd had managed to save some £6,000. Since she was not entitled to a pension, most of this must have been gleaned from the meagre allowance she got from the DHSS. I am not sure whether under the present regime she would have been praised for her thrift or singled out as a sponger. Arch-Tory though she was, she seems a prime candidate for Mr Lilley’s little list, a paid-up member of the Something for Nothing society. I would just like to have seen him tell her so.

  Modest though Miss Shepherd’s estate was, it was more than I’d been expecting and made the finding of the envelope more urgent. So I went through the old clothes again, this time feeling gingerly in the pockets and shaking out the greasy blankets in a blizzard of moth and Trench Fern’. But there was nothing, only her bus-pass, the grim photograph looking as if it were taken during the siege of Stalingrad and hardly auguring well for the comedy series she had once suggested I write on the subject. I was about to give up, having decided that she must have kept the envelope on her and that it had been taken away with the body, when I came upon it, stiff with old soup and tucked into the glove compartment along with another cache of batteries and sherbet lemons, and marked ‘Mr Bennett, if necessary’.

  Still looking for some explanation (‘I am like this, possibly, because …’), I opened the envelope. True to form, even in this her final communication Miss Shepherd wasn’t prepared to give away any more than she had to. There was just a man’s name, which was not her own, and a phone number in Sussex.

  I finished cleaning out the van, scraped down the aisle, and opened all the windows and doors so that for the first time since she had moved in it was almost sweet-smelling – only not, because sweet in an awful way was how she had made it smell. My neighbour, the artist David Gentleman, who ten years before had done a lightning sketch of Miss Shepherd watching the removal of an earlier van, now came and did a romantic drawing of this her last vehicle, the grass growing high around it and the tattered curtains blowing in the spring breeze.

  2 May 1989. This afternoon comes a rather dapper salvage man who, fifteen years ago, refused to execute a council order for the removal of one of Miss Shepherd’s earlier vans on the grounds that someone was living in it. So he says anyway, though it’s perhaps just to establish his claim. He stands there on the doorstep, maybe waiting to see if I am going to mention a price; I wait too, wondering if he is going to mention a charge. Silence on both sides seems to indicate that the transaction is over with no payment on either side, and within the hour he is back with his lifting-gear. Tom M. takes photographs as the van is hauled like an elephant’s carcass through the gate and up the ramp, the miraculous tyres still happily inflated; the salvage man scrawls ‘On Tow’ in the thick dirt on the windscreen; stood by the bonnet I pose for a final photograph (which doesn’t come out); and the van goes off for the last time up the Crescent, leaving the drive feeling as wide and empty as the Piazza San Marco.

  1 A. B. (left) and elder brother Gordon (right) with Mam, Filey, 1937

  2 Mam, A.B., Gordon and Dad with Weatherhead, Byril Farm, Wilsill, 1940

  3 Nidderdale, 1942

  4 Aunty Kathleen, Grandma Peel, Mam and A. B., Morecambe, 1948

  5 Upper Armley National School, Leeds

  6 Armley Branch Library, Leeds

  7 Redmire, 1952

  8 With Michael Frayn, Bodmin, 1954

  9 Oxford, 1955

  10 Otley Road, Leeds, the Bennetrs’ house and shop (far right)

  11 Walking on the beach at Brighton, April 1961

  12 and 13 Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and A. B. in Beyond the Fringe, May 1961

  14 Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook and A. B. in Beyond the Fringe, May 1961

  5 May 1989. ‘Mr Bennett?’ The voice is a touch military and quite sharp, though with no accent to speak of and nothing to indicate this a man who must be over eighty. ‘You’ve sent me a letter about a Miss Shepherd, who seems to have died in your drive. I have to tell you I have no knowledge of such a person.’ A bit nonplussed, I describe Miss Shepherd and her circumstances and give her date of birth. There is a slight pause.

  ‘Yes. Well it’s obviously my sister.’

  He tells me her history and how, returning from Africa just after the war, he found her persecuting their mother, telling her how wicked she was and what she should and shouldn’t eat, the upshot being that he finally had his sister committed to a mental hospital in Hayward’s Heath. He gives her subsequent history, or as much of it as he knows, saying that the last time he had seen her was three years ago. He’s direct and straightforward and doesn’t disguise the fact that he feels guilty about having her committed yet cannot see how he could have done otherwise, how they never got on, and how he cannot see how I have managed to put up with her all these years. I tell him about the money, slightly expecting him to change his tune and stress how close they had really been. But not a bit of it. Since they hadn’t got on he wants none of it, saying I should have it. When I disclaim it too, he tells me to give it to charity.

  Anna Haycraft (Alice Thomas Ellis) had mentioned Miss S.’s death in her Spectator column, and I tell him about this, really to show that his sister did have a place in people’s affections and wasn’t simply a cantankerous old woman. ‘Cantankerous is not the word,’ he says, and laughs. I sense a wife there, and after I put the phone down I imagine them mulling over the call.

  I mull it over too, wondering at the bold life she has had and how it contrasts with my own timid way of going on – living, as Camus said, slightly the opposite of expressing. And I see how the location of Miss Shepherd and the van in front but to the side of where I write is the location of most of the stuff I write about; that too is to the side and never what faces me.

  Over a year later, finding myself near the village in Sussex where Mr F. lived, I telephoned and asked if I could call. In the meantime I’d written about Miss Shepherd in the London Review of Books and broadcast a series of talks about her on Radio 4.

  17 June 1990. Mr and Mrs F. live in a little bungalow in a modern estate just off the main road. I suppose it was because of the unhesitating fashion in which he’d turned down her legacy that I was expecting something grander; in fact Mrs F. is disabled and their circumstances are obviously quite modest, which makes his refusal more creditable than I’d thought. From his phone manner I’d been expecting someone brisk and businesslike, but he’s a plumpish, jolly man, and both he and his wife are full of laughs. They give me some lovely cake, which he’s baked (Mrs F. being crippled with arthritis) and the
n patiently answer my questions.

  The most interesting revelation is that as a girl Miss S. was a talented pianist and had studied in Paris under Cortot, who had told her she should have a concert career. Her decision to become a nun put an end to the piano, ‘and that can’t have helped her state of mind’ says Mr F.

  He recalls her occasional visits, when she would never come in by the front door but lope across the field at the back of the house and climb over the fence. She never took any notice of Mrs F., suspecting, rightly, that women were likely to be less tolerant of her than men.

  He says all the fiancé stuff, which came via the nuns, is nonsense; she had no interest in men, and never had. When she was in the ambulance service she used to be ribbed by the other drivers, who asked her once why she had never married. She drew herself up and said, ‘Because I’ve never found the man who could satisfy me.’ Mystified by their laughter she went home and told her mother, who laughed too.

  Mr F. has made no secret of the situation to his friends, particularly since the broadcasts, and keeps telling people he’s spent his life trying to make his mark and here she is, having lived like a tramp, more famous than he’ll ever be. But he talks about his career in Africa, how he still works as a part-time vet, and I come away thinking what an admirable pair they are, funny and kind and as good in practice as she was in theory – the brother Martha to his sister’s Mary.

  Sometimes now hearing a van door I think, ‘There’s Miss Shepherd,’ instinctively looking up to see what outfit she’s wearing this morning. But the oil patch that marked the site of the van has long since gone, and the flecks of yellow paint on the pavement have all but faded. She has left a more permanent legacy, though, and not only to me. Like diphtheria and Brylcreem, I associate moths with the forties, and until Miss Shepherd took up residence in the drive I thought them firmly confined to the past. But just as it was clothes in which the plague was reputedly spread to the Derbyshire village of Eyam so it was a bundle of Miss Shepherd’s clothes, for all they were firmly done up in a black plastic bag, that brought the plague to my house, spreading from the bag to the wardrobe and from the wardrobe to the carpets, the appearance of a moth the signal for frantic clapping and savage stamping. On her death my vigorous cleaning of the van broadcast the plague more widely, so that now many of my neighbours have come to share in this unwanted legacy.

  Her grave in the St Pancras Cemetery is scarcely less commodious than the narrow space she slept in the previous twenty years. It is unmarked, but I think as someone so reluctant to admit her name or divulge any information about herself, she would not have been displeased by that.

  Diaries 1980–1995

  I have kept a sporadic diary since the early seventies. I don’t write it up every day and often not for weeks at a time; I am most conscientious about it when I’m busy writing something else, so that as a rule when work is going well (or at any rate going) the diary goes well too. If there are problems with rehearsals, say, or filming, the diary gets the complaints, but this querulous litany makes for dull and (on my part) somewhat shamefaced reading. So that side of things doesn’t figure much in these extracts, or in the rehearsal or location diaries which are reprinted here.

  My diaries are written on loose-leaf sheets – sometimes typed, sometimes in longhand – and a year’s entries make a pretty untidy bundle. The writing is often untidy too; immediacy in my case doesn’t make for vivid reporting, which is why I’ve not had any scruples about improving and editing, though I’ve never altered the tone or the sentiments of what I’ve written at the time.

  Most of these diaries were originally published in the London Review of Books, where for reasons of space they had to be compressed, the extracts run together and the gaps between eliminated. What had been a series of jottings became a continuous, if disjointed, narrative. In this version I’ve restored my original spacing, as one of the pleasures of reading diaries, it seems to me, is that they are in bits (titbits with luck) – are like conversations, in fact, even if the conversation is with oneself. Wanting to hold such a conversation is one reason for keeping a diary; another is that it slows down time.

  In the account I have given of Miss Shepherd, who for many years lived in a van in my garden, I describe (in an extract from my diary) how going along in her wheelchair she would seldom lift her feet off the ground and so any Good Samaritan who pushed her found themselves behind a wheelchair continually braked by Miss Shepherd’s slurring, carpet-slippered feet. Particularly as one gets older and time begins to speed up, a diary has the same slurring effects.

  Where no place is given the entry was written in Camden Town in London; ‘Yorkshire’ is a village in Craven to which my parents retired and where I still have a house; ‘New York’ is generally an apartment on Thompson Street in SoHo.

  1980

  Sunday,13 January. A cold, sunny morning, my room smelling nicely of wood and books. A nun passes. Nuns now dress like nurses; gone the voluminous black, the starched coif, the twinkling rosy face; these days it’s a nanny’s uniform in a nasty shade of grey – papal policewomen.

  Struggle through the streaming flux of the Sunday papers before beginning the day: cultural events that are about to happen, talents that will shortly startle and never thereafter disappear, and of course money Novelists who with their first novel stumble into a swamp of dollars; actors sitting down at their scrubbed-pine tables to find their income amounts to £70,000 a year; playwrights who cannot even calculate theirs. And the last interview with Goronwy Rees, in which Goronwy talks to Andrew Boyle. Talks to him and wastes some of his presumably precious breath on calling Andrew frequently by name. ‘Yes, Andrew, Burgess did go to bed with Blunt, and in the process, Andrew, Blunt absorbed more of Burgess’s Marxist principles.’ In what process, one wonders? In the process of Burgess putting his cock up Blunt’s arse? To each according to ability (‘Does that feel nice?’), from each according to his means. ‘Now if you did it to me would that help you to grasp the principle better?’

  21 January. To the Serpentine Gallery for an exhibition of photographs by André Kertész. The park is empty, the sun warm, and the Albert Memorial is glinting through the trees. If this were New York I would be revelling in such a morning, but it’s only London. Few people in the exhibition, just one or two students and an old couple discussing the human interest of the pictures. ‘Your pictures talk too much’ a New York picture editor told Kertész. So what can I remember, having left the exhibition half an hour ago? A recruit in the Austrian army writing a letter in a barrack room in 1915. A corner of Mondrian’s house in Paris in the twenties. Washington Square under snow, and a boy holding a puppy’s head towards the camera.

  And, while on photographers, Cecil Beaton died on Friday. The obituaries mention his capacity for hard work but not his toughness. The toughness of the dandy.

  31 January. To John Huston’s Wise Blood with Ronald Eyre and Jocelyn Herbert. A beautiful film: Huston seventy-five, and yet it seems the work of a young man. His touch is so firm, the spell cast in the first moments when the young soldier is dropped off by the van he has hitched, reaches for his kitbag and seems about to leave the driver unthanked but suddenly leans in and says, boldly, ‘I’m obliged.’ The town, Macon in Georgia, a battered American small town, shot in bitter, blue sunshine; the hero mad as the figures in Dadd or Fuseli are mad – wide-eyed, bony, possessed.

  We have a meal at Bertorelli’s in Queensway, and Ron talks of how there may be a way of doing Enjoy in which the furniture is gradually removed during the last part of the second act, and the stage left wholly bare for the final speeches. Then to Jocelyn’s house, where Ron plays some of the tunes her father A. P. Herbert wrote the lyrics for – ‘Bless the Bride’, Other People’s Babies’. The house white and plain with no particular stamp on it, as designers’ houses often are; the walls of the study crowded with photographs of George Devine and the great days at the Royal Court, and two vast models ready for the set of Galileo, which Jocely
n is designing for the National. Jocelyn is I suppose sixty-odd, with children and grandchildren, yet she seems a contemporary, with a wonderful regal face, drawling voice and effortless style.

  1 February. To the Roundhouse for the Georgian State Theatre’s Richard III. A handful of pickets on the steps hand out pamphlets, saying ‘These will tell you what life in Russia is really like’; actually I’d have thought Richard III was a pretty fair picture (and certainly of life under Stalin). Seat 71 appears to be missing and I wander about the rows and stumble over Gaia Servadio.