Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  7 July. When I say goodbye to Mam after taking her back to the home at Weston, she gets out of the car saying, ‘Thank you for all you’ve done for me, love.’ And she means this; it isn’t a remark intended to induce guilt. But in a film the next shot would be me looking down at the shaft of a spear protruding from my belly with the head stuck out a foot behind me.

  3 August, Yorkshire. I know so little that writing is like crossing a patch of swampy ground, jumping from one tussock to another trying not to get my feet wet (or egg on my face). Of course at a distance no one can see the ground is swampy, and at a distance too one’s movements are smoothed out, the hesitations diminished. Fifty years on, the anguished leaps may seem like confident strides. Except who will be looking?

  Today is the anniversary of Dad’s death, and I go down to the cemetery about half past twelve, which was around the time he died, and put flowers on the grave.

  I would like to forward on to him beyond the grave a card David Vaisey sent me last Christmas. It’s of a toy butcher’s shop, c. 1885, and it would remind him of the butcher’s shop he made for Gordon and me when we were evacuated to Wilsill in 1939. It had little wooden joints that hung on bent-pin meat hooks, a counter and a block, and he had made it sitting at his Hobbies fretwork machine by the fire at Halliday Place in those first weeks of the war.

  The other item I’d send him would be Emanuel Hurwitz’s valuation of the violin he bought at Barnoldswick in 1970 for £16. Hill’s, the snooty violin shop in Bond Street, made him feel a fool for thinking it was of any interest and grandly offered him £20 for it. Hurwitz says it’s worth £2,000, and with restoration much more.

  What I wouldn’t like to send him is Mam’s address, or the Orton script which I’ve been struggling with all this year [Prick Up Your Ears].

  Standing by the grave, I fetch back a memory of him in his waistcoat with his sleeves rolled up, grinning all over his still young face. But no voice that says, ‘It’ll be all right eventually’ or ‘You’ll get through this patch,’ which is what he’d have said if he were alive.

  22 August, La Garde Freinet. This villa is a farmhouse that has been converted so ruthlessly that only two buttresses of the original remain. It belongs to Reiner Moritz, the German TV mogul. My room is the so–called library and games room, one end of which holds the bookshelves. The books are a varied selection, but they have one thing in common: they have all been read with a view to turning them into TV programmes.

  Apropos of books, I have just finished Robert Byron’s Road to Oxiana in a new paperback edition with an introduction by Bruce Chatwin. It’s a funny and enjoyable book, though I have reservations about both Byron and Chatwin – Byron contemptuous of other ‘worthier’ travellers, a (possibly invented) schoolmaster, Thrush, Chatwin of the hippies who have made much of the journey to Afghanistan commonplace. Both, though writing forty years apart, are acceptable figures socially. Embassies abroad are invariably outposts of snobbery of one kind or another, where one is welcomed if one is ‘amusing’ or a ‘celebrity’ but not otherwise. Boredom is the enemy, and diplomats, like aristocrats, wish to be diverted.

  Chatwin irritates on another level. ‘I can guess, too, what happened to Wali Jahn,’ he writes. ‘He took me to safety when I got blood-poisoning. He carried me on his back through the river, and bathed my head, and made me rest under the ilexes. But when we came back five years later he was coughing, deep retching coughs, and had the look of someone going down to the cold. ‘This is sheer Buchan, the permitted degree of male camaraderie – men caring and crying for each other, both nobly – plus the bit of Sapper-Buchan lore in ‘the look of a man going down to the cold’. What is this look? Does he mean the man has TB or bronchitis?

  I am a mean-spirited reader, though. ‘One afternoon…’ Chatwin writes, ‘I took The Road to Oxiana into the mosque [of Sheik Lutf ‘ullah, in Isfahan] and sat, cross-legged, marvelling both at the tilework and Byron’s description of it.’ It’s the ‘cross-legged’ I dislike, partly because five minutes of it and I’d be crippled. But why tell us?

  28 August, La Garde Freinet. Ten years ago it was thought (or I thought it) quite daring for a girl to loosen her bikini top to brown her whole back. Nowadays girls bare their breasts and bake them openly just as a matter of course. Or girls with nice breasts do. Charlotte H., for instance, who sits across the swimming-pool from me now, has huge unexpected breasts with large, snub nipples; they look like the noses of koala bears.

  I wear a pair of flip-flop sandals, the sort with a sole and one strap across-the biblical type, I suppose. When I was a boy and read of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples, I thought of their feet as like my own in 1943, sweating in grey Utility socks and encased in heavy black shoes with stuck-on rubber soles. Consequently I regarded Jesus’s gesture as far more self-sacrificing, even heroic, than it actually was. After twelve pairs of such feet, I thought, the Crucifixion would have been a pushover.

  11 November. An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail, listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.

  14 November, Bristol. Mam is now having difficulty putting names to objects, as much, I think, from disuse of her faculties as from actual decay. She was stood in front of the mantelpiece trying to think of the name for the clock. ‘It’s one of those things’, she said, ‘with things going round, and then when they get there they’ve had it for a bit.’

  20 November, Yorkshire. The phone rings. ‘Have I got the pox, darling?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Have I got the pox? It’s Coral Browne, dear. I’ve just got into London and found everybody else has left. Alec’s not here. You’re not here. The only person who is here, thank God, is John Schlesinger, and I’m going there to supper tonight.’

  I ask her what it is she’s doing. ‘An American TV special. Are you sitting down, dear, because I’m about to tell you the title: “The Most Wonderful Woman in the World”. I need hardly add, darling, that I am not playing the title role. About Eleanor Roosevelt. Being played by Jean Stapleton. No, not Maureen Stapleton – that would make sense. I’m playing Lady Reading. Ever heard of her? No, I hadn’t. There’s apparently only one photograph of her extant, and they’ve given it to make-up so I fear the worst. They’ve kitted me out in some Oxfam clothes, furs with alopecia, and they haven’t even let me see the hat, saying its got to be “refreshed”, plus I have to wear these invalid shoes. In the scene we do tomorrow I’m supposed to walk from Claridge’s round the corner into Parliament Square. I’ve pointed out that Parliament Square is not round the corner from Claridge’s, but they say it’s all the footage will allow. Vincent is in Paris, getting some award for his services to horror, then we go to Rome for something similar only in Italian.’

  We talk about the Burgess piece [An Englishman Abroad] and discuss who should play him, and we go through various names while it becomes increasingly obvious that we haven’t talked about who is to play her. Eventually I hear myself saying, ‘Would you like to do it?’

  ‘But aren’t I too old?’

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘what do you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure, dear. You see, in a way, age didn’t come into it’ (which is true). ‘And I was playing Gertrude at the time – mother to Michael Redgrave, who’s several years older than me. I mean, I’ve played mother to them all, Redgrave, Gielgud, Alec. The only one whose mother I haven’t played, thank God, is Ralph Richardson.’

  I promise to keep her posted and send her the next draft, when there is a next draft, and that’s where we leave it. It slightly alters the play, makes it less fictional, but I think I like that.

  1982

  17 January, New York. At The Odeon on our last evening A. and I sit on the banquette next to a couple in their late twenties, good-looking, though the woman over-attended-to – hair carefully coiffed, eyelashes curled, altogether too done-up. They are waited on by Helen, who is pretty and na
tural-looking (and also imperturbable). Their main dish is lobster, and the girl sends it back twice, the first time because it is cold, the second because ‘it’s like rubber.’ The real reason, it seems, is that the boyfriend had noticed Helen and been pleasant to her while she was taking their order. Stephen C, who is maître d’, says this often happens, and, ‘without being sexist at all, gays do not do that.’ If a gay couple are served by a good-looking waiter and one of them fancies him, it’s all part of the fun.

  24 January. To the Lutyens exhibition at the Hayward, thinking (wrongly) that towards the end of a Sunday afternoon it will not be crowded. In fact the rooms are so full the only solution is to go round the wrong way, though no matter, since my impressions of exhibitions and galleries are always haphazard. As usual, I am struck more by who is doing the looking rather than by what they are looking at: worthy architects, with grey hair and bright ties, seeming younger than their age; pencil-slim architectural students dressed with casual care, functional in their persons; a lot of people who have probably had a decent salad for their lunch and come in their five-and six-year-old cars, reflecting that this is what architecture should be about – warm, idiosyncratic, cosy. Though in fact much of Lutyens’s architecture is as contemptuous of the individual as the bleakest tower block. But more fun – particularly the follies of it: a wooden bridge over a gate, a pergola, a billiard table on a plinth of solid chalk, gingerbread housing, and some of it like the architecture of dreams. His furniture is beautifully curved and chamfered in bleached oak and lime, and in the crowded lecture hall, which I cannot get into, a glimpse of two chandeliers in painted wood, fat coloured hens and ladies fishing – nursery chandeliers from the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi. I have a sense of uncompeting ease here, knowing what I like and what I don’t like without being mystified or bewildered as I always am by first-rate pictures, and the feeling recurs that had I been a designer (though I would not have wanted to be an architect) I would have been a happier man.

  I go upstairs to the second exhibition, the later paintings of Sickert. Some are thin and unfinished and (which always disqualifies a picture for me) with the grain of the canvas showing through the paint. A good one of George Vat Aintree, with his dead Cambridge-blue eyes, and a superb boldly done picture of ‘Lazarus Breaking His Fast’. Odd pictures I recognize from boyhood and Leeds (‘Oh hello. Fancy seeing you here!’) and are more friendly than any face in the gallery. But it’s a foul little building, and its inadequacy emphasized by the photographs of Lutyens’ delicious details – delicate finials, tiled floors, curved banisters. All the Hay ward can boast in the way of decoration is the impress of boards on concrete. The staircase up to Waterloo Bridge is wet and stinks of urine, and rightly – it is properly pissed on.

  10 February. I am walking in the Lower East Side in New York, strolling east through the Village. I am surprised by how much of it has been smartened up. Then I come out into an intersection between warehouses and railway buildings, where, across a large central triangle, I see a herd of mackintoshed derelicts, who are also convicts, each with a white oblong on his boots carrying his prison number. I turn and run, much as one might run to get out of the way of a herd of cows, for I know they are not individually dangerous.

  Now I am walking back towards safety – east is danger, I know, and west is home – back along a narrow track beside fields of standing corn. A colourful character waves me on, and then I am confronted by a young man in a smart cavalry-twill coat, the coat slightly too big for him; he has a small head, with gummy, edgy hair. He wants money, and I reach into my right-hand back pocket, where I have several bills, and, taking them out, pull out one for ten dollars. I notice that all the colour has drained from the note. Knowing that I have only taken out one bill from many, he suddenly has a knife in his hand which he is holding before his face, a small knife, the blade of which I can hardly see. I know as we confront each other in the standing corn that this young man of twenty-six or so is going to kill me and that I had been misled by the cavalry-twill coat into thinking him a better class of person. Suddenly I see why the coat is too big – because that too is stolen. I look into the face of this cold-eyed runt and see as I wake and die that I will perish because I have been a snob.

  23 March. When, like today, I feel I have got a little, little way with a plot and knock off for the day, it is like a climber going up a sheer face who pitches camp on a narrow ledge. Tomorrow he may get no further; he may even roll off during the night.

  ‘That’s a place I haven’t been for some time.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On top of the world.’

  1 April. To the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith, to record Roy Hattersley’s It’s My Pleasure, an evening of Larkin’s poetry, with Judi Dench. ‘Are you still writing your lovely plays?’ she asks. Still, yes.

  As always the simpler the programme the more one is called upon to rehearse, in this case all day from ten till five. Hattersley is decent and straightforward and with a sense of humour, but wastes much of his commentary by talking about how deeply the poems have moved him rather than riveting it to fact. He is more nervous of doing this programme (‘not his job’) than he is of addressing the House of Commons, and he takes up all sorts of points with the producer, thinking there is some sort of expertise involved, whereas really the knack is just to come through as oneself. On recording he is very nervous, and we have to do several retakes, the final one being when he ends up, ‘And my thanks to Miss Judi Dench and Mr Alan Brien.’

  ‘Alan would be very flattered,’ he says.

  ‘Why?’ ‘To think that his name is so much at the forefront of my mind.’

  His choice of poems is dull, and I read indifferently; Judi as always with great sweetness and lots of light and air in her voice. She wears the same dress she wore when we did my Evening With thirteen years ago, and I am in the same suit. Happier then, I reflect (and much in the spirit of the poems); happier almost any time than now.

  5 April, Yorkshire. I walk round the village at half past ten, the shadows from the barns sharp and clear under Larkin’s ‘strong, unhindered moon’. ‘This must wait’, is my foolish thought, ‘until I have written something that permits me to enjoy it.’

  27 April. Gavin Millar rehearses Julie Walters and me in our two main scenes from my television film Intensive Care. I play a shy schoolteacher, she a night nurse in the intensive-care unit where my father hovers between life and death. In the first scene, after a bit of palaver, I ask her to go to bed; in the second scene we do so, and in this brief absence from duty and the paternal bedside my father, of course, dies. The scene was suggested by an incident in the life of Gandhi, whose father died while he was actually screwing. I had had some thoughts while writing the play that I might act the schoolmaster, but coming to the bedroom scene I sighed with relief, knowing this was something I wouldn’t be prepared to tackle – an experience that occurs too frequently when I am writing for it to be just accidental; i.e. I deliberately write myself out of my own work. In this case, though, Gavin hasn’t been able to find anyone else to play the part, so here I am. It is a hard job because I have written myself very few lines, something I regularly do with the central character. Supporting parts I don’t find difficult, either to invent or to supply with dialogue; the central character is a blank, a puzzle, and one which I hope the actor will solve for me. But now the actor is me and I don’t know what to do.

  16 May, Yorkshire. A racing pigeon comes down in the garden. It has been plucking its breast as pelicans were once thought to do and now just stands there, amber eyes unwinking, its beak full of fluff. It cannot fly, not even to help itself over the threshold of the hut, and, though we feed it on Ryvita and milk, A. finds it lying on its back this morning, fluttering and unable to right itself. I get the axe and, shutting my eyes, hit it on the head. Bright blood suddenly flows over the dust, though I seem to have made no wound, and its sharp-ringed eye is still. Gingerly I turn it over and it flutters again, so I give it an
other blow and as I lift it up there is a sound like a sigh as life leaves it. I put it in the bin. I cannot have killed more than three creatures in my life.

  25 May, Airedale Hospital, Keighley. Neil, the dresser, has been arguing with Simon, the AFM, and Miri, the make-up assistant, about the colour problem. Simon and Miri are both Jewish (Miri an Israeli) and Neil is ill-equipped to argue with them.

  ‘I just think,’ he says, telling me of the argument afterwards, ‘I just think there are too many coloured people in London now. And I don’t like it. But it’s only a preference. After all, some people don’t like Bette Davis.’

  4 June. We (we!) drop leaflets on the Argentine troops besieged in Port Stanley, urging them to lay down their arms. Were such leaflets dropped on our troops we would consider them contemptible and ludicrous; our leaflets are represented as a great humanitarian gesture.

  15 June. Mrs Thatcher announces the surrender of Port Stanley in well-modulated tones. Film follows of the funeral of the commandos killed at Goose Green, the simple service and the youth of the wounded unbearable. A pilot of one of the Harriers talks about the effectiveness of the Sidewinder missiles. ‘A bit of an eye-opener,’ is how he puts it. A bit of an eye-closer too. Not English I feel now. This is just where I happen to have been put down. No country. No party. No Church. No voice.

  And now they are singing ‘Britannia Rules the Waves’ outside Downing Street. It’s the Last Night of the Proms erected into a policy.

  Alan (Son of Civilisation) Clark MP wants the Argentinian prisoners paraded in front of the cameras with unlaced boots. I’m surprised he doesn’t want them displayed in front of the cameras with no braces, like the July plotters.