Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  1984

  29 January. Russell has been given some beta-blockers which help to suppress the symptoms of nerves and stage fright. He had put one of them in a tissue, meaning to take it just before his programme, but when he came to do so he found it had dissolved, leaving a patch on the tissue. In the hope that some effective trace of the drug remained, he sucked this patch and within a few minutes felt calmer and came through with flying colours. A second attack of nerves he dealt with in the same way. It was only on the way home after the programme that he felt in another pocket and found the original tissue with the pill intact. What he had been sucking was some snot.

  16 February, London. Forty Years On is to be produced at Chichester in May, sixteen years after it was first done. I am nervous about this. When I’ve written something, I’d quite like to have it adopted, put in someone else’s name, and thus have none of the responsibilities of parentage or run the risk that at sixteen one’s offspring doesn’t turn out as well as one had hoped.

  Apropos of which, a few years ago I adopted a Kenyan boy through Action Aid. Every three months or so I get an aerogramme covered with his drawings and a comment on his work from his teacher. The drawings have scarcely improved at all over the years: today’s are ‘house’, ‘pesil’, ‘bus’ and ‘boy’, with the teacher’s comment ‘He is doing nice in all fields.’ John Ryle, who has lived in Africa, says that these boys invariably end up in government service as petty officials.

  23 February. Local elections are in progress and I have two posters in the window on behalf of the Alliance candidate. Today is polling day and around eight I am woken by the doorbell. Thinking it’s the postman, I go down in my dressing-gown, open the door, and just catch Miss Shepherd scuttling back into the van. She has left a note on the mat:

  Mr. Bennett. Urgent.

  It has dawned on me I have not been given the Alliance Leaflet. If it should be the second one you have put in your window as my property I demand that it is removed immediately. Please put it through my window so that I can dispose of it as I think best.

  Later I see she has stuck a Conservative poster in the back window of the van.

  14 March. Two nuns in Marks & Spencer’s studying meringues.

  21 March. Malcolm Mowbray, Michael Palin, Mark Shivas and I go to Broxbourne, where we have three pigs being groomed for their role in the film A Private Function, due to be shot in May. The couple doing the grooming operate under the name ‘Intellectual Animals’, but our pigs are anything but intellectual, squealing to be let out and then trotting round on delicate little feet like buxom landladies tripping naked to the bathroom in their high-heeled shoes. Their bums are much more striking than their faces, constantly on the move and shivering with delicate erotic tremors. They are supposed to have been house-trained and taught to come when called, but they aren’t and don’t. None of us mentions this.

  31 March, Oxford. In the morning to the Ashmolean, where I look at and dislike Leonardo’s John the Baptist, the body so smooth and rubbery it makes one doubt the attribution. The face, with its ambiguous smile, and the hand raised in what is almost an insulting gesture make it look more like a whore than a saint, the mysteriousness of the smile not a natural mystery – the enigma of beauty, say – but one of deliberate provocation. If he weren’t John the Baptist he’d be carrying a fan or peeping from under a parasol.

  In the afternoon to Libby Vaisey’s confirmation in the cathedral. Though it’s not a large building, the bishop dons a mike in order to speak, but then, moving to the pulpit, forgets that he has done so and there is a terrible amplified slurring as he fouls the cable. However, the young, bearded priest who attends him (who is probably as much his sound man as his chaplain) disentangles his lordship so that he can get into the pulpit. Once there he unceremonially dons another mike, though presumably if this becomes a feature of the ordinary service it will end up being given ceremonial trappings and perhaps even a place in the liturgy.

  The actual laying-on of hands has been personalized since that evening thirty-five years ago when H. H. Vully de Candole, the Bishop of Knaresborough, confirmed me in St Michael’s, Headingley. Nowadays each candidate carries a card with his or her name on it in block letters, some, I imagine, with an aid to pronunciation in brackets. And there are Kims and Beckys and Mandys and Trevs, all blessed and admitted to communion by this miked-up bishop and with a casualness about it that nobody seems to find surprising and which I think myself a snob for even noticing. Few of the boys wear suits, and one of the older candidates goes up in almost doctrinaire Fabian undress in an anorak.

  In the new form of service God is throughout referred to as You; only one Thou left in the world, and the fools have abolished it. Of course they can’t do away with the vocative, which is every bit as archaic, so we still say ‘O God’. It’s a good job God doesn’t have a name, or we’d probably be calling him Dave.

  4 April. Commentators on Kafka tend to enlist him. Heller enlists him, holds him up to the rest of the literature class as a good example. How he would have squirmed! Canetti does the same, annexes Kafka for his own stringency.

  Once upon a time K. remarked that he didn’t understand why I complained about growing old. Look at the compensations. I was, after all, old enough to have known steam trains in daily use. I made fun of this at the time but today I come across the same point in Auden:

  Let your last thinks be all thanks:

  . . . . . .

  In boyhood

  you were permitted to meet

  beautiful contraptions,

  soon to be banished from the earth,

  saddle-tank loks, beam engines

  and over–shot waterwheels.

  Yes, love, you have been lucky.

  13 April. Susan B. was in a traffic jam in Liverpool caused by a large car blocking the road. It only needed to reverse a little to clear the way, so a taxi-driver leaned out and shouted, ‘if you’d just reverse the length of your dick we could all get through.’

  16 April, Yorkshire. Between Stamford and Grantham en route home I pass a convoy of seven police vans and two coachloads from the Suffolk Constabulary on their way to the coalfields.

  A bank clerk counts me out some notes and scarcely pausing in his counting, puts aside the more dog-eared ones as he does so. With about as much thought, and for exactly the same reason (the practical use of this object is almost over), the SS officer on the platform at Auschwitz separated out the sick for immediate extermination.

  17 April. Bettany, the Ministry of Defence employee, is given twenty-three years for treason, and likely to serve the whole of it – and in isolation, because he has a photographic memory and so cannot be released until the information he has in his head is obsolete. Just as radioactive waste has to be sealed in drums and sunk in the depths of the ocean, so he has to be confined to his cell.

  No one suggests this is barbarous. We are getting back (or Mrs Thatcher would like to get back) to a view of treason that is Elizabethan in its rigour. The Lord Chief Justice delivers a moralistic lecture about Bettany’s inadequate character, saying nothing of course of those who, well aware of his inadequate character and its usefulness, recruited him into government service.

  9 May, Ilkley. James Fenton has been recruited by The Times and today reviews Peter Nichols’s autobiography, Feeling You’re Behind. Feeling you’re behind is a feeling I share, though Fenton professes to be mystified by it. Nichols has written many excellent plays, Fenton protests; he is well thought of, prosperous, but at fifty-seven confesses to feeling that nothing he has done is much good, is not even ‘writing’. In Nichols Fenton finds this ridiculous, though not presumably in Kafka, whose thoughts in much the same vein have made him revered. But Nichols is not Kafka. Precisely. That is what he is on about.

  16 May, Ilkley. My function on this film [A Private Function], as on many of my productions, is to sit around and keep people happy. Much of today I spend in Maggie Smith’s dressing-room while the pig is put through its pa
ces downstairs. She talks about Noel Coward and how when she was in Private Lives her performance had got very mannered and self-indulgent. Coward was in one night and came round and told her off, but in the best possible way, wagging his finger and saying, ‘You’ve got very common. Very common indeed. You’re almost as common as Gertie.’ To be compared with Gertrude Lawrence, if only for overdoing it, was such a compliment Maggie instantly mended her ways.

  Maggie always refers to Malcolm (Mowbray) the director as ‘our fearless leader’.

  2 June, Bradford. Denys Hawthorne, who plays an undeservedly small part in the film as a hotel manager, comes from Belfast, where he knew Maurice Miles, whom I as a boy in Leeds used to see conducting the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra. Miles was a balletic conductor who very much fancied himself on the rostrum, fond of shooting his cuffs and fetching the brass in with a flourish. Denys was chatting with him one night after a concert when Miles broke off to have a word with the leading horn-player, a dour Yorkshireman.

  ‘What went wrong tonight, George? Something, I wasn’t quite sure.’

  ‘Well, let’s put it like this, Mr Miles, it’s very hard to come in on the fourth rattle of the cufflinks.’

  The hierarchy on the film unit can be discerned much easier when the sun shines. The riggers and electricians regardless of whether they are fat or thin straightaway take their shirts off; the camera crew and the upper levels of production never.

  Jim Carter, who plays the police inspector in the film, is a tall, dark, rather saturnine character, less effusive than most actors, and while the others tell stories he quietly does sleight-of-hand tricks and close-up magic. I am slightly nervous of him, feeling that he sees through me. And he does. I was leaving early today when he remarked, ‘You can’t go. You’re Continuity Giggles’.

  30 June, Prince Charles at Betjeman’s memorial service. Never read the Bible as if it means something. Or at any rate don’t try and mean it. Nor prayers. The liturgy is best treated and read as if it’s someone announcing the departure of trains.

  Giles Cooper, who died nearly twenty years ago, is described in today’s Times as ‘award-winning playwright Giles Cooper’. I’d have thought that one of the few things to be said in favour of death was that it extinguished all that.

  9 July. After four days feeling under sentence of death, having found a small lump on my foot, I go to the doctor. ‘Not a nasty,’ says young Dr Macgregor cheerfully – ‘just a thrombosed vein.’

  Reprieved, I bike back home thinking of the people who are not reprieved and do not bike back home, resolving to do better, work harder, behave. But it’s such a precarious business, life’s peaceful landscape suddenly transformed, what look like green fields suddenly a swamp of anxiety.

  I had said this to the doctor.

  ‘No. It’s quite natural. Most people are the same, particularly when they get to…’ and he looks down at my notes.

  ‘My age?’ I supply.

  ‘Yes. No way of saying that in a complimentary way, is there?’

  2 September. M. Neve calls to say that a colleague of his has told him that while Goffman was writing Asylums his wife was an inmate of the institution where he did most of his research and that she died in that same institution.

  Projects I have been sent in the last week: a life of Lola Montes; ‘Survive’ (an ordinary family wrecked in the South Pacific); Pierre Loti (‘exotic, erotic and neurotic’); ‘The Life and Times of Emanuel Swedenborg’. And then people ask, ‘Anything in the pipeline?’

  9 September, Yorkshire. The little boy opposite, who has the beginnings of muscular dystrophy, is leaning over the bridge watching his sister fishing. A tall, bald-headed man comes over the bridge, having been walking on the fells. He stops, looks over the wall beside the little boy, then tentatively pats his bottom. The boy takes no notice and continues to watch the fishing while the man looks sideways at him and touches the boy’s blue anorak. There is a gap between the anorak and the top of his jeans, and he looks at that. Someone is coming. He pats the boy’s bum again and, as the boy shyly looks after him, waves goodbye. The boy gets up and leans over the other side of the bridge, and a minute or two later his sister comes up from the beck with a tiny trout she has caught – the first time I have ever seen anyone actually catch a fish in all the eighteen years I have lived here. Together they come up the path to show the fish to their mother, the girl going slowly so that her brother can hold on to her and balance himself, moving in his odd dislocated way like a long-distance walker. He is very happy.

  14 September. The working miners, particularly those working in villages which are largely on strike, would make an interesting sociological study. This conflict has distanced them from their neighbours, but I would guess that process had begun long before the strike. Some are social oddities – bespectacled young men living with their mothers – others are over-emphatic, even obsessive; and one is filmed against his bookshelf, an oddity in itself. He and his fellows were plainly on a different track before the strike even started.

  18 September. In the inane publicity hand-out for A Private Function I find myself described as ‘This Northern lad’ – maybe even (I can’t bear to read it closely) ‘This flaxen-haired Northern lad’. Is Pinter ever described as ‘This East End boy’? Has he ever been? I put this down not to my supposedly youthful appearance but to the attitude comic writing engenders. Any third-rate journalist putting together copy feels entitled to be matey simply because one makes jokes.

  25 September. Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard (Watership Down) Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal’s new novel about Lincoln. ‘I thought it was meretricious.’ ‘Really?’ says Gore. ‘Well, meretricious and a happy new year.’ That’s the way to do it.

  13 October. Mrs Thatcher is achieving mythic status. Scarcely does her step falter than the gods intervene with some terrible event like this bomb at Brighton from which she emerges with her reputation enhanced. There is the sad sight of the injured Tebbitt trying to prevent the British public getting a glimpse of his balls; firemen arranging his dusty pyjama trousers to foil the ever-present cameras, as ministers in varying states of undress wait on the front. If the IRA had really wanted to succeed they should have left a sniper behind and he would have had an easy task. Much comment on Mrs T.’s courage the next morning, when she arrives at the Conservative conference on the dot, but it’s not difficult to appear calm and unruffled in such circumstances, as any actor could tell you. The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.

  28 October. Truffaut dies – an oddly personal loss. I sometimes haven’t liked his films but could always understand their language, share his concerns, sense his humanity. Like Woody Allen’s films, though in a different way, they were within range. I watch a South Bank Show repeat in tribute.

  ‘My films,’ he says, ‘are about timidity. My characters want to take part. They want to belong, and be like everybody else.’

  I have supper with Russell. A few weeks ago on his programme, which is filmed at the Greenwood Theatre, he interviewed Billy Graham and had at one point to escort him to the lavatory. At the Greenwood these are all cubicles. The following week he went into the same cubicle Dr Graham had used, where he saw at eye-level and in very clear handwriting, just where the Doctor’s eyes must have rested, the message ‘The only pussy worth licking is young pussy’

  6 December. Agents are like doctors: they prefer dealing with one another. Clients, like patients, are secondary – there to be soothed and comforted and lied to while the real business is done in straight talking between professional men. This is after all what a professional man is: someone who can talk to other professional men without feeling, or feeling only a precise measure of concern that will pass for feeling. This is why voters distrust politicians, a prisoner his lawyer, and, at this particular moment, why I am unhapp
y with my agent. I am a graceful appendage to his list, I make enough money but nothing spectacular, and I make no trouble. Result: when I do have a success I end up being underpaid (as with An Englishman Abroad – £3,000) or the play comes off (Forty Years On). Meanwhile my contemporaries who have learned how to be hard-nosed and fifty, even to make telephone calls and speak their minds, get themselves disliked but make money. Whereas I prefer to be liked and thought a nice man. But I’m not. I’m just as bad as the rest of them, only I don’t like to show it.

  7 December. To a party at the Department of the History of Medicine at University College. I talk to Alan Tyson, who’s like a figure out of the eighteenth century: a genial, snuff-taking, snuff-coloured, easy-going aristocrat – Fox, perhaps, or one of the Bourbons. He is a fellow of All Souls, and when Mrs Thatcher came to the college for a scientific symposium Tyson was deputed to take her round the Common Room. This is hung with portraits and photographs of dead fellows, including one of the economist G. D. H. Cole. Tyson planned to take Mrs Thatcher up to it saying, ‘And this, Prime Minister, is a former fellow, G. D. H. Dole.’ Whereupon, with luck, Mrs Thatcher would have had to say, ‘Cole not Dole.’ In the event he did take her round but lost his nerve.

  15 December. Filming this week for Man and Music at Penshurst Place, the home of Lord de L’Isle and Dudley. Everything one imagines an English country house should be – a hotchpotch of different periods, medieval hall, eighteenth-century courtyards, Gothic front, solid green walls of yew and parterres of box. We film in a room adjoining the drawing-room, part of the private wing, with photographs of Lord D. at Cambridge, in India as a young man and ADC to Wavell, and now stood beside Macmillan as he unveils a plaque to Lord Gort. On a coffee-table are back numbers of The Economist, Country Life and the TLS, with drinks at the side.