by Alan Bennett
‘Ah,’ one thinks – ‘a glimpse here of the private life.’ But is it? Is this really a private room or just a private room for public consumption? These drinks (and the bottle of vitamin pills beside them), have they been artfully arranged to suggest a private life? Is there somewhere else, another flat, which is more private? And so on. And so on. This impression is confirmed by the hall table, on which are all the Viscount’s hats: his green Guards trilbies, his bowler, his lumberjack’s hat that was plainly presented to him on some sort of ceremonial visit. Surely all this is meant to be seen.
31 December, New York. I leave The Odeon around eleven, the place already a frenzy of streamers and horn-blowing. Back at the apartment all is quiet, but as firecrackers go off in the street and the noises in her head are blotted out by the whistles and bangs, Rose sings in the new year with a love song:
I love you
And I find it to be true
And the whole world smiles at you.
Except that five minutes into 1985 the fireworks stop, the noises come back, and once more she thinks there is a boy bouncing his ball on her ceiling. No matter that she has thought this for twenty-five years and if there were a boy he would now be a middle-aged man, for Rose he is still bouncing his ball.
‘Stop it. Stop it,’ she shouts. ‘I can’t have this. Stop it, you goddamn filthy bum.’
1985
6 January. The revival of Forty Years On closes after a five-month run. Houses are good and it has made a decent profit, but it now makes way for Charlton Heston in The Caine Mutiny. The classified ad reads, ‘“The Queen’s Theatre will not have seen the last of this play for many a long day.” Final week.’
25 January. The chaplain of Chelmsford Prison has recently died of Aids, since when maiden ladies of irreproachable morals have been inquiring of their doctors whether they stand to have caught the virus from the communion chalice. I remember having the same problem when I was seventeen and a fervent Anglican, though then my fear was only of catching dear old VD. The regular Sunday Eucharist was no great worry, as those with whom one shared the cup were of blameless life. The problem arose at the great festivals of Christmas and Easter, when the church was thronged with the promiscuous multitude. All too easy to catch something you couldn’t get rid of from such once-or-twice-a-year Christians, particularly at the watch-night service, when many of them were half-drunk. I was contemptuous of these opportunistic worshippers who didn’t know the service backwards like I did, never knew when to stand and when to kneel, and, when they did kneel, didn’t kneel on their knees but just leaned forward with their head in their hands as if they were on the lav. I didn’t feel the clergy despised them, though – knowing without ever acknowledging it to myself that, like doctors with hypochondriacs, their faint contempt was reserved for regular attenders like me. Mindful of the parable of the lost sheep, they were happy to see the church packed out with the once-a-year crowd, and me and the pious hard core swamped.
12 February. I am buying daffodils in a shop in Camden High Street. An oldish woman asks for some violets, but they aren’t quite fresh. ‘Never mind,’ she explains. ‘I only want to throw them down a grave.’
My TV play The Insurance Man has come back typed and duplicated by the BBC. It’s about Kafka. In various places I had included a note, ‘Cut or shift elsewhere’. This is transcribed, ‘Cut or shit elsewhere.’
13 March, Los Angeles. The Pig Film [A Private Function] is due to open the British Film Week at the LA Film Festival. A limousine which will fetch the director Malcolm Mowbray and myself from our hotel to the cinema doesn’t arrive. Eventually we are rushed down Hollywood Boulevard in the hotel van, which smells strongly of fish. The opening is at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. There are searchlights and what appear to be a troop of Horse Guards on duty. Close inspection reveals that none of the troops is under sixty. A few passers-by watch the arrival of the celebrities, of which there seem only to be two, Michael York and Michael Caine (who later slags off the film). The audience is not star-studded either and heavily sprinkled with those freaks, autograph-hunters and emotional cripples who haunt the stage doors of American theatres. A troop of ‘Highlanders’ file on to the stage but with trumpets, not bagpipes. They stand about awkwardly for a few minutes, blow a discordant fanfare, then another endless pause before they shuffle off again. The British Ambassador now stands up to introduce the evening, but his microphone doesn’t work and the audience start barracking. The producer Mark Shivas, Malcolm Mowbray and myself are sitting in different parts of the cinema, and we are to be introduced to the audience. Mark is introduced first, the spotlight locates him, and there is scattered applause; then Malcolm similarly. When my turn comes I stand up, but since I am sitting further back than the others the spotlight doesn’t locate me. ‘What’s this guy playing at?’ says someone behind. ‘Sit down, you jerk.’ So I do. The film begins.
16 March, New York. K. wants to make a seafood salad, so we go into a fishmonger’s on Bleecker. A young, fat GUY sits by the door, an old, grey one at the back, and, doing all the work, a Puerto Rican.
K.: I want a dozen mussels.
FAT GUY: We don’t sell them by the dozen.
K.: How do you sell them?
FAT GUY: Sell them by the pound.
K.: OK. A pound. (Pause.) How many are there in a pound?
fat guy (triumphantly):‘Bout a dozen.
12 May. Opposite the Libyan Embassy in St James’s Square a woman is photographing the newly unveiled memorial to WPC Fletcher. Will she show it as one of the slides of her London visit, one wonders. The Beefeaters, the Horse Guards – ‘Oh, and here’s the memorial to that policewoman who was shot.’
During the miners’ strike we heard nothing of the Lebanon. Now the strike is over the first item on the news is once again the Middle East. Did the Shiite Muslims liaise with Mr Scargill? Was the Christian militia apprised of the efforts of Mr Michael Eaton in that suit with the persistent check? Do murders cease in Beirut because the pickets are out in Bolsover? I suppose to The World at One and the rest of the hyena crew of newsmen this is what’s called ‘a sense of priority’.
20 May. Money begins to pour in for the victims of the Bradford football ground fire. Cash the poultice: not for the injuries of the victims or the feelings of the bereaved but for the memory of the public. Give now in order to forget. Though there is no denying it helps. The squabbles about the amount of money to be distributed are already beginning; once greed has been reawakened we know that all is well.
Apropos the safety measures now required of soccer clubs, it is pointed out to Mrs Thatcher that many of them are too poor to afford such outlays. She then expresses surprise that clubs of this kind have survived at all. The same argument could of course be applied to churches. It’s a good job Mrs T. isn’t Archbishop of Canterbury, or we would just be left with the cathedrals and a few other ‘viable places of worship’.
30 May. Writing a review of Auden in Love [see pages 504–16], I come across Stephen Spender’s story of how Auden made Spender pay for the cigarettes he had bummed off him on Ischia. Spender points out that at other times Auden could be conspicuously generous, on one occasion giving Spender £50 towards a pony for his daughter. This isn’t uncommon. Michael Codron will spend vast sums on entertaining the cast, but resents replacing an actress’s cardigan. If someone stays overnight I count the cost of laundering the sheets but never think about the price of dinner. This kind of inconsistency is enshrined in the language: it’s ‘a mean streak’.
3 June. A bizarre accident in Camden Town. Shooting the lights at the foot of Chalk Farm Road, a fire-engine swerves to avoid a car and plunges straight through the front of a shop. It happens first thing in the morning and no one is hurt – the call turned out to be a hoax. All day the fire-engine has been stuck inside the shop, and so neatly, long ladder and all, with only the rear wheels visible, it’s as if it has been deliberately garaged. Scaffolders toil till dark to shore up the building lest, when t
he engine is withdrawn, it will fetch the building down with it. Were the shop a newsagent’s or a greengrocer’s it would be bad enough, but the premises in question are those of an extremely select antique shop, which fastidiously confines itself to art deco. There are mirrors tinted a faint pink, lamps in frail fluted skirts. Suddenly in the pearly light of dawn in bursts this red, bullying monster.
I read biographies backwards, beginning with the death. If that takes my fancy I go through the rest. Childhood seldom interests me at all.
7 June, Yorkshire. Driving to Giggleswick on the back road, I see a barn-owl. It is perched, eponymously, on a barn and at the very tip of the gable, so that at first I take it, stone-coloured and still, to be a finial. I stop the car and gaze up at it, whereupon it doesn’t take flight but edges delicately back out of view. I stop again at the top of High Rigg, the sun low behind Morecambe and the sky full of flying clouds. It’s nine o’clock, but they are still haymaking above Eldroth, the newly mown fields fresh and green. Then down into Giggleswick to a silly supper and a game of Trivial Pursuit. To play Trivial Pursuit with a life like mine could be said to be a form of homeopathy.
30 June. To supper at the Camden Brasserie. It’s a hot night and the shutters have been folded back so that the room opens directly on to Camden High Street. In France or New York this would excite no comment. In London, or in Camden Town at any rate, it draws the jeers of every passing drunk. Kids on their way to the Emerald Ballroom stop and stare. To dine like this in England is somehow to advertise one’s status. Though the restaurant is neither expensive nor exclusive, fold back the shutters and suddenly we are in a ‘Let them eat cake’ situation.
17 July, Southport. A sign on the road to this still rather genteel seaside resort reads, ‘You are now entering Southport.’ Someone has added, ‘Eat shit.’ I’ve come here because I am weary of Liverpool, where we are filming. Every Liverpudlian seems a comedian, fitted out with smart answers, ready with the chat and anxious to do his little verbal dance. They are more like Cockneys than Lancashire people, and it gets me down.
25 July, Yorkshire, T. R. (‘Tosco’) Fyvel, friend of Orwell, has died. The Telegraph obituary is headed ‘T. R. (Tesco) Fyvel’.
Supper at Warwick and Susan’s. We have fish and chips, which W. and I fetch from the shop in Settle market-place. Some local boys come in and there is a bit of chat between them and the fish-fryer about whether the kestrel under the counter is for sale. W. takes no notice of this, to me, slightly surprising conversation, and when the youths have gone I edge round to see if I can get a glimpse of this bird, wondering what a cage is doing under the counter and if such conditions amount to cruelty. I see nothing, and only when I mention it to W. does he explain Kestrel is now a lager. I imagine the future is going to contain an increasing number of incidents like this, culminating with a man in a white coat saying to one kindly, ‘And now can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister?’
30 November. My dustbin has been on its last legs for some time, and after the binmen have called this morning I find no trace of it. Never having heard of tautology, the binmen have put the dustbin in the dustbin.
1986
6 January. Isherwood dies. The Times obituary, with a discretion amounting to insult, makes no mention of his homosexuality. The Telegraph has no scruples on this score though the obituary, written by a critic (David Holloway) mentions I Am A Camera as notable only for occasioning a critic’s joke. Which it misquotes (Holloway: Me no lika; Tynan: No Leica). In both obituaries the note is the familiar one of ‘Could have done better’.
I met Isherwood in 1962. He had seen Beyond the Fringe and I went out to supper with him and Don Bachardy at Chez Solange in Cranbourne Street. He wanted to tell me about the sermons and ceremonies he and Auden used to perform in a disused quarry near their school at Hindhead. I was incurious and so shy I scarcely remember speaking. It was the first time I had come across a couple who made no bones about their homosexuality. The difference in their ages stunned me.
30 January. A meeting at the Royal Court about Kafka’s Dick, now put off until September. Their next play is an adaptation by Howard Barker of Women Beware Women, and the production after that The Normal Heart, an American play about Aids. This is referred to at the theatre as ‘Men Beware Men’.
14 February, New York. Lunch with S. at the Harvard Club. Grander (or certainly loftier) than any London club at lunchtime, it is as busy as a railroad station. Afterwards we sit in the library. Smack opposite the vast window of this superb room, in which sleep several distinguished senators, is a cheap clothing store and a neon sign winking ‘Crazy Eddy’s’.
I go into a pharmacy and ask for some Interdens. The girl behind the counter does not understand but the handyman who is stocking the shelves guesses I mean Stim-U-Dent and says they have a new brand just in. ‘I didn’t put them on the shelves yet. Guess I didn’t want to inundate the public’
4 March. Read Winnie the Pooh to an audience of children at the Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn. Many have never been in a theatre before. I battle against the crying of babies and the shouts of toddlers and end up screaming and shouting myself hoarse. It is Winnie the Pooh as read by Dr Goebbels.
28 March. (Easter Sunday), Yorkshire. To church at eleven for the Eucharist, where I hit Rite B. This is a new one on me. It mysteriously adheres to some of the old forms then suddenly we’re onto a bit of dual carriageway that by-passes lots of the old prose and fetches us up at the altar rail by a new route entirely. I think back to Easter at St Michael’s in Leeds, the great lilies on the altar, the copes and the candles and the holy ladies plummeting to their knees at any mention of the Virgin’s name. Today nice Mr Dalby, the bearded plain-spoken vicar of Austwick, guides us through the ruins of the Book of Common Prayer (‘turn to page 189 and then to foot of page 192’) no more the great rhythmic prayers, the majestic rise and fall of the service to the hushed ‘Then in the same night he was betrayed.’
‘Many there?’ Dad would always ask after church. About thirty today, well wrapped-up farmers’ wives, cheap fur coats and bobble hats and all the little niceties of devotion I had forgotten, like the couple at the front, more fastidious worshippers than the rest, who wait until the queue has subsided before going up ‘to receive’.
Tell Mary-Kay about the service, who says that she knows of a church in France where the rite is sung as in the patristic church and people flock. It’s like Real Ale. And if the C of ? were differently organized that would be one way to revivify it, advertise the type of worship and the quality of the service provided. Real God.
29 March, Yorkshire. It is Bank Holiday, and the cave rescue gets called out to find some students who have gone pot-holing and not come up. A young caver from our village, David Anderson, is one of the rescue team. The water is rising, and as he is going down he slips into a narrow gulley. Though he is roped up, the force of the torrent is too much for his companions: as they struggle to pull him out, his light still shining through the water, he drowns. The students are later found unharmed. What the feelings of the rescuers must be when, having lost one of their colleagues, they come upon the students is hard to imagine. Some harsh words spoken, or no words spoken at all more likely, pot-holers being a pretty laconic breed. The boy himself was very shy, blushing if his leg was pulled and cautious to a fault. Putting a TV aerial up on Graham Mort’s cottage roof, he got into a complete safety harness. He is the first cave rescuer ever to have died. Four hundred cavers turn up for his funeral and follow the coffin down the village to the graveyard. It is like a scene from Northern Ireland. The students who were rescued have gone down again today.
8 April. A helicopter crashes near Banbury. The pilot, four children and a woman are killed. An eager reporter on P.M. interviews an eyewitness, who describes what happened. ‘But what did it look like? ‘persists the reporter. What he means is, ‘What did it look like seeing six people burn to death?’
19 April, Bruges. After seeing Uncle Clarence’s grave at Yp
res* we drive to Bruges for the weekend. Drenching rain. Sea Scouts are putting up two wooden stakes near the Fish Market as once upon a time, in this city of cruelties, other more sinister stakes were often erected. Later we pass by; it is still raining and two figures in oilskins have been lashed to the stakes and a Sea Scout waits with a bucket of sponges for anyone wanting to pay for a shot.
The Groeninge is a good small museum with the rooms set on a circular plan so that the final room is next door to the first. They cover the whole span of Flemish painting. In the first room hang the Van Eycks and Van der Weydens. In the last room the chief exhibit is a large canvas which has been partially cut away to incorporate a bird-cage. The bird-cage contains a live bird, and the whole is reflected in a mirror opposite.
I May. When Denholm Elliott is sent a script he opens it in the middle and reads a few pages. If he likes it, finds the characters interesting, he goes back to the beginning and reads it through. ‘You soon enough decide whether these are the kind of people you want to spend any time with. Reading a play, going into a pub – same thing, old boy’
11 May, Yorkshire. A day or two after the accident at Chernobyl Barry Brewster, our local doctor, rang the Department of Health and various other authorities wanting information about the likelihood of contamination. Getting none, and indeed no help whatsoever, he called all the local farmers and told them to keep their cows indoors and alerted all the schools to stop them drinking the milk. On such people will survival depend.
14 May. When stuck in hospital (I am thinking of Sam) it is irritating to find that, though on the one hand you are an object of pity and concern, on the other one is a social catalyst. Friends meet around the bed, discuss where they can ‘go on’ after the hospital, supper possibly, then a movie, all pleasures which one’s illness has made possible but from which the illness excludes you. The last glimpse of the world as one goes through the gates will be of friends making plans what to do afterwards.
