Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  25 May, Gloucestershire. Walking in the bleak, deodorized fields round Blockley, we pass a large modern barn. Barns used commonly to be compared with cathedrals, and this, too, is not unlike a cathedral – but one of the terrible present-day ones at Bristol or Liverpool. The metaphor has kept pace. Of course, to say a barn is like a cathedral is different from saying a cathedral is like a barn.

  26 May, Weston-super-Mare. To Weston. Mam and I sit in the sun lounge and she holds my hand, hers now so thin and fine it is like an anatomical illustration, every vein visible. She has had her hair done, her face is plump and happy, and she talks gibberish.

  Other residents pass through. ‘I hate it here,’ says one. ‘I hate it here, only my mother died.’ She is about sixty.

  ‘Can you remember your mother?’ I ask Mam. ‘No. I don’t think she had done then.’ Pause. ‘I am glad to see you. You are a love.’ She kisses my hand. ‘You’re beautiful.’

  ‘You’re beautiful too. Do you know how old you are?’

  ‘Was it?’

  While we sit there a younger woman helps lay the tables. She has straight white hair, a red rustic face, long socks pulled up almost to her knees, and trainers. ‘It’s 26 May,’ she says, not unhappily, ‘so I’ve been here one year, one month, and six days’.

  ‘I haven’t seen you,’ says a much older woman, ‘but then I’m upstairs most of the time. Just thought I’d come down for a trot round. I’m from Cirencester. Most people I know are from Westbury-on-Severn. Too far for them to come. I’ve only been here five weeks. My son’s off to Portugal tomorrow’

  She is quite sensible, and when Mam responds in one of her garbled sentences I am apologetic, but the woman takes no notice. Occasionally Mam takes hold of her hand and kisses it.

  It is time for lunch, so Mam is taken upstairs, though not on the chair lift. A few years ago, when she was still talking sensibly and getting about, I was with her as one of the other ladies sat on the chair and slowly ascended. Mam was not impressed. ‘I’ve been on that thing,’ she said. ‘It’s nowt.’ It might have been the Big Dipper.

  I go and sit with her in the bedroom and help her with her lunch. She shares the room with two other old ladies, one the small Lancashire woman who always used to hang about the hall and keep trying the door. Now she is very frail, and with her little square face and beaked nose she looks like a finch. The third woman has rather a distinguished face and seems to be asleep, then suddenly without opening her eyes she shouts, ‘Help! Help! Help!’ Neither of the other two takes any notice. The handyman puts his head round the door, sees there is a responsible person present, grins, and goes away. ‘Who was that?’ Mam says, and laughs.

  When I go she blows me a kiss.

  27 May. Roger Lloyd Pack is to play Kafka’s in Kafka’s Dick. We also see Mark Rylance, an actor whom I don’t know and who is also very good. Totally self-absorbed, to the point of eccen¬ tricity, he’s the first actor we’ve read who makes sense of Kafka’s desire to be somebody and nobody at the same time. Roger L.– P. will be funnier and is physically more striking (and looks like Kafka), but Rylance has a lovely, appealing face and marvellous directness. He has played Peter Pan and many roles at the RSC (all, of course, unseen by me) and has had his own company presenting potted Shakespeare. Born in Kent, he was brought up in Milwaukee but talks like a northerner who has lost his accent.

  I June. Mary-Kay has been dining at All Souls and comes back with a nice Alan Tyson story. One of the Fellows is a vegetarian and was telling Tyson how he had to arrange himself special food at a dinner. He was to start off with Jerusalem artichoke soup which would be followed by a salad of Jerusalem artichokes. ‘Surely,’ said Tyson, Once in Royal David’s City is enough.’

  3 June. The harrying of the hippies continues. Turfed off a farm, they now camp on a disused airfield belonging to the Forestry Commission. The FC protest, saying the convoy will be injurious to wildlife, as if – with all those millions of acres of factory firs they’ve planted – they have ever given a toss about wildlife. The Chief Constable of Hampshire issues a statement: ‘If only they would return to a conventional way of living there would be no problem.’ It is the cry of the police the world over. I’m surprised there’s no such thing as an international police conference (perhaps there is). I can see the Hampshire Police and the KGB getting on like a house on fire. Later, on The World at One, the same Chief Constable, a drab accountant-like figure, describes the hippies as ‘rebels’. Nobody queries his use of the word. Meanwhile Mrs T. sets up a special committee of the Cabinet to deal with the problem and the threat to property. No Cabinet committee to deal with the problem on the other flank, the daily attacks on Asians and the threat to property there. No monitoring of that by the police.

  The Guards beat the retreat to the signature tune from East Enders.

  When Larkin says his childhood was a forgotten boredom, what he means is that he has nothing to write home about.

  14 July. First day of shooting a film based on the life of Joe Orton. We begin with the childhood scenes, Thornton Heath standing in for Leicester. The film is announced in Variety. The title, Prick Up Your Ears, presents a problem, as Variety’s cryptic style demands the film be known as Prick. But no: the headline reads, ‘Ears lenses Monday’.

  Those best at saying what they mean aren’t always best at meaning what they say.

  I am reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Emperor, the story of the last days of Haile Selassie. The accounts by the lowliest of the palace officials are the most interesting. Something of Oliver Sacks in the other ‘verbatim’ accounts. It’s not always easy to believe these articulate and over-literary witnesses, or to trust that words are not being put into their mouths. The most curious feature of the account are the names: Tenene Work, Asfa Wossen, Teferra Gebrewold. Are they Germanic or Scandinavian? Makonen, Zera Yakob: who would guess these were Africans?

  A boy and a girl in Marks & Spencer’s, she punk, he gay. They take the lid off a prawn cocktail, shove their noses in it, sniff, then put it back on the shelf. Marks & Spencer’s now sell freshly-squeezed ruby orange juice. Delicious, it is of course blood-orange juice, only the word ‘blood’ is thought to be unmarketable. It will doubtless not be long before the Church of England takes note of this and amends the already much-amended communion service, so that the priest, proffering the chalice, will say, not ‘This is my blood which is shed for thee,’ but, more palatably, ‘This is my ruby liquid.’ And while we’re at it, why not ‘This is the fibre-enriched bread of the New Testament’?

  20 July. What is written all over Gary Oldman’s muddy, slightly spotty face of Joe Orton at fifteen is a forgotten disease. It is that look of guilt and cunning you used to see thirty years ago on the faces of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old schoolboys, wankers doom. Look at old school photographs and it’s there in the faces of half my form because most of us were using every spare moment to wank ourselves silly and thinking nobody else knew. Nowadays everybody knows. Wanking is authorized, joked about on television. Not every boy is a wanker but everybody wanks and there is no doom.

  27 July, Yorkshire. The annual street market in the village and I take out piles of stuff for the junk stall. At home this clearing-out process was always known as ‘wuthering’ and Dad used to love it. ‘What’s happened to such and such?’ I would, ask Mam. ‘Ask your Dad. He’s probably wuthered it.’

  And it does become a fever as I search each room for any object worthy of being wuthered. It’s like cutting a play, the zeal and pleasure of finding a cut far exceeding the joy of writing the stuff in the first place.

  Among the junk I put out are piles of Mam’s old Ideal Home magazines and as I am about to hand them over a photograph falls out. It’s a portrait of the four of us in Beyond the Fringe, taken and signed by Cecil Beaton.

  31 July. To St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, to speak to a summer school. My vanity is nicely exposed at the outset when I am introduced by the principal. A few nights ago, he tells the
audience, he was playing a parlour game with some friends in which one pretended to be a famous person. He was a playwright beginning with ? and he was asked whether he was one of the most profound, influential (and here a modest-seeming smile begins to play shyly across my face) ascetic and un-self-regarding writers of our time. By now my smile is sickening in its humility.

  ‘And I said, “No”,’ says the principal, ‘“I am not Samuel Beckett.”’

  5 August. Neville Smith plays the police inspector in the Orton film. He was an undergraduate at Hull and is un-impressed by the current canonization of Larkin. He came across him twice. Once, waiting at a bus-stop in torrential rain, Neville edged closer and closer to Larkin, who had an umbrella. Finally the poet spoke: ‘Don’t think you’re going to share my umbrella, because you’re not.’ Another time Larkin in his role as librarian collared Neville as he was slipping in with an overdue book: ‘Don’t you know there’s a queue for this book?’ Neville swears the last time it had been taken out was in 1951.

  1 September. A group of drunks in the back doorway of the Odeon on Inverness Street. Another drunk, somewhat younger, sways across the street to join them. One of the drunks staggers to his feet. ‘Go away. We don’t want you jumping on our bandwagon.’

  Play snooker with Sam. It is just before his bedtime and when I am not looking he keeps moving the white to a worse position so that the game can go on longer. One of the lines I have cut from Kafka’s Dick is about the games of cards he used to play with his parents. Eventually his father refuses to play with him because his son used to cheat. ‘But only’, says Kafka, ‘in order to lose.’

  24 September, Yorkshire. Kafka’s Dick opens at the Royal Court, and Richard Eyre rings at noon with the gist of the notices. They are mixed, with only the Standard and the Financial Times wholehearted in its favour. Wardle in The Times strikes his usual ‘Bennett has bitten off more than he can chew’ note, just as he did years ago with Forty Years On. What he means is that I have bitten off more than he can chew. Billington trots out his school essay on Kafka, and few of them bother to say that it is a funny evening. I walk in the fields above Austwick looking for mushrooms. Find none. Well, one must take it like a man. Which means that one must take it like a woman – i.e. without complaint.

  26 September, Ljubljana. Here playing a small part in a BBC drama series, Fortunes of War, an adaptation of Olivia Manning’s Balkan Trilogy, Yugoslavia standing in for Romania, Ljubljana for Belgrade. The people here are Slovenians, tall, fine-looking and Roman in their grace and self-assurance. A few (Croats?) are small and fierce and heavily-moustached, and look as if they are taking a day off from herding the goats. ‘Ah, partisans!’ I find myself thinking. There is a good deal of smoking, and they kiss as if it had just come off the ration. At the next table in our restaurant tonight, two couples in their late twenties. One couple cock their cigarettes, go into a clinch, and kiss long and lingeringly. The meal is on the table, but their companions wait, watching without impatience or embarrassment as the kiss goes on, the cigarettes burn down, and the food gets cold.

  Through a gateway I see student actors in a garden rehearsing a play. I can’t hear the dialogue and would be no wiser if I could, but it only takes a minute to see that it is Hamlet. A tall young man stands centre-stage watched by an older couple. Two actors come on, have a word with the older couple, then saunter innocently over to the lone figure and chat before scurrying back to report. Hamlet is in jeans and bomber jacket. He looks tiresome, but I can’t tell whether this is because he is a tiresome actor, or because he is playing Hamlet tiresome, or whether, divested of the poetry, tiresome is what Hamlet is.

  I October, Grado. Two days off from filming and I drive into Italy. Still depressed about Kafka’s Dick, I come by chance on the village of Aquileia. Knowing nothing about the place, I go into the church (a cathedral, as it turns out) and find a huge mosaic floor laid down in the fourth century. To read Kafka is to become aware of coincidence. This is to put it at its mildest. His work prefigures the future, often in ways that are both specific and dreadful. Sometimes, though, these premonitions are less haunted. In my play Kafka is metamorphosed from a tortoise and is also sensitive about the size of his cock. So to find here, by the west door, a mosaic of a cock fighting a tortoise feels not quite an accident. In Aquileia, the guidebook says, they represent a battle between the forces of light and darkness. I buy a postcard of the mosaic, and the postcard-seller tells me there is a better example in the crypt. This takes some finding: the tortoise isn’t in the crypt so much as in a crypt beyond the crypt, and even there hidden behind the furthest pillar, just where Kafka would have chosen to be. It seems if not quite a nod then at least a wink, and I drive on in better spirits.

  13 November. The notice has gone up for Kafka’s Dick, so Richard Eyre and I take the cast out to supper. Alison S. and Vivian P. particularly ask not to be put next to Charles L. (who is eighty-six next week), because he tries to touch them up. Coming offstage at one point in the show he always likes to get in a salacious remark to A. which sends her on stage flurried and blushing. He’s very good, though, on anti-memoirs. ‘You worked with Edith Evans, Charles. What was she like?’ ‘She was a miserable cow.’ More theatrical memories are of this nature than is ever let on.

  20 December. Run into stately, plump Don Warrington moving slowly up the Crescent. Says he has to go to Newcastle for Christmas. I say I like Newcastle. ‘Why? It’s all vomit and love-bites.’

  24 December, Yorkshire. I find a little artificial Christmas tree in a box in the junk room and put it up. It’s not the tree we had as children, but some of the ornaments are the same, including the fairy that went on top, back to back with Santa Claus. Santa has long gone, and the fairy is pretty battered, a slit in her celluloid head for a tiny cardboard tiara, her wings bits of kitchen foil Mam put on ten years ago, along with a skirt made of lampshade fringe. Her painted hair-do is a twenties shingle, and I suppose she must be about as old as I am. Perhaps through being suspended by the neck from the top of the tree every Christmas for fifty years, the look in her painted eyes is of sheer terror.

  1987

  2 January. Reg, who kept the junk stall in the market, has died, and today is his funeral. Where his stall stood outside The Good Mixer there is a trestle-table covered with a blue sheet, and a notice on a wreath of chrysanthemums announces that Reg Stone passed peacefully away on Boxing Day and that his cortège will be passing through the market at three o’clock. Until I read the card I’d never known his last name.

  Reg’s stall was a feature of the market long before I moved here in 1961. Then he had two prices, sixpence and a shilling. In time this went up to a shilling and five shillings, and latterly it had reached 50p and £1. To some extent he shaped his price to the customer, though not in a Robin Hood sort of way, the poorer customers often getting charged more, and any attempt to bargain having the same effect. I have two American clocks, both in working order, that were five shillings apiece, and an early Mason’s Ironstone soup dish that cost sixpence and hangs on the wall of the kitchen. Local houses used to be full of treasures from Reg: model steam engines, maple mirrors, Asian Pheasant plates, rummers – all picked up for a song. Once I saw a can of film (empty) with ‘Moholy-Nagy’ round the rim, and only this last year Harriet G. got some Ravilious plates for 50p. Money didn’t seem to interest Reg. Scarcely glancing at what one had found, he’d take the fag out of his mouth, say ‘A pound,’ then take a sip from his glass of mild on the pub window-sill and turn away, not bothered if one bought it or not.

  I go down at three. The table is now piled high with flowers, mostly the dog-eared variety on offer at the cheap stall in the market, petals already scattering on the wind. One or two of the long-established residents stand about, old NWI very much in evidence. Thinking the cortege will arrive from the Catholic church, we are looking along Arlington Road when it comes stealing through the market itself. It is led by a priest in a cape and an undertaker bearing a heavy roll
ed umbrella that he holds in front of him like a staff of office or a ceremonial cross. The procession is so silent and unexpected that it scarcely disturbs people doing their normal shopping, the queue at Terry Mercer’s fruit stall gently nudged aside by the creeping limousines. The priest stops at the top of the street, turns, and stands looking down the market as if the street were a nave and this his altar. The flowers are now distributed among the various cars, more petals falling. In one of the limousines a glamorous blonde is weeping, and in other cars there are children. Just as I never thought of Reg as having a name, so a family (and a family as respectable as this) comes as a surprise. And for a man I never saw smile or scowl, laugh or lose his temper, grief, too, seems out of place.

  8 January, Egypt. To Cairo to film another scene in Fortunes of War. The Ramses Hilton is on the site of the demolished Anglican cathedral, the view from the sixteenth floor taking in the Nile, the back of the Cairo Museum, three flyovers and, dim shapes beyond the tower blocks, the Pyramids. On stand-by for filming, we take a trip down the Nile by three-decker river boat, on which we have lunch. The boat never reaches even the outskirts of Cairo, and, since many of the buildings on both banks are in the process of demolition or construction, it’s like a boat trip down the Harrow Road. The streets are filthy, the pavements torn up, no architecture of any distinction, and all of it in the same dusty, dun-coloured stone. And yet it is a delightful place, wholly redeemed by the people, who are open and friendly, the men tall and handsome, the women of a ripe biblical beauty, heavy-eyebrowed, voluptuous and bold, none of them veiled and on seeming equality with the men. As for beggars, there are now more in London than in Cairo.

  The most striking feature of the boat trip is an entirely rural island of lush green fields and primitive cultivation with a mud-brick farmhouse at the edge of the water where boatmen are mending nets, women washing clothes, and the farmer trots round the fields on a mule, all this virtually in the middle of the city. It looks almost as if it has been laid on for passing tourists, and in the West that’s just what it would be: a folk park or an urban farm.