Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  9 January, Cairo. When they are not called for filming, the cast spend much of the day lounging round the hotel swimming-pool. P. is wearing a bikini, and whispers to her neighbour that before putting it on she has had to shave a little. She reckons without the blind and therefore sharp-eared Esmond Knight (eighty-two), who is on the other side of the pool, and he calls across, ‘Could I inquire, my dear, what you did with the clippings?’

  I spend the day with Magdy, a student who turns out to be a Muslim fundamentalist. He has left his temporary job at the Cairo Museum because the scantily clad foreign ladies put wicked thoughts into his head: ‘They come in with their closes very high up on their legs and no closes on their shoulders, and I find something in me that desire them.’ He also thinks that chopping people’s hands off for theft is not entirely a bad thing. We take the river bus to Old Cairo. Magdy has never been on the river and insists on sitting next to a lifebelt in case we capsize. We see some of the Coptic churches, and I try to explain to Magdy about Jesus. ‘We believe he was the Son of God.’ ‘God have a son? That is stupid. Does he have an aunt, an uncle? Who is his mother?’ I point to a picture of the Virgin. ‘Who her husband?’ ‘She was a virgin.’ ‘Of course. All women virgin till married. I marry virgin’ (though presumably not one with closes that come high up on her legs).

  Down the Nile float gobs of vegetation which I take to be clumps of rushes or some kind of water lily, but so rich and fertile-looking that one knows as soon as they hit land they will take root and grow. Swallows swoop low over the water and at dusk cluster in the dusty eucalyptus trees. Some may have summered in Craven.

  10 January, Cairo. One of the company, Diana H., spent her honeymoon in Cairo. The marriage did not last long, and when she learned she was to be filming in Cairo she wondered where the unit would be staying. It was the Ramses Hilton, where she had spent her honeymoon. When the desk handed her her key it was the same room.

  Every day in the late afternoon the hotel fills with tourists, and after breakfast empties again as they depart for Luxor and the boat up the Nile. Many are English. ‘Palm trees are nothing to us,’ one said today – ‘we’re from Torquay’

  12 January, Cairo. To Gizeh, where, in hot sunshine, we ride camels and horses around the Pyramids. Not expecting much, I am not put off by the litter and trash, and even the dead dog my camel steps round does not seem out of place. The Sphinx, like a personality seen on TV then met in the flesh, is smaller than one had imagined, and it’s quite hard to tell how tall the Pyramids themselves are. In the distance stand the towers and skyscrapers of Cairo, in the misty morning sunshine a sight every bit as remarkable as the Pyramids. Odd that one marvels at stone piled up in one shape but not in another, both of much the same height. Were our world largely wiped out, would tourists flock to Croydon as they do to Cairo?

  Beyond the Sphinx, on the edge of the desert, is a Coptic cemetery, and, as we ride past, a funeral arrives. Painted green and looking like an ammunition locker, the coffin is handed out from an old Commer van to be passed over the heads of the crowd into the graveyard, the shrieks with which the women urge it on towards the grave not much different from the shouts the men use to encourage the camels. Mine farts continuously, and on one occasion manages to spit down my neck.

  A discussion of sex life uncovers the fact that in this unit of fifty and more people, most of them quite young, no one is known to be having an affair.

  14 January, Luxor. Here by overnight train, waking as the sun comes up and farmers on donkeys scurry along paths beside barriers of tall sugar cane and, somewhere over the flat fields, the Nile. By cab from the ferry to the Valley of the Kings. What I had been expecting, I realize afterwards, was a landscape out of King Solomon’s Mines, but it proves to be not much more than a large quarry, whatever shape and grandeur it may have had now obscured by the huge heaps of excavated spoil, among which are the shafts going down into the tombs. I traipse dutifully round three or four, but am soon weary. Struck by the freshness of the colours, the dark-blue ceilings thick with stars and the hair of the Pharaohs chiselled in tiny regular diamonds as sharp and fresh today as when they were done three thousand years ago. Still, a long way to come for that. Handicapped too by ignorance. Luxor is Thebes, but is it Oedipus’s Thebes or Tiresias’s ‘Thebes below the wall’? I don’t know, the guidebook doesn’t say, and if it did I don’t suppose it would insert the place into my memory. It’s not nine o’clock and yet the place is already crowded with parties picking their way over the hard flints under a cloudless sky. What are these jaded tourists looking for? Some flicker of wonder, some sensation or reminder of a sensation they once had, perhaps as children when they first gazed on the world? Is tourism like pornography – blue films and the holiday slides both a search for lost sensation? I can see some (serious) point in guided tours with a very particular interest – the sex life of the ancient Egyptians, say, or hairdressing under the Pharaohs. One would pick up more because incidentally. It’s Forster’s Only what is seen sideways sinks deep.’

  Our cab takes us on, and we stop at the edge of a field to look at the Colossi of Memnon, but so sated am I with antiquities (after two hours only) I do not even get out to look. In any case these statues have been so quarried and defaced their heads are just jumbles of masonry, a reality disguised by the artful photography of the guidebooks, the world never as pretty as it is photographed.

  15 January; Luxor. Tea on the terrace of the Winter Palace Hotel, a brown stucco building no different from the Winter Gardens of many an English seaside town because built around the same time and nowadays as run-down and deserted as they are. We watch the sun set over the Nile, a scene captured by dozens of tourists with film cameras, who wait as if for the passage of royalty.

  19 January, Cairo. Early at Cairo Airport, we wander round the departure lounge, where Christopher S. discovers a museum. It’s just one room, looking out on to the tarmac, and has a score or so showcases of various periods – Ancient Egypt, the Copts, the Mamelukes – with only a few exhibits in each: a wooden tablet of a saint in glory, vases for viscera with smiling dogs ‘heads, a fragment of Greek alabaster labelled ‘Man carrying something on his shoulder’. There’s more satisfaction in these few (I’m sure) inferior artefacts than in a morning spent traipsing round the tombs. It’s partly because we have time to kill and here is just one room and nothing else – no other objects queuing up for attention, no visions of rooms unvisited, treasures overlooked. (Madame de Sévigné on sightseeing: ‘What I see tires me and what I don’t see worries me.’) It’s also that the museum itself is something discovered, a found object, an oddity.

  It saves its best surprise until last: a painted limestone statue, c. 3000 BC, of two monumental figures: Iuh and his wife Mary They sit enthroned in their ceremonial wigs, the woman’s real hair peeping out from underneath, their expressions, insofar as they have expressions, solemn and unsmiling. Except that Iuh has his left arm round his wife’s shoulder, which is, according to the label, ‘a mark of affection’. It is another version of what inspired Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’, where the effigies lie hand in hand. That turned out to be a bit of sentimental nineteenth-century restoration, whereas this husband from the Old Kingdom has had his arm round his wife for four thousand years. I think. I hope. As maybe Larkin hoped.

  Our flight is announced, and when I come out of the museum the domestic departure lounge has emptied, travellers and airport workers gathered at the far end of the room kneeling in prayer.

  18 February. Children are less coy than the Department of Health. In the playground at Primrose Hill, Aids is referred to as ‘the bum disease’.

  I March. The tabloids full of some ‘Russell Harty is gay’ shock horror. The first inkling of it came last week in Giggleswick when Mrs Walton, Susan Brookes’s mother, went upstairs to get ready for her stint at the Oxfam shop in Settle. Her house overlooks the recreation ground, where she saw four men seemingly playing football, though rather on the old side to be
doing it. The recreation ground borders on Russell’s garden, and the men were kicking the ball once or twice then deliberately booting it over the wall. They would then take it in turns to climb over and retrieve it, meanwhile spying on the house. Mrs Walton watched this curious game for a while and couldn’t make it out until she saw the spread in the papers this morning.

  The youth in question describes Russell’s flat as ‘scruffy… it had plates on the shelves and the paint was a dirty orange’. So much for R’s Staffordshire figures, carefully chosen decor and expensively distressed paintwork.

  14 March, Oxford. To Oxford to cast my vote for Roy Jenkins as Chancellor. Only 9.30, but the line of voters is already round the Sheldonian and the atmosphere that of a cocktail party. The average voter is about my age, tall and armed with a beaming wife, both determined to make a day of it. Never was there such a feast of complacency, so many silly men showing off to their womenfolk in their robes. Some have got themselves up not simply in gowns but in hoods as well, remaining gowned long after they have voted and probably only to be persuaded out of them when they get into their pyjamas. And oh what a convivial queue, merry with the prospect of drinks in Oriel and lunch in Wadham, jokes shouted to friends, contemporaries spotted – isn’t this fun! It’s like the theatre at Chichester, the same tall families, the same assurance of happiness and their place in the world. That is Theatre, this is University, both their birthright. Inside the Divinity Schools there is a scramble to fill in the voting-form, with a pig-faced university official bullying any dawdlers. We line up finally before the Vice-Chancellor, Patrick Neill, who looks about as lively as the mercury in a thermometer. He tips his hat, and twenty minutes later I’m heading back down the M40.

  9 April. Seeing the flag blowing over the Polish Embassy in Portland Place reminds me how as a child I found flags of other nations a disappointment. The Stars and Stripes was OK, but, that apart, in the Union Jack we did seem to have bagged all the best colours. The flags of other nations were the genteel shades of ice-cream, and as often as not with a fiddling little motif to distinguish them from other flags to which they were all too similar. Ours was best.

  16 April. A letter from the director of the Thorndike Theatre at Leatherhead, where they are producing Forty Years On. The title of the play within the play is ‘Speak for England, Arthur’ and the schoolboy cast hold up letter-boards to spell it out for the audience. Part of the stage directions is that, before getting it right, one or two of the boys should get their letters jumbled. One of the eighteen local schoolboys doing it at the Thorndike has discovered that if jumbled still further they can come up with ‘O Grandfather, Real Spunk’. This is not incorporated into the production.

  13 May. Colin Haycraft and I are chatting on the pavement when a man comes past wheeling a basket of shopping. Out of the way, you so–called intellectuals, ‘he snarls,’ blocking the fucking way.’ It’s curious that it’s the intellectual that annoys, though it must never be admitted to be the genuine article but always ‘pseudo’ or ‘so-called’. It is, of course, only in England that ‘intellectual’ is an insult anyway.

  28 May. Mary Hope’s sister-in-law has cancer and is in intensive care at the Royal Free. Because of staff shortages her ward has to close down at weekends, and on Friday she was wheeled across the hospital to a ward where, with men on one side, women on the other, there was scarcely room to move between the beds and several patients were dying. Here she stayed all weekend. If the Labour Party could fight the election on the state of the Health Service alone, it would win hands down.

  29 May. A letter from David [Ned] Vaisey at Oxford saying that John Carey thinks my ‘Kafka at Las Vegas’ too ‘ruminative and ambling’ to qualify for a university-sponsored lecture. Ned, though finding it ‘a good read’, tends to agree, and suggests an undergraduate society might leap at the prospect. Or I could take my stand alongside the seller of Socialist Worker in Camden High Street on a Saturday morning and deliver it there.

  7 June. With Mrs Thatcher safely ahead in the polls, that voice and the little scuttling walk threatening to lead us into the next century, Conservative commentators like P. Worsthorne feel it now safe to admit that perhaps there is just a little truth in the general distaste for Thatcherism, the decay of manufacture, the throttling of the Health Service etc., and in the last few days of the campaign it might be as well to look at these details. The well-being of half the country, and all it is now is an election garnish: ‘Conservative Party: Serving Suggestion’.

  17 June. Lord Hailsham, the Arthur Negus of the English law, is at seventy-nine put out of office. Not before time, some might think, but on News at Ten he is feeling a bit sorry for himself. He was just the same the only time I met him, after one of Ned Sherrin’s shows in the sixties, but then his complaint was not neglect or ingratitude but poverty. Very much one of the ‘You must grin and bear it’ school (inequities dismissed with a chuckle), he doesn’t like it when he gets the mucky end of the stick. Not that most people would consider the House of Lords and the Lord Chancellor’s pension exactly mucky.

  20 June. A list of queries comes from the German translator of Kafka’s Dick:

  Q. Who is Nurse Cavell, a figure from a movie or a play? I think I know her, but I cannot remember from where.

  A. You shot her.

  Other questions:

  ‘For a long time I used to go to bed early.’ This Proust quote, where?

  Ivy Compton-Burnett: who or what is that?

  Gas oven: do you mean the gas chamber of the Nazis or the kitchen stove, which is used for suicide?

  Altar: do you mean marriage or sacrifice?

  2 July. All the life has gone out of politics. I switch on the televised debates from the House of Lords and it is like a clip from a Hollywood epic of Ancient Rome. While Nero or Caligula rules, the footling Senate goes through the motions. Like the trams at Beamish or the mills of Ironbridge, democracy, once part of the English heritage, will soon be part of English Heritage – a property of the Department of the Environment.

  3 July. My TV film The Insurance Man has won the Beautiful Human Life Award in Japan, and Robert Hines, the young actor who starred in the film, has been out to Tokyo to collect the citation. He calls round with a souvenir for me. It is a headband as worn by Kamikaze pilots.

  In the market today: ‘Listen, there’s nothing you can teach me about road-sweeping.’

  16 July. Watch the first of two programmes by Tony Harrison about death. It begins at Blackpool, where Harrison was conceived in August 1935. Harrison comes from Leeds, as I do, and August Bank Holiday at the seaside was when I was conceived. So, too, was my brother: three years older than me, he has the same May birthday. With us it was Morecambe not Blackpool, which my mother always thought a bit common. If we ever went to Blackpool she made sure we stayed at Cleveleys or Bispham – ‘the refined end’. The era of package holidays came too late for my parents and they never went abroad, but had they done so the same standards would have applied. Mam would soon have sussed out the refined part of Torremolinos or a select end to Sitges.

  2 September. Evidence of madness: a woman entering Marks & Spencer’s and saying brightly ‘Good morning!’

  A young mother passes the house wheeling a pram. She is wearing headphones. The baby is crying desperately.

  14 September. A. ‘s dog is run over and she takes it to the vet. The dog’s name is Lucky, and in this particular practice people are called in not by the name of the owner but by the name of the pet. So the receptionist comes into the waiting-room and says, ’Lucky Davies?’

  I November, Switzerland. On the train from Gstaad to Montreux. It is the train panoramique, and since this is Sunday it’s crowded out, with people standing in the aisles. In front of me sits a man, about forty, French or possibly American, reading a magazine of pornographic stories in English. ‘Her body arched to receive his quivering member’ is one paragraph heading. Beside him sits a businessman, who glances curiously at the magazine and once
or twice at its reader but makes no comment. He eventually gets off at the same moment as the porn-reader decides to go to the buffet car for some coffee. The porn-reader leaves his magazine on the seat to keep his place. Not having seen him go, a middle-aged couple take the seats, and the husband picks up the magazine and starts leafing through it. He shows it to his wife, and they are still looking at it when some time later the French/American returns with his coffee. ‘I see you’re having a good time with that,’ he says in French, completely unabashed. Equally unembarrassed, they agree that they are, and some discussion of the magazine follows. In the middle of this the magazine-owner points out without rancour that the husband is actually sitting in his place. The husband promptly gets up, the porn-reader sits down, and he and the wife (ankle socks, anorak, a schoolteacher possibly) carry on their amicable conversation about the magazine, with the husband occasionally joining in. It’s a curious scene for a Sunday afternoon, and one hard to imagine taking place in England. In its directness it is like the beginning of a film by Bertrand Blier, except that there sexual connections would be being made. There is none of that here, just human beings confronting each other without judgement or preconception. Not so much humanity as specimens of humanity. And not what the Swiss are supposed to be like at all.

  15 November, Yorkshire. This Week’s Cause of Cancer in the Sunday Times is bracken, the spores of which are said to affect the lungs. The Department of Health is reported to be concerned about ‘how to get this message across’ without causing a mass exodus from the countryside. One reason for mass exodus being as good as another, it’s also been disclosed that, after Chernobyl, an area of fifty miles centring on Skipton, and therefore including our village, was (and possibly still is) a radiation blackspot. The weekend after Chernobyl the local CND had organized a barbecue, and I remember Graham M. telling me how it had rained so hard he and his family (three children under six) had given up trying to shelter and got happily soaked. It was this rain that carried the radioactivity which is now said to be still present in the bilberries on the moors. Along with the bracken spores, of course.