Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  I December. Read a poem by Tony Harrison about his childhood in Leeds in which he recalls that the slang for the rhubarb which filled the fields in and around the city was ‘tusky’. I recall it too, reading his poem, but cannot remember when I was a boy in Leeds ever calling it that myself. Other boys did, I remember. Other boys nicked rhubarb from the field’s edge. Though I did it too, it was more fearfully than the others. They were part of the gang as I never was, quite, and not being part of the gang (the last to be picked, the first to be turned out) I never felt easy using their language. So with me it wasn’t ‘tusky’; I stuck to ‘rhubarb’. In later years, and for the same reason, I never said ‘bird’ or ‘screw’, and today hearing myself say ‘guy’ I winced and felt it an imposture.

  Being picked, though, reminds me of Russell’s account of his childhood. As usual he was the last to be chosen, and as the two captains dithered as to who should have him the master in charge lost his temper and cut it short: ‘Right. That’s it. You have him.’

  ‘Oh, sir, sir. No, sir. We had him last week, sir.’

  21 December, Yorkshire. In a bookshop in Ilkley – ASSISTANT: Is that Geoffrey Chaucer?

  1988

  10 January. The newly privatized tow–away trucks are now operating in Camden and make regular visits to our street. The crews display a fearsome zeal, scrambling to get the slings and chains around the offending car before the owner (just doing five minutes’ shopping in the market) returns. They are like a gang of executioners hurrying the victim to his doom before a reprieve arrives.

  The pound is only at the top of the street, and the crews find it handier (and, if they are on piecework, more profitable) to tow our cars away rather than go questing for them in the outlying areas of the borough.

  That the operation is on the dubious boundary between commerce and law-enforcement could be deduced from the jaunty demeanour of the policeman in charge, who wears his flat cap tilted to the back of his. head. ‘Distancing’, the late Erving Goffmann would have called it, the cap enough to call the whole activity into question.

  17 February. To Cambridge with A. to see an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam on the conservation of pictures. I skimp the actual exhibition, my aim just to get the catalogue and study it at leisure – i.e. sitting down. The Backs are full of snowdrops and crocuses, school parties, Japanese and dozens of retired couples – undergraduates almost an event.

  Then to Ely, where I have not been since I cycled there thirty-five years ago when I was at Cambridge on the Russian course, the then empty fen now cluttered with gas stations and chicken farms, an industrial park and all the litter of modern agriculture. In 1953 the cathedral was damp and empty, looming like a liner out of the fog. Now there is a desk inside the door and it costs £1.60 to go in, which I don’t mind much – less, anyway, than the information display that spills, as it does in all such places, halfway down the north aisle, like ‘Who’s Who in the Diocese of Ely’, a montage of photos from bishop to verger, all flashing fluorescent smiles. ‘That’s nice,’ says a visitor, and I suppose it’s just me that minds, even A. not understanding my grumpiness. Still there (though doomed, I’m sure) are the great black Gurney stoves, lit and warm and as much monuments as the reclining alabaster figures of nineteenth-century deans and professors of divinity.

  The painted roof is half covered over, in process of restoration, the colours pastel as if done in chalk. And there are the features that always move and disturb: the regimental chapel and the war memorials, the threadbare nets of colours long ago laid up. Note the absence of the old black-garbed, proprietary vergers – just more ladies sitting at the information desk and helpful retired gentlemen doing their duty as Friends of the Cathedral. How once in this huge hangar I would have knelt and prayed and hoped to hear the Voice of God, or some twitching of my teenage sensibility that would convince me I might one day turn out to be – what? Not a grumpy middle-aged playwright anyway.

  6 March. A wet Sunday afternoon, and A. and I walk round the edge of Inverforth House on Golders Hill. Noting a number of condoms in the bushes I assume it’s a Lovers’ Lane, but gradually we become aware of a number of single men wandering slowly round and realize we have hit a cruising-ground. We walk up into the gardens, empty on this cold, grey afternoon, and up the steps to the huge pergola that stretches round the house and which is now threatened with demolition. From here we have a grandstand view of the wood below.

  A young man in white with a rucksack, whom we saw outside, is still hanging about. He is passed by three or four men, none of whom go far but wait and look back so that eventually he is ringed by admirers, all of them at a radius of twenty yards or so. But nobody actually approaches him, and he seems unaware that he is being watched and eventually drifts away. Occasional decorous family groups pass through the middle of this cruising-ground, civilians crossing a battlefield under the white flag of respectability, but no one who watches for more than two minutes could fail to be aware of what is going on. Though nothing is actually going on – just men watching and waiting. Driving home, we speculate why no one approached the young man in white and decide it was because he was (or was thought to be) a policeman.

  7 March. Three IRA terrorists shot in Gibraltar, dreadful mayhem averted. It’s fairly plain that the terrorists were shot in cold blood by the SAS, though this, of course, is not stated in the Commons and no one dares query Geoffrey Howe’s bland version of events except, to his credit, Eric Heffer.

  Some high-ranking general pointed out only last week that a live terrorist is much more use than a dead one, but nobody thinks to bring this up either. Instead we take one more step down the road to barbarism, the real damage the IRA does in making us their mirror image. But of course the mirror is thickly veiled in English hypocrisy – ‘making movements which might seem to threaten life and limb’ is how it’s justified.

  Celebrations in the mess at Shrewsbury tonight, no doubt.

  12 March. Watch the South Bank Show on Kafka, which falls into the customary mistakes, Tim Roth playing Joseph K. in the usual style – blank-faced, anonymous, cosmic. There are long, featureless corridors and lofty rooms, distorted camera angles and all that, and, though the actual trial is set in an attic, as it should be, it’s an attic so vast it could be a tithe barn.

  The mistake in dramatizing Kafka is always the same (and we didn’t manage wholly to sidestep it in The Insurance Man): actors and directors don’t play the text, they play the implications of the text. So Joseph K., instead of being just a bank clerk, wrongly accused, becomes emblematic of everyone who has been wrongly accused. What Kafka writes is a naturalistic account of ordinary behaviour, and that is what actors should play and let the implications take care of themselves. Directors similarly. Or, as Arthur Miller says somewhere, ‘Just play the text, not what it reminds you of.’

  19 March. A wet weekend in the country, where I gather armfuls of branches of balsam poplar. To look at the balsam poplar isn’t much of a tree, with none of the shimmer (the ‘dazzle’ Gerard Manley Hopkins called it) or the grace of the Lombard variety, but for a few weeks in spring it comes into its own.

  For years I didn’t know of its existence, only that around this time of year one occasionally caught a whiff of something so intoxicating that it seemed to promise opportunity, fresh beginnings, the turning-over of new leaves; it seemed the very breath of spring. Once I thought it was daffodils (the daffodils were under the tree); in Rome I thought it was a waiter’s aftershave (we were dining outside); once I even thought it was sweat and that the person concerned (we were walking in the Parks at Oxford) must be like a saint and have the odour of sanctity. It was only a few years ago that I came upon a line of these poplars in the grounds of Alec Guinness’s house and was told by Alec that it was a tree on the site that had decided them to live there.

  The buds of the balsam poplar secrete a gum which, as the buds burst, releases its scent. It lasts only a couple of weeks, but once the leaves have begun to open they can be d
ried to retain their scent throughout the year and long afterwards. There’s no elaborate procedure, like making pot pourri: I just put them on a newspaper on top of the central-heating boiler. I once took a branch from the tree into Penhaligon’s, hoping they manufactured something similar. They didn’t, but a dreamy look came into the assistant’s eye as she sniffed, and she called in her colleagues, who were similarly entranced.

  There’s a scene at the end of Patrick Suskind’s novel Perfume when a mob clamouring for a murderer’s execution falls instead into a frenzy of lust and adoration because he has drenched himself in some specially concocted essence. I imagine that was balsam poplar.

  21 March. I listen to the debate in the Commons on the lynching of two British soldiers by an IRA mob. ‘The House of Commons at its best’ is how the papers will put it, but no one dares get up and say that had we captured the terrorists in Gibraltar and not shot them out of hand there would have been no funerals and no lynchings.

  Meanwhile the inquest on the Gibraltar dead is set for June. The Sun’s headline this morning: ‘String’Em Up.’

  15 April. An exchange at the Cashpoint. I put my card in the dispenser only to have it returned with the display reading ‘Card wrongly inserted’. I try again and the same thing happens, so I join the other queue. One of two men in their thirties – estate agents in their lunch hour maybe – now tries the same machine, with the same result. ‘Let me,’ says the other. ‘It’ll know a good insertion from a bad one.’ There is a general snigger, but his card comes back too. ‘It doesn’t know when it’s lucky,’ he says, joining our queue.

  17 April. Drive back from Yorkshire, calling at Giggleswick to see Russell, who has jaundice. He is lying in bed, surrounded by the Sunday papers which are full of bad reviews of his Grand Tour programme. In profile he looks thinner and somehow papal. I only stay five minutes or so, while he drifts in and out of sleep, before I go, saying ‘Is there anything you want?’

  ‘Yes. Pie and chips.’

  18 April. The news about Russell has reached the papers. The Sun claims (I’m sure reluctantly) that he hasn’t got Aids but the hepatitis-B virus, ‘which is passed in the same way. Harty is a bachelor.’ His secretary, Pat H., hasn’t made things easier by saying he has ‘catarrh of the liver’, a wonderful nineteenth-century diagnosis. He is now in Airedale Hospital, where the nurses have told the papers they have been asked not to talk about it. And so on.

  27 April, Harrogate. In a break from filming Dinner at Noon* at the Crown Hotel, I walk across to St Wilfred’s, which I cycled over from Leeds to see forty years ago with John Totterdill. Having remembered it as Ninian Comper, I find it’s by Temple Moore, Early English cathedral architecture miniaturized – tiny clerestory passages, sweeping steps up to the organ, and lots of Arts and Crafts rood-loftery stuff which I just about liked then but which looks much nicer now. Modern I thought this church was once. Now it’s antique, the pewter-coloured door bound in iron and as rutted and heavy as its medieval model.

  Half expecting it to be locked, as churches generally are nowadays, I find evensong is being said (and in the BCP version too), with three men sitting in the Lady Chapel – one I imagine the priest in charge, and a third (bearded) who is possibly the curate. I sit and listen for a while but don’t wander round as I’d have liked to do, not wanting to be roped in or (when they’ve finished) welcomed. The same conflict in church (particularly when a service is being said) that I feel in art galleries, a need to stay and go at the same time. (Watching a sunset the same.) It’s a sense that there is something to be had here and I ought to have the patience to wait on it, while the other (and generally stronger) urge is get out and think about it later. Which, having signed the book, I do.

  Walk back through the suburbs of Harrogate: wide empty streets, huge houses, girls’ schools, private hotels, homes.

  28 April, Harrogate. Mike Fox, our cameraman, once filmed on Concorde sitting on the flight deck. He spotted an out-of-the-way dial and asked its function. It was the radiation meter, which the plane needed because it goes near or beyond the limits of the earth’s protective layer.

  ‘Does it ever go off the dial?’ Mike asked.

  ‘No,’ said the pilot. Or not for that reason anyway. The one time it does is coming in over the Bristol Channel. It’s the Berkeley nuclear power station.’

  This is just the kind of odd information cameramen often have – their experience of the world more various than almost any profession I can think of, and also more oblique. It’s what would make a cameraman a good character in a play, and a useful one (all worlds known, all walks of life visited) in a thriller.

  1 May. Miss Shepherd asks me to stick a notice on the back of her wheelchair. It reads, ‘Please help push me. Sometimes.’

  6 May, Leeds. Some signs yesterday that Russell was coming out of his coma, and today he is sitting up and taking notice, even trying to write notes. Intensive Care, though actually the busiest and most fraught section of the hospital, is also the most carefree. Though everyone has so much to do, dodging round each other in their green pyjamas like Olympic gymnasts, they all have time to stop and explain what it is they are doing. There are no obvious signs of rank. We were told we could wave at R. through the glass by a young man in green who might have been a nurse, a doctor or just someone there cleaning the floor. The consultant himself is in shirt sleeves and pullover and looks as if he might have come in to adjust the radiators. He says R. is not yet out of the wood.

  7 May, Leeds. It’s now thought that R. has turned the corner, and St James’s is planning a press conference to announce this, in the hope it will get rid of the reporters camped in the car park and also the group in the flat opposite with a telescope trained on the window of the ward. A nurse inadvertently mentions the press conference to Russell, who since then can think of nothing else and keeps scribbling indecipherable notes on the lines of ‘Tell the world I am grateful to the doctors of St James’s Hospital and all staff and cleaners on Ward 17.’

  These signs of life, far from producing sighs of relief from his assembled friends, just make them think that Russell has done it on them again. Schooled in the tactics of the Harty family, they have been fooled so often before and vowed never to be fooled again but once more they have been CONNED.

  Meanwhile the press continue at their games, and Mrs Thatcher attacks media ethics. But of course she doesn’t mean Mr Murdoch (whom she regularly invites to Christmas Dinner); what she means is the investigative reporting of the Gibraltar shootings.

  10–20 May. I spend ten days in Russia on a visit arranged by the Great Britain-USSR Society. My colleagues are the novelists Paul Bailey, Christopher Hope and Timothy Mo (who also writes for Boxing News), the poet Craig Raine (who doesn’t) and the playwright Sue Townsend, of Adrian Mole fame. I have many misgivings about the trip, particularly in regard to creature comforts. I wonder, for instance, if the Russians have got round to mineral water. John Sturrock reassures me. ‘Haven’t you heard of Perrierstroika?’

  The Writers ‘Union is a pleasant one-storeyed nineteenth-century building set round a leafy courtyard and currently being refurbished against Mr Reagan’s visit. He is to have lunch here. We are never going to have lunch, it seems, as this introductory session of talks began at ten and it is now I.30 with no sign of it ending. We sit down one side of a long green-baize-covered table with the Soviet writers on the other, the most eye-catching of them the playwright Mikhail Shatrov, a stocky middle-aged man with a pallor so striking Sue Townsend insists it owes something to Max Factor. Shatrov is seemingly contemptuous of these proceedings; he arrives late, ostentatiously reads a newspaper during the speeches, and from time to time points out items of interest to his colleagues. Sceptical of the purpose of formal discussions like these, I find Shatrov’s attitude not unsympathetic, particularly when the talk turns to the writer’s role in society. I feel like a not very expert motor mechanic taking part in a discussion on national transport policy. Presiding over the meetin
g is Professor Zassoursky, who holds the chair of journalism at Moscow University. He is an urbane and elegant figure (in what looks like a Brooks Brothers suit), and witty with it. The talk among the Soviet writers is all of the coming Party Congress, which they hope will enforce the retirement of the heads of the Musicians’ and Writers’ Unions, both notorious hard-liners. ‘But if they resign,’ says Zassoursky, ‘it could even be worse. After all, they might start writing again.’ The Hotel Ukraina, where we are staying, looks like the Gotham or the Dakota, those monstrous nineteenth-century mansions on New York’s Central Park West, though this and dozens of buildings like it were built fifty or sixty years later by Stalin. Like the Writers’ Union, the Ukraina is being refurbished against The Visit, the refurbishment taking the form of new three-ply cabinets to encase the (old) TV sets. My room has a fridge which lights up nicely but otherwise just makes the contents (one bottle of mineral water) sweat. An engineer comes and looks at it but is baffled. It is hard to understand, with simple technology such a mystery, why they haven’t blown us all up years ago. ‘Be fair,’ says Sue Townsend: ‘I believe they do a very good smelter.’

  I am disturbed to find Melvyn Bragg working in the hotel as a doorman. He pretends not to recognize me.

  To Massenet’s Werther at the Bolshoi. It is an indifferent production, the scenery and sets almost music-hall, but the house is packed, and Nina and Galina, our guides, say that this is the first time for years they have managed to get a ticket – which makes us all feel worse for not enjoying it. Someone who is enjoying it is Melvyn Bragg, this time in the back row of the chorus.