Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  At one point after supper I go up to the bathroom at W.’s, which overlooks the graveyard, just to see if it’s quietened down. There are myths in friendship, and one of ours was that I envied Russell his life and he envied me mine. He certainly had his much better sorted out – had a housekeeper, someone to cook and to clean, took lots of trips abroad, and always with a car to take him wherever he wanted to go. Whereas what he envied about me was that I could point to the work I’d done and that I caught much less critical flak than he did (who caught more than most). The truth is, of course, that I wouldn’t have wanted his life or he mine.

  My grave will, I imagine, be in the next village, a few miles north of Giggleswick. It’s a fairly anonymous spot, as our churchyard is full and burials are in the overflow cemetery on the road to the station. It’s where my father is buried, pleasant enough and surrounded by trees and fields, but without much character. Russell’s grave is in the churchyard itself, Giggles-wick church an ancient one, the setting picturesque, the graveyard grazed by sheep beneath the fell. He lies on the edge of the playing-fields, a stone’s throw from the village street and within sight and sound of the school where he was so happy. The church clock strikes ten as I look out of the bathroom window in the dusk. Not a bad place to be, I think. Then it comes to me that what I am doing is envying him his grave.

  12 June. Simon Callow calls suggesting Single Spies as a title for the double bill of Burgess and Blunt plays. While I’d hoped to get rid of spies altogether, it’s a much better title than any I’ve thought of and so Single Spies it is.

  19 June. Various quotes from today’s Sunday Telegraph:

  that evil decade the 1960s…

  Four-letter words replaced the classics as the language of the 1960’s Royal Court Theatre. Nobody well-washed had a chance of advancement

  … lots of families are now trying to buy back their stately homes from the National Trust. This is an excellent sign. The life of the country house was very much part of a civilizing process.

  all Peregrine Worsthorne

  [When Mrs Thatcher’s satellite revolution comes] it will be rare for an entire saloon bar or dinner party to have all watched the same television programme the night before. There will then be a healthy decline in the importance of the programme chiefs.

  Frank Johnson

  That there will also be an unhealthy decline in the standard of the programmes televised does not of course concern him.

  27 June, Paris. To the Brasserie Bofinger near the Bastille. As we are finishing our supper a party rises from a distant table. It is Francis Bacon and his little entourage. A sharp narrow-trousered suit like the ones Peter Cook used to wear from Sportique in 1960, hair in a slick modified DA, and no sense at all that he is in his mid-seventies.

  As Bacon and his party wait on the pavement outside, the waiters gather and look out of the window, paying their unashamed respects to a great man in a way I can’t imagine waiters doing in England. It recalls the dining-car attendant Harold Nicolson encountered who joined him and Vita Sackville-West in a toast to Sainte-Beuve as their train passed through Boulogne.

  Kafka could never have written as he did had he lived in a house. His writing is that of someone whose whole life was spent in apartments, with lifts, stairwells, muffled voices behind closed doors, and sounds through walls. Put him in a nice detached villa and he’d never have written a word.

  Someone writes asking advice about where to send a TV script. ‘We sent it to Kenneth Williams and he was extremely enthusiastic about our script but he committed suicide soon after.’

  20 August Watching Barry Humphries on TV the other night I noticed the band was laughing. It reminded me how when I used to do comedy I never used to make the band laugh. Dudley [Moore] did and Peter [Cook], but not me. And somehow it was another version of not being good at games.

  The Foreign Secretary says that with regard to the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds Britain is in ‘the forefront of anxiety’.

  September. Watch Tony Palmer’s film on Richard Burton, a morality tale about the perils of art. Less effective with me because I never went for the Welsh-wizardry and didn’t like the way he cultivated or acquired the Olivier mannerisms – the sudden fortissimos, the instant access to the emotions, and all the characteristics of the shouting school of acting. In 1968 the Burtons came to Forty Years On, coming round afterwards to see Gielgud together with a posse of black-suited hairdressers, make-up artists and, I suppose, bouncers. Then at a party at the Savoy a few months later Liz Taylor perched momentarily on my knee (and pretty uncomfortable it was too). In an earlier connection I knew Burton’s first wife, Sibyl, when we were in New York with Beyond the Fringe, and the night the divorce from Sibyl and the marriage to Liz was announced Sibyl asked me to accompany her to the film premiere of The Criminal with Stanley Baker (more Welsh-wizardry). Even at the time I realized I had been chosen because I was someone with whom no one could seriously imagine she had a romantic link. But what really impressed me about the evening was that, while I had Sibyl Burton on my right, on my left was Myrna Loy.

  21 September. I have started working on a play about George III, but I fear it may just have been brought on by being about to do another play [Single Spies] in which royalty figures and that it will accordingly come to nothing. This often happens. When I was waiting for Forty Years On to be produced I was trying to write a farce which was also about a school. Enjoy was preceded by months of fruitless work on another play about old people, Gerry Ward; and, though it’s hard to say which came first, I suppose The Insurance Man and Kafka’s Dick are similarly related.

  25 October, Russell’s memorial service* belatedly attacked in the Daily Telegraph by Peter Simple. Its inaccuracy (‘A friend tells me…’) and the toadying omission from censure of Ned Sherrin suggests that the author is C. Booker. The Telegraph’S obituary of R. was equally vile.

  The kind of memorial service the Telegraph likes is on the same page: the Prime Minister, flanked by her favourite bishop, Dr Leonard, looking caring at the service for T. E. Utley, for whom no one in the Tory world has a wrong word, though the presence at the service of the Chief Constable of the RUC plus the South African Ambassador suggests that a different view is possible.

  11 November. To Weston to see Mam. Two of the other old ladies in the home are having their hair done. One of them shouts above the noise of the dryer, ‘They keep telling me I ought to have been a Trappist nun. I didn’t want to be a Trappist nun. My father had Friar’s Balsam in the medicine chest, but that’s as far as it went.’

  The train back is crowded, and at Bath a bunch of schoolboys get on, either from a prep school or from the lower forms of a public school, Monkton Combe probably. They are talking of the football team. ‘Tim’s in the A team,’ says one, ‘but he’s only hanging on by a needle and thread. ‘There is a pause.’ Actually,’ says the other. ‘I think it’s just “thread”. You don’t have to say “needle”.’ This is said with perfect solemnity and kindness.

  21 November. A girl of twenty-five is kept in solitary confinement for two hundred days in conditions which induce a breakdown, before being brought to trial for conspiracy, when she is sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment.

  A vote in which those voting in favour of an official proposal lose the vote to those voting against it but are declared the winners because those abstaining are deemed to have voted in favour.

  Both incidents happen here: one to Martina Shanahan, convicted in the highly dubious conspiracy trial at Winchester, the other in a dispute over council-house sales in Torbay.

  And Mrs Thatcher refuses to allow the Queen to visit Moscow until Mr Gorbachev has shown more genuine concern for human rights.

  I am allotted my dressing-room at the National – not unlike a cell at Risley Remand Home. I share it with Michael Gambon. There is no evidence of his occupancy at all; not even a razo 0blade.

  Four preview performances of Single Spies do not diminish my stage frig
ht, the worst moment being when one pushes through the double doors from the dressing-room corridor into the staircase well and hears for the first time the amplified roar of the audience. They are only chatting together before the curtain, but it sounds like the crowd waiting for the Christians in the Colosseum. Still, both plays produce lots of laughs, the biggest always for HMQ’s remark ‘Governments come and go. Or don’t go’, which one night is even cheered.

  I December. I am reading Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming Pool Library, which is about a rampant homosexual Wykehamist. The Wykehamists I knew at Oxford were all rather cold fish – famously so in fact – but it may be that Hollinghurst’s novel explains something that happened when I went to the Age of Chivalry exhibition at the Royal Academy.

  ‘You’ve only an hour,’ says the ticket lady. More than enough for me, who finds shovelling coal slightly less exhausting than traipsing round an art gallery. I generally put down my fatigue to my ignorance of the contents but in this instance that doesn’t apply as, being a former medieval historian, I know all about Richard II’s character and Edward III and what Bastard Feudalism is. In fifteen minutes I’m shattered, so conclude it must just be art that exhausts.

  I marvel at the statue of St Michael brought from Norway (or is it Sweden?), at the painted screen from some Suffolk church, and at the jewellery and swords and armour that have survived – the survival as much a miracle as the handiwork.

  Of course these days my eyes are going, or altering anyway, and I catch myself joining in the bifocal minuet in front of the showcases: glasses on to see the item, one pace back and glasses off to read the card, glasses on and in to look at the item again. At one point I am bending down and peering at the information card alongside an old county lady (plenty of those about). ‘This exhibit’, the card reads, ‘was lent by the Master and Scholars of Winchester College’, to which someone (presumably a Wykehamist) has added in a beautiful italic hand, ‘all of whom have big dicks’. I leave the old lady to it and bury myself in a pipe roll.

  1989

  January, The Government ‘profoundly rejects’ the report of the inquiry into the Thames TV programme Death on the Rock. ‘Firmly’ one could understand, and ‘passionately’ even, but profoundly? Of course what they actually mean is ‘contemptuously’. Or, in Mrs Thatcher’s case, ‘furiously’.

  A man rooting in the dustbin opposite stops suddenly and looks at his watch.

  24 February. Single Spies has transferred from the National to the Queen’s and is now previewing, though not without incident. Stage-hands in West End theatres are used to long runs and find it hard to turn productions round as deftly as they do in repertory. Tonight, as the lights go down at the end of the first scene of ‘A Question of Attribution’, I wait on the sliding truck for the projection screen to rise before the truck carries me upstage in the blackout. However, the screen does not rise and the truck moves inexorably upstage, which means that the screen demolishes everything in its path. I flatten myself on my desk and hear it swish over my head before catching me a heavy blow on the shoulder. Then, in a sequence reminiscent of A Night at the Opera, thirty or so slides flick rapidly through on the wildly swaying screen, a bookshelf collapses, and the Buckingham Palace set descends amid the chaos. When eventually I manage to get off, expecting to find myself the hero of the hour for having sat there as the world collapsed about me, I find that nobody realizes I’ve been hurt at all.

  Later I run into Judi Dench, who says that when she was in The Good Companions she caught her foot in the revolve. It was agonizing, but she carried on, with the result that nobody was much interested in her injury. Finally she took to limping, in order to enlist some sympathy, but gave that up when the director, noticing it for the first time, thought it was part of a developing insight into her character and said, ‘Love the limp, darling.’

  10 March. A fat woman stops me in Parkway and puts out her hand. ‘The council’s put me in a hotel, me and my three kids. They said they’d send me my books, but they haven’t. ‘I give her the coins in my pocket and come away thinking,’ Well, at least she reads. I’d miss my books too, if I were stuck in some hotel.’ It takes me a time to realize that she is not talking about her treasured copies of Anthony Burgess but her social-security books.

  11 March. Wake up from a dream saying, ‘I have no faith in him as a sort of cricketing Velázquez, if that’s what you mean.’

  Lent is now ‘the run-up to Easter’.

  12 March. Names of the Albanian Football Team:

  The Interpreter: Ilir Agolli.

  The Manager: Shyqri Rrelli.

  The Goalkeeper: Blendi Nallbani.

  2 April. Hotel Terminus, Marcel Ophuls’s documentary on Klaus Barbie, includes an account of how Barbie was spirited away to South America, having been recruited by the FBI, and in their comfortable suburban homes various old FBI agents recount the arrangements they made for Barbie some forty years ago. Similar revelations here would be illegal under Douglas Hurd’s new Secrets Bill. But then, of course, we are a decent nation; we don’t do things like that.

  16 April. The ninety-eight Liverpool fans crushed to death at Sheffield bring back memories of a similar disaster at Bolton in 1946. We never took a Sunday paper at home but sometimes saw the News of the World when we went down to Grandma’s on a Sunday night, and I think I knew at eleven years old that there was something wrong about the gusto with which the tragic story was written up, and something prurient about the way I gobbled up every word. Today I read very little, and because of being at the theatre see nothing of the live coverage on television. But already the process begins whereby terrible events are broken down and made palatable. They are first covered in a kind of gum: the personal reactions of bystanders, eyewitnesses giving their inadequate testimonials – ‘It was terrible’; ‘I’ll never forget it’; ‘Tragic. Bloody tragic’ – and the wreaths inscribed ‘You’ll never walk alone’. Then the event begins to be swallowed, broken up into digestible pieces, minced morsels: the reaction of the football authorities is gone into, then the comments of the police, the verdict of the Sports Minister and so on, day after day, until by the end of the week it will begin to get boring and the snake will have swallowed the pig. Then there are all the customary components of the scene – the establishment of a memorial fund (always a dubious response) and the bedside visits by the Prime Minister. I find myself thinking, It would be Liverpool, that sentimental, self-dramatizing place, and am brought up short by seeing footage of a child brought out dead, women waiting blank-faced at Lime Street and a father meeting his two sons off the train, his relief turned to anger at the sight of their smiling faces, cuffing and hustling them away from the cameras.

  30 April, Yorkshire. W. tells me that the Misses Blunt – Violet and Dorothy – lived near Settle and were cousins to Sir Anthony, a relationship of which they made much (at any rate before his downfall). Miss Dorothy had a moustache and an eye-patch, and Miss Violet worked for a time at Giggleswick School.

  They decided to leave their house and move to a bungalow at Austwick. On the morning of the removal the men arrived and began taking the furniture out. Then one of them came downstairs white-faced and took Miss Violet to one side. ‘I’m afraid’, he said, ‘there’s a woman dead in the bedroom upstairs.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Miss Violet. ‘It’s Dorothy. She died in the night. I’m expecting the undertaker shortly.’

  14 May. Resist various appeals to go down to the South Bank, where Dames Peggy and Judi are holding a vigil to protest against the bulldozing, starting tomorrow, of the site of the Rose Theatre, on the stage of which Shakespeare played. Like most archaeological sites it’s closer to dentistry than it is to architecture – just a pit with some gap-toothed masonry -though doubtless the developers will capitalize on its associations and feel they are paying their debt to history by naming the building Rose House and installing a Shakespeare Carvery. Had Jerusalem been builded here and the site of the Crucifixion discovered,
it would promptly be built over and christened the Golgotha Centre.

  29 May. Oliver Sacks is about to set off for Japan to look at some patients suffering from Tourette’s syndrome, a condition that results in an involuntary stream of abuse and obscenity. ‘Japanese, you see, has no expletives. I’m most curious to know how the complaint expresses itself

  1 June. From time to time middle-aged couples walk past the house arm-in-arm and looking around them with more than ordinary interest, as if this were a foreign town and they were visiting it. There is a house for sale up the street, and, having looked round it, they are walking down the street and trying to imagine living here. Today, though, there is a girl weeping by my wall and trying to get into a car. Now her boyfriend comes up, a tall young man in shorts, with a muscular face. They get in the car and he puts his arm round her, but she starts to argue, banging her hand on her knee and gesturing with the fingers of the hand open in a way that looks Italian. All he offers her in the way of consolation is his bag of peanuts, which in terms of consolation is peanuts. Still, she takes them, so that’s a good sign. All it needs to end the quarrel is for her to put her hand on his knee, which she does just as my telephone rings. It is K. in New York, and I describe the scene to him, how they are now getting out of the car, the quarrel ended and the boy with something of an erection, which he adjusts in his shorts before putting his arm round his girlfriend and walking her back to Camden Lock.

  2 June. A helicopter swoops low over Camden Town as President Bush departs from the American Ambassador’s house, the President having left Mrs Thatcher folding the reins of history’.

  9 June. Apropos George III I am reading Namier’s England in the Age of the American Revolution and come across this: ‘Similarly in Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus the true humour of the tragedy is not so much the pair of naked legs sticking out of the water, as the complete unconcern of all potential onlookers: not even the fisherman who sits on the shore notices what has happened.’ It pre-dates Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ by eight years or so.