Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  SHE: We been on a bus, a boat and two trains. The only form of transport we not been on today is a plane.

  HE: Yeah.

  SHE: Did I tell you that when I went to the toilet this morning there was a pigeon on the window-sill and it was still ther when I came out (Pause.)

  HE: No. You didn’t tell me that.

  23 August. Saddam Hussein poses with the children of the hostages on TV, thereby producing outrage in the Foreign Office and Downing Street. ‘Nauseating,’ says Douglas Hurd, and Mrs Thatcher is said to have thrown up her hands in horror. There’s some hypocrisy here. The programme was foolish, the propaganda crude, and Saddam H. an obvious villain, but politicians have always made a beeline for babies. This ‘nauseating obscene exhibition’ (Gerald Kaufman) is only an extension of the ‘caring’ image they all like to project, and with about as much truth in it.

  5 October. An article in the Independent entitled ‘The Gatecrasher’s Guide to Berlin’: ‘Now is the time to visit Berlin while the shock of the Wall is still evident, consumerism’ – of which the Independent is wholly innocent – ‘has yet to take over and freedom means more than a new microwave oven. Berlin in 1990 is extraordinary; go there before it becomes plain ordinary’ – i.e. before the readers of the Mail get round to it.

  8 October. Rehearsals for The Wind in the Willows begin this week. The cast are having movement classes to teach them how to move like the animals they are representing – rabbits, weasels and so on – and as a first step have been watching videos and nature films. Michael Bryant, who plays Badger, is sceptical about this, as older actors tend to be. However, Jane Gibson, who is teaching them movement, thinks she has made a breakthrough when Michael asks if he can take away the videos and study them at home. He comes back next day and takes her on one side. ‘I’ve been watching these films of badgers and the way they move… and the thing is they all move exactly like Michael Bryant.’

  7 November. I film at a TV studio in Harlesden where Gary Lineker had been filming the previous day. The girls in the crew have still not recovered from the beauty of his thighs. ‘They were so big. And so smooth. You could land a helicopter on them.’

  11 November. A young man sets himself on fire during the Two Minutes ‘Silence and, as he lies on the ground burning, shouts, ‘Think about the people today’ Closer in feeling and in genuine agony to what is being commemorated than anyone else on the parade, he is bundled away to be treated for 60 per cent burns at Roehampton, and nothing more will be heard of him. If Jan Palach had put a match to himself in Whitehall and not Wenceslas Square, the same would have happened. It’s not called ‘martyrdom’ in England, just ‘going too far’. Still, ‘it is thought that the Royal Party were unaware of the incident,’ and that’s the important thing.

  22 November. Phoned by the Guardian in a round-up of what people think of the departure of Mrs T, I say that I’m hopeless at this kind of thing and am simply relieved I shan’t have to think about politics quite so much. They print this fairly uninspired comment but preface it with ‘Oo ’eck’ and systematically drop all my aitches. I suppose I should be grateful they didn’t report me as saying: ‘Ee ba gum, I’m reet glad t’Prime Minister’s tekken her ‘ook.’ Actually, now that she has gone, what it does feel like is the week after Christmas.

  24 November. In all the welter of comment on the Tory leadership crisis, no one seems to have noted how eighteenth-century it all is. Namier would have found Michael Heseltine a familiar figure: the leader of a group of ‘outs’ numerous enough to have to be taken into the government but who cannot be taken in without the administration being reconstructed. Hence the departure of Mrs T.

  Of course the difference between politics then and politics now is that in the eighteenth century there were few issues that really divided the House, leaving members time and energy to squabble over patronage and place. Not yet quite the same, but ‘the structure of politics in the age of Charles III’ may be getting on that way.

  28 November. Two young men come down the Bristol train, unshaven and in track suits. Looking up from my book, I wonder vaguely if they’re football hooligans. They knock on the conductor’s door and have a word with him, and when they go back up the train I notice one of them is carrying a policeman’s helmet. All is explained when the conductor announces over the Tannoy that there are two policemen on the train, doing a twenty-four-hour rail marathon in aid of the Bristol Children’s Hospital, and would we all give generously. There is a general reaching into pockets, but as the carriage awaits their return, certain questions occur. What if the collectors had not been policemen but students collecting for Amnesty, say, or Action Aid, or the Terrence Higgins Trust? Would the conductor have acquiesced so readily in a collection for them? Besides which there’s the other nagging thought that hospitals ought not to have to depend on charity, and that by forking out for a hospital fund one is just playing the government’s game and getting it out of the hole it has dug for itself. But now the policemen have returned and the helmet is under my nose. A pound seems the average gift, so I put one in meekly and say nothing.

  8 December. Richard Briers tells me how he was going up the steps from the National on to Waterloo Bridge when he was accosted, as one invariably is, by someone sitting on the landing, begging. ‘No, I thought,’ said Richard – ‘not again, and walked on. Only then I heard this lugubrious voice say, “Oh. My favourite actor.” So I turned back and gave him a pound.’

  That particular pitch is known to be very profitable, partly because of actors and playgoers being more soft-hearted than the general run. The beggars have got themselves so well-organized as to ration the pitch to half an hour apiece on pain of being beaten up. I find it easiest to think of Waterloo Bridge as a toll bridge, and resign myself to paying at least 50p to get across, thus sidestepping any tiresome questions about need or being taken advantage of.

  II December. I am taking A.’s three children to The Wind in the Willows.

  TREVOR: How long does it go on?

  ME: It finishes at ten.

  ROBIN: Are there any of those things when they let you out for a bit?

  BEN: He means intervals.

  ME: Just one.

  ROBIN: Oh. Those are the bits I like best.

  1993

  4 January. On BBC’s Catchword this afternoon, one of the questions is on anagrams of playwrights. Mine is Annabel Tent. Nobody guesses it.

  A joke about the Queen Mother, who in an old people’s home finds herself not treated with the proper respect. She approaches a nurse:

  QM: Don’t you know who I am?

  NURES: No, dear, but if you go over and ask the lady at the desk she’ll probably be able to tell you.

  14 January. Most of the headlines this morning quote Bush’s remark that they have given Saddam Hussein ‘a spanking’ – a homely term which nicely obscures the fact, nowhere mentioned, that people were killed, spanked, in fact, to death. A couple of days ago one of our peace-keeping troops was shot in Bosnia, and he is pictured everywhere. Maybe the Serbs or the Croats, or whoever it was shot him, think this was just a bit of a spanking too.

  16 January. Now the papers are full of the latest scandal, the bugged phone call between the Prince of Wales and Mrs Parker-Bowles. I read none of it, as I didn’t read the earlier Diana tapes, not out of disapproval or moral superiority, just genuine lack of interest. I wish it would all go away.

  I am sickened by the self-righteousness of the newspapers, which, though it takes a different form, is as nauseating in the Independent as it is in the Sun. Depressed too by the continuing corruption of public life, ex-members of the Government moving straight on to the boards of the ex-public utilities they have helped to privatize and reckoning to see nothing wrong in it. Meanwhile the Government keeps at it, relentlessly paring and picking away at the proper functions of the State; ‘lean’ is how they like to describe it, but it’s gone beyond lean – now it’s more like the four-day-old carcass of the Christmas turkey. Then an item
today about babies born without eyes in Lincolnshire makes me want never to read a paper again and go and live in the middle of a field.

  20 January. Collected by The New Yorker and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of seventy-two who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde Park. Avedon’s assistants bustle round with lights, Avedon himself scarcely bothering to look through the lens, just enquiring from time to time where the edge of the frame is. He explains he wants me to seem to sit on the branch but actually to lean forward into the camera at the same time. I try.

  ‘You’re game,’ says Julie Kavanagh of The New Yorker. Actually I’m not game at all, just timid, and – short of taking my clothes off – ready to do anything, even climb trees, rather than be thought ‘difficult’.

  A propos of which is Whitman’s description of himself to Edward Carpenter: ‘An old hen… with something in my nature furtive.’

  2 February. Late for a final rehearsal for the tour of Talking Heads, I rush out of the house on this bright spring-like morning to be confronted by a large pile of excrement on the path. Thinking it’s a dog, I swear and am about to go in and get a bucket to swill the path when I see that shit has been smeared on the car, and the paper whoever it is has used to wipe his or her bum has been carefully stuffed into the door-handle. I swill the flags, wash the car, and, returning home this evening, wash it again with Dettol, reflecting that if my mother were in a state to know of this she would never get into the car again, would want it sold or at the very least a new door fitted. Wonder if the person who did the shitting is the same person who stove in the car window on Saturday night, but decide this is paranoia.

  8 February, Newcastle. Coming back to the hotel from the dress rehearsal, I call in at the cathedral – the parish church as it must have been until about 1900. A grand medley of Church and State, the army and the professions, it’s an old-fashioned place too in that you’re not blitzed with information, exhibitions and outreach as soon as you set foot in the door. Here are Collingwood, Nelson’s admiral, and an eighteenth-century general in the Deccan Rifles, dead on the voyage out; surgeons and solicitors of the town; neat, kneeling Tudors; plump Augustan divines; and an atmosphere of piety, property and Pledge never quite caught by anyone – even Larkin, whose life I must get on and review. I wanted Forty Years On to be like this cathedral, studded with relics and effigies, reminders and memorials, half-forgotten verses and half-remembered hymns. Everything fits: the crypt chapel nicely restored in the thirties, the memorial to Danish seamen dead in the war, the brasses rubbed to extinction before a lavish twenties altar rail – time and what it has deposited.

  11 February, Yorkshire. Am periodically sent statements of profits (sic) by Hand Made Films, which produced A Private Function. Each year the loss escalates, and it now runs at some £2 million for a film that cost two-thirds of that. Write back suggesting they submit the statement as an entry for this year’s Booker Prize for fiction and saying that if it won they’d probably be able to convert the prize money into a loss too.

  Remember at supper in Giggleswick that, when I was a boy in Armley, the clothes-horse was called the ‘winter edge’ – actually the ‘winter hedge’. W. suggests, poetically, that it was because, laden with clothes, it would look like a hedge covered with snow. More plausibly, it was because in summer clothes could be spread on the hedge (though not in sooty Armley) and in winter on the horse. The other name for it, remembered by W.’s eighty-five-year-old mother, is ‘clothes maiden’.

  16 February. A child lured away by two boys in Bootle and found battered to death and run over by a train. A boy is taken in for questioning, and crowds gather outside his house, jeering and hurling stones, so that the family have to be taken away to a place of safety; the boy is later released. The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard – probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.

  22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused of the toddler’s murder are driven away. One man eludes the police cordon and manages to bang on the side of the van, and six others are arrested. Yesterday Mr Major appealed for ‘less understanding’, as indeed the Sun does every day of the week.

  The single and peculiar life is bound

  With all the strength and armour of the mind

  To keep itself from noyance.

  Come across this, said (I think) by Resencrantz. As so often with Shakespeare, you wonder what sort of life he led, how he came to know this. It takes in most of Larkin’s life.

  A regular from Arlington House walks down the crescent, stiff as a ramrod, upright, respectable. By his side and pressed as firmly into the seam of his trousers as the thumb of a Guards sergeant-major is a can of McEwen’s lager.

  10 March. The Independent pursues its campaign against John Birt over his tax arrangements. On another page it boasts its acquisition of Jim Slater as its Stock Exchange commentator.

  13 March. To Weston to see Mam, who is dull-eyed, expressionless, absent. The sun is hot through the blinds, and the radio full on. ‘My,’ says a nurse (who’s not really a nurse), bending over the wreck of some ex-Somerset housewife, ‘it’s 12.30. Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun!’ Downstairs comes an uninterrupted lamentation from some caged creature. ‘Well,’ says the nurse, spooning another dollop of rice pudding into a gaping mouth, ‘what I say is, If you’ve got lungs, why not use them?’

  20 March, Yorkshire. Late on Saturday afternoon I drive over to the Georgian Theatre at Richmond and do my piece. Half the audience are in dinner-jackets, part of a group paying extra to dine afterwards with the Marquis of Zetland, thus raising more money for the Dales Museum. Nobody comes round, and since I’ve cried off the dinner I come away feeling unthanked but also obscurely pleased, as it shows I’m just the entertainment, below stairs the proper place for the actor, and which I’m in favour of if only because the opposite can be so dire. So, while half the audience are dining at Aske with the Zetlands, I am sitting in the Little Chef at Leeming Bar having baked beans on toast. Which is what I prefer, so it isn’t a grumble. But I catch myself here doing a Larkin (or being a man) – i.e. claiming I don’t want something, then chuntering about not getting it.

  9 April, Good Friday. ‘It’s Good Friday!’ shouts the ginger-haired young man who presents The Big Breakfast, as if the goodness of the day were to do with having a good time.

  What nobody seems to say (and what I didn’t say) about Larkin’s idea of the artist – lonely, unpossessed and unposses-sioned – is that it’s both romantic and conventional. Pearson Park was a garret.

  15 April. Lady Thatcher back on the scene, lecturing the world about Bosnia, with ‘Bomb the Serbs’ her solution. She doesn’t begin by saying, as any fair-minded person would, ‘I admit I supported the Serbs to start with,’ just hoping no one will remember that (and having some glib answer if they do).* Most people would also say that the fewer arms there are on the market the easier these conflicts would be to settle, and that anyone whose family is involved in arms-dealing would do better to pipe down about the moral issues. Nobody points this out – least of all to her.

  18 April. A seventieth-birthday party for Lindsay Anderson in St Mary’s Church Hall, Paddington. Lindsay in one of his presents, a silk dressing gown (‘I’m wearing it to show that I am quite happy to direct Noël Coward if asked’). A wheelchair has been provided for a ninety-year-old guest who hasn’t turned up, so Lindsay commandeers it and is wheeled around the room getting older by the minute. The room is full of all sorts of people, with show business probably in a minority, and offhand I can’t think of any other director who’d be given a birthday party like this, and with such lovely parish-hall food. ‘A very English occasion’ is how it woul
d be described. The church hall was built after the parish had discovered that it owned the land on which the A40 flyover had been built and so was compensated with several millions – a real-life Ealing Studios plot.

  11 May. To Weston. Besides the women, Mam’s room now has two men: Cyril and Les. Cyril is small and plump with a little secret smile, as if he’s sitting on an egg; Les has a bad chest and does what Mam would once have called ‘ruttles’, i.e. gargles with phlegm. He can’t speak except as part of a routine he does with the cleaner. She says, ‘Les, Les,’ and, having got his attention, ‘Boom tee bum bum.’ And Les (sometimes) says, ‘Bum Bum.’ This is as much laughed at and applauded as if he were an elephant that had got on its hind legs.

  15 May, Yorkshire. Sitting in the car at Richmond, waiting while R. has a look round, I see out of the corner of my eye a middle-aged woman crossing over towards the car with a broad smile on her face. I assume I have been recognized and am about to be accosted, and compose my features in a look of kindly accommodation. Even so I am a little taken aback when the woman, without even knocking on the window, actually opens the car door. Still, I don’t show any surprise – this is a fan, after all. But not merely does she open the door, she gets in, sits down beside me, and closes the door. Still I make no protest. She settles herself, then finally turns to me, still smiling. Only in Yorkshire… Bloody Hell! I’m in the wrong car!’ and bolts, running back along the pavement to her by now wildly gesticulating husband. The person who is really shown up by the story is, of course, me.

  Tony Cash tells me that he saw A Lady of Letters done on French TV. When Miss Ruddock is watching the young couple who live opposite her, she remarks, ‘The couple opposite just having their tea. No cloth on. Milk bottle stuck there, waiting. ‘This has been translated as ‘The couple opposite just having their tea. No clothes on. Milk bottle stuck there waiting.’ It’s the milk bottle that intrigues.