Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  23 February. Derek Jarman has died. I liked his writing more than I did his films, though I wish he had made the film which he once asked me to write about his father, a Battle of Britain pilot who turned kleptomaniac in his old age. Jarman dies on the eve of the fudged Commons vote which reduces the age of male consent to eighteen not sixteen. Anyone in any doubt should have compared the speech by the civilized and courageous Chris Smith with that of the bigot Tony Marlow. ‘Predatory’ is a word much in evidence, the frail faltering flame of heterosexuality always in danger of being snuffed out by the hot homosexual wind.

  1 March. It seems pretty well accepted now that much of one’s life, including the length of it and the weaknesses to which one will be prone, is decided in the womb. This would please Kafka, or at any rate confirm his worst fears: to be sentenced to death before one is even born would be for him a kind of apotheosis.

  25 March, Yorkshire. Drive over into Wensleydale for the view of a sale at Tennant’s. Leyburn turns out to be a High Recognition Area, and as I walk past the church two middle-aged WI-type ladies come out and their faces light up. ‘Oh, do come and have a Lenten Lunch. Very simple. Delicious soup. All home-made!’ Actually I wouldn’t have minded the soup but I can’t face the chat, though in the event I can’t settle on anywhere else to eat either. Tennant’s, which was a small country auctioneer’s twenty years ago, with sales in church halls etc., is now a huge concern with a vast custom-built South-Forks-like pavilion complete with restaurant (where again I don’t eat), changing-room for babies, computer terminals and all the paraphernalia of big business. There are some nice bits of furniture, but the atmosphere (well-heeled retired couples, women in sharp little Robin Hood hats, men in Barbours) puts me off, and, having driven fifty miles to get there, I spend ten minutes looking round then beat a quick retreat.

  I drive back over Upper Wharfedale to Kettlewell on a road that used to be deserted and scarcely signposted, though this was probably twenty years ago too. Now it’s obviously a scenic tour for Sunday afternoons and another outing for retired leisure. I stop and look in Hubberholme church, and sitting in a pew see a plaque on a pillar recording that the remains of J. B. Priestley are buried near this spot. I look at the war memorial to the dead of the 1914–18 war (ranks not given) and think of boys going on carts down the dale once the harvest was in. Dennis Potter’s impending death is announced this morning, and I wonder where his ashes will lie. Potter’s health, or lack of it, has always been a factor in his fame, so that, like Kafka, he visibly conformed to what the public thinks artists ought to be – poor or promiscuous, suffering or starved. And perhaps that’s why Priestley was treated so condescendingly: because he was none of these things.

  21 April. A lunch party at the Connaught for John Gielgud’s ninetieth birthday given by Alec Guinness. John G. in an olive-green corduroy suit, elbows pressed firmly into his sides, hands clasped over his tummy, smiling and giggling and bubbling over with things to say and (except for a small fading of the voice) no different from when I first met him twenty-five years ago. Dame Judi is here and Michael Williams, Dame Wendy, Lindsay Α., Ron Pickup and Anna Massey, Keith Baxter, Percy Harris – who’s ninety herself– and Ralph Richardson’s widow, Mu. I am seated between Jocelyn Herbert and Merula Guinness, with both of whom one can be happily silly.

  ‘You see,’ says Jocelyn, ‘I look down this table at all these distinguished people and think, What am I doing here?’ Same here, but as soon as one loses the sense of being in grand places on false pretences it ceases to be fun. Lindsay, who is on Jocelyn’s other side, is amiable but made more combative by the circumstances. ‘Is this very grand? I suppose it is. Jocelyn insisted I put on a tie, didn’t you, Jocelyn? I thought that was very bourgeois. And she told me not to wear my leather jacket.’ Since he’s now a bit deaf one has to shout, and I see J. G. giving our end of the table uneasy glances as we seem to be making a lot of noise.

  ‘Othello’s a silly play, I always think,’ says Lindsay. ‘You designed Olivier’s Othello, didn’t you, Jocelyn? Winter’s Tale is much better. What do you think, John? Is Winter’s Tale better than Othello?’ ‘I see no reason to make the comparison,’ says John G. crisply, then snuffles, as he does when he’s made a joke. Lindsay then provokes some talk about how, before doing David Storey’s Home, John thought Lindsay disliked him. ‘You did dislike me,’ John wails. ‘Take no notice, John,’ calls Mu Richardson. ‘This is your birthday. Shut up, Lindsay.’

  Lindsay playing the bad boy only serves to emphasize how jolly the rest of it is, with John G. still able to produce stories one has never heard – how during rehearsals for The Good Companions the leading lady had been reluctant to come down the stairs and step on a trapdoor at the bottom for fear she’d fall through. Whereupon Jack Priestley climbed up the stairs, lumbered down the steps… and promptly went through. They stood round aghast gazing at the open trapdoor, when there came a voice from under the stage: ‘I’eard you laughing.’

  Percy Harris talks about the stable behind St Martin’s Lane where the theatrical designers Motley used to function in the thirties: it was in Garrick Yard and had been Chippendale’s workshop, and when Douglas Byng first used the stable for a nightclub in the twenties Chippendale’s lathe was still hanging from a beam. All Motley’s costumes were stored there, and when it was blitzed early in the war John G. came down the morning after and found nothing left, just the firemen sweeping up in the Hamlet hats.

  Alec G’s hospitality is, as always, princely, Jocelyn saying she’d never tasted such wine, and when I come away there is a line of cars he’s hired waiting to take all the old ladies home.

  1 May. ‘He/she died in my arms’ is an odd phrase. M. used it of Tulip, the last of her goats, who snuffed it a few weeks back. ‘She was so clever,’ M. said, ‘waiting until we got back from Rome, then dying in my arms at 10.30 the next morning.’ It may be quite a comfortable way for a goat to go, but it must, I imagine, be most uncomfortable for a person – particularly if you’re not feeling quite up to it, as presumably you aren’t if you’re on the way out. Or is it a general statement of things that might mean holding the dying one’s hand or just being there at the bedside at the time? Because, without actually getting into the bed behind the person in question, how can he or she die in one’s arms? It’s as difficult to envisage as that other deathbed posture – ‘He/she turned his face to the wall.’ What if the bed isn’t by a wall? Actually it’s only men who turn their faces to the wall: women face up to things, peeping over the blanket to the last.

  26 July. Upset and angered by the extradition of the two British women who’ve been accused of conspiracy to murder ten years (and another life) ago and now sent to face trial in Oregon. Police wait for them outside the court, but they are allowed bail in order to make their own way to Heathrow. I would make my own way to Sweden or Denmark, one of the decent countries. The original decision to extradite them was taken by nice, tubby, hail-fellow-well-met Kenneth Clarke.

  I stroll round the block later thinking about this. The heat is almost tropical. Certainly it’s like the South of France, because somewhere along Regent’s Park Terrace there is a cricket singing – something I don’t remember ever hearing in England before.

  10 August. Do two interviews for Writing Home. In each case I find myself telling stories to the interviewers and, seeing them slightly glaze over, realize I am simply repeating stories that I have included in the book. Note that this is something to be careful of for the future. It’s the same state of affairs I noticed once when having supper with Stephen Spender, namely that he was telling me lots of stories I knew already But of course I only knew them because he had already published them in book form. There’s very little in the back of the shop is the message: now that it’s all out on the shelves the best plan is to pipe down.

  25 August. Second day shooting a documentary on Westminster Abbey. Henry VII’s Chapel, which the Abbey prefers (and the pious Henry VII would, I’m sure, have preferred) to ca
ll the Lady Chapel, is to be closed at the end of the week for cleaning and repairs, so we have two days to film all our set-ups there, which we can only do once the last visitors have gone. The set-ups include a piece on Dean Stanley’s quest for the body of James I which began at the grave of his queen, the six foot five Anne of Denmark, where he ought to have been buried, and finished in the vault below the tomb of Henry VII, where James finally ended up, the founder of the Stuart dynasty snuggling up as of right to the founder of the Tudors. With the excuse of looking at the shot, I go up on the camera crane high above the bronze outer wall of Henry VII’s tomb to look down on Torrigiano’s effigies of Henry and his queen, Elizabeth of York. And wonderful it is, except that there is also something of the top of the wardrobe about it, the ramparts of the tomb quite dusty, with a few old planks lying about and odd bits of flex. One half-expects to see a suitcase or two.

  Alfie, the grip on the crew, worked on A Day Out. We sit around at dinner-time swapping stories of what the BBC used to be like, deploring in particular the security men who now man the gates and know nobody, remembering the BBC commissionaires of old and one in particular, of famous surliness, who had one arm. He guarded the car park as if it were sacred ground. Once, when told it was full, Sid Lotterby, the director of Porridge, became so infuriated he wound down his window and shouted, ‘Let me in, you old bugger, or I’ll tear your other arm off.’

  Alfie has a better story. The same commissionaire was a big fan of Morecambe and Wise, to whom even he deferred. As they drove in one day he stopped their car and asked if there was any chance of a ticket to one of their shows.

  ‘No,’ said Eric. ‘We don’t want you.’ ‘Why?’ said the one– armed commissionaire. ‘I’m your biggest fan.’ ‘But you can’t clap.’

  26 August. A fire on a cross-Channel ferry. On the World at One this is announced as ‘a fire on a cross-flannel cherry’. The newsreader pauses, then decides the error is irretrievable and passes on, a slight tremor in his voice. Fortunately he is just finishing the news and gives way to the presenter, who talks about some slight fall in the trade figures with a degree of intensity and concentration utterly unwarranted by the importance of the subject. It’s exactly what would happen on the stage.

  1 September. Lindsay Anderson dies. Unusually, the obituaries are quite fair and catch the essence of him, all of them regretting that he had made so few films but praising him as a critic and a conscience. Had he been born ten or fifteen years earlier, and worked under a studio system that demanded he direct three or four films a year as a matter of routine, he might have made more rubbish but there would have been more first-rate films as well. As it was, he was too fastidious – enabled to be so, it was said, by a small private income from an aunt with a stake in Bell’s Scotch whisky. The pity was that so much of his time was taken up not with working in the theatre but in futile development deals that never came to anything.

  None of the obituaries mentions how consistently and constructively kind he was, shouldering other people’s burdens (albeit with a sigh), housing the homeless, his flat in Swiss Cottage always sheltering someone down on their luck.

  He wasn’t a person it was wise to go to the theatre with, as he tended to groan aloud. ‘Oh, honestly,’ he would mutter, and turn to look in wonderment at his neighbours who were so lacking in discriminations as to be actually enjoying themselves. If in the interval you said you were quite liking it too, his eyes would close in a fastidious despair reminiscent of Annie Walker in Coronation Street. ‘Well of course, Alan, you would. These are your people.’ Then (the clincher in most arguments) a sad shake of the head and: ‘England!’

  He had never, so far as I know, been a schoolmaster, but there was a lot of the schoolmaster in him – sceptical, sarcastic, given to provocative exaggeration, and able to generate in his associates, as good teachers do, a longing to please. He was schoolmasterly, too, in his loves, his loyalty to a few chosen actors setting him apart as a perpetual romantic in what is a pretty hardbitten profession.

  Anyone who was his friend will miss those instantly recognizable postcards with their capitals, underlinings and exclamation marks, like the one he sent me from Moscow in 1987: ‘I have been standing for PEACE and MR GORBACHEV with Gregory Peck and Yoko Ono and Gore Vidal and Fay Weldon. Where were you?!’

  26 September. And as I am correcting the proofs of this piece comes the death of my next-door neighbour, the publisher Colin Haycraft. He was like Lindsay A. in many ways, standing at the same ironic angle to the universe, though his anarchism was of the right rather than the left. Worn down in his last years by his efforts to retain control of Duckworth’s, he never ceased to be perky and good for a laugh, my best memory of him being at the funeral of Miss Shepherd, who had lived in a van in my drive. As the hearse doors closed on the coffin, Colin loudly remarked, ‘Well, it’s a cut above her previous vehicle.’

  1995

  13 January. One of Peter Cook’s jokes, several times quoted in his obituaries, is of two men chatting. ‘I’m writing a novel,’ says one, whereupon the other says, ‘Yes, neither am I.’ And of course it’s funny and it has a point, but Peter, I suspect, felt that this disposed of the matter entirely. That people did write novels or poetry and were heartfelt about it didn’t make much difference: literature, music – it was just the stuff of cocktail-party chatter; nobody really did it, still less genuinely enjoyed it when it was done. Forget plays, pictures, concerts: newspapers were the only reality – not that one could believe them either.

  16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw their blackout curtains perhaps), and one night, having had to ring the bell and remonstrate yet again, Joe burst out, ‘I’d like to give them a right kick up the arse.’ This wasn’t like Joe at all and turned into a family joke – and a useful one too, as Dad never swore, so to give somebody a kick up the arse became known euphemistically as ‘Joe Fitton’s Remedy’. With Dad it even became a verb: ‘I’d like to Joe Fitton him,’ he’d say. And that’s what I felt like this lunchtime, Joe Fittoning Michael Heseltine, and Mr Brown too.

  20 January. I note how much pleasure I get from anemones. I love their Victorian colours, their green ruffs and how, furry as chestnuts, the blooms gradually open and in so doing turn and arrange themselves in the vase, still retaining their beauty even when almost dead, at every stage of their life delightful.

  I used to like freesias for their scent, and when I was at Oxford and bought them in the market two or three flowers would scent a room. But florists (and certainly Marks & Spencer) have now bred a strain which has no scent at all except faintly that of pepper. Considering this is a flower which is not much to look at, the whole point of which is its scent, this must be considered a triumph of marketing.

  24 January. Somebody writes from the New Statesman asking me to contribute to a feature on Englishness, the other contributors, the letter says, ‘ranging from Frank Bruno to Calvin [sic] MacKenzie’. I wish, as they say.

  26 January. The papers are full of the beastliness of Eric Cantona, who kicked some loud-mouthed, pop-eyed Crystal Palace supporter and got himself suspended for it – for ever, some soccer-lovers hope. Currently Walker’s Crisps are running a TV advert in which Gary Lineker, returning home from Japan, sits on a park bench beside a little boy and then, saying ‘No more Mr Nice Guy,’ steals the child’s crisps. If Walker’s were smart they would make a sequel in which Lineker, making off with the bag of crisps, is stopped in his tracks by Cantona, who kicks him and makes him give the crisps back. Then the British public would be thoroughly confused.

  13 February, To Westminster for the last two days of shooting The Abbey documentary. Happily they coincide with one of the rare showings of the thirteenth-century Cosmati pavement in the Sanctuary. Knowing it only from photogra
phs, when the carpets have been rolled back I’m slightly disappointed to see the original. Portions of it – particularly the bits of opus sectile in black and white – I’d like to grub up and frame, but some of it seems crude and the colours vulgar, and I’ve no means of knowing whether the parts I like are the original stones and the vulgar bits Victorian renovation or the other way round. Certainly the much later tiles round the altar are more faded and pleasing than the harsh reds and blues of ancient glass in the original work (which probably come from medieval Islam); and the purple and green porphyry, which must of its nature be original, isn’t to my taste at all.

  During the day the pavement is roped off, but once the Abbey is closed I am allowed to walk across it in my stockinged feet.

  14 February. A courier, a good-looking dark-haired boy, comes this Valentine’s Day with a single rose for someone next door. Having rung the bell, he waits with his rose and clipboard: today’s Rosenkavalier needs a signature.

  Huge crowds at the Abbey for the unveiling of the Oscar Wilde window: both transepts full, with people standing (some on chairs) to catch a glimpse of the speakers. The most notable is of course the ninety-year-old Gielgud – black overcoat, velvet collar, a half-smile always on his lips as of someone prepared to indulge the world in its fondnesses but with his thoughts already elsewhere. Michael Denison and Judi Dench do the handbag scene from The Importance, J. G. reads from De Profundis, and Seamus Heaney gives the address. The congregation look sober and worthy, Gay Pride not much in evidence, with the wreath laid by Thelma Holland, Wilde’s daughter-in-law, a link which vaults the century.

  After the congregation clears we do cutaway shots of the window, ‘the little patch of blue’, and that’s the end of our filming in the Abbey, which has been going on, on and off, since last September.