Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  As the crew packs up, I go and have another look at the tomb of Henry Ill’s children in the south ambulatory, which I’ve just read incorporates one of the medieval relics of the Abbey – the stone supposedly with the imprint of Christ’s foot when he took off for the Ascension. I’m not sure if this is the square stone on the front of the tomb or the roundel on the top, but I lay my hand on both – as maybe pilgrims did once – though why I’d find it hard to say. It’s a beautiful tomb, the arch still with traces of vermilion paint and black and green foliage, the top studded with bits of mosaic. Not expecting any elegiac feelings (I will, after all, be coming back to record the commentary), I am surprised to find how sad I am that the shoot is over and that I shan’t be coming here regularly as I have the last five months.

  17 February. To Leeds, where the decent cupolaed building on Woodhouse Moor that housed both the public library and the police station has been converted into a pub, The Feast and Firkin. The Woodman, the pub opposite St Chad’s, has been renamed Woodies Ale Bar, in homage, I suppose, to Cheers. The more real community has dwindled in the last twenty years, the more cheap marketing versions of it have multiplied.

  20 February. In the evening to the National Gallery for a private view of the Spanish Still Life exhibition, which I don’t expect to like but do, very much – particularly the Cotáns, vivid vegetables of horticultural-show proportions (tight cabbages, huge cardoons) strung up in dark boxes as if for the strappado. There are some ravishing Zurbarán still lives, the most appealing – a beaker on a dish with a rose – belonging to the Saltwood Bequest and so to Alan Clark, who is somewhere about, though I don’t see (or hear) him. Then there are lots of terrible flower paintings before some wonderful Goyas in the last room, including a heap of dead fish. The look in the eye of one of the dead bream seems familiar, then I realize it’s also the look in the eye of the man throwing up his hands before being shot in The Third of May. Find no one to hand with whom I can quite share this (probably mistaken) perception, so come away.

  22 February. Switch on Newsnight to find some bright spark from, guess where, the Adam Smith Institute proposing the privatization of public libraries. His name is Eamonn Butler, and it’s to be hoped he’s no relation of the 1944 Education Act Butler. Smirking and pleased with himself, as they generally are from that stable, he’s pitted against a well-meaning but flustered woman who’s an authority on children’s books. Paxman looks on undissenting as this nylon-underpanted figure dismisses any defence of the tradition of free public libraries as ‘the usual bleating of the middle classes’. I go to bed depressed, only to wake and find Madsen Pirie, also from the Adam Smith Institute for the Criminally Insane, banging the same drum in the Independent. Not long ago John Bird and John Fortune did a sketch about the privatization of air. These days it scarcely seems unthinkable.

  28 February. There have been football riots in Bruges, where Chelsea have been playing. Responsible for their suppression was the commissioner of police for Bruges, one Roger de Bris. This gives quiet pleasure, as it’s also the name of the transvestite stage director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers, who makes his appearance bare-shouldered and in a heavy ball gown.

  7 March. Our pillar box is now emptied at 9 a.m. not by the Royal Mail van but by a minibus marked Portobello Car and Van Hire.

  10 March. To Bradford for the provincial premiere of The Madness of King George. The Lord Mayor is present, and R. sees him afterwards in the gents, mayoral chain round his neck, trying to have a pee. His badge of office dangles just over his flies, so that he has to take great care not to piss on it. Eventually he slings it back over his shoulder rather like a games mistress and her whistle.

  29 March. Nell Campbell calls from New York to say that Don Palladino, maître d’ at the Odeon and Café Luxembourg, died last night. He was very gay in his concerns, even the historical ones. ‘Yes,’ Nell says, ‘we like to think he’s with Marie Antoinette now.’

  17 April. Easter Monday. On Saturday with Τ. and R. to Oxford, where we find most places (the University Museum, the Ashmolean) closed. Also all the colleges – and not just not open to visitors, but the gates actually locked. I ring the bell at Exeter, but there is no answer so we hang about until an undergraduate goes in (entry now by swipecard). An expressionless figure in the lodge, looking like a middle-ranking police inspector, says the college is closed. I say I’m a Fellow, which produces no change of expression but at least procures us admission, and we go into the garden and look at the grandstand view of Radcliffe Square, – now, without cars, much improved.

  The day is redeemed when, going back via Dorchester, we call in at the Abbey to look at the thirteenth-century crusader tomb of a knight struggling to draw his sword in death. The naturalism of the pose and the fall of the draperies make it extraordinarily impressive and modern-seeming. I’ve no notion whether the sculptor was English or French, though, as R. says, if it were in a German church he would certainly be known as the Master of the Crusader Tomb. What contributes to its freshness is that, whereas a nearby fifteenth-century tomb is covered in centuries of graffiti, the knight, perhaps because he was originally under a grille, is virtually untouched.

  24 April. The Tories are now in a great hurry to mop up any corners of the state that have not been privatized, presumably against probable failure at the next election. Next on the list is the nuclear industry – not a popular project, as the decommissioning of the older nuclear power stations has no commercial attractions and safety considerations are likely to be skimped. But of course it will provide the Government with some election pin-money, which is what it wants. The real driving force, against all common sense and reason, is ideology. When the Germans were withdrawing from Italy in 1944 and were short of trains, troops and every other resource, priority was given when crossing the Po not to military formations but to the transports involved in the last-minute deportation of the Italian Jews. The analogy will be thought offensive, but it is exact. Ideology, as I think Galbraith wrote, is the great solvent of reason.

  1 May. A drunk clinging on to the railings in Inverness Street gathers himself up to speak.

  ‘Excuse me, squire, but how far has yesterday gone?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘How far has yesterday gone?’

  I say helpfully that it’s six o’clock.

  ‘Six o’clock? Six o’clock? What sort of fucking answer is that?’

  Of course I could have said, What sort of fucking question was it in the first place?

  3 May. Invited to speech day at Giggles wick, where the guest of honour is to be Lord Archer. I write back and say I can’t come but I look forward to being invited next year, when doubtless the guest will be Bernard Manning. Giggleswick doesn’t have many distinguished old boys, though one which it never seems to acknowledge was the critic James Agate. This reticence may be on account of Agate’s well-known propensity to drink his own piss.

  13 June. Three police acquitted in the case of Joy Gardner, who died after being gagged with thirteen inches of tape, a restraining belt and leg irons. It’s not unexpected. I can’t offhand recall any serious case in the last ten years in which the police have been found guilty and punished. Or even sacked.

  20 June. Three jokes from George Fen ton.

  1. A man has bad pains in his bum. A friend says it’s piles, so he applies various creams which do no good. Another friend says; ‘No, creams are useless. What you want to do is have a cup of tea then take the tea leaves and put them up your arse. It’s like a poultice. Do the trick in no time.’ So whenever the man has a cup of tea he puts the tea leaves up his bum. No joy. When at the end of the week he’s no better he goes to the doctor. The doctor tells him to take his trousers down, looks up his bum, and says, ‘Yes. Well, there are two things to say. One is that you’re quite right, you do have piles. And the other is you’re going to go on a long journey.’

  2. A devout Jewish man is desperately anxious to win the lottery. He goes to the synagogue and prays that h
e may win. Saturday comes round, but he doesn’t win. Goes to the synagogue again and remonstrates with God, pointing out how often he comes to the synagogue, how devout he has been, etc., etc. Saturday comes round again and again he doesn’t win. Back he goes to the synagogue and prays again to God, this time in despair. Suddenly the clouds part and there is a figure with a grey beard leaning down between the clouds: ‘OΚ. So you want to win the lottery. But please, meet me halfway: buy a ticket?

  3. A man buys a green bottle at a car-boot sale. He rubs it. Out pops a genie and offers him one wish. The man asks to be the luckiest man in the world. The wish is granted and the genie disappears. Next week the man wins millions on the football pools and takes his mates out to celebrate. He explains about his luck but they don’t believe him, saying, ‘Right, if you’re so lucky, try pulling that beautiful Indian bird.’ So the man goes over and chats her up and sure enough she’s all over him, they go back to her place and have a fantastic time. In the morning he wakes up and looks down at her beautiful naked body and thinks how lucky he is. She is still fast asleep, and as he gazes at her sleeping face he sees the little red spot she has on her forehead. Gently he scratches it – and wins a Renault 5.

  All these come from musicians, George being the only one of my friends who still hears jokes or moves in circles that tell them, or make them up.

  27 June. Most adverse comments on John Redwood’s appearance remark on his resemblance to Mr Spock or someone from outer space. Actually he looks like Kenneth Williams in one of those roles (Chauvelin, for instance) when the eyes suddenly go back and he goes wildly over the top. The smirking crew around Redwood are deeply depressing, Tony Marlow and Edward Leigh both fat and complacent and looking like two cheeks of the same arse. It’s all so sixth-form – the prefects in revolt.

  14 July. A letter this morning saying the Tokyo production of Wind in the Willows is to be revived for two weeks in August, the revival to be supervised by a Nigel Nicholson. Mole and Ratty as Harold and Vita now (and Violet Trefusis as Mr Toad).

  29 July, Ménerbes. Stripping some redcurrants this evening reminds me how when I was writing both Getting On and The Old Country I could never think of something for the wife to do while the husband was talking. In Getting On I think I made Polly top and tail gooseberries, and in The Old Country I even gave Bron some flowers to press (I go hot with shame at the thought). Of course, if I’d had any sense I would have seen that if it was so hard to think what it was the woman should be doing then there was something wrong with the plays or that this was what the plays should have been about, as in a way it was. Neither of the wives had seemingly ever had a job – an omission I had to some extent rectified by the time I got to Kafka’s Dick, when the wife had at least been in employment at some period (she was an ex-nurse). But again the men did the jobs and most of the talking. In Enjoy, which is set in Leeds, the women do most of the talking, which is how it always used to be when I was a child. It was only when I got to London that the men started talking and the women fell silent.

  8 August. A new strategy for not working: empty the fluff not only from the sieve on the dryer door, which is routine, but from the grilles on the machine itself. This involves prising off the plastic covers and poking about with a skewer to dislodge the fluff that has fallen through. A quarter of an hour can be made to pass in this way.

  9 August, Surprised to find from today’s New Yorker that Madame Chiang Kai-shek is still alive at ninety-seven. My surprise is less surprising when I realize I have her inextricably confused with the Duchess of Windsor, who I know is dead – both, in Geoffrey Madan’s words, ‘part governess, part earwig’.

  11 August. In the yard at the back of Camden Social Services, in Bayham Street, a mound of tangled Zimmer frames.

  14 August. Toothache, and I make an appointment for the dentist. The trouble is almost inevitably deep under one of my many caps and bridges. It will be like having to go through the dome of St Paul’s in order to repair the floor of the crypt.

  16 August. Life in Camden Town. As I come in this afternoon two young men are sitting by the garden wall drinking cans of beer. One looks like a Hong Kong Chinese; the other is Australian, fair, brown and not unlike the actor Jack Thompson, who used to figure in sheep-shearing films. I sit and work at my table, where I can hear the murmur of their talk. Then the Australian, slightly reluctantly but egged on by the Chinese, goes over and has a piss in the gateway of number 61. Before they go, the Chinese does the same. Had they not seen me come in, mine would doubtless have been the gateway they would have used. I groan inwardly at the loutishness of it all (the beer cans just left on the pavement), but a couple of hours later I am coming up Inverness Street when a large Mercedes draws up outside the Good Mixer and the two pavement drinkers get out. I suppose they’re from the fashionable music fraternity which now heavily patronizes the pub, the crowd at weekends spilling right across the road, which means the street is seldom effectively cleaned and always littered with cans and broken glass first thing in the morning when I go down for my paper. The pleasures of drinking here must be diminished (or, who knows, heightened) by the squalor of the setting: the recycling bins opposite, every doorway a urinal, the pavements caked in the market’s grease and muck. Such squalor is these days about average for Camden Town, the end of Inverness Street now a haunt for drug dealers.

  17 August. ‘Grounded’, meaning a withdrawal of privileges, is a word I dislike. It’s off the television (Roseanne notably), but now in common use. (I just heard it on Emmerdale Farm, where they probably think it’s dialect.) I would almost prefer ‘gated’, deriving from forties public-school stories in Hotspur and Wizard.

  Other current dislikes: ‘Brits’, ‘for starters’, ‘sorted’ and (when used intransitively) ‘hurting’.

  9 September. Drive into Oxfordshire, stopping first at Ewelme to look at the church. The village is too manicured for my liking, though the mown lawns and neat gardens don’t quite eliminate an air of rural brutishness I often sense in Oxfordshire. I note features in the church I’d forgotten – the gilded angel with outstretched wings which acts as part of the counterweight for the font cover, and the angels that spread their wings to support the aisle roof. Then on through terrible Didcot to Faringdon and Buscot Park, which belongs to the National Trust. The house is well set, with beautiful long vistas down alleys of trees to water gardens and a lake, and from the terrace at the back vast views over Oxfordshire. Inside, though, it’s disappointing, with a Rembrandt that I’m sure isn’t, a nice Ravilious of the house, but none of the rooms informed by vision or individual taste and like a rather dull country-house hotel.

  As we’re going out, a scholarly man, whom I’d seen carefully studying the catalogue, pauses by the desk. ‘Could you tell me,’ he asks of the lady on duty, ‘how the first Lord Faringdon made his money?’ She gives him a vinegary look as if the question were in very bad taste: ‘I’ve no idea.’

  11 September. Nick Leeson, the errant young man from the Singapore Stock Exchange, is interviewed in his Frankfurt prison by David Frost, the interview, made by Frost’s production company, broadcast by the BBC at ten this evening. The papers, which have had a preview, are full of Leeson’s self-justifications, but nobody seems to question the propriety of broadcasting such an interview in the first place. Like so many of the interviews Frost is involved with, it’s a pretty seedy affair. Not that Frost isn’t highly respectable, but his rise as a political commentator is in direct proportion to the decline of respect for politicians. Major, Blair and Ashdown meekly trot along to be lightly grilled by the heavily made-up Frost, and indeed use the occasion for statements of policy and matters of national importance. It’s as if Jesus were to undertake the feeding of the five thousand as a contribution to Challenge Anneka.

  [Much is explained when in October the filming of the Leeson story is announced, starring Hugh Grant and produced by D. Frost.]

  14 September. The house next door is empty, and I have got its mice. Having
watched a mouse last night gambolling away among the poison pellets behind the gas oven, I find this morning that it (or a colleague) is in one of the humane traps. I have been told mice have a good homing instinct, so I take the trap up to the railway bridge, give the box a shaking to disorientate the occupant (and teach it a lesson), then empty it on to the railway line. I find I am a little cheered by this.

  19 September. A young man walks up the street dressed with casual care in blue T-shirt and narrow jeans and with the loose, bouncing walk I associate with an (albeit humble) assumption of moral superiority. Say this to K. ‘Yes. He walks like a vegetarian flautist.’

  28 September. Pass a gown shop off Manchester Square called Ghost and Foale. Mention this to Mary-Kay as seeming an unusual name. Not at all, apparently, as both names are famous and fashionable in the world of frocks. More amusing to her was my calling it a gown shop.

  19 October. To Accord near Poughkeepsie in New York State, where Don Palladino had a house which Lynn has been clearing out before the new owner takes over next week. It’s a little clapboard cottage, idyllically situated on the bank of a broad shallow river backed by woods and looking across meadows to the distant Catskills. A huge catalpa shades the house, and beyond it is a derelict canal. We roll up matting and put it on top of the van along with two bikes, then pack the inside with bedding and books and lampshades. When it’s done I sit on the brick terrace in the warm sunshine looking across the river and watching the dozens of birds, most of them strange to me – even the pheasants looking more like turkeys, as they peck about among the sweetcorn.

  Emptied, the little house still manages to be a temple to Marie Antoinette. Her bust is on the mantelpiece, books about her line the stairs, and there are French wallpapers incongruously on the walls and a few damp tapestried chairs marooned in the dining-room. Most of this is to be left for the new owner, though a garrulous handyman hangs about hoping to pick up what he can. ‘Of course he loved it here, only I gather he got sick.’ We walk along the dried-up canal for a bit, before driving to Rhinebeck for some tea, then back along the Taconic Parkway through the famed autumn tints to a huge red sun setting over New York.