Writing Home

by Alan Bennett

  30 October. Noël Coward comes to the final preview. After the performance I hear his party announced at the stage door and they disappear into John G.’s dressing-room. It has been a charity show, the audience very quiet as they invariably are when they have paid too much for their seats. (Curiously, if they pay nothing at all the effect is the same.) I sit in my room hoping Coward has liked it and that if he hasn’t he’ll have the tact not to show it. Any criticism or even advice at this late date is destructive. And I remember the story of Gielgud rehearsing a speech in an empty theatre, the only other person there a charwoman mopping the stage. At the finish she is reputed to have leaned on her mop and said, ‘I don’t think you should do it like that, dear.’ ‘Really? Oh God, how do you think I should do it?’ John G. sends Mac to fetch me in to meet Coward, who is brimming with enthusiasm and saying all the right things. John is standing there in his shirt tails with Mac waiting to slip on the knightly trousers, a ritual I am sure John indulges him in out of the kindness of his heart: to be helped into one’s trousers is no help at all. Meanwhile Coward is recalling his favourite moments and John is glowing with pleasure. Though I don’t know it at the time, this is going to be the pattern for this moment in the day for the next twelve months. Manchester seems a long way away.

  1 November. I open The Times first. It is a niggling notice. But the rest are solid in praise, with the Financial Times particularly perceptive. But how sick I am of being told how wicked and irreverent it all is: critics should be searched for certain adjectives at the door of the theatre – ‘irreverent’, ‘probing’ and (above all) ‘satirical’. I would have all such adjectives left with their coats in the foyer, only to be redeemed when their notices are written.

  10 November. In the first week the play has broken all box-office records, and is an assured success. Gielgud is very happy and in wonderful form. I listen to the BBC Critics. They all say it is very funny, but what is it about, what am I trying to do, is there a message? Nobody knows, and I certainly don’t. If one could answer these questions in any other way than by writing what one has written, then there would be no point in writing at all.

  The boys got the play right. One of its themes is memory, the dull, distorting effects of time, in phrases which sound right, but aren’t: ‘Patience is mine, I will delay saith the Lord.’ ‘They are rolling up the maps all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ ‘One always forgets the most important things, it’s the things one can’t remember that stay with you.’ The Headmaster remembers and reveres the Lost Generation of 1914. His successor, Franklin, shrugs them off, but in his turn recalls with passion and conviction the Second War. But in the eyes of the boys this war too is ancient history and its causes mere catchwords. While Churchill is announcing victory in Europe, the boys step out of the play to have a scuffle on their own account. On the first night I heard one of the boys shout ‘Fascist’ at his attacker. It wasn’t my line – he had thrown it in off his own bat – but it summed up more neatly than I could have done one of the main themes of the play.

  Certain specific points I could set straight. The upper-class couple in the basement of Claridge’s was suggested by, though not modelled on, Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. All the literary and other memoirs of the period 1900–1940 were within the compass of their lives and the scope of their background. The MP’s attitude to the war, his hatred of the Munichers, his love of Churchill, coupled with a dread of the outcome of the war for himself and his class, all echo Harold Nicolson’s attitudes and his fear of the post-war ‘Woolworth’s world’. I sympathize with this attitude, and my heart is very much in Gielgud’s final speech in which he bids farewell to Albion House and this old England. And yet the world we have lost wasn’t one in which I would have been happy, though I look back on it and read about it with affection. And from this affection stem both the parody and the nostalgia; they are very close together.

  Today is Armistice Day and the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the First World War. I listen to the ceremony on the radio, and as I type this I hear the guns rumbling across the park for the start of the Two Minutes’ Silence. I find the ceremony ridiculous and hypocritical, and yet it brings a lump to my throat. Why? I suppose that is what the play is trying to resolve.

  A Day Out

  I wrote A Day Out in 1969. Then called There and Back to See How Far It Is, it’s an account of a Halifax cycling club on a day’s outing in 1911 – an idea I’d got from an old photograph. I sent the script in to the producer of ‘The Wednesday Play’ and had it back a month or two later: it wouldn’t fit into their seventy-five-minute slot. Besides, it wasn’t really about anything: it didn’t go anywhere, did it? The script then drifted round the BBC, eventually being washed up on the shores of BBC2. ‘It’s not quite our slot,’ I remember them saying ruefully, ‘though we occasionally do forty-five-minute plays on “Thirty-Minute Theatre”.’ I mention this delay because by the time the film came to be made, in May 1972, I had very little sense of the script as being my own. I talked to Stephen Frears, who was to direct it, and found I had forgotten the impulse that made me write it or whether I had had any other intention than to tell a story.

  Looking back, I think this remoteness partly explains why I found the filming process so enjoyable. Tactfully, I was never cast in the role of The Author and everyone did their best to make the process of filming comprehensible to me, but much was and remains a mystery. Invited to examine the shot, I peer through the viewfinder with what I hope looks like assurance. But too often it’s like a seaside telescope before you put the sixpence in: total darkness. Maybe this is because I wear glasses.

  I nod enthusiastically and express myself satisfied – the first priority, as always, being not to make a fool of oneself

  1 May, Halifax. The first ten days of filming are in and around Halifax. Ten years ago, when I was last here, this area looked pretty much as the nineteenth century had left it: villages huddled round the mill in the valley bottom, rambling seventeenth-century farms on the tops. A line of gas-lamps ran out into the country, stopping in the middle of the moors at the council boundary. There were cobbled streets between green fields, boarded-up chapels and black, leaning cemeteries. Now many of the mills are pulled down, the chapel is a carpet warehouse, the solid, sensible dwellings have been tarted up with bow-windows to fetch them into line with a Christmas-card view of the past. Flush doors, leaded lights, ‘Monk’s House’ on a glazed slice of log, and not a gas-lamp to be seen except as salvaged to grace the drive of ‘Four Winds’ and its tastefully converted frontage.

  But if you’re looking for locations it’s more than a matter of taste, and it very early becomes clear that to shoot a period film in urban surroundings involves frequent and costly shifts of location. You may find a nineteenth-century ginnel intact, but pan fifteen degrees and there’s a cooling-tower. Here’s a good row of mill cottages, but pull out and there’s a car-port. In colour, anachronistic details are hard to lose, and the BBC is persuaded to settle for black and white. Everyone is slightly surprised when it agrees. Even so, the production assistants and props boys spend the first part of the morning shinning up walls, swathing concrete lamp-standards in blackout material, draping ‘a spot of dingle’ (greenery) over the intrusive bus-stop.

  And always a nagging feeling that somewhere in shot is something so obviously wrong that no one has noticed it. At the first rushes, all I was looking for were lamp-standards.

  2 May, Ackroyden Square, Halifax. A good start. The day dull and cold, but since we’re not shooting in colour this is a possible light for early morning, when the club meets before setting off for the day. Because of traffic we don’t shoot sound, so filming bowls along. Once in costume and on their bikes, the individual character of the actors takes over and they become fully fleshed versions of characters only sketched in the script. In Hebden Bridge we do one shot when they all come down a steep hill on their bikes: Philip Locke as Wilkins, a shy, chapel-ridden
man, very sedate; Jimmy Cossins playing a pompous fool, nervously running with his bike; David Hill, as Gibson, a lout stood up on his pedals; and David Waller as Mr Shuttleworth, the father of the club, bringing up the rear. Most of the cast know each other already. Several are from the RSC, some from the Royal Court, where they were together in David Storey’s The Changing Room. Bernard Wrigley, who plays a retarded boy, is a folk-singer from Bolton, Paul Shane a club comedian from Rotherham.

  We are sitting in the hotel this evening and a football crowd is braying up and down the street. ‘Oh God,’ sighs John Normington, ‘I knew Patience Collier would tell all her friends we were here.’

  4 May, Oats Royds, Luddenden. In between takes, while shots are being set up, we sit in the coach, drink coffee, and eat bacon sandwiches. The actors do the Times crossword, tell stories, play the cinema game: ‘In what film did Cedric Hardwicke star with Arthur Lucan and Bela Lugosi?’ ‘Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire.’ Sitting around like this is the most characteristic part of an actor’s life. They swap anecdotes about the awfulness of the shows they have been in, the sadism of directors and the terrible things that have happened to them on the stage.

  My function here is not defined. I am called in if there’s a problem about the script, and I watch any scene that involves dialogue, but my main job seems to be to help jolly things along. If I want to make a suggestion about the acting of a scene I’ll generally ask the director first, though relations are so easy it wouldn’t be remarked on if I didn’t. Since the film has been carefully cast, the actors are encouraged to fill out the characters themselves. It’s the best way. Most of my suggestions are to do with pronunciation. I think anyone not brought up in the North finds it hard to get dialect pronunciation exactly right. If you say ‘up at t’mill’ as it’s written, it comes over like a parody. The ‘t’ shouldn’t be sounded at all: it’s a syncopation, not a sound. If you’re not careful the whole thing sounds like the Take It From Here take-off of The Crowthers of Bankdam:

  ‘There’s trouble at t’mill. T’workers are upset. They say they’ve too far to come to t’mill.’

  ‘Too far to come? Nay, but they’ve only three fields to cross.’

  ‘Ay, but they’re Huddersfield, Macclesfield and Sheffield.’

  Electricians’ slang. ‘An elephant’: a small box to stand on. ‘A pancake’: a smaller box. ‘Horse’: electrician’s assistant. ‘Make it Chinese’: give me just a slit of light. ‘A pup with a snoot on it’: a small light, shaded. ‘Baby legs’: small tripod for the camera. ‘Follow the money’: make sure the lights are on the star. ‘Running all the way, Guvnor’: I’ll walk over to that light and switch it on.

  Sequence of calls before a shot. Production assistant: ‘Quiet. Going for a take. Standing by.’ Director: ‘Right.’ Sound: ‘Sound running.’ Director: ‘Turn over.’ First assistant: ‘245, Take 5.’ Director: ‘And remember it’s tight on you, Paul. Action.’ Then the take. Director: ‘Very good. Now let’s go once more.’

  10 May, Mytholm Steps. After three days in London I come back to Leeds, arriving in City Square just as Leeds United begin their triumphal progress to Elland Road. At Halifax they are shooting the country-pub scene. It ought to be an idyllic country place, a lush pub garden with an earth-closet set in a bower of honeysuckle. Instead it’s a grim, dark spot, with a few thin privet bushes and a tussocky garden set with sooty plants. It looks dismal and is bitter cold. The bad weather, which we’ve had consistently since we started, has altered the character of the film. We’d decided to film in May because you can generally bank on a spell of fine, prematurely hot weather. But not this year, and each day is worse than the last. However, this natural disaster puts everybody on their mettle, and the atmosphere of the slightly crisis-ridden unit is very good. Stephen Frears realizes that the slow, dreamy piece I’d written won’t work in this sort of weather: you can’t film an idyll in temperatures of forty-five degrees. So he shoots the script much more off the individual characters of the actors, and the story becomes brisker and, I think, stronger than I had imagined. Not figures in a landscape, but characters in relation to one another.

  This is the last sequence in Halifax, and we move to Ripon. At the hotel there is chaos, partly endemic but also because of improvements being made against a visit by the Queen Mother. The manageress, a genteel Scotswoman, regards the BBC as a subversive organization. ‘No one has ever complained about the bed before,’ she says to Philip Locke. ‘No one of normal size, that is.’ It is a hotel straight out of Feydeau, with residents to match. On television in the lounge, the Duke of Edinburgh remarks on the unemployment among young people on Teeside. ‘Rubbish,’ comes a voice from an armchair. ‘They can work. They just don’t want to.’

  11 May, Fountains Abbey. The abbey is set in a deep wooded valley, so that you come upon it from above. What at first sight looks a plain, squat tower – like a Norman keep – turns out to be only the last stage of the bell tower soaring above the valley-top to the level of the surrounding fields. Now it’s encased in shining stainless-steel scaffolding, so it’s useless for our purposes. ‘How long will it take, all this?’ someone asks the foreman. ‘I don’t know. It’ll last me out.’

  As I am writing, we are waiting for silence. These days there is nowhere in the world where there is still continuous natural silence. Six years ago, on Jonathan Miller’s Alice in Wonderland, I can remember occasional delays. But not like this. Now, when there is silence, there is no sun. When sun, sound. High up above Fountains, a young man leading a man’s life in the regular Air Force idly loops the loop hour after hour. Stuart, the boom operator, who has seen it all before, explains that the offending plane is practising stall turns. Innes Lloyd, the producer, phones the BBC. The BBC phones the nearest RAF base, Leeming, but they say it’s not one of theirs. He could be from Leuchars or St Mawgan. At his speed here is only ten minutes from anywhere. But there he is, two miles up with all England spread out below him.

  Kay Fraser, the director’s assistant, is putting a daffodil into her hat before writing up her continuity notes. Anne Ailes, the make-up girl, is cutting Laurie, the second assistant’s, hair. James Cossins is doing the Times crossword. Stephen does the odd clue, then goes over the next shot. Bob, one of the grips, keeps an eye on the sky through a glass. Jimmy and Alf, the prop boys, are changing a wheel on one of the bikes. Joan Hamilton, the production assistant, sits by the refectory wall ready to warn sightseers who might wander into shot. John Normington is 4 doing an imitation of Bette Davis in Mrs Skeffington. Philip Locke is doing Marlene Dietrich going round to a friend’s dressing-room to congratulate her after a terrible performance. Bernard Wrigley, Paul Rosebury and Don McKillop are playing football. Ray Henman, the cameraman, is handing round a pattern-book of shirt samples he can get cheap from Hong Kong. David Hill is making a daisy chain.

  12 May, Sawley Hall. The shot is down an avenue of Wellingtonias at Sawley Hall. (‘Used this last year for Jane Eyre,’ Judy Moorcroft says drily.) The sun casts long shadows across the path, trees are alive with birds, midges flickering in the sun. ‘Oh dear. This is what the film was supposed to be about,’ says Stephen.

  Next day it is bitter cold again. On the lawn in front of the house, the tea-party scene is set up. There is a fierce east wind cutting across from the wolds. Dorothy Reynolds in a thin cotton frock pours tea, with the tablecloth weighted down against the gale. As soon as one shot is in the can, make-up and wardrobe rush out from behind a wall and swathe the cast in rugs and coats. On the lawn, Virginia Bell plays croquet. She is a great-niece of Virginia Woolf, to whom she bears an extraordinary resemblance. A fragile, transparently beautiful face, with sad downcast eyes, but underneath, I suspect, as strong and direct as her great-aunt. I sit in on this scene as an extra in blazer and straw hat, eating chilly little fancies at Dorothy’s frozen elbow.

  19 May, Laver Banks. The sex scene takes place by a stream in Winksley Woods above Fountains Abbey. A sex scene it is too: not a love scene. Conn
ie, the girl, lies passive and silent while Edgar unbuttons her blouse, searching her face for some reaction. When eventually he has her blouse open, he puts his hand quickly on her breast in a very odd way. It looks almost as though if he weren’t quick the breast would take to its heels. We wait half an hour for a patch of sun, and I wander off into the woods and find a duck’s nest full of cold blue eggs.

  Bad day for planes. There is an air display at Biggin Hill. At one point we wait ten minutes for an ancient Wellington droning its slow way from horizon to horizon.

  23 May, Galphay. Watched this afternoon by a long line of village children sat on a wall, including, on this May afternoon in the middle of Yorkshire, two little girls who are the greatgrandchildren of Tolstoy. We film late-sunset shots. The actors are fed up of their heavy black bikes, bumping over fields, humping them over stiles, and always the chains coming off. Brian Glover, who plays Boothroyd, an early socialist, is a wrestler as well as an actor, and at the end of these long days he drives off to Newcastle or Leicester to wrestle.

  24 May, Ripon. Some of us talk over supper about fees. No one mentions any figures. I have been paid £700. The leading performers, when expenses have been calculated, will get about two-thirds of that. Stephen, since he’s a freelance and his work editing and dubbing goes on until July, quite a bit more. I feel slightly aggrieved, I think, but fortunately our waitress, Maggie, joins in the conversation. She has come on duty at seven that morning. It is now 8.30 at night and she has had one hour off. She works six, sometimes seven, days a week. She is paid £9 plus her keep. ‘And there’s folks queueing up in Ripon to do the job if I didn’t.’