Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  8 September, Yorkshire. On Saturday around the same time we blackberry up Crummock Lane, the stream full and loud over the other side of the wall on one side, a herd of friendly cows on the other – now that I’ve been told they have inner lives I ought to adapt my behaviour accordingly (though how?) instead just letting them lick my hands – and two lovely horses higher up the lane the same. Rupert if anything more nervous of the cows than the horses, which wear fly-masks, transparent blinkers across their foreheads that make them look blindfolded. We were planning to walk up to the clapper bridge but R. is uneasy about walking through the field with such attentive cows so instead we drive round on the Crummock road, park and walk down. No one about, utterly still and over the wall a ring of huge pearly white mushrooms. We pick about four, which is more than we will eat and then go down to the clapper bridge in what is now named Wash Dub Field, a National Parks notice explaining how the sheep were penned here to be washed. That and an iron seat apart, it’s no different from what it was when I first came here forty years ago. But a lovely evening and we go back to a fire, beans picked from the garden and a salad niçoise with the mushrooms – never as nice to taste as they are to pick – for Sunday lunch.

  11 September. There are buds in plays, points where other plays can branch out. I can see, for instance that this story about the Queen began as a bud in the scene between Hector and Posner in The History Boys when Hector is talking about reading.

  I can see that one of the buds (because there can be several) which grew into Habeas Corpus was in the last speech of Act 1 of Forty Years On and I hear John Gielgud’s voice saying, ‘“This time,” I always thought as I tied my tie. “Perhaps this time.” But there would be other times and time yet, I thought.’

  And so one could go on, hopping from play to play, one budding out from the next, swinging from one to the other like Tarzan through the jungly fronds.

  12 September. Read Nicola Lacey’s life of H. L. A. Hart – the Sacred Hart as J. used to call him. The core of the book skipped – namely the jurisprudence and the philosophy, all I carry away from that the confirmation that I could never have been a don; still daunted by the sheer brains of e.g. Hart himself, Ronald Dworkin and their pupils and followers. ‘I have no mind,’ I think as I read, ‘and never have had.’ Not this sort of mind anyway. Hart’s want of self-assurance is appealing, particularly in view of his great renown – as also is his difficult sex life – married but gay, with hopeless passions for heterosexual men continuing into his seventies.

  I remember seeing him about Oxford in the fifties and knowing he was a star, just as one knew Lord David C. was a star – Rowse, Lord David Cecil and C. S. Lewis once seen walking down towards Magdalen, just as conscious of their reputations and their glamour as any actor appearing at the Playhouse.

  14 September. Jonathan M. very funny about Archbishop John Sentamu’s front teeth, saying that he felt the gap was just the continuation of the centre aisle.

  16 September. Listen to Sue Roberts’s production of Single Spies1 on Radio 4. I’m particularly struck by Edward Petherbridge playing Anthony Blunt in A Question of Attribution. Although I played the part myself I’ve forgotten a good deal of it, particularly the lectures on art history in general which in the stage play Blunt gives directly to the audience. Petherbridge gets so much more out of these than I did that listening to them I can scarcely believe they’ve come from my own pen, infusing them with so much sadness and irony one feels Blunt’s whole life is there. The same with Prunella Scales as the Queen, which was a joy to write and is still a joy to listen to. Nicky Henson is very good as Chubb, the man from MI5 – less breezy than he normally is and between the questioner and the questioned (which is also pupil and teacher) a relationship more flirtatious than Simon Callow and I ever quite managed.

  I go on with painting/staining the walls of my study, doing an experimental strip of wall with cerulean blue which, on top of the yellow, turns it green. It would just about do but I feel I can do better – though what or how I’ve no idea.

  18 September. ‘There shouldn’t be any religion. There should just be people being nice to one another.’ This is check-out women at M&S discussing the Pope’s remarks at Regensburg with an equally vapid customer while I fume in the queue. The conversation ends, almost incredibly:

  ‘What about the Spanish Inquisition?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  21 September. The Bush–Blair attitude to war:

  ‘A War’ by Randall Jarrell

  These set out, slowly, for a Different World,

  At four, on winter mornings, different legs…

  You can’t break eggs without making an omelette

  – That’s what they tell the eggs.

  Found in John Bayley’s anthology Hand Luggage (Continuum, 2001).

  28 September. At the outset of the Iraq war Tony Blair was determined not to be another Chamberlain. Now as he slowly prepares to leave office one can see that Chamberlain is exactly whom he has come to resemble. In the 1930s Chamberlain put through some enlightened social legislation, but all anyone nowadays remembers is Munich and Appeasement. Tony Blair, too, has achievements in the social field but no one will remember those, only Iraq. I suppose this says something about history.

  29 September. I call in at the Farmers’ Market which now takes place every Saturday in the playground of Princess Road school. It’s a friendly occasion, but whereas in Union Square in New York, the only other farmers’ market I’ve been to, I take it as simply a nice (and useful) collection of stalls – meat, veg, bread, cheese – and am unself-conscious about it, here, on my own patch as it were, I’m aware of the middle class (and it is predominantly middle class) hugging themselves in self-congratulation at the perfection of their lives. I know this is unfair and grumbling and I wish I were more open-minded and didn’t care. But as it is I queue to buy two slices of delicious-looking pork pie but am put off by the vendor’s over-cheerful butcherly demeanour (and his brown bowler) and come away empty-handed.

  Ahead lies two to three weeks of promotion for the film of The History Boys, the opening with Prince Charles on Monday then visits to Glasgow, Leeds and Manchester talking to local schools and doing Q&A in cinemas.

  One of these Q&A encounters at a school in Leeds is to be filmed by Channel 4 and looking through the schedule I find the school they’ve chosen is Leeds Grammar School. Now LGS is not a state school, indeed it’s about as far from a state school as you can get in Leeds and I suspect it’s still the same snobbish emporium purveying education that it has always been. Tony Harrison has bitter memories of it as a boy and when I made the mistake of opening their new theatre in the 1980s I was shocked by how much flummery there was – gowns and tassels on caps etc. like something out of Frank Richards or The Magnet. So I rule out LGS and they are now finding a state school that will fit the bill and not offend the writer’s awkward sensibilities or trespass on the memories of his youth. [We eventually do the Q&A at City of Leeds High School.]

  30 September. When, passing the house, someone lights up a joint they straight away look at the lit end, something they never do with a straight cigarette.

  1 October. Watch Bremner, Bird and Fortune which nowadays we generally miss since it’s been shifted forwards to eight o’clock. It contains a pun so terrible it ranks with those John Bird, John Fortune and I used painstakingly to construct for the (live) performances of Not So Much a Programme and The Late Show back in the 1960s.

  In tonight’s programme they are talking of someone who is ‘not fit for purpose’ and J.F. says that this leaves out of account the hapless employee of the Brighton Dolphinarium who was recently sacked on similar grounds.

  J.B.: I didn’t hear about that.

  J.F.: Oh yes. Not fit for porpoise.

  Back in the 1960s Bird and Fortune were playing detectives, one of whom was called Farley.

  J.B.: It’s a risk, Farley.

  J.F.: No. It’s a rusk, Farley.

  The puns were
deliberately introduced, sometimes without prior warning in order to break each other up, which in Fortune’s case was always signalled (as it still is) by his opening his eyes very wide and shaking his head, a process known as ‘boggling’. It doesn’t happen this evening but it brings back the exquisite agony of trying not to laugh in full view of two million people.

  9 October. Bike past a skip on Gloucester Avenue in which are three whole and undamaged Belfast sinks, thrown out of a house being ‘renovated’ presumably by East European workers who now undertake much of the building work round here. The sinks would easily fetch £40 or £50 second-hand but unschooled in the aesthetics and the economics of old-fashioned culinary kitchen revivalism the Croats or Bulgarians or whatever have just ripped them out and dumped them. In similar circumstances a few months ago a nineteenth-century marble fireplace was dumped from a window in Gloucester Crescent and smashed. If nothing else it’s sheer waste but short of putting the builders through a crash course on the economics of architectural salvage it’s hard to see what’s to be done.

  Of course the blame really rests with the new owners of the houses – nowadays likely to be young turks from the City with too much money and no knowledge of what to do with it. So decent nineteenth-century houses get ripped apart and turned into the modish and featureless dwellings that figure in the glossy brochures that daily clog the letterbox. Some houses in this street have been ‘renovated’ three or four times over so that there can’t be an original feature left. Trees are taken down, massive conservatories erected and with the cornice in the skip and the surrounds all gone, every house will have the same dull white-walled interior.

  11 October. R. still ill when I leave at nine fifteen to introduce the film to an audience of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds and afterwards do Q&A. There are good questions from the audience and James C. soon has them laughing. One question is about what scenes had to be cut and would I like one day to have a Writer’s Cut of the film. A Director’s Cut and (if there is such a thing) a Writer’s Cut implies that there has been some disagreement or pressure exerted before the finished film reaches the screen – the Director’s Cut a kind of rearguard action, ‘This is the film as I’d really imagined it.’ With us there was no such disagreement. What cuts there were – before shooting and afterwards – were all discussed and agreed on with no one producer, director, writer or actors pushing their own version or cut. The scenes I miss weren’t the ones that were cut before shooting but odd bits from shots we had intended to include.

  One is the toothy art mistress, Mrs Bibby (beautifully played by Penelope Wilton), who after trying in vain to get the scholarship boys interested in art is left chuntering to herself:

  ‘The best way to teach art would be to ban it. Put it out of bounds. That way they’d be sneaking in here all the time. Art is furtive, unofficial; it’s something on the side.’

  She puts a bowl of hyacinths viciously on the table –

  ‘The mistake is to put it on the syllabus. Yes, Hazel, thank you very much.’

  Another casualty was a scene where Wilkes, the evangelical PE master (Adrian Scarborough), has all the boys hanging upside down on the wall bars except the plump Timms who can’t manage this feat.

  ‘Frame yourself, lad,’ says Wilkes. ‘They won’t want you at Oxford unless you can hang upside down on the wall bars.’

  15 October. In the course of an interview last week Andy Knott was asked if he minded that there was now another company taking The History Boys on tour.

  ‘Well, put it this way. We’re in the Dorchester. They’re in Dorchester.’

  25 October. ‘It’s good to talk’ is the most specious and misleading injunction since ‘All you need is love’. It has prompted millions of opinionated and empty-headed people to take to the internet and regale the world with their fatuities. It is not good to talk. Most of the time it’s better to keep quiet … and that includes playwrights.

  8 November. To Oxford with Bodley’s librarian emeritus, David Vaisey, to look at the muniment room in New College. It’s in the tower above the hall and chapel, with access by a spiral staircase so narrow that the two huge ten-foot chests which used to house the deeds and documents must have been built in situ in the fifteenth century. There are also two complete medieval tiled floors. Down the road we toil up another spiral staircase to the muniment room in the Bodleian, where there is no medieval floor but a delicate early eighteenth-century ceiling that might have come out of Claydon House, part of the fall-out after Gibbs built the Radcliffe Camera, a building which still astonishes me now as much as it did when I was a young man.

  That young man turns out to have records here, too, as Simon Bailey the archivist shows me my original October 1954 application for a reader’s ticket, my best twenty-one-year-old handwriting making me wince even fifty years later. I have other records, too, which ought to make me wince but don’t, as here is a character assessment of me written by G. D. G. Hall, the law tutor and sub-rector of Exeter who was later president of Corpus, a document originated when I went, as everyone did at the beginning of their third year, for an interview at the University Appointments Board in order to be placed for a job. Derek Hall’s remarks on my character seem wholly fair and very perceptive: ‘amiable, funny but not a first-class mind’. He ends up, ambiguously, ‘not yet ready to play about with people’, meaning, I think, that I wasn’t fit for an appointment that carried any sort of authority. Though if there’d been more ‘playing about with people’, not just falling hopelessly in love with them, I might have been more fitted for Life back then in 1957. It’s a source for Jake Balokowsky, and, under the Freedom of Information Act, an available one, apparently.

  11 November. Catch part of the Festival of Remembrance from the Albert Hall but find myself switching over less from inattention than because it’s more vulgar, sentimental and, inevitably, hypocritical than I can ever remember. The problem facing the producer is to find a way of commemorating the most recently dead without getting into the rights and wrongs of the circumstances in which the deaths occurred. If in doubt, he cuts to World War One and Two where we’re on safe ground. After the messy roadside bombs of Iraq it’s almost a comfort to be back among the tombstones and immaculate graves of Flanders.

  Unsurprisingly there is not much room for jokes, but these days audiences need to be diverted, the Palladium and the Royal Albert Hall not all that far apart. So some elaborately dishevelled youth sings his heart out, along with another dewy-eyed group, and Chris de Burgh leads the nation in ‘Abide with Me’. It’s the Royal Sobriety Show.

  As the various contingents march in and fill the arena, one longs for some representatives from Families Against the War, which would at least bring a breath of honesty to the proceedings. As always at such ceremonies, the dead don’t get a proper look-in and having made their sacrifice are now taken to be somehow on the reserve, endorsing the continuing wars of the living. Overseeing it all is the bishop of Manchester, who has the face of a rugger forward and presumably the skin to match, because the ironies of the ceremony are inescapable. No wonder the Queen looks grim throughout, though as the royal party rises the one whose thoughts one would like to share is Princess Anne.

  20 November. Two young men sit on the sand box by the wall and roll a joint, and a pretty large one too. They get down out of view and I see the smoke rising for a while. Then the younger one stands up, is mildly sick in the gutter and, wiping his mouth and laughing, he and his companion go off down the street.

  24 November, Rome. Sitting on a bench in the Pantheon while R. and Lynn fight their way round through hordes of schoolchildren (and it isn’t even half-term) I get talking to a young man who turns out to be a stonemason at Ely, working on the restoration of the cathedral. He has been redoing some of the medieval carvings and says that the higher up the carving the more lewd the carvers’ imagination. One capital he has had to restore had a devil biting off someone’s balls, and he needed the chapter’s permission before he could repro
duce it. He thinks the medieval carvers enjoyed such licence because the scaffolding on which they worked was so rickety the architect or the master mason was reluctant to risk much hands-on supervision and just let them get on with it.

  25 November. The last day of a Caravaggio exhibition in Santa Maria del Popolo and the queue goes right round the church. We don’t wait, but notice that the people queuing pay as much attention to the preparatory display of screens and moving images leading up to the actual paintings which, when they eventually reach them, they’re rapidly hustled past. Come away depressed but are then cheered when, turning down a side street, we pass what looks like the back of a shabby garage. Except that the walls of these seemingly industrial premises are studded with architectural fragments – bits of moulding, tracery, the broken sculpture of a head or a hand and of all periods. The supposed ‘garage’ turns out to be the one-time studio of Canova.

  26 November. On, on. Which is one of the things Simon Sainsbury used to say, I think – his memorial service last Tuesday (21 November) at Christ Church Spitalfields.

  Knowing it was likely to be socially very grand makes me not look forward to it, particularly since I scarcely knew Simon – and only through sitting next to him at the NG Trustees. But it turns out unexpectedly enjoyable and even uplifting for all sorts of reasons, some of them incidental. I’m put right at the front and so have a close view of the quintet who are playing and able to see, as I was with the Medici, the undercurrents and tensions between the players and the signals that pass between them, particularly from the first violin. Another sort of direction evident with the choir, brought over, I think, from the Royal Chapel at Windsor who, there being no choir stalls at Spitalfields, stand in a circle in the manner of carol singers. Some are tiny, several are odd but all so serious and concentrated they seem oblivious of any other consideration but the music, and indifferent almost to that – just opening their mouths and out it comes. Wholly absorbing to watch at close quarters, though the setting lacks atmosphere and however meticulously restored the church seems dull and, perhaps inevitably, on the corporate side.