Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  27 October. A lovely morning, and around eleven we drive out on the M40, turning off at Stokenchurch and then along the Adwell road, where we eat our sandwiches above the Georgianised medieval church at Wheatfield. It’s a church we’ve found open only once, but it’s a good picnic spot overlooking the flat lands below the Chilterns and around Thame. It’s somewhat spoilt this bright morning, though, because the church is now completely surrounded by ugly timber fencing and three strands of barbed wire. There seems no break in the wire (which pretends to be electrified), so there’s no entry into the graveyard still less the church itself, so how anybody worships there is a mystery. Still, the sandwiches are delicious – lettuce, tomato, avocado, black olives and Parma ham – and we drive on past Stoke Talmage to Easington, a church that is open and seemingly unchanged from when we last came fifteen years ago: two-decker pulpit, moss-grown font, medieval tiles in the chancel, and a framed account of how in the storms of 1992 the roof was badly damaged. It has since been repaired, if not entirely by parishioners, certainly by those who cherish this obscure little building – and a very grand lot they are, including J. Paul Getty, Jeremy Irons and a Rothschild or two, so that one just wishes they could take Wheatfield under their wing.

  All this, I have to say, is overhung by the thought of the reception at Oxford this evening and the speeches, dinner etc. consequent on the formal handing over of my manuscripts to the Bodleian Library.

  This takes place in the Divinity School, where my praises are duly sung, the problem always on such occasions where to look, and how to look too: modest, sceptical, bashful, I can do all those – it’s appreciative I can’t manage. The credit for the manuscripts going to Bodley belongs to David Vaisey, who long before he was Bodley’s librarian, asked me if when the time came I would think of depositing them here. Lest it should be thought there had been any sort of competition, this is the only enquiry I’ve ever had. Nothing from the British Library, nothing from Austin, Texas, nothing from Leeds. One offer in forty years makes me some sort of bibliographical wallflower. Finally, I tell the story of Richard Ovenden telephoning to say my manuscripts were resting that evening on the next shelf to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, adding that the only other time in my life when I’d been in such proximity to ancient memories was one evening in New York when I’d found myself sitting next to Bette Davis. And I add confidently that this will be the only occasion when the audience will ever hear Bette Davis and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle included in the same sentence.

  8 November. Listen to The Archive Hour on Radio 4, with Stella Rimington the ex-head of MI5 taking us through the material the BBC holds on the Cambridge spies, particularly the so-called fifth (or is it sixth) man, John Cairncross. It’s all pretty factual, with Rimington banging the treason drum and making the mistake writers on the spies always make: that the whole lives of Burgess, Blunt, Maclean and co. were taken up with spying. Maybe they should have been and had they been dutiful Marxists ought to have been. But spies have lives too, and were (even Blunt) often quite silly and like everybody else out to have a good time. Arthur Marshall and Victor Rothschild (whose secretary Arthur Marshall briefly was) were the only sensible voices, with Marshall recorded as saying (on, I think, Woman’s Hour) that just because someone you like and are fond of does something you disagree with doesn’t mean you turn your back on them. Stella Rimington is shocked by this evidence of loyalty and good sense and asks us to be shocked too. A short extract from An Englishman Abroad ends the programme only, I think, because it points up how lost and lonely Burgess found himself in Moscow. Astonishing that the ex-head of such a disreputable organisation as MI5 can still expect anyone to care.

  10 November. Did I nod or has there been any fuss about the Speaking Clock? I didn’t much like ‘The time sponsored by Accurist is …’ but it was at least sober, and indeed English. Now it’s a child who sounds like a fugitive from a John Waters movie who says, ‘Hi! It’s Tinkerbell! At the third bell the time will be …’ and even the so-called bells sound silly. I had not thought of time as having a colour; now it is quite definitely pink and the texture of time fluffy. Why? And what other country in the world would submit to the time told in an American accent? What is happening to us? Or maybe all this has been said and I’ve missed it. But God rot the fools who thought it was a good idea.

  One does try not to be an Old Git but they don’t make it easy.

  ‘All my life’, Stravinsky complained to Robert Craft, ‘I have been pursued by “my works” but I don’t care about my works, I care only about composing. And that is finished.’

  20 November. John Sergeant retires from the Strictly Come Dancing competition. I have no views on this but, having worked with Sergeant on a BBC comedy series in 1966, I can truthfully say that whatever he knows about rhythm and dance (i.e. nothing) he learned from me.

  24 November. To Downing Street and a reception for Fanny Waterman, founder of the Leeds Piano Competition. The last time I was here was in Harold Wilson’s time when he held a reception (‘Do you know Buzz Aldrin?’) for the astronauts. I was talking to Nicol Williamson as Lord Chalfont came up and said, ‘This is Mr Williamson and Mr Bennett, Prime Minister. Actors.’ Denis Healey was in the cabinet and here he still is, thinner but with the eyebrows intact, shaking hands with R. saying: ‘And is this your Young Man?’ The place is more corporate than I remember, and while in the other room a plump solemn Georgian boy gives a cello recital we take the handbook, and wander round looking at the pictures. Andy Burnham, the minister for the arts, who with his heavy dark hair looks as if he’s strayed out of an early Pasolini movie, makes a speech standing in for Gordon Brown, who’s running late. Except that now here is Gordon Brown, young, tousled and despite the financial crisis almost carefree. It’s a revelation. He straight away has the audience laughing, and makes an excellent speech, harder to do since these are not his natural supporters, rich North Leeds Tories rather than from poorer South Leeds, but they’re completely won over. Later he shakes my hand, telling me I’m an institution. What he means, says the Young Man, is that you’re not in one yet. We’re both of us astonished at how different Brown is in private from the dour figure he presents in the Commons. Before coming away we look in the cabinet room, the lighting of which is pitilessly bright. ‘It’s like a night bus,’ says R. to a lacquered Alwoodley lady who, never having been on a night bus (or possibly a bus at all), looks suitably blank.

  26 November. Debo D. to supper. R. once having mentioned we often have cheese on toast, she claims that it’s her favourite and begs to be invited. Warns that she will be ‘dangerously punctual’, and she is, nice Gerard her chauffeur delivering her prompt at eight o’clock. Not being able to see very well she comes with a small powerful torch that she keeps beside her at all times as people do their mobile phone. V. smart, in navy blue with a lovely white frilly blouse – at eighty-eight still glamorous and fashionable and an alert almost imperious look to her (though her manner not imperious in the least). Full of archaisms: ‘Aren’t you IT! Rupert, isn’t he IT!’

  We talk about her book and she retells some of it, how easy JFK was, the only time he paid the slightest attention to formality was when she was dining with him and two other members of the administration and going down to dinner they deferred, letting her go first – except that then JFK put his arm in front of her, saying, ‘No, I think it’s me. I’m head of state.’ Says again as she says in the book how covered in hair Bobby Kennedy was, even when young.

  Drinks a little but eats scarcely at all, even though it’s the longed-for cheese on toast. But no awkwardness to any of it – chattering and laughing and always this extraordinary voice. Had once had to teach the actors (I think at Chichester) in The Mitford Girls and ‘They couldn’t even get the basics – lorst and gorn – hopeless.’ The only actor who could do it perfectly had a Glaswegian accent so thick she couldn’t understand him.

  When she was running the farm shop at Chatsworth she felt she ought to know more about butchery so
asked her local butcher up to Chatsworth. ‘I saw him in my room, which has about three Velázquez, a Veronese and I don’t know what else – very very grand. And I said, “Tell me about butchery.” He looked round. “Well, Your Grace – imagine this is an abattoir …”’

  30 November. A hard frost in the night, thick on the branches and the top stones of the wall furred (frost-furred) like the ears of a rabbit.

  Something old-fashioned about a frost like this – just as there is with fog, the frost, though, always putting me in mind of Guildford in 1944 when Aunty Kathleen had come down to stay and took Gordon and me out for a walk to Bramley. It was a day like today, Aunty K. full of toothy enthusiasm – probably in her Persian lamb coat, Gordon and me in our navy gabardine raincoats and school caps. We were walking in woods or across a common where they had been coppicing or cutting wood and in the middle of this heath were the glowing embers of a huge fire. This, of course, delighted Aunty K. – as it probably did us – only with her it meant she had more of a tale to tell when we got back home to Epsom Road. And not just there but forever afterwards that walk across the common never forgotten by her or indeed by me – and Gordon probably remembers it too. I would be ten, Gordon thirteen. Mam and Dad would suffer the tale-telling, one of the many instances of the adventures their children had with the aunties which they were seldom able (or anxious) to rival.

  Nothing else of the time remains except some books she and Grandma had brought us for Christmas one of which was an Edwardian tale of Cornwall, Lost on Brown Willy – the joke lost on me at the time. Another book they brought was by Cecil Aldin, which was of more interest.

  Think of Aunty K. favouring everyone with her beaming smile and exaggerated diction, not in Leeds – wasted on tram conductors – but here in Guildford (and in the posher south of England) the bus conductor probably got it.

  Bootees she would have been wearing, suede bootees.

  The other white frost that I’ve never forgotten (and have several times written about) was at Cambridge in December 1951. Just such a day as this.

  4 December. From my notebooks:

  ‘… where we dedicated a glass of wine to Artemis and generally conjured up the spirit of things long ago. They also do a nice curry and chips.’ I think said by John Fortune.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be as bald as that. You’d never know where to stop washing your face.’ My mother.

  A.: I’m working on the structure of the cell.

  B.: Oh yes. Whether it has bars on the windows, that kind of thing?

  ‘It’s one of those churches in the City like My Aunty by the Wardrobe.’

  ‘If only one could do it with some clean part of the body, like the elbow.’ Frith Banbury’s mother.

  ‘It’s no good. The larger Florentine churches of pre-Renaissance date are not a success.’ Roger Hinks.

  2009

  1 January, Yorkshire. Ill over Christmas I say to Ernest Coultherd, a farmer in the village, that my Christmas dinner consisted of a poached egg. ‘Oh. Credit crunch, was it?’

  Two dead salmon in the beck just above Mafeking Bridge, both of them huge creatures, nearly two feet long, so big that one wonders how the beck at low water can accommodate them, though there are a few deepish pools. It’s thought at first that an otter is responsible, and as otters have been seen I suppose it’s cheering that there are both otters and such large fish for them to prey on. However I talk to Dr Farrer this morning and he thinks the fish probably died after spawning and wonders if they’re sea trout. Salmon have not been known to come up so far, as they can’t negotiate the waterfall and the weir before the lake. I saw them in action at Stainforth forty years ago just after we had agreed to buy the house and it seemed at the time like a good omen.

  3 January. En route for London we turn off the A1 into Rutland to look at the monuments in Exton Church – a splendid sequence from the fifteenth century through to the eighteenth century. The earliest, Sir John Harington and his wife, are curious. He died c.1525 but his armour is like that of someone killed at Towton or Bosworth, thirty or forty years out of date, a medieval knight not a courtier of Henry VIII. Another monument is by Grinling Gibbons and as R. says he can see why Gibbons generally stuck to leaves and garlands as his figures are squat and earthbound, possibly because they aren’t designed to be seen from below. A lovely sixteenth-century monument opposite, the face of the recumbent lawyer (?) in cap and hood tied under his chin seemingly a genuine portrait – and looking more so as the marble of the face is flecked and pockmarked giving him a greater appearance of reality. A tiny trussed-up baby before him, his grandchild.

  10 January, Yorkshire. I call in next door to have a word with the district nurses who are due to visit. It’s after ten on a bitterly cold Saturday night and the two nurses are still on duty, washing and changing Anne, giving her her medication and settling her down for the night. And two nurses come again at nine the next morning, one of them the same nurse who had been on duty the night before. When one sees this level of dedication in the NHS it is both humbling and inspiring, and undertaken in such a straightforward matter-of-fact way, working round the clock not worth mentioning.

  21 January. Working in the BBC Studio at Maida Vale I don’t watch President Obama’s inauguration and am astonished when I see on the news in the evening the vast concourse of people gathered in Washington. I don’t read any official estimates of the numbers though it’s to be hoped they estimate more accurately in the US than they do here, where any demonstration of which the police disapprove – the Stop the War marches, for instance – is routinely marked down whereas demos on which the police look kindly, the Countryside Alliance, say, are correspondingly inflated. If there had been a police presence at the Feeding of the Five Thousand there would have been no miracle. ‘Listen, there were only a dozen or so people there. Five loaves and two fishes perfectly adequate.’

  27 January. Christopher Hibbert dies. Unlauded as an historian because never on TV he was also marked down, I imagine, because so wide-ranging. His biography of Elizabeth I, The Virgin Queen, is by far the best account of her that I have read and I nearly wrote to him to say so. And now, of course, wish I had.

  Find myself cheered this morning by the sun catching a silver scaffolding pole on a rooftop beyond the garden. The sea it suggests in the clean air. New York it could be, I think. Elsewhere anyway.

  28 January. A photograph in the Independent of Picasso painting Guernica in 1937 in a collar and tie.

  30 January, Yorkshire. My friend Anne’s funeral and we are about to set off for the crematorium in the pouring rain when as we turn the car round a young pheasant skitters across the road. Nothing unusual in that except that this pheasant is pure white. I’m not given to a belief in signs or portents but it’s nevertheless quite cheering to feel that she’s still around.

  The service in the village church in the afternoon is packed. I give an address but the whole occasion is wonderfully and unexpectedly rounded off by Ben, her middle son, who despite grief and nerves manages to say what his mother had meant to him and his two brothers. I couldn’t have spoken impromptu as he did and the congregation quite properly gave him (and Anne) a great round of applause. The boys then take the flowers that have been on the hearse and decorate the front of her café.

  1 February. Entertaining Mr Sloane, Orton’s first play, is being given another outing, this time at the Trafalgar Studios. I saw the first production at Wyndham’s in 1964 with Madge Ryan, Peter Vaughan and Dudley Sutton. Good in the part Sutton was already too old, as have been most of the actors who’ve played in it since. It’s a play I would dearly like to have written, though these days for it to retain its shock value the young man should not be much more than a boy. As it is he’s always cast as someone already well corrupted and who knows exactly what he’s doing whereas from a boy of fifteen the flirtatiousness would be much more shocking. All productions put him in black leather and a little cap such as Orton himself used to wear. Here too an outfit that
is not so self-conscious would serve the play better. The more ordinary it is the more shocking it will seem.

  3 February. One of the cards of condolence we get on Anne’s death is unintentionally comical. ‘Sorry to hear your bad news!’ The exclamation mark is hilariously inappropriate though it’s quite hard to pinpoint why.

  14 February, Yorkshire. A red kite (I think) peering over a wall as we drive up the Feizor road later catches us up as it flies down over Buckhaw Brow. At this point it is mobbed by a crow – tackled would be a better word as one bird can’t mob another – which harasses it until the kite presumably leaves the crow’s air space.

  If it was a kite it’s the first I’ve seen round here and also (though I’ve often heard of it) the first time I’ve seen a bird harassed – though of course it was what R. saw when the crows mobbed the heron in Primrose Hill and in Gloucester Crescent the seagulls similarly (as in this year’s LRB diary).

  20 February. It’s years since I was on Desert Island Discs but these days I’d find it much easier to choose the eight records I don’t want than those that I do. I don’t ever want to hear again:

  Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition

  Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade

  Schubert Fifth Symphony

  Beethoven Pastoral Symphony

  Mozart Fortieth Symphony

  And it isn’t that I’ve heard them too often. I just don’t care for any of them.

  7 March, Yorkshire. To Oxenholme, half an hour from home and on the edge of the Lake District, where we catch a Virgin train to Glasgow. It’s a brisk ride, only two hours and seems less than that because the scenery is so uninterruptedly rural and sometimes spectacular. Virgin trains, though, are designed on the American model with dark interiors and small windows and are nowhere near as comfortable as GNER. I’ve never had much time for the spurious populism of Richard Branson: his jolly japes and toothy demeanour can’t disguise the fact that he is a hard-faced entrepreneur. These thoughts recur when we come back from Glasgow the next day and have to travel by bus two thirds of the way (‘track repairs’) and with a driver who has the radio on throughout. It rains, too, but the journey is redeemed when back at Oxenholme we drop down into Kendal and the Abbot Hall gallery, where there is a touring exhibition of Robert Bevan pictures. The shows at Abbot Hall are just the right size, and never more than three or four rooms. The Bevans are shown alongside other Camden Town paintings, the best of which is a lovely, glowing, slightly abstract picture by Spencer Gore, The Beanfield, Letchworth, which is from the Tate. There’s a Gilman, Mrs Mounter, some Nevinsons and lots of Bevans of horses and their hangers on – horse copers, idlers and jockeys in civvies and large caps.