Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  ‘I like Bevan,’ says R. ‘He wasn’t afraid of mauve.’

  What’s interesting about the exhibition also is the various views it has of Cumberland Market, the great horse-market north of Euston Road where the 1950s Regent’s Park estate now stands. It was bombed during the war, or so it’s always said, though it was probably recoverable and from the various drawings on show in the exhibition one can see how these days it might have been a lovely place to live, a vast square surrounded by early nineteenth-century houses, a space comparable to the Marais if not quite so distinguished.

  13 March. Red Riding by David Peace is much talked of and applauded, and it is powerful and sometimes hard to watch. Whether it’s feasible or the assumptions about the police entirely plausible I’m inclined to doubt. ‘The Leeds police kick mainly in the teeth’ is the gist of it, plus an assumption that the force in the 1970s was thoroughly corrupt.

  Though the circumstances were hardly as lurid, this was very much the assumption when I was a boy. Rationing offered increased opportunities for peculation and my father, a butcher, who was both Conservative and conservative, nevertheless always assumed that most policemen were ‘on the take’ and the magistrates, too. Still, though the police get away with extreme violence and even murder, I find it hard to credit (if I understand the plot) that masked bobbies could shoot up a club or batter and rape a reporter on the Yorkshire Post without there being some sort of repercussions. Comically, since in my memory the Yorkshire Post was always rather a genteel newspaper, I’d find it easier to believe if the reporter had been from the Yorkshire Evening Post – the newspaper Keith Waterhouse first worked on as a reporter.

  So while Red Riding seems like gritty realism it is in this respect quite romantic, as romantic and fanciful as the stories told at the other end of the social and geographical scale in Midsomer Murders. In Midsomer the murders average three or four per episode but never seem to incur any comment in the press or ruffle the calm surface of the community. It takes more than the discovery of a mere body to stop the garden fête. Midsomer and Red Riding are not very different in this and alike, too, in that they’re both, Midsomer particularly, a boon to actors.

  23 March. A concert hall in Prague in 1942. A performance of Dvorák’s Cello Concerto. The hall full, a group of German officers and their wives prominently placed, one of them a general. In the middle of the concerto the great door of the concert hall opens a little and three leather-greatcoated Gestapo slip into the hall. There are three aisles and an officer walks slowly down each one scanning the audience. One stops at the end of a row, another at the far end, and we see a young man in the middle of the row. There is some sort of disturbance, a shout during a quiet passage of the music maybe, so that the general turns round. He sees the Gestapo and waves them away and reluctantly they move to the back of the hall where they wait by the door. The concerto continues.

  We are now at the third movement and during it a small paper bag is passed surreptitiously along the row where the young man is sitting. When the parcel reaches the young man he puts his coat over it.

  The concerto ends, the applause is tumultuous, the Gestapo run down the aisle, though impeded by people leaving. They reach the young man’s row and wait. At which point he takes a gun out of the bag and shoots himself. The general and his party leave.

  24 March. Eleanor Bron, met outside Paul Scofield’s memorial service at St Margaret’s last Thursday, had said John Fortune was ill again so I call him. Not at first available as Emma says he’s playing with their new Saluki puppy. Later he rings back in good spirits, having finished his chemo and been signed off, his doctor saying, ‘This is an indolent disease, Mr Fortune. You and your condition are well suited.’

  I have no good stories to tell him (the inanities of actors always a favourite). His social life has been limited to visits to Waitrose where the check-out girl asks him if he wants help packing. ‘No, I’ll manage,’ he says, ‘though it’s one of the many things women do better than men.’

  There is an old married couple behind him and the wife says viciously to her husband, ‘Why can you never admit that?’

  A similar couple in the store are at the greengrocery counter where the husband is undecided, on a cauliflower.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ says the wife. ‘Do you want it to sprout?’

  John delights, he says, in these ancient couples who have spent a lifetime honing their skills at scoring off one another. Cheering call.

  28 March. I go up the street to Sesame, the organic shop, slipping on a green corduroy jacket. I’m also wearing an old pair of green corduroy trousers so it looks like a suit. It makes me remember how Gielgud used to be excited – or pretended to be – by corduroy. ‘Corduroy! My dear!’ And his eyebrows would go up as if it were some kind of statement. Which it may well once have been, but was hardly the case in 1968.

  4 April. News that this year’s Royal Show will be the last ought not to impinge, and that it does is because back in 1948 the Royal Show took place at York and a coachload of us were taken over from school. Why I can’t think as we were hardly sons of the soil and Leeds had no farming pretensions, few places less so, but I suppose events of any sort were thin on the post-war ground and this was thought to be one. I’ve no recollection of there being anything to do with farming, no prize bulls or sheepdog trials, and what stands out in my mind was that there was a good deal of free literature on offer. None of us schoolboys had ever come across this before and we dashed round the various pavilions stocking up on brochures about milking machines and silage pits, poultry catalogues and pamphlets about scrapie plus the latest in tractors and combine harvesters. Clearing out a cupboard a year or two ago I came across some of this material, now, I suppose, an archive though it was displaced a few years later by slightly more worthwhile giveaways from the Festival of Britain.

  8 April. Fairly obvious that the newspaper seller who died in the G20 demonstrations was pushed over by a policeman. Equally obvious that even if the calls for a public inquiry are conceded no policeman will be charged or even suspended. According to the Economist, in the last ten years there have been more than four hundred deaths in custody, with no convictions for murder or manslaughter, the police always vindicated. This isn’t simply against the laws of England; it’s against a more fundamental law – the law of averages.

  10 April, Good Friday, Yorkshire. Wet for most of the day, but towards evening it fines up and there is a strong sunset as we walk round the now empty village. In the fields above the back road there are two white horses, one in a pink jacket and the other blue. There’s been an old and rather shabby white horse on this hillside for almost as long as I can remember with a rather Eeyore-like structure as its stable. That’s gone and these horses are not shabby at all, rather smart in fact and they walk indifferently over to see what we have to offer – which is very little – a hand nervously offered, a pat on the nose and then off they go. Forty years ago to the day there were horses. Forty Years On was playing in the West End but in those days there were no theatrical performances on Good Friday and George Fenton and Keith McNally and I went down to Chislehurst to go riding – riding on the downs above Brighton one of the happiest memories of the tour of the play the previous year. It was a lovely day and I’ve remembered it ever since.

  16 April, Yorkshire. En route home and with half an hour to spare we stop briefly at Kirkstall Abbey, which R. has never seen. After Fountains, Byland and Rievaulx, Kirkstall is a bit of a disappointment, though to me it was always a familiar relic, soot black with its niches and side chapels piled with meaningless masonry and stinking of urine.

  Now it’s all tidied up, the ancient Ministry of Works lead labels replaced by over-informative notices, illustrated with slightly jokey pictures of the jolly monks going about their monastic business. Still, I’m glad we’ve been as it confirms something I’d thought was a legend, namely that until the nineteenth century the main road (now the A65) ran down the nave of the abbey,2
which to an unsuspecting traveller in the dusk must have seemed extraordinary, like a journey out of a dream.

  Thinking of Byland and Rievaulx I remember the little sketches of beauty spots the cartoonist Thack used to do in the Yorkshire Evening Post and which Mam would cut out and put in the letters she and Dad wrote to me when I was in New York in 1963 with Beyond the Fringe.

  18 April. Reluctant as one is to agree with Henry VIII, I find it difficult to believe that Prince Arthur, aged fifteen, did not consummate his five-month-long marriage to Katherine of Aragon. He would have had to be exceptionally innocent or lacking in lust or enterprise, though since he’s said to have died of testicular cancer that might account for it.

  19 April. I see I don’t figure on today’s Independent on Sunday Happy List, ‘one hundred people who make Britain a better, more caring and contented nation’. It does include Ian McKellen (actor), Ray Mears (woodsman) and Sam Roddick ‘for revolutionising sex accessories’. All of them ‘representing values that need trumpeting’. Clinging on, that’s what needs trumpeting, this Sunday morning (and not being swept away by the journalistic torrent). Keep on keeping on.

  25 April. Listen to the (always interesting) Archive on 4. Tonight it’s memories of Mrs Thatcher and a real feast of humbug with Lords Butler, Tebbit and Bell joining in a chorus of self-serving reminiscence of their old mistress with the equally fawning commentary supplied by Matthew Parris. Thatcher’s was a court and her courtiers just as cowardly as the courtiers of Henry VIII, and one can imagine some sixteenth-century Lord Butler justifying his master much as Tebbit and Bell are doing this evening. ‘It was unfortunate, of course, but the second wife had to go. She was impossible and yet, you see, His Majesty was genuinely fond of her, so much so that on the day she was … disposed of … he couldn’t be anywhere in the vicinity and took himself off hunting. His Majesty was in many ways a very sensitive man.’

  These days – i.e. after a lifetime – I am just about satisfied – or at least not embarrassed – by my handwriting. It’s not neat but neither is it childish. It looks like the handwriting of an adult (and not yet of an old man).

  This equanimity with regard to my handwriting vanishes when I look at the corrections I make to a script – and in particular at the present moment – to the fifth draft of The Habit of Art. Here my handwriting is big, childish, clumsy with no evidence of character or purpose and certainly not the handwriting of someone who has written the play. It’s a mess. Nick H.’s handwriting in which he suggests improvements and points out omissions is neat, legible and of a piece with his other handwriting. Not so mine. Mine reverts to the all-over-the-place stuff I used to write while I was in the army and before I got to university – i.e. fifty years ago. Why I’ve no idea. But it is so.

  8 May. A lot of fuss about the Prince of Wales, with a group of architects writing to the Guardian claiming HRH’s objection to the Chelsea Barracks design is an interference ‘in the democratic process’.

  This is hypocritical rubbish. Architects have always had scant regard for democracy and as often as not have the planners in their pocket; anyone who stands up to them gets my vote, including the Prince of Wales.

  11 May. We have a cat that visits, a big heavy-shouldered flat-faced black-and-white tom which can occasionally be found sitting on a rolled-up blanket in one of the cellars under the road off the front yard. If it’s discovered in the cellar it leaves quickly but slows down on the steps and if one goes back inside, slinks downstairs again. It’s grubby, unattractive and unresponsive to any words of affection. Indeed if one presumes to address it, it practically scowls. Rupert, who is allergic to cats, loves it.

  24 May, Yorkshire. We stop for a cup of tea at bleak M1 service stations, the one after Leicester Forest – a vast hall, the atrium I think for a Travelodge, lined with shops, M&S, W. H. Smith, Costa Coffee but almost empty of people. The other, also empty, between Wakefield and Leeds.

  I suppose we’re both in a good mood and looking forward to the holiday so that these cheerless venues are not without charm – Indian ladies in saris squatting on the ornamental rocks eating a take-away beside parked cars; and half-naked, heavily tattooed, uncomely youths arsing about – and remind me of George F. saying forty years ago that there’s no sense in holding aloof on bank holidays, better just to go along with the rest and (if you can) enjoy it. The emptiness of the place in the late afternoon sunshine and occasional new arrivals in the car park’s vast piazza make it an unexpected idyll.

  1 June. Clitter – a name for the bits of wax and old skin that gather in the ears, particularly as one gets older.

  9 June. Reading Enlightening, the latest volume of Isaiah Berlin’s letters, which has been rather grudgingly reviewed. One redeeming thing about Berlin – if he needs redeeming – is that he likes women. He likes talking to them, he likes writing to them, gossiping with them and, I suppose, though a late starter he likes sleeping with them. This is unusual. Most English men and fewer dons don’t actually like women. They may like screwing them, but liking the women themselves, that’s rare.

  In the book there’s an account of how Berlin lunched with the Queen and other eminent guests on 11 June 1957. At the lunch, Berlin tells us, he pressed the merits of Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County, Nabokov’s Lolita and the works of Genet, whereupon the titles were dutifully written down for Her Majesty by a courtier. So when in The Uncommon Reader HMQ questions the French president about Genet it has some (though fifty-year-old) foundation in fact. And it’s sheer coincidence. In 2007 when I wrote the story I had no knowledge of Berlin’s correspondence, the relevant volume of which was only published this year. I chose Genet simply as an author whom the Queen would be most unlikely ever to have come across. And to mention him to her even in 2007 might be thought bold, but much more so fifty years earlier when the home secretary, R. A. Butler, was rather cross with Berlin, implying his temerity might have interfered with his knighthood.

  Like Auden Berlin seems to have had no visual sense at all and to have been uneasy in the countryside.

  23 June. In the afternoon to Heywood Hill to sign books with Ms Debo. Not many books, thirty at the most, and we are soon through ten, even though D. needs a spotlight to be able to see the page. She writes along the top and I tuck in halfway down. Two Americans come in and ask to have their books signed, he claiming some sort of connection with Patrick Leigh Fermor in the SOE, though hardly in the war as he’s young and quite full of himself. D. is very gracious and chats but they don’t have much to say to me. Afterwards she gives me a lift (‘Can I split at Lowndes Square’) and Gerard her Irish chauffeur takes me back to Primrose Hill. He’s a big fan and could go on Mastermind he seems so clued up about what I’ve written; nice voice and looks a bit like Father Ted.

  Talking about Patrick L. F. Debo says he got into the bath (possibly at Edensor) and saw that both his feet had gone black. Thinking this was another affliction that comes with being ninety-one he called for help whereupon the butler came in and told him he’d forgotten to take off his socks.

  27 June. Eugene, the New Zealand carpenter and Tree, his Thai wife have fitted up a lovely drop-leaf table in the utility room which lifts up to hold the laundry and the stuff coming out of the dryer. It’s a plain old wood and looks as if it’s been there forever and exactly the kind of thing that would catch one’s eye in an old house as giving it charm. So nice that I start looking round for other drop-leaf table sites. R. entranced by it.

  28 June. When we were staying at Kington in May we called at Presteigne, where the junk shop is a favourite of R.’s. In the window was a devotional jug with on it a picture of a hen and this verse:

  The Saviour of Mankind adopts

  The figure of the Hen

  To show the strength of his regard

  For the lost sons of men.

  2 July. I am reading (or trying to read) Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A House and Its Head, the result of dipping again into Hilary Spurling’s superb biography. I encount
er all the usual obstacles: the characters not distinguished from each other by their manner of speaking, forgetting which character is which with Compton-Burnett’s description of what they look like not helping. And some of it (this is seldom said) downright bad. Still, there’s more happening than one realises. In the first couple of chapters of A House and Its Head the eponymous Duncan Edgeworth burns a copy of a book, not named but what one imagines to be Darwin’s Origin of Species, which has been given to his nephew for Christmas. Later that same Christmas Day the said nephew and his cousin re-enact an Anglican service, sermon included. Whether I shall manage to finish the book I doubt as I’ve never yet managed to read one of her novels right through.

  6 July. But thinking I won’t finish the book means that I can and do and find the novel ends with a flurry of marriages and (if I understand it correctly) the murder of a child being brushed under the carpet, money making all things right. I will try another one – Manservant and Maidservant is said to be good – but goodness, Dame Ivy is hard work.