Keeping On Keeping On

by Bennett, Alan

  I close the door in Amy’s caring face, tell a photographer who’s hanging about to bugger off (‘That’s not very nice’) and come in and reflect that though the theft is bad enough more depressing is that someone in the police must immediately have got on to the Mail, neither the bank nor M&S having either my private number or the address. I just wonder how much the paper paid him or her and what the tariff is – pretty low in my case, I would have thought. The women are thought to be Romanians, and in any case were very good at their job and must have been pleasantly surprised at how much they netted and how stupid I was. Quite hard to bear is that I have to go back to the bank to draw out another £1,500 or the builders will go unpaid.

  The con is a familiar one, apparently, and often pulled in Spain. It even has a name: the Mustard Squirter. Still it’s the liaison between the police and the Daily Mail that is the most depressing. Years ago when Russell Harty had been exposed in the tabloids he was being rung in Yorkshire every five minutes. His solicitor then agreed with the local police that he should have a new number, known only to the police. Ten minutes later a newspaper rang him on it.

  13 June. Yesterday afternoon the Express telephoned. This morning at eight o’clock the Standard is on the doorstep. Talk to Niamh Dilworth at the National about it and tell her that the police have asked me not to dry-clean my jacket and ice-cream-smeared raincoat in order to test them for DNA. She says that all they’ll be able to discover is whether it was Wall’s, Viennetta or Carte D’Or. The casualty, though, is trust, so that I am now less ready to believe in the kindness of strangers. But one has to be careful when one has been robbed. Like cancer it’s one more topic on which it’s easy to become a bore.

  26 June. A propos Prince Charles’s intervention in the Chelsea Barracks redevelopment Ruth Reed, the principal of RIBA, says: ‘The UK has a democratic and properly constituted planning process: any citizen in this country is able to register their objections to proposed buildings with the appropriate local authority.’ This is disingenuous. The planning process is and always has been weighted against objectors who, even if they succeed in postponing a development, have to muster their forces afresh when the developer and the architect come up with a slightly modified scheme. And so on and so on, until the developer wins by a process of attrition. Furthermore Ms Reed, in her role as trade union leader for her profession, ignores the dismal record of mediocre architecture which has ruined so many English towns and continues to do so. Anyone, even the sultan of Qatar, who stands up to this collection of mediocrities gets my vote. And all the talk of HRH exceeding his constitutional rights is tripe.

  30 June. One of the umpteen competing narratives thrown up by my ‘unfortunate experience’ comes in the greengrocer’s this morning when an Australian woman tells me how she had been at Glyndebourne, presumably somewhat dolled up, when what she describes as an ‘over-effusive Latin type’ (not, she thought, a fellow operagoer) had insisted on kissing her hand. Retrieving it she found he had in the process managed to grease her fingers with a view, presumably, to slipping off her rings – perhaps greasing her hand when he took it and, as he kissed it, hoping to take her rings off with his teeth.

  5 July. A child in Settle is said to have asked what the Mafia was and his grandfather said, ‘It’s like the Settle Rotary Club, only with guns.’

  9 July. In the rumpus over the cutbacks in school building, the errors in the schools listed and the (quite mild) humiliation of Michael Gove there’s been no mention that I’ve seen about private education. I may have missed it, but since we’re all supposed to be tightening our belts why not the public schools? Don’t they have a contribution to make, subsidised as they are in all sorts of ways by the government? Soon after taking office Gove deplored the stratification of education in England, while managing to say nothing about the most obvious stratification of all, namely the public schools that form the top layer and will go on doing so.

  15 July. Finish reading Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, a wonderfully absorbing book. Seeing Trevor-Roper in Oxford in the 1950s I thought him extraordinarily young, so that when he was made regius professor in 1957 he still looked like an undergraduate. His face always seemed to me to have a flattened nose which gave him a slightly (and fittingly) pugnacious air. He was a lifelong sufferer from sinus trouble and at one point had his septum removed so this may account for it. Happy to see his predecessor as regius professor, V. H. Galbraith, mildly rubbished. I remember him as a small bullying man with highly polished boots; he thought the world of Maurice Keen (quite rightly) but took me for a fool and more or less said so. He’d apparently served with distinction in the First War and been decorated for gallantry by the French, the gallantry including driving his men over the top at the point of a revolver which, had I known it, would have made me like him even less. Another recurrent figure is that fugitive from Mount Rushmore Gilbert Ryle, who sounds, in his wartime days anyway, to have been very funny, saying of Trevor-Roper’s supposedly tactful politicking, ‘Many a bull emerging from a bloodstained china shop has congratulated itself on its Machiavellian diplomacy.’ But as always when I read about Oxford I’m so thankful I never ended up a don.

  25 July, Yorkshire. A week’s holiday begins with an appearance at the Harrogate Festival. It’s also a ninetieth birthday celebration for Fanny Waterman, the founder of the Leeds Piano Competition, one of whose ex-pupils is doing the first half of the programme. This is scheduled to last for forty minutes but, entranced by his own music-making, the pianist goes on for well over an hour while I fume in the dressing room. I don’t mind curtailing my performance but this means I won’t get my supper until well after eleven. Some of this truculence feeds itself into my stint, which begins with a speech in favour of the NHS from an early play of mine, Getting On. This is well received and encourages me to say how, whereas nowadays the state is a dirty word, for my generation the state was a saviour, delivering us out of poverty and want (and provincial boredom) and putting us on the road to a better life; the state saved my father’s life, my mother’s sanity and my own life too. ‘So when I hear politicians talking about pushing back the boundaries of the state I think’ – only I’ve forgotten what it is I think so I just say: ‘I think … bollocks.’ This, too, goes down well though I’ll normally end a performance on a more elegiac note.

  27 July, Yorkshire. To Mount Grace, the Carthusian monastery, visited once before fifteen years ago though today it seems much larger, the scale of it perhaps accentuated by the small size of the cells surrounding the cloister. The irrigation system still survives, with the individual closets connected by a channel running along the back of the cells and another channel watering the kitchen gardens which were a feature of each cell, the whole place delightful and making it understandable why they were queuing up to become monks here right until the eve of the Dissolution. The kitchen gardens are very much overgrown, some of them planted with authentic medieval herbs including tansy, which smells disgustingly of pee. It’s an English Heritage site and R. suggests that rather than the medieval jousting and other olde japeries which are regularly laid on these days it would be far more of an attraction if all these adjoining cell gardens were run together and planted out as allotments. Something similar is currently being tried at one or two National Trust properties but it’s what Mount Grace would be ideally suited for.

  13 August, Yorkshire. When I go up on the train to Leeds I’ll generally sit in the same seat, often in front of the same businessman, who must also be a creature of habit. We chat, though without really knowing one another, and today as we’re getting out at Leeds he tells me that he’s been staying with friends in East Anglia. He had mentioned that he often sees me on the train whereupon his hosts had looked rather sheepish. It turns out that at their work, office or whatever they have a sweepstake to which they contribute every month with the participants drawing various well-known names from a hat; the winner being the one whose named notable is the first to die. I am one of their nam
es.

  They haven’t had a win for some time, their last bonanza coming with the death of Spike Milligan, who died in an otherwise fallow period so the pot had grown quite large, which it isn’t always: if two names die within a month or two of each other when the pot hasn’t had time to accumulate the winner will only get a paltry sum.

  I laugh about this when he tells me, but I find it depressing to think that even in a light-hearted way there is at least one family in the kingdom waiting (if not longing) for my death. I don’t know what the monthly contribution amounts to but were it substantial I suppose a game like this might even lead to murder – even if it’s only a murder such as occurs in Midsomer.

  It’s also another instance of ‘write it and it happens.’ Towards the end of The Habit of Art Humphrey Carpenter tells the ageing Auden and Britten that they have reached that stage in their lives when even their most devoted fans would be happy to close the book on them: no more poetry, no more music. Enough. It’s not the same but still, the thought of anyone who for whatever reason would be happy to see the back of you is disturbing even if it’s a joke. Good plot (or sub-plot) though.

  16 August. Annoyed that I didn’t write down a quote from Camus that headed a piece on Tony Judt in (I think) Friday or Saturday’s Guardian – something like ‘The only party which I could join would be one whose members weren’t certain they were right.’ Though another quote appropriate to Judt and his life would be Simone Weil’s ‘One must always be ready to change sides with justice, that fugitive from the winning camp.’

  Cf. Tennyson’s line on the French Revolution: ‘Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.’ (Read in The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker.)

  One of the saddest things in architecture – a dilapidated greenhouse.

  18 August. To the NT where Padraig Cusack chairs a meeting with a dozen or so journalists from some of the places that will be visited by the provincial tour of The Habit of Art. He also managed a similar tour of The History Boys and tells me that ‘cunt’, which Mrs Lintott has to say about the headmaster, in Plymouth was received in dead silence but as the production slowly made its way north it got more and more of a response so by the time the play got to Glasgow they were throwing themselves about. This may just be evidence of how easily shocked they are in Plymouth (and not at all on the Clyde) but other factors enter in. I think that I might not be allowed to say cunt in Plymouth but Jez Butterworth, say, would. In Leeds I’d get the benefit of the doubt and in Glasgow nobody’s heard of me anyway.

  22 August. Listen to the afternoon prom, wholly devoted to Rodgers and Hammerstein, particularly the filmed musicals. Thus there is Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I and – of course – The Sound of Music, all of which, The Sound of Music excepted, I saw at the Cottage Road Cinema in Far Headingley in the late forties and early fifties. Not The Sound of Music, which was later, and has always been a joke.

  The others, though, were – as the phrase is nowadays – the music to my life and particularly to my emotional life. In the darkness of that little cinema I would feel that ‘If I Loved You’ or ‘Hello Young Lovers’ were songs addressed particularly to me and to whatever boy I was hopelessly infatuated with.

  And it comes back to me this afternoon how I regarded such longings then as evidence almost of a destiny. Being in love unhappily singled you out, I thought, it drafted you into an aristocracy which set you apart. It was more than just a badge of being gay (which it wasn’t called then anyway) but rather an ordeal you were called on to undergo if only to transcend it and reach a sublimity denied to other mortals.

  24 August. To UCH for an X-ray of my hip. I leave home at 11.45 a.m. and am back there by one o’clock. This is because it’s a walk-in facility which, on the several occasions I’ve had to use it, has been of exemplary efficiency. There is speed, privacy and one goes at one’s own convenience – all of these regularly advertised as the benefits of private medicine. I have used both in the past and if need be will do so again but in this regard, as in so many others these days, the NHS is better.

  30 August. Reading – but not enjoying Ion Trewin’s biography of Alan Clark (borrowed, I’m happy to say, from the Sharpleshall Street Library, so I haven’t contributed to the Clark fortune), who was no stranger to worries about his own health. I find him difficult to like or have much sympathy for even as a swashbuckler. The gentleman he seems to have thought himself he certainly wasn’t, except in some outward particulars. He began life as a used car dealer and though with a silver spanner in his mouth remained one. Without the money he had from his grandfather and from his over-indulgent father he wouldn’t have got started as even his career as a military historian was smoothed along by being K. Clark’s son with the connections that brought him. Thus he could send his writings to Liddell Hart for approval and to Trevor-Roper; no door was closed.

  He also skived off National Service, which one would have thought he might have enjoyed. And as a young man he looks a spiv.

  There’s a chapter about the publication of the diaries which reminds me of the conversation at my agents Peters Fraser and Dunlop (then at Chelsea Harbour) between Agent Jones and Michael Sissons. Sissons must have come into Jones’s office when I was talking to Jones on the phone. Jones put the phone down but not properly with the result that I could hear Sissons telling Jones what dynamite the (then unpublished) diaries were and describing some of the elaborate security precautions they must put in place when publishers came to the office to read through them prior to making an offer.

  I hope I wrote this down at the time, though short of going down to Faber and checking the transcript I’ve no means of knowing.

  To begin with, I remember I kept shouting down the phone but in the end just gave up and did what anybody else would have done (Clark himself certainly) and eavesdropped.

  Apart from his love of animals Clark’s hypochondria is his most appealing – certainly his most human – characteristic.

  31 August, Yorkshire. While we’ve been here I’ve read Chris Mullin’s diaries (1999–2005), A View from the Foothills. There are dull patches e.g. African politics and jockeyings for position in the Labour Party but what comes over very plainly is Mullin’s fundamental decency and honesty. He’s so patently a good man that one feels he’s taken on board the government simply because (and having voted against the war) he adds moral weight. He’s glamorised by Blair (referred to throughout as The Man) and even at the finish when he knows Blair deserves to go he can’t help but be sympathetic. Other impressions are of the relentless grind of an MP’s job and the sense of futility that comes with almost any experience of politics, partly due to the iron grip exercised by the Whips and also by the unshiftable weight of the civil service, who turn in jargon-laden speeches that he has to rewrite or, worse, actually deliver, who bury initiatives they disapprove of and cling desperately to their procedures.

  Mullin, I think, emerged unscathed from the MPs’ expenses scandal – which is unsurprising considering that his London base was a (frequently burgled) pad in Brixton, from which he travelled in on the 159 bus – and his home in Sunderland where cars are frequently vandalised or abandoned in the lane at the back of the house – and paradoxically one of the uplifting features of the diaries is the ordinariness of his complaints: he doesn’t let his position, even when he’s a junior minister set him apart from the common man. I hope I meet him one day if only to tell him how clearly his voice comes through and to say (though I don’t think I would ever dare) never to underestimate the good he has done in his life.

  3 September. Primrose Hill never fails to surprise. Today I am walking up Chalcot Road along the edge of Chalcot Square when I see an old lady having difficulty walking and just making it to a bollard where she rests for a moment. She’s spectrally thin and has difficulty speaking, but she manages to gasp out that she’s looking for Cahill Street and that her son is touring round in his car also looking. I offer to go home and fetch an A to Z whi
le she sits on a seat, though the seat is already occupied by a young man who is taking no notice of this little drama. Suddenly the woman straightens up and starts speaking in a man’s voice and I see that, having been wholly convincing as an old woman, she is actually quite a young man. Still, though, he claims not to know where he is, saying that he keeps having ‘these dos’ and that the last thing he remembers was being in Bromley and where is he now? Another passer-by has stopped to help and I decide it’s getting a bit too complicated for me so I go on my way.

  Ten minutes later I’m walking up the street and the old lady/young man comes running up to me together with the one who’d been on the seat, who, it turns out, had been filming the encounter. Surprise, surprise they’re actors, trying to put together a pilot for BBC3. This is a shame if only because it makes the whole encounter more ordinary. Afterwards I think back to my last unsought encounter in M&S when my pocket was picked, and had this been a similar scam it would have been just as easy to pick my pocket again as I’d helped the ‘old lady’ to the seat. This had never occurred to me. Streetwise I’m not.