Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 1

by Alan Bennett

  RUSSELL: I don’t think you have ever appreciated, Ottoline, the saving qualities of elastic.

  OTTOLINE: Do you ever have the same problem?

  RUSSELL: Mutatis mutandis, no. But then I have led a very sheltered life. I had no contact with my own body until the spring of 1887, when I suddenly found my feet. I deduced the rest logically.

  HEADMASTER: (Offstage) Franklin!

  RUSSELL: Ottoline!

  OTTOLINE: Yes, Bertie?

  RUSSELL: I would like to take the earliest opportunity of seducing you. Would half-past seven on Thursday the 4th suit you?

  HEADMASTER: (Coming down the stairs) Go away, you boys, you’re not to listen to this. This is one of the bits you were keeping to yourself, I never had any inkling of it.

  (The BOYS clear the gallery in a great hurry.)

  FRANKLIN: I’m sure you can’t object to them poking fun at Bertrand Russell.

  HEADMASTER: Get up, you treacherous pedant. (He gropes up the skirt.) What have we got here? (He lifts the skirt and calls up it.) Who’s up there? Come down this minute.

  (The figure splits into her component parts. SKINNER emerges clad in a long pair of orange tights, high-heeled black shoes and a red satin underskirt which covers the top half of his body.) (To TUPPER.) I might have known you’d have been at the bottom of it.

  SKINNER: No. He was the top, sir. I was the bottom.

  HEADMASTER: Don’t try me, sir. I am not a fool. I am not a fool. What I am objecting to is the use, absolutely without qualification, of the word, breast.

  FRANKLIN: I’m sure the boys may have come across the word.

  HEADMASTER: They may indeed. They may even be aware of its implications. But it is not merely the boys we have to consider. We are in mixed company.

  MATRON: I don’t mind a bit, Headmaster.

  HEADMASTER: I wasn’t meaning you, Matron. Of course you’re not shocked by it. You’ve had medical training. I have my sister Nancy in the audience.

  TEMPEST: Well, she’s got a bust like a roll-top desk.

  FRANKLIN: Headmaster, I think you must face facts. We have it on excellent authority that this lady was rather slip-shod in her personal appearance.

  HEADMASTER: So you make a pantomime horse out of her.

  FRANKLIN: It’s in Stephen Spender’s autobiography which I read with the Arts Sixth last term. He actually saw her breast pop right out of her frock. It was on top of a bus. I can give you the page reference.

  HEADMASTER: And the number of the bus too, I suppose. What Mr Spender saw is his own business. I would merely say hat if everyone who caught an unlooked-for glimpse of the female bosom chose to publish it in book form, civilization would very shortly grind to a halt. Don’t misunderstand me. I know the times are changing. I am trying to be as liberal as I can. But there is a time and a place for everything.

  FRANKLIN: And might one be permitted to ask the time and place for a breast?

  HEADMASTER: Certainly. It is in the mouth of an infant of six months and under. There must have been other features about this woman, this Emmeline Squirrell, apart from the fissiparous nature of her décoiletage.

  SKINNER: Tupper and I were just about to pluck your heartstrings, weren’t we, Tupper?

  TUPPER: Yes, sir.

  HEADMASTER: If there are any heartstrings to be plucked round here, gentlemen, I will be the one to pluck them. Do you understand?

  SKINNER: Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

  TUPPER:

  HEADMASTER: Go straight on. We’ll have all this out in the interval.

  (HUGH is listening to a radio bulletin giving statistics of air losses during the Battle of Britain.)

  NURSIE: You’re putting on weight down at that depot, young lady. It’s exercise you want, not standing about in a canteen all day.

  MOGGIE: You just mind your p’s and q’s, or I shall write and tell them about your gas-mask. It’s just going to be like the last one, taking all the brightest and best.

  NURSIE: Matter with you? Cat got your tongue? He says we shall have to fight in the ditches. Ditches indeed. He doesn’t have my legs.

  MOGGIE: You’re not much older than he is.

  NURSIE: Yes, but he hasn’t had you two to cope with all his life.

  (HUGH switches off wireless.)

  HUGH: I met one of them tonight, down at the House. A very gallant young man. Everything that a hero should be.

  Handsome, laughing, careless of his life. Rather a bore, and at heart, I suppose, a bit of a Fascist.

  MOGGIE: That’s a foul thing to say.

  HUGH: I just felt he’d have been happier talking to his counterpart in the Luftwaffe than to an ageing prop in the Ministry of Information. It was Aesop, the eagle talking to the mole.

  MOGGIE: There weren’t really airmen last time, were there, not to speak of.

  HUGH: It’s just like a house game at school. The people having a good time on the field while one stood shivering on the touchline, having to cheer.

  MOGGIE: You do talk bloody nonsense, sometimes.

  NURSIE: Just because you’re in the WVS doesn’t mean you’re allowed to swear.

  HUGH: One day people will think that it was just a war like all the others.

  NURSIE: Takes two to make a quarrel.

  MOGGIE: Don’t talk such rubbish. Just like any other. Not this time. It’s not like last time.

  HUGH: Not this time. It’s always not this time.

  MOGGIE: I haven’t time to argue. I’m on late turn. I don’t wonder you get depressed, you smoke too much.

  (CHARTERIS alters the hymn board to 1914.)

  LECTERN: June, 1914. Osbert Sitwell visits a Palmist. Nearly all my brother officers of my own age had been two or three months earlier in that year of 1914 to see a celebrated palmist of the period, whom, I remember, it was said, with what justification I am unaware, Winston Churchill used to consult. My friends, of course, used to visit her in the hope of being told that their love affairs would prosper, when they would marry or the direction in which their later careers would develop. In each instance it appears the cheiromant had begun to read their fortunes, when in sudden bewilderment, she had thrown the outstretched hand from her, crying ‘I don’t understand it. It’s the same thing again. After two or three months the line of life stops short and I can read nothing.’ To each individual to whom it was said this seemed merely an excuse she had improvised for her failure: but when I was told by four or five persons of the same experience I wondered what it could portend. But nothing could happen … nothing. (Osbert Sitwell. ‘Great Morning’.)

  BOYS: (In chorus offstage)

  They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.

  TEMPEST: Remember them because they had in a measure rich and abundant the quality of grace … grace of body, grace of manner, grace of movement. It was an awfully careless grace, bred out of money and leisure and the assurance they gave. And I do not suppose it would find much favour today.

  FRANKLIN: Edward Horner, Raymond Asquith, Shaw-Stewart and the Grenfells… they were not passionately concerned with the shortcomings of the world. It was still too rich and enthralling a place for them to find much fault with it, ‘that great free world in which comity prevailed’. (As FRANKLIN has mentioned their names, the faces of Edward Horner, Raymond Asquith, and their fellows have appeared on the B.P. screen.)

  HEADMASTER: Like a hundred or so young men of my acquaintance I had spent the evening of August 3rd, 1914, dutifully dancing to Mr Casani’s band at Dorchester House. Dutifully because it was the end of the season and the weather sultry. I was bored and longed to be in Scotland. ‘We’re cutting,’ said Edward Horner as we came up from the supper-room. He had had a fancy to hear the nightingales down at Kimber, and soon he, Julian and Billy Grenfell, Patrick Shaw-Stewart and myself were in the Grenfell motor shooting down Park Lane. It occurred to me as we passed the Achilles Statue that o
ne of the partners on my card whom I’d cut was Princess Lichnowsky, the wife of the German ambassador. But I would call the next day and apologize.

  And so through that short summer night we motored down the white roads into Kent.

  We have forgotten since how strong and fresh and pure was in those days the first sensation of speed. But ours was the generation to discover it. Our parents did not know it. Our children … such of us who survived to have them … took it for granted. In that open car, running down to Kimber at thirty miles an hour, it was as if we had been made sensible of the very force of life itself. We walked up through Kimber Park to find the house locked and shuttered for the summer. But the latch of the nursery window was broken, as it always had been for as long as I could remember, and we broke into the silent house. Here still were all the pictures I remembered from the countless Kimber holidays of my childhood. The Arming of the King, The Piper of Dreams, A Little Child Shall Lead Them, For He Had Spoken Lightly Of A Woman’s Name.

  And then through the house, Patrick breaking back the tall shutters as we went, furniture sheeted, drugget down, chandeliers done up in bags, and moonlight like frost about the room. On an impulse I pulled back the white porcelain handle of the bell by a fireplace and heard, far away across the court in the deserted kitchen, a faint answering ring. We filed up the staircase, to the galleries and the state rooms, and through the bright chestnut varnish of the night nursery to the housekeeper’s door where I had not been since I was a child and all the house was my province. It opened on to the maid’s corridor, a narrow strip of carpet running away over the wide uneven boards under the ribs of the house, still close and heavy with the afternoon heat.

  (Back projection of the turrets and towers of a great country house against a midsummer sky. As this photograph appears, we see four of the boys, dressed in white tie and tails, lounging on the gallery in front of the screen like the subjects of the HEADMASTER’s memoir.)

  We climbed out onto the leads among the turrets and towers and the green copper cupola. I remember the weather vane’s shrill singing in the breeze, the lanyard slapping the mast as Julian Grenfell broke the square medieval flag above the dark house. I would like to think that up there on the leads at Kimber, where within months I should stand to hear the guns in France, I would like to think that on that summer night in 1914 the shiver I felt was one of foreboding. But if I shivered I fear it was only because it was the hour before dawn and cold up there on the roof. And if I felt a shadow come across the moment, it was only because, young, rich, and as I see now, happy, I could afford melancholy. For another day, another ball had ended and life had not yielded up its secret. ‘This time,’ I always thought as I tied my tie. ‘Perhaps this time.’ But there would be other nights and time yet, I thought. And so we waited on that short midsummer night and a deer barked and our footsteps were dull on the leads. And then as the light seeped back into the sky, suddenly, just before dawn, we heard the nightingales.

  (As the nightingales sing, above them we hear the rumble of the Flanders guns and the lights go up slowly to reveal the boys, grouped on the stairs in their cadet corps uniforms, the doomed youth of the 1914–18 War. Full light.

  MATRON bangs down a crate of milk at the side of the stage.)

  MATRON: There’s milk for those who want it. Line up by forms. Lower forms first.

  (The BOYS break formation and begin to chatter and come down the steps as the curtain falls.)

  CURTAIN

  ACT TWO

  It is the interval of the School Play. On the open stage, the staff and boys are standing about talking. Boys are drinking milk, sitting up on the galleries with their legs dangling through or lounging about the Claridge’s set. One boy has a jug of coffee, another a plate of biscuits.

  MATRON: Headmaster, can I replenish you?

  HEADMASTER: Just a modicum, Matron, thank you.

  MATRON: You’ll be shedding a few quiet tears tonight, Headmaster, handing over the ship after so long.

  HEADMASTER: Retirement offers its own challenge. Matron. A chance to take up the slack of the mind, savour the rich broth of a lifetime’s experience. Of course I’m not going far. I want to be within striking distance of the boys… biting your nails, Leadbetter? Have you no moral sense at all?

  MATRON: I don’t know what Mr Franklin will do without you.

  HEADMASTER: Don’t you? The first thing he will do is abolish corporal punishment, the second thing he’ll do is abolish compulsory games. And the third thing he’ll do is abolish the cadet corps. Those are the three things liberal schoolmasters always do, Matron, the first opportunity they get. They think it makes the sensitive boys happy. In my experience sensitive boys are never happy anyway, so what is the point. Excuse me. (He has seen two boys who have donned gas-masks and are larking about with them, running at each other like bulls. He suddenly comes between them and peers in through the talc.) Skinner! Tupper! (SKINNER and TUPPER are not in fact the boys in the gas-masks, but are up to no good in the gallery where, hearing their names, they stand up guiltily.)

  SKINNER: Here, sir!

  TUPPER:

  (The HEADMASTER is nonplussed.)

  HEADMASTER: No. No. I know those ears. Filthy! Wigglesworth. Cartwright. You can just stay like that the pair of you, until I tell you to take them off.

  Somewhere, somehow, somebody is smoking. It’s you boy, isn’t it?

  CHARTERIS: No, sir.

  HEADMASTER: No, sir? You mean, yes, sir.

  CHARTERIS: No, sir.

  HEADMASTER: (Picking him up and shaking him) Don’t bully me, sir. Smoking stunts the growth. Oh, it’s you, Matron.

  MATRON: (Offering him a cigarette) Do you indulge in this appalling habit?

  HEADMASTER: No. Certainly not.

  MATRON: Quite right. Wish I didn’t. Bit of a change from Fairbrother, all this. A far cry from Dear Octopus.

  HEADMASTER: It is. It is. I suppose it’s for the best.

  MATRON: I’m sure it is.

  HEADMASTER: I wish I were.

  MATRON: Ah, the lusty Wimpenny. What’s the ginger nut situation like?

  HEADMASTER: If you’re going to take the radical step and throw Dodie Smith out of the window, warts and all, as it were, you’ve got to have something to put in her place.

  MATRON: We had got into a rut though.

  HEADMASTER: Perhaps. But the advantage with ruts, Matron, is that when one is in them one knows exactly where one is.

  RUMBOLD: Matron!

  MATRON: Oh, Christmas. Dishforth is being sick again. I must be about my errands of mercy. Get his head between his knees. Not your knees, Rumbold.

  MISS NISBITT: I wonder, are there any windows open. It’s terribly hot. All these boys take up far more oxygen than they should. Mr Franklin, I wonder if you’ve nothing better to do, could you open one of the windows?

  FRANKLIN: Why don’t you take that thick cardigan off?

  MISS NISBITT: If I did that, I shouldn’t feel the benefit.

  TEMPEST: One of the fundamental principles upon which human society is based, Wimpenny, is that people do not comb their hair over the ginger nuts.

  WIMPENNY: They’re digestives, sir.

  TEMPEST: You’ll be digestives too if I catch you. Desist.

  MISS NISBITT: Do you think anybody would be offended if I opened a button of my blouse?

  TEMPEST: Have a care, Miss Nisbitt, lest you unleash forces you are powerless to control. Matron, you dark horse. Who would ever have suspected that beneath that starched front lay such histrionic talent.

  MATRON: Oh go on with you.

  TEMPEST: You’re wasted among your liniments and your embrocation, Molly. Fate intended you for something better. As it did me, I think.

  MATRON: Tell you something that struck a chord in this old heart, that business on Primrose Hill. Gosh yes. Some of the brightest pages in life’s book were written up there, you know, during the war in 36 Ack Ack Battery. I somehow seemed to come into my own round about then. Th
e thing was, we were doing an absolutely essential job and enjoying it like hell. The battery commander was one Ron Prentiss. Sweet soul. Sweet sou!, but so cheeky. I got quite silly about him. Me! Like a little fox terrier he was. I don’t know, before the war boys were always put off by my fat legs. Came the war, nobody seemed to care whether you had fat legs or not. I suppose like everything else fat legs get swallowed up in the larger issue. Those tense days in the summer of 1940 when we really thought the Hun would be here any minute. He really helped me to discover myself, did Ron. Widened my horizons terribly. It was under his auspices I had mv first cigarette. Then in slack periods when we weren’t busy drawing a bead on the Foe we’d adjourn to the local hostelry for a festive gin and tonic. Golly it was nice.

  TEMPEST: War is a strange alchemist.

  MATRON: Hey ho!

  (FRANKLIN comes across the TWO BOYS standing waiting in their gas-masks.)

  FRANKLIN: And what may I ask are you two comedians doing? If you don’t get those gas-masks off in three seconds flat, you’ll be wearing them all night.

  Sorry, Headmaster, did I balk you of your prey.

  HEADMASTER: Would it be impossibly naive and old-fashioned of me to ask what it is you are trying to accomplish in this impudent charade?

  FRANKLIN: You could say that we are trying to shed the burden of the past.

  HEADMASTER: Shed it? Why must we shed it? Why not shoulder it? Memories are not shackles, Franklin, they are garlands.

  FRANKLIN: We’re too tied to the past. We want to be free to look to the future. The future comes before the past.

  HEADMASTER: Nonsense. The future comes after the past.

  Otherwise it couldn’t be the future. Mind you, I liked that last bit, the bit that I read. Was it true?

  FRANKLIN: Truth is a matter of opinion, really, isn’t it, Headmaster?

  HEADMASTER: Did they actually go down there to that country house?

  FRANKLIN: No.

  HEADMASTER: Oh, so it was a lie.

  FRANKLIN: It was a lie in the true sense of the word.

  HEADMASTER: You still like to sail a bit close to the knuckle, don’t you? It won’t be for much longer. It’s very easy to be daring and outspoken, Franklin, but once you’re at the helm the impetus will pass. Authority is a leaden cope. You will be left behind, however daring and outspoken you are. You will be left behind, just as I have been left behind. Though when you have fallen as far behind as I have, you become a character. The mists of time lend one a certain romance. One thing at least I can say. While I have been Headmaster, Albion House has always been a going concern. Whether that will continue I am not sure. It depends on you, Franklin. But I am not sure of anything nowadays. I am lost. I am adrift. Everywhere one looks, decadence. I saw a bishop with a moustache the other day.