Alan Bennett: Plays, Volume 1

by Alan Bennett

  FRANKLIN: It had to come.

  Molly, see if you can get the Old Man out of the way for the first bit or he’ll be breezing on to the stage again.

  MATRON: Headmaster, I wonder if you’d come up to the San and have a look at Dishforth. Not a pleasant sight at the best of times, but he’s a bit on the pasty side.

  HEADMASTER: Can I be spared?

  FRANKLIN: I think we’ll just about manage.

  HEADMASTER: Very well, if all the parents are back in their seats I’ll just inaugurate the proceedings. If I don’t say a prayer nobody else will. Lord, take this cup from me. Thank you, Lord.

  LORD: You’re welcome.

  HEADMASTER: Don’t be cheeky.

  O God, who has given unto each one of us a part to play in this great drama we call life, help us so to sustain our roles that when the lights of life go down and the last curtain falls we may put off the motley of self and the raiment of sin and take our place at last in that great chorus line of saints ever more praising Thee around the glassy sea.

  BOY: Hear, hear.

  HEADMASTER: It is customary, Wimpenny, to say Amen at the end of prayers, not hear hear. That is heresy, and also, impudence.

  And remember, this is the School play. You are not here to enjoy yourselves.

  FRANKLIN: Still less, each other. Skinner, Tupper. (CHARTERIS alters the hymn board to 1918.

  Boys enter and garland the War Memorial with wreaths.

  The SCHOOLMASTER stands before the War Memorial as we hear the rumble of guns.)

  LECTERN: The splendour falls on castle walls

  And snowy summits, old in story:

  The long light shakes across the lakes,

  And the wild cataract leaps in glory.’

  BOYS: (Offstage)

  ‘Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying

  Blow bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying-

  (A horn call offstage.)

  BOYS: (On stage)

  ‘O love, they die in yon rich sky,

  They faint on hill or field or river:

  Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

  And grow for ever and for ever.’

  (Another horn call as the rumble of guns grows louder.)

  SCHOOLMASTER: What are you eating, boy?

  MACILWAINE: A sweet, sir.

  HEADMASTER: Do you hear that, boy?

  MACILWAINE: Yes, sir.

  SCHOOLMASTER: And do you know what it is?

  MACILWAINE: Yes, sir. It’s the guns in Flanders, sir.

  SCHOOLMASTER: Precisely. Young men are not busy laying down their lives in Flanders simply that you may eat sweets, particularly in my lesson. Always we must be worthy. Worthy of those who die. It is for us that they are going down into the river and they are watching us from the farther bank. How can we be worthy? We can make a start by not eating sweets in class and we can follow it up, Foster, by not passing notes to the boy in front.

  FOSTER: Will it be over before it’s our turn, sir?

  SCHOOLMASTER: That depends on you, Foster. The army is not yet so depleted in numbers that it will take someone who cannot master Latin gerundives. Take this down.

  ‘If the ten million dead of the 1914–18 War were to march in column of fours into the gates of death, they would take eighty days and eighty nights to pass through, and for eight days and eight nights the marchers would be the British dead.’ In the light of that information, I want you to calculate (1) the width of the gates of death to the nearest centimetre and (2) the speed in miles per hour at which the column was marching.

  (The Rugger hearties again are heard singing to the tune of ‘For those in Peril on the Sea’.)

  RUGGER HEARTIES:

  It nearly broke the family’s heart

  When Lady Jane became a tart

  But blood is blood and race is race

  And so to save the family’s face

  They bought a most secluded beat

  The shady side of Jermyn Street.

  (TREDGOLD walks round the gallery singing the second verse against the more distant sound of the other hearties. Towards the end of the verse the HEADMASTER appears and stalks him.)

  RUGGER HEARTIES:

  For six months she was doing well

  With a most exclusive clientele

  And it was rumoured without malice

  She had a regular from the Palace.

  And so before the sun had set

  She’d shagged her way right through Debrett.

  HEADMASTER: That’s quite enough, you boys. Quite enough.

  (The third verse is only partially heard and tails off into the distance.)

  RUGGER HEARTIES:

  It was not to the family’s fancy

  When Lord de Vere became a Nancy

  And so in order to protect him

  They had tattooed upon his rectum:

  The working class must travel steerage.

  This passage is reserved for peerage.

  (HUGH and MOGGIE are dancing to the music of Carol Gibbons, NURSIE is watching.)

  MOGGIE: A woman at the canteen said that her son, who’s in the Ministry of Food, says that it’s common knowledge that Hitler died six months ago. Only it’s being hushed up.

  HUGH: The Times Correspondent says that air raids are having a serious effect on bridge.

  MOGGIE: Lyndoe in the People says they won’t invade until Venus is under Capricorn.

  HUGH: When’s that?

  MOGGIE: 1947.

  HUGH: A man has been arrested in Epsom for signalling to German planes with a lighted cigarette.

  MOGGIE: Apparently they’ve tried one invasion already. They say that –

  MOGGIE: (Together) The Channel was white with bodies

  HUGH

  MOGGIE: They say that some of the Luftwaffe pilots who’ve been shot down were wearing lipstick and rouge.

  HUGH: A German agent has reported that London is now so demoralized that titled ladies are relieving themselves in Hyde Park.

  NURSIE: And there was a nun on my bus today paid her fare with a man’s hand.

  (NURSIE puts various plates on a tray.)

  What’s the matter with that bit?

  HUGH: It’s burnt.

  NURSIE: ‘Course it’s burnt. It’s to make your hair curl. And you haven’t eaten your cabbage. Cabbage is bottled sunshine.

  HUGH: I walked through Bloomsbury this morning. It’s really caught it this time. Glass on the pavements thick as autumn leaves in Vallombrosa.

  MOGGIE: Better the devil you know. If Hitler hadn’t done it, London University would.

  HUGH: Half Tavistock Square is down, odd houses knocked out here and there like teeth. Just a mirror hanging high up on a wall where once was 52. And somebody’s coat on a peg in an attic.

  MOGGIE: They were appealing down at the Canteen for us to ask soldiers in for a bath.

  NURSIE: I wouldn’t fancy that. They might be dirty.

  (CHARTERIS alters the hymn board to 1922,)

  LECTERN: Leonard Woolf and the Beginnings of Bloomsbury: ‘In March, 1922, we started the Memoir Club and on March 6th we met in Gordon Square, dined together, and listened to or read our memoirs. The original thirteen members of the Memoir Club identical with the original thirteen members of Old Bloomsbury, were all intimate friends and it was agreed we should be absolutely frank in what we wrote and read.’ (Leonard Woolf. Downhill All The Way.)

  TEMPEST: In the twenties and subsequent thirties the pinnacle of every young man’s literary ambition was to be invited to one of Virginia Woolfs Sunday morning soirées. These were invariably held at her home, No. 52 Tavistock Square, where I was a frequent visitor for I was distantly related to the Woolf family through some Alsatian cousins. The door of No. 52 was invariably opened by the maid, George, a friend of Lytton Strachey’s who would show one upstairs. I can see that room now, full of talk and smoke and people. And what extraordinary people they were. Eliot was there, Auden, Spender and Isherwood, the old faithfuls and young h
opefuls, but always there was someone one never quite expected to see. I saw A. E. Housman there once, lured down from Cambridge by Dadie Rylands and the prospect of All-In Wrestling at Finsbury Park.

  There by the window talking to Leonard and Virginia were the Berlins, Irving and Isaiah. And then there was Virginia herself elegant and quizzical, those great nostrils quivering and the sunlight playing over her long pale face. She never used cosmetics, except to powder her nose. But then she had her father’s nose. She was talking of her contemporaries, how she had spoken last week with Hemingway and how Ernest had said, When I reach for my gun, I hear the word culture. How easy it seemed for them, she thought and how hard it was for her. For she must always be asking, What is Life like. Life is like … Life is just … a bowl of cherries… was that it? No, for someone else had said that, and besides it was false to the whole nature of reality. Some of her books disappointed, vitiated by her intense feminism. Virginia was never a suffragette, for she subscribed to the theory that the pen was mightier than the sword and I once saw Evelyn Waugh reel under a savage blow from her Parker 51. Of all the honours that fell upon Virginia’s head, none, I think, pleased her more than the Evening Standard Award for the Tallest Woman Writer of 1927, an award she took by a neck from Elizabeth Bowen. And rightly, I think, for she was in a very real sense the tallest writer I have ever known. Which is not to say that her stories were tall. They were not. They were short. But she did stand head and shoulders above her contemporaries, and sometimes of course, much more so. Dylan Thomas for instance, a man of great literary stature, only came up to her waist. And sometimes not even to there. If I think of Virginia now it is as she was when I last saw her in the spring of 1938 outside the changing rooms in the London Library. There she stood, all flushed and hot after a hard day’s reading. Impulsively perhaps I went up to her and seized her hand. ‘It’s Mrs Woolf, isn’t it?’ ‘Is it?’ she said and looked at me out of those large limpid eyes. ‘Is it? I often wonder,’ and she wandered away.

  HEADMASTER: Highbrow layabouts, that’s who they were. I have no time for them at all. The silly way of talking they had. How simply too extraordinary they used to say about the most humdrum occurrence. If you blew your nose it was exquisitely civilized. Darwins and Huxleys and Stephens and Stracheys, all living in one another’s pockets and marrying each other. And they were all socialists. Why is it always the intelligent people who are socialists? (Two BOYS sing one verse of the song ‘Little Sir Echo’. MOGGIE is bandaging NURSIE’s arm, according to instructions from a St John’s Ambulance Brigade book.)

  MOGGIE: Hold your arm up, Nursie. It’s supposed to be broken.

  NURSIE: But it hurts.

  MOGGIE: It would hurt if it was broken Keep still.

  NURSIE: What is it for?

  MOGGIE: My nursing course.

  NURSIE: Nursing course! In my day nurses had better things to do than bandage their nannies.

  (HUGH is reading a letter.)

  HUGH: Christopher says ‘The country is rather like Aldershot, all sand and pine trees and what bit I can see of it very uninviting, so I shan’t miss the walks.’

  MOGGIE: He won’t like being a prisoner of war.

  HUGH: ‘I don’t mind being a prisoner of war. It’s not half as bad as school really and the food slightly better. There are seven old Marlburians in my hut … (MOGGIE smiles happily.) … which is rather a bore. They display to the full a disgusting capacity for making the best of a bad job. Tell Nursie I’m wearing her socks.’

  MOGGIE: He’s wearing your socks, Nursie.

  NURSIE: I could have knitted half-a-dozen pairs while I’ve been stuck here being bandaged. There’s no call to throttle me.

  HUGH: ‘A disturbingly high proportion of my fellows appears to welcome incarceration as a longed-for opportunity to dress up as chorus girls. Meanwhile the rest burrow fruitlessly under the foundations. Given half a chance the English revert with sickening alacrity to their schooldays. Those bracing phrases I thought to have heard the last of when my headmaster’s door closed behind me ring out new minted on the alien air of Silesia … pulling one’s weight, letting the side down, putting a face on it. However, I find I am kept quite busy lying on my bed all day, sleeping. And also reading, an activity which is regarded as mildly eccentric. Would you please send me any copies of this Horizon magazine you come across. Much love. Christopher.’

  MOGGIE: Of course, he’s joking, isn’t he?

  NURSIE: Joking indeed and him a prisoner of war. He ought to be ashamed of himself. There’s a time and a place for everything.

  MOGGIE: It does seem a very cheerful letter. He doesn’t seem to mind quite as much as he might do. Does he mention the bestiality of the Germans at all?

  HUGH: Not in so many words.

  MOGGIE: But it’s there between the lines, don’t you think. I wish he’d tell us.

  NURSIE: If wishes were horses beggars could ride.

  MOGGIE: You don’t think … you don’t think they forced him to write at gunpoint like P. G. Wodehouse, do you. Just to undermine our morale? (CHARTERIS alters the hymn board to 1929.)

  HEADMASTER: (Reads from the lectern) May,1929. The Death of Lord Rosebery. On the evening of May 20th, 1929, Lord Rosebery sank into a coma and in the early hours of the morning of May 21st, with his son and Lady Leconfield by his bed he died. He had given instructions that a record of the Eton Boating Song was to be played as he died, and this wish was actually carried out, although it is doubtful if he heard the haunting music, redolent of hot summer afternoons, the quiet laughter of friends and the golden days of his young manhood.’

  (BOYS sing the ‘Eton Boating Song’ under the lectern reading.)

  SCHOOLMASTER: Now you’re sure you’ve got the Catechism all buttoned up, Foster?

  FOSTER: I’m still a bit hazy about the Trinity, sir.

  SCHOOLMASTER: Three in one, one in three, perfectly straightforward. Any doubts about that see your maths master.

  FOSTER: Yes, sir.

  SCHOOLMASTER: Well, Foster, here at St Onan’s I usually try to make my last Confirmation Class rather more of a personal chat than a theological thing. Now Foster … look, we’ve been through the 39 Articles together, we know each other pretty well, I don’t want to go on calling you Foster. What’s your nickname? What do your friends call you?

  FOSTER: Nitbags, sir.

  SCHOOLMASTER: Well, Foster, what I want to tackle now is this problem of your body. Now your body is laid out on fairly simple straightforward lines, isn’t it? You’ve got your two arms, and your two legs, here’s that valiant worker the heart and his two stout cronies the lungs. It’s all pretty straightforward.

  FOSTER: Yes, sir.

  SCHOOLMASTER: And here we come to the crux. You’re not embarrassed about this are you, Foster. There’s no need to be embarrassed about it. You’re a bright observant sort of lad, you’ve probably noticed when you’ve been slipping into your togs or getting into your little jim-jams, that when you get down here things aren’t straightforward at all?

  FOSTER: Yes, sir.

  SCHOOLMASTER: Good, good. And I suppose you must have wondered how it is that God, who by and large made such a splendid job of the rest of your little body, made such a bosh shot at that particular bit?

  FOSTER: Yes, sir.

  SCHOOLMASTER: Well, I agree with you. But God, whatever else He is, and of course He is everything else, is not a fool. It’s not pretty, but it was put there for a purpose. Point taken, Foster?

  FOSTER: Yes, sir.

  SCHOOLMASTER: Good, well I think that clears up any doubts you might have had on that particular subject. Just one moment, Foster. I know you’re a bit of a scallywag… anything I say to you will probably just go up one trouser leg and down the other. But remember this. That particular piece of apparatus we’ve been exploring is called your private parts. And they’re called that for a reason. It’s not that they’re anything to be ashamed of. They’re not… though they’re not anything to be proud of either. T
hey are private because they are yours and yours alone. (He moves his chair nearer the boy’s.) And you should keep them to yourself. (And nearer still.) If anyone else touches you there that person is wicked. (He places his hand on FOSTER’s knee.) No matter who it is, you should say to him that belongs to me. It is my property. You have no business to touch it.

  FOSTER: That belongs to me and you have no business to touch it.

  SCHOOLMASTER: Doesn’t apply to me, Foster. (Hitting him.) Doesn’t apply to me.

  HEADMASTER: This has gone too far. Tempest, not another word shall you utter. Franklin. I am going to put my foot down. You, boy, get off the stage before you are irredeemably corrupted. Do you defy me, sir. Off. Franklin. Where are you. Don’t sulk. Oh, you’ve gone too far this time. Tempest!

  TEMPEST: Don’t blame me, Headmaster. I’m an executant merely.

  HEADMASTER: If you’re not on the stage by the time I count three, Franklin …. (FRANKLIN stands up. He has been on the stage all the time.)

  FRANKLIN: Sir.

  HEADMASTER: Don’t you sir me, sir. What do you mean by it?

  FRANKLIN: What is it this time, exactly?

  HEADMASTER: This … this farrago of libel, blasphemy and perversion. Make no mistake about it, Franklin: God is not mocked. And even if He is, I’m not. Fouling the nest, the lot of you. You, Matron. A fellow of the St John’s Ambulance Brigade! You disappoint me.

  MISS NISBITT: (Still in her NURSIE character) I think somebody got out of the wrong side of the …