by Alan Bennett
Still, the most bigoted clergyman would have been gratified by the degree to which I translate these longings into action, i.e. not at all. The objects of my affection are never aware of the place they hold in my heart, or that I am so primed with the details of their existence that I can at any moment of the day pinpoint their whereabouts. But so remote am I, and so aloof, they may not even think of me as a friend. None long to know me as I long to know them; all are normal, as I think of it; none, as I also think of it, are queer.
Though I know in my heart I am not mistaken, I still cling to the hope that these feelings (the feelings I have had for as long as I can remember) are ‘just a phase’, that this is a stage everybody goes through, and since at fifteen I am still technically a boy, not yet having achieved puberty, I kid myself there is still time.
What could trip the switch that will divert me from one sex to the other, I do not speculate. I try and pretend to myself there are girls I find attractive, but there aren’t, and none find me attractive; but since our school is not co-educational, there’s not much chance to find out.
The incentive, though, is always to be ‘normal’, or at least (as in so many other departments) like everyone else. Still, there is a part of me that takes pride in the fact that, for all its miseries, not being normal is to have been singled out, though for what, except continuing frustration and unhappiness, I find it hard to say.
I study as if they are code books the works of writers I have been told are homosexual, though of course they cannot at this time openly admit it. There is Stephen Spender, whose autobiography World Within World is on this score thought rather daring, though I am puzzled that he has subsequently got married. How could this be, homosexuality, as I see it, some sort of Devil’s Island from which there is no escape? There is Auden, about whom I am not sure, though a careful study of the pronouns in the love poems seems to indicate that his affections might just go either way. There is Denton Welch, who is a little over-sensitive for my taste, and who, like me, seems only to gaze. Most satisfactorily, though, there is A. E. Housman, whose affections are unspoken (or spoken of as unspoken), which is what mine always are, and who regards love as a doomed enterprise, right from the start. Of his life and the object of his affections I know nothing, but as I roam the streets of Headingley in 1950 I feel he is the one I might tell it to, though what this ‘it’ was I would have been hard put to say.
As it is, I share my shameful secret with no one, though I have a friend at church, Robert Butterfield, who is older than I am, and who seems to take it for granted without being told, just as I know without being told that he is the same way. Did I not know, it would be hard to deduce from his demeanour, camp (at any rate in Leeds) not yet having been invented. Robert is so far from camp he’s actually dangerous, prone to sudden rages and denunciations, scathing pronouncements on friends’ characters that seem to me far too outspoken. Robert keeps a notebook and has unchanging, adult handwriting which I envy, mine large, obviously immature and changing from one day to the next. He has already done some of his National Service in the RAF, but has apparently been invalided out. He retains, though, a fondness for boots and heavy shoes which he keeps highly bulled. Religious, fond of music, and well read, he seems to have no job and lives at home, his brother and sister part of the same group of friends I belong to at St Michael’s Church.
Far and away the most sophisticated and knowing member of our group, he is worldly, mocking and above all grown up. He has come to some conclusions about his character, decided what he is and where he is going. I like to think I am like that too, but only need to compare our handwriting to know this is not the case. Still, he seems to know what I am like and when he sums up my character, not always favourably, I am nevertheless flattered. A mystery to myself, sloppy and longing for definition, it pleases me that someone should have some notion of what I am like, because I don’t.
We are both queer, that at least I do know, though I make him impatient because I am less resigned to it than he is, holding hands with the occasional girl (the furthest it ever gets), an effort at conformity he does not see the point of and which triggers off one of his rages.
Periodically he disappears, and it’s only later I find these unexplained absences are time spent in a local mental hospital. It’s not on this account, though, that we drift apart. I go into the army, and then am away at Oxford, so I see him very little. I am shocked, but somehow unsurprised, when in 1966 I hear that he has committed suicide.
It’s Robert who gets me to read Denton Welch’s journals, Stephen Spender’s World Within World and the early novels of Mary Renault, books which, if you spotted them on someone’s shelves, told you all you needed to know about their sexual proclivities. And told the police, too, though that might seem fanciful. But this is the 1950s, the period of the Montagu case and the suicide of the pianist Mewton-Wood, both casualties of the campaign against homosexuality conducted by the vicious and bigoted Home Secretary at the time, David Maxwell Fyfe. It’s hardly surprising if to someone as timid as I am the very act of falling in love seemed to put you on the wrong side of the law.
The sight of such tell-tale books in someone’s house ought then to signify safe ground: here at least there is no need for discretion. Perversely, never having chosen to be part of the homosexual club in the first place, I just wince at the implied complicity, and am bashful and ill at ease.
It’s the same later on in life, where I find myself occasionally invited to all-male parties and where I resent the assumptions about my character and inclinations such an invitation implies, and find the uninhibited talk both tedious and embarrassing. This duly marks me out as stuffy and closeted, which may well be true (and was certainly true then), but since homosexuality is a differentness I’ve never been prepared wholly to accept in myself, why, I think, should it be so readily taken for granted by others, and I want nothing of their covert camaraderie.
As I am writing this I notice outside my window a man standing on the corner. It’s nearly 1 o’clock, when the Hare Krishna van is due to park down the street in order to distribute free curry to the poor of the neighbourhood. Anticipating its arrival, a small crowd usually gathers, sitting on the edge of the pavement or lounging against the wall. The man on the corner obviously wants no part of this enforced conviviality, though he is as hungry and needy as the others. So now he waits, and when the van arrives and the queue subsides, having shown himself not too eager, and so set apart from the rest, he walks down the street to collect his lunch. That is me.
Whether my parents take note of these early torments, I never know. Nothing is ever said and I wonder if they even talk about it to each other. Only once does my father ask me outright if I am a homosexual, though not, it hardly needs to be said, in so many words, and in circumstances that now seem comic, though I do not think so then.
It is not until my first year in college that I become aware that there are fashions in clothes, a fact of life which, like other facts of life, the young nowadays seem aware of very much earlier than we were, the subtlest distinctions in footwear, for instance, now obvious to a ten-year-old.
With us, it is trousers. There had been no men’s fashions that I know of until the fifties. Women have had the New Look but there was nothing comparable for men, suits or sports coat and flannels the general rule. There are variations in quality, certainly, but no discernible differences in style. By the time I go up to Oxford this has begun to change, particularly in the trouser department; narrow trousers now very much the vogue. Unable to afford a tailored version, I take mine along to the only place in Headingley which does alterations, the local dry cleaners, but this fashion not yet having reached Leeds, the motherly lady who does the sewing is not cognisant of the look I am after, so when the trousers come back they are narrowed but only at the ankle, so that had I worn them I would have looked like a West Indian immigrant or a circus clown.
Eventually I go to a proper alteration tailor but they are puritanical a
bout it, refusing to take them in beyond a pretty conventional sixteen inches, when the least I am prepared to settle for is fifteen inches. It’s odd, the relationship between fashion and morals; at this time I have just begun to study medieval history and in the fourteenth century it was very much an issue, and in Leeds, it seems, it still is.
Despairing of finding an understanding seamstress I decide to have a go myself, and painstakingly chalk out the necessary line, and sew along it, taking them down to under fourteen inches round the ankle. In these extraordinary trousers, which must have made me look like the late Max Wall, I parade before my wondering parents.
‘You can’t go out like that,’ Mam said. ‘People will think you’re one of them.’
Whereupon Dad, who was even more shocked than she was, said (and the question must have had a long gestation), ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’
‘Oh, Dad,’ I think I replied, as if the question was absurd. ‘Don’t be daft.’
But I never wore the trousers.
To have lied like that ought to be shaming, even fifty years after the event. That it doesn’t shame me is because to have said ‘Yes, I am “one of them”’, or in today’s terms to have come out, would have made both of them deeply, and as I saw it needlessly, unhappy. Besides, if I am one of them, it is only in theory. Nothing has ever happened, except a persistent yearning for this friend or that. And had I said ‘Yes’, prey to the prejudices of their generation they would have assumed I hung around public lavatories, interfered with little boys, or even got done up in drag, none of which I ever have any inclination to do.
Whether my nonchalant and implied denial satisfied Dad or not, the subject was never raised again, not even much later in his life when I learned to talk to him more, and when, I suppose, it might have been possible. The incident, though, found its way into one of my TV plays, Me, I’m Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and the passage quoted at the head of this chapter, with Dad turned into Mam and me into Hopkins, a polytechnic lecturer, having tea together in the basement of Leeds Town Hall.
The irony is that, subject though my parents were to the prejudices of their own and succeeding generations, it didn’t mean that when they met someone as exuberantly homosexual as Russell Harty they weren’t captivated. He called them Walter and Lilian after just one meeting, the only one of my friends ever to use their first names; he played the piano while Dad accompanied him on the violin, and went round the house envying Mam her antiques and Staffordshire figures, and altogether delighting them both.
‘He’s grand, is that Russell,’ Dad said.
‘Well, he’s one of them,’ I ought to have said, but if I had they probably wouldn’t have minded. It was only if it got into the family that there was cause for concern.
MAM: There’s no sign of him getting off.
DAD: So? What you want to think is that it’s better for us if he doesn’t. Once he starts courting, there won’t be any more of these little runsto Harrogate. He won’t be fetching you flowers or following youround antique shops. Miss Right will put a stop to all that.
MAM: I wouldn’t want him not getting married just because of us.
DAD: I didn’t say it was because of us. I’m just saying, count yourblessings.
Pause.
DAD: I wonder where he goes out on a night for these walks? Wheredoes he go? Where is there to go?
(Cocktail Sticks)
In those days laden with smoke and dust, the skies over west Leeds produce dramatic sunsets, the lingering afterglow of which is often tinged with green. It is a spectacle that, in the early evening, will often draw me to the fringes of Beckett Park above the Aire Valley and a view that takes in the sky over Kirkstall and Armley. Which is what I try to do, too, take it in, though without knowing what it is I’m looking for, or why I feel the need to gaze.
Nor is it entirely wholehearted. I seldom look long enough, it seems to me, the impulse to stay or go never entirely resolved, and confronted with a mystery I cannot fathom or even adequately consider, my contemplation is impatient, insufficiently rapt and invariably curtailed. It’s partly that, ever timid, I know that a young man (in a raincoat probably) hanging about in a park at dusk, is open to misinterpretation. And it is always dusk: at the going down of the sun, yes; in the morning, never.
Still, these half-hearted appointments with the sunset sky are the start of writing. If I can manage to put the sky into words, get it down on paper, then, as I see it, I will be released from the unrest it makes me feel. So I come home and scribble down phrases like ‘hushed departure’, ‘sunset’s cooling fires’ or ‘the embers of the day’, wondering as I do if this, too, is just a phase as maybe love is. I show what I write to nobody.
It takes me years, though, to see that the heavens have no secret, at any rate for me, and that, however often I stand to for the sun’s departure, the sky’s sublimity will never be mine, and it’s not until well into my thirties I begin to lower my sights to what’s going on around me, and attend more to what I hear than what I see.
When I start to write, like Ruskin few of my thoughts are for my fellows, my teachers or the circumstances in which I find myself, none of which I attempt to describe.
Oh, that someone had but told me in my youth, when all my heart seemed to be set on these colours and clouds, that appear for a little and then vanish away, how little my love of them would serve me, when the silence of the lawn and wood in the dews of morning should be completed [sic]; and all my thoughts should be of those whom, by neither, I was to meet more.*
It is the moon I look at, or the last of the sun, but as for people, how they seem, how they talk, how they behave, where writing is concerned none of this comes into it.
I do, on the other hand, notice the city. For all so much of Leeds is soot-covered and black there is an astonishing range of colour and texture in its brick and stone. The setts which pave so many of the streets (and, underneath the asphalt, still do) are for most of the time greasy and black, but after a storm glow with all the assorted colours of the stone, and even the acres of red brick and slate roof take on a richness and a shine.
Charles Ginner, who did many paintings of Leeds, catches both the colour and the grimness. The York stone pavements, now coveted, and indeed looted to grace southern patios and gardens, are another source of colour, and the eroded sandstone walls even more so. So in the evenings when I walk my lonely walks round Headingley and Woodhouse, dull though I think it all is and a place from which I long to be away, yet I can see this is a handsome and gracious city still, though not knowing then that I am seeing the last of it.
But the impulse to gaze never lets up. Oxford, Venice, New York at dusk, the line of the fells above Ribblesdale: ‘Look at the light,’ I say, but I don’t, or not for long enough, anyway. And it persists. Driving through the outskirts of Leeds on Friday nights nowadays I often stop on Eccup Lane and look across to Cookridge, where the sun has just set. I am as I was fifty years ago, and in the same place, all my writing behind me and no nearer taking it in. And no nearer knowing what the ‘it’ is either.
ANDY: Have you ever thought what’s happened to all the shy people? What became of them all of a sudden?
GEORGE: Right.
ANDY: Whatever happened to reserve, Dad, and self-consciousness? Was it your government that got rid of guilt? Tell me this, Dad. How is it easier, how is it easier to reach out and touch someone for the first time? Why is it easier for me now than it was for you, then, whenever that was? Because that’s the irreducible fact.
(Getting On)
‘Our Alan’s like us,’ Mam would say. ‘Shy.’ And it is both boast and excuse, but with the pride uppermost, because though shyness is an elusive virtue there is no doubt in my mother’s mind that it is a virtue, or at least has merit attaching to it.
So shy is passed on to me as it is not to my brother, as part of my inheritance. Nor do I question her assessment, seeing shy as she intends, as a mark of approval, a blessing on being blushing,
bashful and diffident. That I may sometimes long to be none of these things hardly matters, as so do my parents, though they are able to blame their shyness as I never can on ‘not having been educated’. I have nothing to blame it on at all, except possibly them. But that comes later. For the moment, shyness is the mark of a natural aristocracy to which I am deemed to belong, and though there is nothing socially superior about it (my father belongs to it after all) I take to the idea a bit too readily, happy to have my social shortcomings thus legitimised and my boyish character defined.
In Mam’s vocabulary shy is adjacent to, and almost interchangeable with, sensitive … shy and sensitive belonging to a cluster of associated adjectives (refined, nicely spoken, unassuming) that she intends as high praise, though it’s notable that none of them have masculinity to the fore, and with all of them saying ‘No threat’.
They are qualities, though, that she detects in reassuringly high places; she thinks the King has a sensitive face, for instance (which perhaps explains his stammer), and also Anthony Eden (bullied by Churchill, though she is not to know that). ‘He looks a sensitive feller,’ she says of the Foreign Secretary, ‘very refined,’ which is what she will often say of someone, generally a man, who combines sensitivity with a bit of class. It means quiet, fastidious, educated probably (though not invariably) and generally with a degree of suffering etched on the face. Thus the actor Robert Donat is thought of as sensitive (by virtue of his asthma), Ronald Colman refined, Laurence Olivier less so; Clark Gable, no; Leslie Howard, yes. Writers tend to be refined by dint of their profession, though some (Beverley Nichols) are more refined than others (J. B. Priestley). I suspect she may have thought my father refined when she first met him: quiet, violin-playing, and certainly not a typical butcher, besides being, as she always says, ‘lovely looking when he was younger’.
