by Alan Bennett
Lauren Bacall, Gene Tierney, Laraine Day: here they all were in the un-cinematographic flesh, more worn perhaps than when we had first met in the ninepennies but still cool, still sceptical (and still smoking, very often), though they were grandmothers now as they piled their plates at the buffet table. How say I had last seen them aged eight at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road, though I fear I sometimes tried – to be met with a patient, practised smile.
Arnold Weissberger was a keen photographer, at any rate of celebrities. Indeed, he later published a book of photographs of the famous people in his life. You might hope to get away from the party unobserved but Arnold would have spotted you and followed you into the bedroom where the coats were left. Following him would come his tiny mother, who seldom left Arnold’s side. And there, sometimes with his mother, he would snap you looking slightly startled and with the mountain of coats in the background. Thus it is I have a photograph of myself, just having put on my coat, and beside me is Joan Collins, though this was before she was Joan Collins and so not someone worth writing home about.
There were parties, too, when Arnold came to London, generally with his longtime partner Milton Goldman. They were held in the Savoy and were notorious for being graded according to reputation: the most famous or the eminently successful were invited on the A night, the less so on the B night and on the C night one could practically wander in from the street. I only once made the A night, shortly after Forty Years On had opened. The Burtons were there: it was not long after their marriage (or one of their marriages) and not seeing a chair handy Elizabeth Taylor, whom I had met in John Gielgud’s dressing room at the theatre, perched briefly on my knee.
This was for me such an atypical situation that I find myself wondering whether I am recalling it correctly: did she sit on my knee or did I sit on hers? But this cannot have been (how would I have dared?), though I’m sure her knee would have been more comfortable than mine.
Oddly, this was not the first time I had figured in the Burton story and in a curiously similar capacity. When we had been in New York playing Beyond the Fringe we had got to know Burton’s first (or at any rate current) wife, Sybil. She was jolly, domestic, very Welsh and living in a vast apartment on the West Side. One Sunday in 1963 she phoned and asked me if I would go with her to a film premiere at the 59th Street cinema.
Whatever partner she had been planning to go with must have cried off. I doubt it was Burton himself: he and Sybil were long past picture-going by this time. It would probably have been somebody Welsh, as the evening had a strong Celtic flavour, and in my memory the film was The Criminal with Stanley Baker. What I did not know, but presumably Sybil did, was that this was the day Burton had chosen to announce his divorce from Sybil. It followed that her companion had to be chosen with care, had not to be someone with whom Sybil could conceivably be thought of as conducting a liaison of her own.
Had I even the smallest liaison potential and certainly had I been something (or indeed anything) of a hunk, my presence would have been noted by the columnists who were in the audience and the photographers who were outside. As it was, nobody even noticed me: Sybil might have been there by herself. Nor was there any going on to supper or the party afterwards. I slipped away, leaving Sybil to Stanley Baker and other expatriate Celts.
In retrospect I see these two brushes with the Burtons as having a certain symmetry. One wife hitting on me as a suitably flavourless companion for the evening, the other sitting on me as a knee that would raise no eyebrows, both made me a prop in the drama of their lives far more interesting and celebrated than my own. I was, it should be said, an entirely willing prop, flattered to have had even such a small part to play in this legendary love story. Such brushes with the famous do have a name. That Elizabeth Taylor once sat on my knee is what in the Edwardian slang of the Baring family would have been called ‘a Shelley plain’ (after Browning’s ‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?’), an unlooked-for and even incongruous contact with the great.
However, that was not why the evening stuck in my memory, as I remember little of the film or of Sybil’s mood or whether I even knew of the events in which I was playing a walk-on part. What made my heart beat faster was that while Sybil, the about to be ex-Mrs Burton, was sitting on my right, on my left was Myrna Loy.
I had no notion as a child that going to the pictures was a kind of education, or that I was absorbing a twice-weekly lesson in morality. The first film I remember being thought of as ‘improving’ was Henry V, which, during our brief sojourn in Guildford, was playing permanently at Studio 1 at the Marble Arch end of Oxford Street. I saw it, though, with my primary school at the local Odeon in Guildford, and that it was meant to be educational did not stop it being, for me, magical, particularly the transition from the confines and painted scenery of the Globe to the realities of the siege and battlefield in France. The reverse process had the same effect so that the final cut back to the Globe and the actors lining up for their call still gives me a thrill.
Seeing films one also saw – always saw – the newsreels, though only one remains in my memory. It would have been sometime in 1945 and it was at the Playhouse, a cinema down Guildford High Street. Before the newsreel began there was an announcement that scenes in it were unsuitable for children and that they should be taken out. None were; having already waited long enough in the queue nobody was prepared to give up their hard-won seat. It was, of course, the discovery of Belsen with the living corpses, the mass graves and the line-up of sullen guards. There were cries of horror in the cinema, though my recollection is that Mam and Dad were much more upset than my brother and me. Still, Belsen was not a name one ever forgot and became a place of horror long before Auschwitz.
The moral instruction to be had at the cinema was seldom as shocking as this: just a slow absorption of assumptions not so much about life as about lives, all of them far removed from one’s own. There were cowboys’ lives, for instance, where the dilemmas could be quite complex and moralities might compete: small-town morality v. the morality of the gunfighter with the latter more perilous and demanding of heroism, High Noon perhaps its ultimate demonstration. There was the lesson of standing up to the bully, a tale told in lots of guises: in westerns, obviously, but also in historical films – Fire Over England, A Tale of Two Cities and The Young Mr Pitt all told the same story of gallant little England squaring up to the might of France or Spain, for which, of course, read Germany.
Then there were the unofficial heroes: dedicated doctors, single-minded schoolteachers, or saints convinced of their vision (I am thinking particularly of The Song of Bernadette, a film that had me utterly terrified). Always in such films it was the official wisdom v. the lone voice and one knew five minutes into the film what the hero or heroine (star anyway) was going to be up against. I suppose one of the reasons Casablanca and Citizen Kane stand out above the rest is that their morality was less straightforward. William Empson never, I think, wrote about film but there are many the plot of which this describes:
The web of European civilisation seems to have been strung between the ideas of Christianity and those of a half-secret rival, centring perhaps (if you made it a system) round honour: one that stresses pride rather than humility, self-realisation rather than self-denial, caste rather than either the communion of saints or the individual soul.
It was a dilemma I was familiar with because it was always cropping up at the Picturedrome.
Banal though the general run of films was, I learned, as one learned in fairy stories, about good and evil and how to spot them: the good where one would expect only degradation and squalor, and treachery and cowardice to be traced in the haunts of respectability. I learned about the occasional kindness of villains and the regular intransigence of saints but the abiding lesson had to do with the perils of prominence. I came out into Wortley Road grateful that, unlike Charles Boyer, we were not called on to stand up against the Nazi oppressor or battle like Jennifer Jones against the small-mindedness of nuns
or like Cornel Wilde cough blood over the piano keys in order to liberate our country from the foreign yoke. Films taught you to be happy that you were ordinary.
Ordinary but not respectable, because in films respectable generally meant cowardly and there were other perils besides. One character who was always cropping up seemed the embodiment of respectability and was often played by the same actor. Not a star (I have had to look up his name), he was called Thurston Hall. With his bright white hair and substantial frame he looked not unlike the local doctors in Upper Wortley, Dr Monies and Dr Slaney, figures of some weight and even grandeur in the neighbourhood. Thurston Hall did play doctors from time to time but more often than not he was a businessman, highly thought of in the community, a person of unimpeachable morals who was ultimately revealed to be a crook. Kind to children, a president of orphanages, a donor of playing fields and a guarantor of symphony hall, he is prominent in every good cause. But the committee of charitable ladies who can always rely on him for a generous contribution would be surprised to learn that the money comes indirectly out of the pockets of their husbands, paid over to the many prostitutes of the city or in its poker dens and illicit drinking clubs behind all of which is this impeccably mannered immaculately suited villain.
That such a character in a film today would seem quite old-fashioned is the fault of the times. Villainy these days is more complicated and communities don’t have pillars in quite the way they did. Two-faced respectability operates best in a setting of accepted values and that setting began to break up, so far as the cinema was concerned, sometime in the late 1950s, with one of its minor legacies for me a lifelong distrust of well-groomed, impressive middle-aged men. When I saw General Pinochet on one of his London jaunts I picked him out as a villain simply from the films I had seen in the 1940s.
To know that one is being taught a lesson or at any rate given a message leaves one free to reject it if only by dismissing plot or characters as clichés. But I had not realised how far the moral assumptions of film story-telling had sunk in, and how long they had stayed with me, until in 1974 I saw Louis Malle’s film about the French Occupation, Lacombe Lucien. Lucien is a loutish, unappealing boy, recruited almost by accident into the French Fascist Milice. He falls in with and exploits a Jewish family, becoming involved with – it would be wrong to say falls in love with – the daughter, whom he helps to escape and with whom he lives. Then, as the Liberation draws near, he becomes himself a fugitive and is eventually, almost casually, shot.
The stock way to tell such a story would be to see the boy’s experiences – witnessing torture and ill-treatment, falling for the Jewish girl – as a moral education in the same way, for example, that the Marlon Brando character is educated in On the Waterfront. That would be the convention and one I’d so much taken for granted that I kept looking in the Malle film for signs of this instruction in the school of life beginning to happen. But it doesn’t. Largely untouched by the dramas he has passed through, Lucien is much the same at the end of the film as he is at the beginning, seemingly having learned nothing. To have quite unobtrusively resisted the tug of conventional tale-telling and the lure of resolution seemed to me honest in a way few films even attempt.
The Ginnel
Mam seldom came back from the pictures in those days without being desperate to empty her bladder, the diuretic effect of the proximity of home making the situation so urgent that my brother and I would be sent on ahead to unlock the door in readiness, thus saving her the last terrible moments bent double on the doorstep.
The urgency of her predicament was never more extreme, it seemed to me, than when we had been to the Palace, a cinema off Stanningley Road. It was a bleak place, having once been a skating rink; painted red, it had double seats for courting couples, and indeed my parents had done some of their courting at the Palace in the twenties, sitting in the raised seats along the sides which were known as the Deck. In those pre-talkie days there was a scratch orchestra which accompanied the films, the violin played by Dad’s teacher, Norris Best, who, if he caught sight of him in the audience, would get Dad down into the pit to play another fiddle, a summary desertion which didn’t please Mam at all. Those days were long gone and in my mind the Palace is associated particularly with George Formby films, and that we had all laughed so much might account for the acuteness of Mam’s discomfort on the way home.
Off Stanningley Road on the left was and still is (in 1998 anyway) a narrow ginnel, only a few feet wide, one side of which backed onto a mill or factory, the other side forming the red-brick rear wall of the houses that make up Pasture View. Coming home from the Palace, when every minute saved was vital, we would go up this ginnel as it was a short cut to Theaker Lane, hurrying along it in single file, then round the edge of the playground of our school, Upper Armley National, before going up by Christ Church across Ridge Road into the Hallidays and home.
Passing the end of this ginnel recently, where I can’t have been for fifty years, I saw that whereas in the forties the passage was clean and uncluttered and did not smell (I know this because had it been in any way insalubrious Mam, ever fastidious, would have gritted her teeth and gone the long way round), now it was half-blocked with rubbish and loose stones, elders and buddleia had rooted on the mill wall and though I didn’t investigate further I knew that it would stink. No one in their senses would nowadays use it as a thoroughfare or, if they did, would just by so doing become an object of suspicion.
Fifty years ago we used to trot up there and think nothing about it, a family on their way home from the pictures. It wasn’t ‘lonely’; it wasn’t ‘nasty’ (i.e. people didn’t piss in it); it was just a useful ginnel.
Inured as one is to change and destruction, the state of this narrow passage poses questions about life in cities that are regularly and routinely posed by weightier developments … motorways, out-of-town shopping centres, debates about violence and street crime and the unending debate about the sense of community and where it has gone.
When did this ginnel fall into disuse? When did it cease to be a short cut? Chart the clogging up of this passage and you will have anatomised urban decay in the second half of the twentieth century. Was it because of cars, people ceasing to walk this bleak stretch of Stanningley Road unless they had to? Was it the demolition of houses or the decay of public transport? At what point did the stones begin to fall from the wall and cease to be picked up? Because in the forties they must have been picked up, put back or to one side and the path kept clear.
Was it the fear of being ‘attacked’ that led to its decay? Because it would be a good place, as appropriate a setting for a filmed robbery or a rape as any locations manager could hope to find. I fancy once there was a lamppost at the top end but it isn’t there now. I can’t imagine anyone ever being responsible for this ginnel and its upkeep; it was kept up just by dint of being used. Old ladies would use it who’d been for a walk in Armley Park, children coming home from Armley Park school, courting couples.
Why the ginnel was there at all never occurred to me, as Leeds, or the Leeds of my childhood, was full of snickets and ginnels, passages behind and between houses, unadopted paths that went along the backs of gardens, preferred thoroughfares for us as children and with no logic to most of them, just cracks in the urban set-up that nobody’d bothered to fill in. The ginnel behind Pasture View, though, seemed older than most and it was only when reading about the history of Armley I found out why.
Like so many of the suburbs of Leeds, Armley had once been a village and in my childhood the lower reaches of Theaker Lane, which we thought of as slums and where we never willingly went, were made up of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cottages, lived in originally by workers in the mills. Like many of the most interesting buildings in Leeds, they were pulled down in the fifties and sixties and now there are only high flats. And so it was in Holbeck and Wortley, Hunslet and Beeston and all the settlements Leeds swallowed up in its nineteenth-century expansion.
In those
days the workers in the mills would often have to walk miles to their work and this ginnel off Stanningley Road turns out to be part of the old footpath from Wortley through Armley to the mills at Kirkstall, so that when the Pastures were built in the 1870s it had to be left open as an ancient right of way.
So what was for us just a short cut home from the pictures had once echoed at the beginning and end of the day to the rattle of clogs.
These days the mills are gone, Armley Mill now a museum and the Palace is gone too, or translated into the New Western Bingo and Social Club. The ginnel, though, is still there behind Pasture View, where, clogged with stones and rubbish, and wanting mill-workers and weak-bladdered cinema-goers or anyone heedless enough of the realities of street life in the last decade of the twentieth century as to be daft enough to use it, it will remain. ‘Welcome to Leeds’ the sign on the M1 used to say, ‘Motorway City of the Seventies’.
Diaries 1996–2004
Every Christmas or New Year I publish extracts from my diary of the preceding year in the London Review of Books. On a personal level these published diaries are pretty uninformative, not to say cagey, but they do give some indication of what work I was doing and where it took me, though more often than not nowadays this is no further than from the armchair to the desk.
Diaries lengthen the days. To read back over a year when nothing much seems to have happened is often to be nicely surprised, though I note how in earlier diaries much more of what I wrote down had to do with what I did whereas lately the entries are more often occasioned by what I’ve read or seen on television. I should get out more if only for the diary’s sake.
