by Alan Bennett
So we go down to Hubberholme to look at the rood loft, one of only two remaining in Yorkshire (the other at Flamborough). And it is a loft proper, not just a screen with a top on it, three feet or so wide and with a slatted floor as if it might be a loft for hay, the screen and loft said to have been brought over the tops from Coverham Abbey after the Dissolution. As we’re looking round two women come in and what interests them isn’t the rood loft or the pews carved and dated 1641. They are on the trail of Thompson, the woodworker of Kilburn who always carved a mouse on his handiwork. Some of the pews are his, done in the forties or fifties, so somewhere here will be a mouse and they scuttle along the pews looking for it. Rather a silly quest, I think, condescendingly, though with as much point and pleasure in it as the two of us marvelling at the ancient loft or noting the memorial plaque to J. B. Priestley, whose ashes were scattered in the churchyard.
19 March. All day at Twickenham recording ‘Nights in the Gardens of Spain’ with Penelope Wilton, directed by Tristram Powell. She does it beautifully and Tristram keeps it simple and static, which is exactly right. [Predictably, when it comes to be transmitted it is this monologue, the simplest in form and entirely perfect in execution, which the sad creatures who preview TV programmes generally disparage.]
At lunchtime I walk by the river opposite Eel Pie Island, then sit for a while in the gardens of Orleans House, the octagon by James Gibbs c.1720, and all that remains of the house lived and entertained in by Caroline of Ansbach. The garden has some tall trees, the upper branches of which are alive with bright green and yellow birds which twitter like hawks. I look them up when I come back and decide, rather doubtfully, that they must have been golden orioles. However, Kate M. tells me that they were probably parakeets, which are spreading rapidly in London (a large colony at Sunbury apparently) and may one day oust the pigeons.
29 March, Yorkshire. The conductor on the GNER train to Leeds is now styled Customer Operations Leader and announces himself as such, though (and it’s to his credit) he stumbles several times when he has to broadcast this absurdity.
4 April. Asked to read The Good Companions for a possible production I find I can only get as far as the end of Act I. It’s interesting, though, in that it’s Priestley on one of his favourite themes, that of escape and escape from the north particularly. Act I, Scene I, ends like this:
LEONARD: Where yer going?
OAKROYD (at door): Down south.
Exit to triumphant music from the gramophone.
And earlier:
OAKROYD: I’d like to go down south again. I’d like to see … yer know… some of them places … Bedfordshire.
OGLETHORPE: I nivver heard tell much o’that place; is there owt special i’Bedfordshire?
OAKROYD: I don’t know but it’s summat to see.
Which was my attitude exactly when I was sixteen. And my father’s in 1944, when the family upped sticks and migrated disastrously from Leeds to Guildford for a year. In the end Oakroyd goes off to Canada, between Bedfordshire and Canada there not being much to choose.
Easter Monday. Watch two programmes on Noël Coward, wishing now I’d agreed to be interviewed for them. I’d said no on the grounds that my acquaintance with him was so slight, but Wesker appears whose connection was even slighter.
I saw Coward first in New York in 1962 at one of the regular parties given by Arnold Weissberger, a show-business accountant. The party was, as ever, stiff with celebrities, the most glamorous to me being the now slightly faded film stars I had queued as a boy to see at the Picturedrome on Wortley Road. Here was Alexis Smith, Eve Arden, Charles Boyer, and Tarzan’s Jane (and Mia Farrow’s mother) Maureen O’Sullivan. The four of us from Beyond the Fringe had been invited as a unit and Dudley Moore had been prevailed on (may even have volunteered) to play the piano. With Coward in the room this was perhaps foolhardy and having watched him for a while Coward turned away, saying: ‘What a clever young man. He can play on the black notes as well as the white.’
The second time I saw him must have been a few years later at the Mermaid Theatre at a performance of Peter Luke’s play Hadrian VII with Alec McCowen. Then it was his characteristic walk that I noticed: he tripped down the aisle after the designer, Gladys Calthrop, his hands, fingers pressed together, half slipped into his trouser pockets – ‘shucked’ I think would have been the word – and gave the impression of someone who moved as neatly and with as much forethought and consideration as he talked.
I actually met Coward for the first time when he came to the penultimate preview of Forty Years On, where he bolstered the confidence of the still uncertain John Gielgud. Later in the run he took me out to supper with Cole Lesley and Graham Payn to the Savoy, where we had sausages and mash. Alas, I have no memories of his conversation on either occasion, remembering only how he put me at my ease and seemed much kinder and nicer than I’d been led to expect.
14 April. Watch Grammar School Days (BBC2), a documentary about the eleven-plus, and after, with reminiscences by various advertisements for the system, including Kenneth Clarke, David Puttnam and Barry Hines. Listening to their recollections of taking and passing the eleven-plus makes me wonder whether I ever took it at all. I had jumped one or two classes at my primary school so by July 1944, when I left to go to secondary school, I was only ten, my most vivid memory of that time not any examination but that my friend Albert Benson, who was regularly top of the class, wasn’t going on to the high school because he would have to go out to work at the earliest opportunity.
Ironically, of those taking part the one whose experience is closest to mine is Kenneth Clarke. Like me he took exams in his stride and just assumed, as I did, that he would go on to grammar school as a matter of course. The most interesting of the participants was Harry Ognall, now a judge, who is pictured going through the old buildings of the empty (because translated to the outskirts) Leeds Grammar School and remarking that he thinks there is less class distinction at the school than there was in his day. My brief visit to LGS in the eighties to open their theatre suggested the opposite, with lots of silly public-school flummery (braided gowns, tassels on caps), public school as filtered through the pages of Hotspur and Wizard, the only encouraging feature the number of clever Asian boys, who obviously now rival the Jewish boys as the intellectual elite.
Several of those taking part say, as I would have done, how desperate the lesser grammar schools were to hike themselves up the social scale and be considered public schools. To this end the headmaster of my own school, Leeds Modern, changed the school over from soccer to rugger, pushed more and more boys towards Oxford and Cambridge and even briefly got himself invited to the Headmasters’ Conference. It was all to no purpose as in a few years the school went comprehensive, lost its identity and was merged with the girls’ school next door.
Hard to fit myself into any of the categories represented except (again like Kenneth Clarke) I feel I had a great deal of luck, not least when I was aged eight and went in for the entrance examination to Leeds Grammar School and happily failed. One of the questions was ‘Who was Job?’ This mystified me.
‘Who was Job?’ I came home and asked, not even knowing it was a name and pronouncing it the same as in a job of work. ‘I’ve never heard of Job.’ And a good job I hadn’t.
25 April. Graffiti in the lift at the Middlesex Hospital: Love. Sex. Salt. An Arab, presumably, pining for the desert.
20 May. Listen to a CD of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. It’s a piece I know well, first heard, like most of what I thought of then as ‘good music’, at one of the concerts in Leeds Town Hall 1950–52. By mistake I put on the second disc first, and so hear not the slow introduction but a section of the recitative by the soul of Gerontius on seeing the angel at the start of Part 2.
It is a member of that family of wondrous beings who, ere the world was made, millions of years back, have stood around the Throne of God. I will address him. Mighty one, my Lord, my Guardian Spirit, all hail.
Hearing it u
nexpectedly I can’t think what it is this reminds me of until Gerontius gets to ‘I will address him’, and I realise it’s Gilbert and Sullivan, or Gilbert at any rate, the period of Newman’s poem roughly contemporary and the diction every bit as unintentionally arch as Gilbert’s is deliberately so. It’s conducted by Barbirolli, the thought of him affecting still: that frail physique, the unkempt hair and the style, histrionic but not self-choreographed; and the concert over, going home in his old raincoat through the fogs of fifties Manchester.
4 June. In one of the new Talking Heads monologues, Playing Sandwiches, I give the five- or six-year-old Samantha studs in her ears, while at the same time thinking that this is a little excessive, because it weights the scales against her mother. This morning in M&S I see a child with earrings who cannot be more than two.
20 June. Watch some of Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief on TV, more for Jessie Royce Landis’s performance as Grace Kelly’s mother than for either Grace Kelly or Cary Grant. One scene is now unintentionally funny: Cary Grant, as the reformed cat burglar, invites the Lloyd’s insurance agent (John Williams) to have lunch at his villa overlooking the Mediterranean. Grant’s housekeeper serves a delicious meal, the first course of which is a tart with ham, herbs and eggs. ‘It’s a local speciality,’ says Grant, looking immensely sophisticated. ‘They call it quiche lorraine.’
29 June. A letter from my Italian translator telling me of a wonderful afternoon in Milan ‘spent talking about your work and listening to some of your minologue plays’.
12 July. On this Sunday morning when the fate of Northern Ireland hangs in the balance at Drumcree the Observer gives it one small paragraph on the front page, the rest all to do with the lobbying scandal the Observer is so proud of having unearthed. It’s only after nine whole pages to do with the paper’s ‘exclusive’ that it manages to get its head out of its own arse to start talking about Northern Ireland.
19 July. Watch two good programmes about Henry Moore, one of whose works, a Reclining Figure bought for the city, could still raise a storm of protest in Leeds as late as 1951. Now of course the city is home to the Henry Moore Institute. Moore has no trace, even early on, of what must have been quite a thick Yorkshire accent; he was the son of a Castleford coal miner after all. The accent could have gone through rubbing shoulders as a young man with the more well-spoken Ben Nicholson, say, or Kenneth Clark. But I would have thought that in the thirties he needed to get rid of it (or at least knock the edges off it) in order to be taken seriously, whereas thirty years later, in Hockney’s day, a sculptor from a similar background would have been well advised to keep it. The contrast is most noticeable when one of his early girlfriends is interviewed: she’s a delightful woman, now eighty-odd, called Edna ‘Gin’ Coxon who is still quite definitely Yorkshire and sounds it. She says Moore wanted to go to bed with her but she wouldn’t because she had a boyfriend already and to do it with Moore would have been unfaithful. ‘You shouldn’t do it with two. You can do it with ten but not with two.’
24 July. It’s announced this morning that the three hundred or so soldiers shot for cowardice during the First World War are not to be pardoned, though in a speech later described as ‘deeply felt’ the Armed Forces Minister, Dr Reid, says that their names can now be inscribed on war memorials and that they will be pardoned in our hearts etc. The official reason they cannot be pardoned is that there is now (as there no doubt was then) little evidence as to who were genuinely cowards, poor wretches, and who were innocent and that it would never do to pardon the guilty with the innocent. Why not? If among the three hundred there was one man who was innocent (and there were many more) then his innocence should procure the pardon of them all. Or so Simone Weil would have said. But Simone Weil doesn’t have much clout in the Ministry of Defence, this decision bearing all the marks of over-cautious civil servants whom the Minister has it in his power to disregard. I write to Frank Dobson, my MP, saying, intemperately, that John Reid is more of a coward than many of the men who were executed.
15 August, Yorkshire. To Pateley Bridge on a lovely afternoon of flashing sunshine and rushing clouds, the drive over from Settle to Hetton going past the house of Cromwell’s general, Lambert, who ought to have been buried at Malham but as a regicide died in captivity and is buried at Plymouth. Tea in Pateley, then up the hill above the high street to look at Pateley old church, roofless now but restored by English Heritage. It’s a bare interior with a primitive Gothic east window, a tower and plenty of odd doors and openings, which is somehow Scottish and feels like a set for Hamlet.
Then back via Burnsall to look at the Saxon hog-back tombstones in the churchyard. These are a bit of a disappointment, just huge hunks of stone which could be gateposts from the end of any drystone wall, and I imagine that is where other similar tombstones have ended up. Much more interesting is the lychgate (restored c.1989): a single broad gate, attached by a bar and chain to an ancient pulley in the thickness of the wall. If you push against the right-hand side of the gate it opens inwards with the left-hand side opening outwards, the pulley then closing the gate. It’s the kind of thing Lutyens would have delighted in and incorporated into one of his country houses.
17 August. Some time this last week a bearded man in a frock strolled through the National Gallery, observed by warders, though not accosted by them until he reached the room with the Rembrandts. In front of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at the Age of 63 he suddenly whips off the frock (the marvels of Velcro) to reveal that he is stark naked with, strapped to his leg, a tube of yellow acrylic. He daubs the beginning of a £ sign on the portrait before he is wrestled to the ground by a warder and a helpful member of the public and bundled away. The police are called, but before they can forbid anything to be touched the conservation department are on the scene, remove the painting and wash off the acrylic while it is still wet: had it dried the process would have been much more complicated. The upshot is that the painting is back on view the next day, Rembrandt doubtless looking even more pissed off than he normally looks in that particular self-portrait.
What interests me about the incident is what happened after the young man had been overpowered – a case of conflicting pruderies as the warders would not want to escort a naked man through the gallery but at the same time might be reluctant to re-dress a naked (and bearded) man in a frock.*
20 August, Toulouse. A new twist in hotel pornography is that the dirty channels are largely, but not completely, blocked out by a card announcing that they can be viewed only if paid for by pressing such and such a number, the card allowing an intriguing glimpse of what is going on to be shown round its edges: a man’s leg in this instance, his thrown-up arm, and what might be an armpit or, there again, not. I can imagine a taste so refined that it would find such marginal glimpses more exciting than the whole scene.
21 August, L’Espiessac. At ten o’clock this morning we are still trying to get out of Toulouse, driving round and round the new suburbs of Blagnac (one of the streets the avenue Albert Camus: ‘voie sans issue’). Eventually we cut across on virtually empty D roads, stopping for coffee at Beaumont-de-Lomagne, an ordinary enough little town, the size of Otley, say, and with no pretensions at all, though seemingly from a street name the birthplace of Fermat of Theorem fame.
The square is taken up almost entirely by a huge open-timbered market hall which is, I suppose, seventeenth or eighteenth century, a vast edifice with a roof like a cathedral. We sit outside the local pool-hall café and watch the comings and goings. Were such a building in Otley and not the Garonne it would be high on the English tourist trail; here, thank goodness, no one bothers. And of course this is Europe and more stained by history than England ever is. These beams will have seen ropes flung over them for hurried hangings in the Terror and the White Terror that followed, and the Occupation and the retribution that followed that, dark shapes swinging among the beams. So it is not like Otley, which just nurtured Thomas Chippendale, who made chairs. No, we are not a serious people, as how sh
ould we be?
26 August, L’Espiessac. After years of sniggering English tourists having themselves photographed next to the town sign, the burghers of Condom have at last woken up to the fact that they are sitting on a gold mine. So now, though there is some doubt whether the town has any connection with prophylaxis at all, a Musée des Préservatifs has opened and the decent old-fashioned sepia postcards of this fairly ordinary provincial town have been banished in favour of highly coloured jokey views: a landscape in which the poplars are green condoms, the clouds white ones; monks have condoms as cowls and even the chaste tower of the twelfth-century cathedral has been sheathed in a condom.
None of which would matter much had not some enterprising mayor decided that the town could do other things besides exploiting its eponymous connection, so the decent little square in front of the cathedral now boasts half a dozen gleaming steel flagpoles, with the flags, I suppose, of all condom-using nations. Still, one must be grateful they are flags and not themselves condoms. Worse, there is a ‘water feature’, a pool from which water overflows down a ramp of artificial stone crossed by a shallow steel bridge which tourists are encouraged to think of as an ideal photo opportunity. In due course someone will throw a coin in the pool and all that will start. It’s almost English in its vulgarity.
