by Alan Bennett
We sometimes tried, though. My parents’ birthdays came within a week of each other so, like ours, tended to coalesce and we would buy them a joint present. Dad was shy and undemonstrative so that, whatever the gift, the actual giving of it was guaranteed to put him off: he could never simulate the show of surprise and gratitude such occasions required. His coolest reception was for a coffee percolator, a present which ignored the fact that they had never drunk fresh coffee in their lives and weren’t going to start now. Dad rightly detected a hint of social aspiration in the gift, the message being that it might be nice if we were the kind of family that did drink fresh-brewed coffee. Dad would have none of it. ‘Faffing article’ was his way of describing it and in due course the jug part ended up in the cupboard under the sink where it came in handy when washing his hair.
Presents were fraught with peril, the subtext to ‘Many Happy Returns’ so often ‘I think you’re the kind of person who’d like this (or I wish you were)’. Even the longed-for bike I got when I was ten came with the same sort of message: not the dashing, speedy bike other boys had, or a racer with drop handlebars like my brother’s; mine was big, heavy and safe and, since it was still wartime, probably made out of the reconstituted iron railings that had been recently stripped from suburban walls in order to aid the war effort. Clumsy, upright and dependable, it was the kind of bike one went to church on, and I duly did.
Cut to twenty years later, and I have just learned to drive and am about to buy my first car. The general view seems to be that I need something solid and dependable, opinion favouring a Morris 1000 (‘Your sort of car’). But in the nick of time I remember my old bike and switch to a scootier primrose-yellow Mini. With my next car I went even further and got a Triumph Herald, and while it didn’t quite have drop handlebars, it was at least a convertible.
It was only when I reached fifty and started looking back that I began to think there might be something inauspicious about my birthday, and tried to count the occasions around that time when I’d strayed close to the edge of life, even been at death’s door or somewhere in the vicinity. There had been the time in Sardinia in 1966, when I suddenly collapsed after vomiting blood. The island was still quite primitive, but was just beginning to be promoted as a holiday resort, chiefly by the Aga Khan, who had built a grand hotel but hadn’t yet got round to providing a hospital. In the meantime, the only medical centre was a semi-monastic establishment run by the Frate Bene Fratelli, an order of Franciscan friars.
Dying, like much else in Italy, is something of a spectator sport and the steps of the monastery were lined with sightseers awaiting the arrival of the more spectacularly sick. As I was borne in on a stretcher, black-shawled ladies gazed down at me, raised their eyes to heaven, and crossed themselves: I was obviously a goner. In more sophisticated medical surroundings I would, of course, have been in no danger at all, as all that had happened was that a duodenal ulcer had burst and, without knowing it, I had been losing blood. Dramatic as it is, this is seldom a life-threatening condition (though my father had nearly died of something similar) and in normal circumstances a prompt blood transfusion will restore the drooping patient.
But these were not normal circumstances. Diagnostic equipment was primitive and the chief weapon in the therapeutic armoury of these delightful monks seemed to be prayer. It was some time, therefore, before my complaint was diagnosed, and when the remedy was agreed to be a blood transfusion it was still a long time coming, the monks seeming reluctant to fill what was so plainly a leaking bucket. So, for a few days, my life steadily drained away while the monks told their beads and somebody else told the Daily Mirror. ‘Fringe Boy in Deathbed Drama’ was the first my family heard of it.
At the lowest point of my fortunes my two companions went into Olbia to find some supper. I was feeling ghastly, but it only came home to me how desperate my situation was when one of them kissed me. Since she had never kissed me before, she plainly did not expect me to be there when she returned. It was the kiss of death.
There was another portent besides. Finding me alone, two novice monks chose this moment to give me a bed bath. I was lying on the bed, stark naked and virtually drained of blood, when one of them lightly lifted my dick (which, in the circumstances, was the size of an acorn) and let it drop again. ‘… è,’ he said, the simple monosyllable given a melancholy falling inflexion, eloquent of pity and resignation. That, at any rate, was one message. The other was more implicit and more sinister: namely, that he was unlikely to take such a liberty were the body he was washing not, in effect, dead already.
Fortunately, that night they began to transfuse me and I eventually received twelve pints of blood, given mostly by sailors from the nearby naval base. It was customary, at any rate in Sardinia, for blood donors to follow their blood to its destination, perhaps to see that it had gone to a good home. So over the next ten days I would wake to find a mute Italian sailor by my bed, smiling and twisting his hat in his hands and nodding reassuringly. I was even visited by would-be donors, those who had tried to give me blood but who were from the wrong group. In those days I don’t suppose there was all that much to do in Sardinia, visiting the hospital quite a high point. Nowadays, they probably go water-skiing.
I wasn’t struck down again in the same way until May 1980, when I inadvertently took an aspirin. I remember looking in the glass and thinking that my face seemed to be acquiring an interesting artistic pallor, when I suddenly passed out, the aspirin having made my stomach bleed. That, too, was around my birthday, but in the intervening years the connection between birth and death had been maintained when I spent my fortieth birthday at Russell Harty’s father’s funeral. Russell had been sent round by his mother to give a neighbour the not unexpected news that Fred had died. ‘Oh dear,’ said the neighbour, ‘I am sorry. Mind you, I had a shocking night myself.’
On my fiftieth birthday I was filming in Ilkley. Nothing untoward occurred until the evening, when I was taken out to supper by Michael Palin and Maggie Smith. Came my salad of mixed leaves and there, nestling among the rocket, were several shards of broken glass.
‘Very mixed,’ said Miss Smith.
‘No,’ said the waiter. ‘It’s a mistake.’
I reached the 1990s without mishap, though Miss Shepherd, the lady who lived for fifteen years in a van in my drive, died at the end of April 1989, after which the undertaker rang up wondering if May 9 would be a suitable day for her funeral.
‘Why not?’ I said. I was only surprised that I hadn’t thought of it myself.
In the spring of 1992 I had arranged to go with a friend to Italy for the weekend. All being well, May 9 would find me in Todi. Writing that Italian name, I see it has a (German) death in it, but that is fanciful. What was not fanciful was that going to Italy meant that I would not be able to go to someone’s funeral which, unsurprisingly, fell on my birthday.*
The friend with whom I was going on holiday was Rupert Thomas. At that time, May 1992, I am not sure that I would have called him my partner, or indeed known what to call him, though partners is what we are now. Friend, I suppose I would have said then, though in 1992 such a friendship is still novel enough for me not to know what to call it (and to hope to get away without calling it anything at all). Rupert is thirty years or so younger than I am and might easily be mistaken for my son. This embarrasses me, though not him, who has more reason to be embarrassed.
At that time we did not actually live together, though what was to happen in Italy was one of the factors that brought this about.
Even now, ten years after the event, I am reluctant to acknowledge these arrangements both because that is the way I have always led my life, but also because I would prefer them not to be made explicit, just taken for granted. But though what was to happen still does not make entire sense to me, without avowing this friendship it makes no sense at all.
Our plane was due to arrive in Rome at 9.30 on Thursday evening. We were to collect a hire car and had arranged to spend the night
at Ladispoli, a small seaside town twenty kilometres or so to the north, from where we could make an early start for Todi the following morning.
Ladispoli is a modern town from what little we can see of it in the dark, and we drive down straight suburban streets lined with shuttered two-storey villas, looking for our hotel. There is no one about, no lights in the houses hidden behind high walls hung over with a few dusty fig trees. It’s a place of Chekhovian dullness, the centre a long tree-lined street ending in a square that scarcely qualifies as a piazza, with one or two cafés still open and a few people sitting outside. Some boys ride round aimlessly on mountain bikes; there is a closed funfair and festoons of dead fairy lights in the trees.
Booking in at the hotel, we find there is no food to be had, and so walk back to the square, where we have coffee and a sandwich. Paying the bill, I ask the woman at the counter the whereabouts of the sea and she points me down the road. It’s now about 11 o’clock. And as I write these prosaic details down – the cashier, the time, the people sitting outside – I realise it’s in an effort to find meaning in what is about to happen, as if the time might explain it, or the dullness of the place, something that I may have missed which might help it to make sense.
The distance from the café to what turns out to be a little promenade is only a few hundred yards along a sandy half-made road, past another line of shuttered villas. Rounding the corner onto the front, I see half a dozen young men sitting on the sea wall opposite. They are talking and some almost shouting, though not more vociferously than Italians often do.
The instant we appear, and it is the instant, with no time to size us up or to say, as one might have conventionally scripted them to do, ‘Hello! Who’ve we got here?’ – no, quick as thought, two of them are coming across the road to meet us. And though they effectively block our way so that we stop, there is no break in their excited chatter, except that it now seems to include us, as if we have arrived, somehow opportunely, to illustrate a point in their argument, the Italian they are speaking not eloquent or expressive, or pleasant to listen to, as Italian is, but harsh, assertive, jabbering almost.
In retrospect I see, as I run and re-run the scene in my head, that these two had come and stood too close, but there is no obvious threat or rancour, only a kind of feverishness to them which, retrospectively again (the debate never stopping), I put down to drink or drugs, or glue possibly (though too old for glue, surely?), like two boys seen once by the lake in Regent’s Park, pulling at their bags, then shouting hoarsely as if assailed, though no one was going near.
Suddenly the talking stops. The one blocking my way is smallish, with fair, curly hair, but his face now is a blank. Has he asked a question? ‘We’re English,’ I say in Italian. ‘We don’t understand,’ the nationality almost an excuse in itself, and I take a step back, meaning to go round and go on. Turning, I feel a blow across the side of my neck (I run my hand over it as I write, trying to decide if it is the neck I mean, or the throat), but not painful, a punch that has missed perhaps. Even so, it is surprise I register as much as alarm. But Rupert has become anxious at the same moment because the other youth is holding a cigarette far too close to his face. Rupert shouts and at the same moment we start to run back the way we have come.
Even at this point I feel surprise rather than alarm, but the scene plays and replays itself in my head, ragged, inexplicable and without sequence, and so unlike a film, though one searches every frame for a clue as to why it happened and how it might have been avoided.
There is no attempt to rob us, which would have been quite easy to do. Except now I wonder whether that was what they were saying when I said I didn’t understand. Still, ‘Hand over your wallet’ isn’t hard to convey, and I would have understood that. Or were they a gang and this bit of random promenade some special territory? Had there been a football match? Were we being punished for the skills of Gary Lineker?
As we run, I feel a heavy blow on the top of my head, the blow struck with a short length of steel scaffolding which Rupert sees the fair-haired youth pick up from the ground. Fortunately, the scaffolding doesn’t come instantly to hand, and he has to spend a vital second or so disengaging it, which, since I am already on the move, probably saves me from a more direct blow on my skull. Had it landed squarely, I must certainly have been stunned and fallen, and so probably received more, the usual procedure nowadays when someone falls to kick them in the head. As it is, I stagger with the blow but run on, and we are now so close to safety and the lights of the café that the two give up the chase.
Looked back on, the few seconds of the assault seem intensely private and solitary. I do not see the blow, feel no pain, just sheer bewilderment as to why this is being done to me. It is as if I am a little boy again, which is the last time I was in a fight, an element of recollection there, or reacquaintance: ah yes, now I remember! But I am not stunned in the least and retain enough sense of drama, as Rupert helps me towards the café, to note my blood falling in the dust around my feet, and to look forward to the looks of horror on the faces of the café clientele that must shortly greet the arrival in their midst of this bloodstained apparition as the pizza turns to ashes in their mouths.
Actually they seem rather less horrified than I’d expected, some of them just looking away in a very English fashion, so I have time to wonder if maybe this isn’t such an outlandish occurrence after all, and whether this establishment regularly welcomes blood-drenched casualties, staggering in from the promenade.
The proprietor of the café sits me down, while the cashier tries to staunch the blood, patting my head with paper napkins. There is so much blood that it seems to me (wrongly) that the wound must therefore be quite deep though I still feel nothing, and am not even dizzy. I am conscious of the blood, though, and apologetic about it; it splashes onto the café table and the café floor, the mosaic now littered with gory serviettes. I am conscious of it because this is 1992 and these days blood is no longer just blood, but can have dangerous overtones, hazardous propensities. So, sitting there, steadily, voluminously bleeding, though I am a victim I can see I also constitute a threat.
I wait in the café for a while, looking, I see in the counter mirror, quite dreadful. My head is now a little tender but I’m not otherwise in pain.
A taxi arrives, the driver concerned and helpful and not at all fussed about the blood on his upholstery; he drives us to the Posto di Primo Intervento, the Pronto Soccorso, which is not a hospital but some sort of emergency clinic, staffed by a doctor and two nurses.
The nurse lies me down on the table and starts to cut away some of my hair, as the doctor enquires about the circumstances of the injury. He has no English, Rupert has no Italian, so, despite being prone on the table, and being shaved and swabbed by the nurse, I struggle to answer with what little Italian I have. The doctor meanwhile is filling in a form, and it is now that I say ruefully that tomorrow will be my birthday. There is no smile, no interest even, and he glumly makes preparations to stitch my head.
I am expecting some kind of anaesthetic but none is forthcoming. Perhaps one cannot anaesthetise the surface of the skull, or perhaps, I think, as he takes a grip of my head, the surface of the skull feels no pain. I am soon disabused of this and, as he puts in his first stitch and draws the flesh together, my feet drum helplessly on the table with the pain of it, so that the nurse lies across my legs as he prepares the second stitch.
I watch him, trying to think who he reminds me of, and as he puts in the second stitch, and my feet start to bang, I realise that he is the young sheikh in John Huston’s Beat the Devil. He, too, is ruthless and unsmiling, and finding Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre and Robert Morley cast up on his shores, plans to have them all shot. Bogart, however, discovers the sheikh’s soft spot, a secret passion for Rita Hayworth, and saves their lives by promising the humourless young man an introduction to ‘the peerless Rita’ (the script was by Truman Capote).
If this equally humourless young doctor cherishes such sho
wbiz longings I am not to know, as throughout this grisly embroidery he utters no word.
‘Nearly done’ or ‘just one stitch more!’ would have helped, even in Italian. But nothing is said: there is just this cold-blooded, cold bloodied, morose medic, plying his impassive needle, remorselessly hemming my head.
Between the twelve stitches it eventually takes, I have time to wonder about his life.
I wonder if he has a young wife, a baby perhaps, and if he was already in bed when the telephone rang, though his impassive demeanour and neat collar and tie betray no sign of him having been summarily rooted out. It will be one of those cheerless Continental apartments where Formica-topped tables stand on rugless tiled floors, the sofa is protected by sheets of plastic and, in the unfrequented sitting room, the green metal blinds are never raised.
Had his ambitions once aimed higher than a casualty clinic in a rundown seaside town? Is he already sinking into a routine of frustration and inanition, like a doctor out of Chekhov, a drink in the same dull bar every night, a walk with the pram on Sundays and a coarsening wife to whom he finds less and less to say? Was the nightly quota of split heads and unexciting contusions diminishing what he had once thought of as a noble or at least profitable vocation? Does he hanker after a larger arena in which to vent his unwinking disdain?
A serious boy, thought promising at school, does he regret not hanging about with his racier classmates, now dashing about on their Lambrettas, and playing pool in the café? As he threads his needle for what I pray will be the final stitch, it occurs to me that he has missed his time, this expressionless, never altogether young man. Fifty years ago in a similar room and under the same unshaded lights, he could have been found lifting the eyelid of some near-insensible partisan; the heart checked, he gives a professional nod and watches while the victim’s head is thrust back into the bucket.
