by Alan Bennett
The truth was I did not want to die in the pages of a newspaper as, say, John Diamond had died, or Ruth Picardie, or, however good the cause, Roy Castle. I read some of the literature their deaths occasioned and I did not want to write it. I had no more wish to give newspapers copy in death than I had in life.
Others struggling with cancer at the same time as I was included the actors Michael Bryant, Nigel Hawthorne, John Thaw and, more lately, Harold Pinter and Alan Bates. Michael and Nigel I knew, and had worked with, but disinclined as I was to belong to any kind of cancer club (as I think they were too) I did not contact them or check on their progress, just hoping they were faring as well as I seemed to be. Both their deaths came as a shock and brought home to me my own luck, as did, latterly, the death of Alan Bates.
Another reason why I was anxious to keep my illness to myself was that, like many writers, I imagine, I get letters from readers, the number varying on how much I’m putting out, but a significant element in the day’s work for all that. I have no secretary and answer most letters in longhand, so even though readers’ letters often call for no more than a postcard, they add to the burden.
There was no doubt in my mind that if the news of my illness got out this correspondence would swell and its content would change. The letters I usually get are what might be called letters of fellow-feeling, readers writing to say that my stuff has rung bells, or that my experiences have chimed in with theirs. Learning that I had cancer, readers would, I’m sure with the kindest of motives, write with similar experiences of their own and with advice as to how to cope and – a particular dread – their foolproof remedies.
To be bombarded with suggestions for alternative treatments, dietary regimes or mental exercises seemed to me a predicament best avoided. A cancer patient feels particularly vulnerable to suggestion, never sure that he or she might not be neglecting the one bit of advice that might lead to a cure. However well I felt I was doing, I did not trust my own strength of mind to resist the well-meant and passionately held blandishments of my readers.
For the same reason I tended not to read articles about cancer in the newspapers, and only someone who has suffered from the disease will know how many that is. I do not use, and would not know how to use, the Internet, so that is another source of information I was not tempted to explore. Five years down the road I still find the contemplation of cancer quite hard, and even hate having to write the word.
12 August 1997. Depressed by an item in the paper about yet another cancer breakthrough at Bristol re caffeine, concentrated doses of which are reckoned to have a better effect on bowel cancer cells in particular, which, so the news item says, are more resistant to chemotherapy. Time was when my interest in this would have been at most theoretical; now it’s a question of life or the other.
I realise that there will be other sufferers who will regard this self-blinkering as cowardice, and who may have found comfort and purpose in immersing themselves in the whole culture of cancer – mastering the facts regarding its forms and their treatment and, of course, its myths, in a course of action which the Internet has made feasible and available to all.
But to go down that road seemed to me to succumb to cancer in a different way. I did not see cancer as a way of dramatising my life, the lurid light of approaching death endowing even the most trivial event with a long shadow. Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.
I cannot remember when I was last in a fight, from early boyhood my natural instinct always to walk (or slink) away. Even the metaphorical fight that cancer obligatorily involved, at any rate if the newspapers were to be believed, seemed inappropriate, the metaphor in my case not of struggle and engagement, but evasion and absence.
There was nothing adversarial in it for me. Once I’d had the operation and the chemotherapy that followed, I just hoped to edge by and to go unnoticed. In my case the metaphor was nearer that of crime, or of enemy occupation. I wanted to be ordinary, dull, my papers (and my results) not worth a second glance. I was a quarry, I knew that, but I still tried to evade the round-up, if only by not registering or identifying myself as a sufferer. Life became warier, more circumspect, but I hoped to slide by and to pass as cured (which is to be cured, perhaps).
I did not say so, or put it into words at all – I was too superstitious for that, one concomitant of cancer that I became much more superstitious. And, in retrospect, I seem to have done so little it didn’t amount to much more than keeping my fingers crossed.
But I ducked the fight, which is a strategy like any other, and which some might see as not so much combating the disease as colluding with it.
The dietary precautions I took were of the simplest, avoiding red meat, eating a good deal of broccoli (which I don’t care for), taking a vitamin supplement and also drinking green tea, the beneficial properties of which seem to me well-authenticated.
These apart, I tended to steer clear of cancer, seldom reading about it in the papers, their coverage of the subject almost carcinogenic in itself, forever hunting after drama or pathos, and garbling what few certainties there are and, it seemed to me, altogether relishing a subject which (like the deaths of children) is always a good column filler.
This fastidiousness might, of course, be one of the reasons I got cancer in the first place. There is a notion, canvassed by no less an authority than the poet Auden, that cancer is almost a product of reticence, or at least of being buttoned up, a disease less likely, therefore, to affect the busy, the brash or the outspoken.
It’s the kind of reach-me-down psychology you find nowadays on daytime TV, where, if reserve is indeed carcinogenic, the audience must be largely immune. Seemingly handpicked for their coarseness and social inadequacy, these vociferous assemblies take readily to the notion that restraint is uncalled for, and indeed perilous to psychic health. In this age of glandular freedom, the adrenalin must flow untrammelled as even manners carry a risk, to all the other drawbacks of shyness now added that of malignant disease.
Early in 2000 I had to go up to St Catherine’s College at Oxford to take part in a discussion and question-and-answer session with Nicholas Hytner, who was at that time Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Theatre Studies. The Senior Tutor of St Catherine’s was Michael Gearin-Tosh, who, five years or so before, had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma and given six months to live.
With some courage, it seemed to me (and with a certain relish for the dramatic), Gearin-Tosh had rejected the few conventional treatments that were on offer at this late stage of the disease, particularly the gruelling chemotherapy that offered the only hope. Instead, after reading all the literature to do with his condition (which in itself takes a good deal of nerve) and with the help of medical colleagues and the goodwill of his college, he embarked on a course of treatment virtually of his own devising.*
This was a regime of some rigour and expense which Gearin-Tosh has himself described, the efficacy of which, certainly to begin with, must have seemed an almost lunatic act of faith, and with all the hallmarks of a crank. There was a daily regime of two caffeine enemas; every morsel of food had to be organic and, even so, all fruit and vegetables needed to be washed with Malvern water. This obsessive hygiene calls up thoughts of Howard Hughes. When I met him in February 2000 at sherry in the college common room, always on the edge of the conversation hovered a young man with a jug of carrot juice, a beaker of which Gearin-Tosh sucked through a straw, the straw, like Coward’s cigarette-holder, a punctuation for his wit.
Tall and not undemonstrative, and with a swooping voice, and hands clasped high on his chest, Gearin-Tosh was an exotic figure, Lytton Strachey without the beard, but what was astonishing about him was that against all the odds he was alive at all. He is not cured but he has survived ten years since the original diagnosis and, carrot juice always at his elbow, still survives, very much in the pink and always in exuberant spirits.
Had we not to some extent both been in the same boat, I might have regarded this extravagant figure, and th
e ambient carrot juice, as almost a joke, and someone to be remembered and maybe written about. As it was, I tried to glean what tips I could, both of us, I suspect, recognising straight away that I was never going to be able to run to the whole package, ‘Don’t eat salt’ the only one of his injunctions I now remember, as he explained the part salt played in the mechanism of cancerous cells.
After Nicholas Hytner’s lecture I didn’t stay for dinner in hall, though I would have been interested to see more instances of Gearin-Tosh’s diet, and how it compared with the more Lucullan regime of the other dons. Perhaps the spectacle of Gearin-Tosh’s extraordinary survival and his unending struggle ought to have cheered me, but I came away from Oxford that night naggingly depressed. I did not know if, all things considered, such a rigorous regime would work for me (though nor did Gearin-Tosh until he’d tried it). Besides, all things hadn’t been considered. I hadn’t gone into the nature of my condition as Gearin-Tosh had; I hadn’t weighed up the pros and cons. I knew that I didn’t want the treatment to become my life and who was to say that all the painstaking effort notwithstanding this exotic treatment might not be a gamble that would work for him but not for me? What I did know was that I was too disorganised, too all over the place, even to give it a try. Had I been Gearin-Tosh, to do all the preliminary reading and investigation that his diet required would have taken me all the six months that were supposedly left to him. How could I employ somebody to ply me with carrot juice or swill every bit of produce I ate with Malvern Water? And who, I thought irreverently, swilled the Malvern water?
No, his was an epic struggle and, as Lindsay Anderson told me many times, I was not suited to epic. I could say that this was being a fatalist and that I was just hoping to muddle through. More truthfully, I was lazy and my laziness persisted even into the grave. It was indolence unto death.
In this, though, I suspect I resemble the general run of humanity more than I like to think. With cancer, submission to the disease and deference to the doctors is the usual form, perhaps because the patient is in the presence of a mystery. Or two mysteries … the condition itself and the death it so often entails. Nothing that the patient can do about it, one would like to think. Wait and see the order of the day.
Back in the endoscopy unit, there have, thankfully, been no surprises.
‘I’m coming out now,’ says the doctor. ‘All well.’ I open my eyes and venture to watch on the screen the last leg of the camera’s journey down my gut, which looks like a tunnel out of Disney. We pause for a reverent moment to gaze at the titanium clip which marks the spot where, five years ago, Mr Northover snipped out the offending section of my bowel, and neatly joined the ends together, the clip looking not unlike a coffee bean.
Wheeled back to my cubicle, I lie for half an hour or so, recovering from (and actually still enjoying) the effects of the Valium; then I get up, pay my bill at the desk and come home. It’s another of those small reprieves which have marked out the last five years, more momentous than the others, perhaps, in that it is five years, but the habit (and the precaution) of treating whatever happens as provisional is hard to lose. So, though I’m cheerful, I don’t rejoice or dare to think I’m cured – though in statistical terms, five years without a recurrence would qualify. Actually I daren’t think that lest I activate the laws of irony and the opposite happens.
Having been given the all-clear I pay my routine visit to my surgeon, who now feels able to tell me that he had put the odds against my survival much higher than he had ever dared reveal. Having told me they were fifty-fifty the truth, apparently, was nearer one in five.
So far from feeling encouraged or even triumphant at this news I had a difficult few days, wondering now whether I was truly as well as I felt and why it was that I’d been singled out for survival.
In time these misgivings subsided, leaving me with a feeling to which I can honestly attest, though it’s both surprising and slightly ridiculous, and that is pride. It’s surprising because pride is normally something I’d shy away from and it’s ridiculous because that I have survived – or survived so far – is entirely without merit on my own part. The credit lies with John Northover and Maurice Slevin, who treated me, and with my GP Roy Macgregor who had helped me at every stage of the journey; and of course my partner Rupert Thomas. If my own frame of mind has contributed to my recovery, that never cost me much conscious effort and was as much thanks to them as to any determination on my part.
And yet, more than in anything that I have written or otherwise achieved in my life, against all sense and logic, I feel pride in having come through, or come this far. Unlike so many others, much worse afflicted, I did not even have to fight. Yet I am thereby enrolled as a member, I hope a long-term member, of the exclusive aristocracy of those who have survived cancer.
Thankfully, it’s a growing aristocracy, and one day, I’m sure, such survival will seem commonplace and hardly worth mentioning. Meanwhile, I am one of many who are here when they did not expect to be here. Take heart.
* No one has ever satisfactorily explained to me how, short of frequent colonoscopy, a physician sorts out benign bleeding from piles from a more sinister cause. And if it puzzles me, who has been through the process, I imagine it must puzzle other patients in the same predicament.
* See ‘A Common Assault’, p. 557.
* Living Proof, Michael Gearin-Tosh, Scribner, 2001.
1 My father, aged twelve
2 St Bartholomew’s Church, Armley
3 & 4 My parents, shortly before they were married
5 Grandma Peel
6 Grandad Peel
7 Dad, on holiday as a young man
8 Mam and Gordon with Aunty Kathleen
9 Aunty Myra
10 Jordy and Ossie (see page 65)
11 Aunty Kathleen in manageress mode
12 Otley Road, 1950
13 Among the marigolds in Grandma’s garden, Gilpin Place, 1947
14 Dad in the Otley Road shop
15 Mam on an outing with Somerset Maugham, 1952
16 Joint Services School for Linguists, Cambridge, 1953
17 With Mme Chernysheva in the garden of Salisbury Villas, Cambridge, 1953
18 Self-portrait, Oxford, 1955
19 The Drinking Party, BBC TV, 1966 (left to right: Roddy Maude-Roxby, AB, John Fortune, Leo McKern, Barry Justice, Michael Gough)
20 With Dudley Moore and Joan Collins in Arnold Weissberger’s bedroom, 1963
21 With Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller, Beyond the Fringe, 1962
22 Yorkshire
23 Photographed by Christopher Fry in his garden, 1992
24 With Rupert Thomas and Madge Hindle, Venice, 1996
25 L’Espiessac, 1997
26 L’Espiessac, 1997
27 With Harry McNally, New York, 1985
28 With Lynn Wagenknecht, 1987
29 Rupert, Fountains Abbey, 1999
30 Palazzo S. Justina, Venice, 2001
31 Miss Shepherd, 1989
32 The Lady in the Van, 1999 (left to right: Kevin McNally, Maggie Smith, Nicholas Farrell)
33 Leeds Modern School, 1952
34 J.S.S.L., Bodmin, 1954 (left to right: AB, Michael Frayn, David Thompson, P. B. Naylor)
35 The History Boys, 2004 (left to right: Jamie Parker, Dominic Cooper, Samuel Barnett, James Corden, AB, Andrew Knott, Samuel Anderson, Sacha Dhawan, Russell Tovey)
36 Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour in rehearsal
37 Exeter College, Oxford Staircase 5:6
38 Exeter College, Oxford Staircase 9:11
39 Leeds Town Hall
40 George Fenton (and one of Miss Shepherd’s vans), 1974
41 Mam and Dad, 1970
42 County Arcade, Leeds
43 The Masons’ Loft, York Minster
44 Templets (sic) in the loft
45 1953
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to Mary-Kay Wilmers and her band of youthful and pitiless scrutineers wh
o edit the London Review of Books, where many of these pieces first appeared. Also to Kathy Burke, Sue Powell and Janet Macklam who have deciphered and transcribed my hand-written diaries.
I am also grateful to the staff of Lancaster Public Library and Leeds Reference Library, an institution which nurtured me as a boy and happily remains largely unchanged. Rupert Thomas at The World of Interiors, Mary Kalemkerian of BBC7, Lyn Haill of the Royal National Theatre, Ruth Rosenthal and Colin Smith of the BBC have all at various times nudged me into writing some of the pieces included here, several of which, particularly those to do with Oxford and National Service, are illustrated with photographs by Adrian Bedson, who almost alone of my friends at that time bothered to record the passing scene.
I am glad Faber and Profile Books have been able to collaborate over the publication of the book as during the last fifteen years I have worked happily with both. Dinah Wood and Charles Boyle have taken the text on the first stage of its journey and seen it through the press and Kate Griffin will manage it thereafter. I am indebted to them all for their tact, energy and understanding.
I have also had expert help much nearer home as my partner, Rupert Thomas, is an editor himself. He has shared many of the not always pleasant experiences the book recounts and sometimes they were not much fun; but without him nothing would have been any fun at all.
