Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  I don’t think I will sing

  Any more just now,

  Or ever. I must start

  To sit with a blind brow

  Above an empty heart.

  JOHN BERRYMAN

  2 April. To Knole this Saturday morning, a not entirely pleasurable expedition as journeys down to Kent seldom are. South London has to be traversed first of all, beginning with that slow and stopping journey along what’s left of the Old Kent Road and through New Cross and Lewisham, areas of London that have depressed me all my life.

  Nor does it significantly improve once you’re in open country as Kent never quite is, crossed and carved up by more motorways than even South Yorkshire. We come off one of these too soon or too late, it’s hard to tell, then have to trek across the garden of England trying to find the largely unsignposted Sevenoaks. Still, it’s the world of Denton Welch and places like East Peckham and Oxon Hoath have some of the romance with which I invested them in 1952 when I first read his Journals. At one point we find ourselves driving past the Gothick tower he painted as The Coffin House, now renovated and bijou-d as indeed most of the county seems to be – I’ve never seen hedges so manicured or cottages so desirable, as if lived in still by Betsey Trotwood rather than some Medway commuter.

  Knole Park where we eat our sandwiches is packed, though the house much less so. I’m not nearly so keen on it as R. who gets more pleasure out of the upholstery and ancient embroidery than I do, not to mention the priceless silver suite which just seems to me like fair-ground stuff. Favourites with me are the painted staircases and the galleried second courtyard but it suffers, I think, from having been over-romanced by Vita Sackville-West and over-written by Virginia Woolf in Orlando – the MS of which is on show in the great hall.

  Still, a good day and, having wandered round the house as ever both put off by the crowds and puzzled by what they get out of it (and indeed what I get out of it), sitting in the café it occurs to me it’s one of those insoluble problems that I have tended to write plays about. So maybe this is another. And looking down at my napkin in the tearoom I see a possible title of ‘The National Trust’. Actually a good title altogether and regardless of what it’s about. Well we shall see. [This eventually becomes People (2012).]

  9 April. Going up and down on the train to Leeds over the years one comes to know the conductors, who (with one exception) have always been friendly. One who regularly chats to me has literary aspirations and also a gift for languages, Finnish is his latest achievement. I’m translated into Finnish and last time we met on the train he promised to try and bring me back something of mine from Helsinki. Today he reports that all the bookshops had sold out – which is, I suppose, good news though I wouldn’t have thought I rang many bells in the Arctic Circle. As the train draws near to Leeds he makes the usual announcement then follows it without any prior warning with the same announcement in what I presume is Finnish. One or two passengers look up, and someone raises his eyebrows in a ‘what are the trains coming to?’ mode. Whereas to find that the railways are still a haven for odd individuals and eccentrics seems to me a cause for celebration.

  10 April. Killing time en route from Ilkley to Leeds where I meet R. off the eight-thirty train, I stop in a lane near Weeton. It’s half past six, the sunshine still bright though bitterly cold at the end of an afternoon of snow showers and icy rain. There are rabbits in the field and two of them climb the wall and run across it so deftly I think they’re squirrels. A pair of robins hop from post to post along a fence, in what is presumably some sort of territorial display, and then above the farm at the top of the ridge I see one of the kites from Harewood lazily circling round. This spot is just on the outskirts of Leeds – crest the hill and there are the beginnings of suburbia – but it seems, as it has always seemed to me since I was a boy, more intensely rural than the depths of the country.

  15 April. In his review of Truman Capote’s letters in the LRB, Colm Tóibín lists Capote’s many dislikes, including Beyond the Fringe, which he thought ‘rather dreary’. I never could think of much to say to Kenneth Tynan or he to me but whenever we met in the early 1960s he’d make a point of telling me that of all the stuff in BTF what ‘Truman’ had most liked was my solo sermon, I think because it reminded him of the sermons of his boyhood. Whether Tynan was just being polite to me or Truman to Tynan there’s no means of knowing but in any case at that time I had no idea who Truman Capote was, the similarity of his name to Capone making me think he was some sort of literary racketeer, which wasn’t far wrong.

  25 April. Keep being rung by journalists asking how I intend to vote, information which I don’t divulge not because I’ve got any principled notions to do with the secret ballot but because I like disappointing newspapers. If I were a voter in the Blackburn constituency my vote would go to Craig Murray, the ex-ambassador to Uzbekistan, who resigned from the diplomatic service over the foreign secretary’s refusal to discount information obtained by torture in the prisons of Uzbekistan, a decision that means torture is likely to continue. If there is a market for the information why should it stop? Mr Straw claims to have lost sleep over his decision. Some of the tortured will have lost sleep, too, but that’s because they will have lost fingernails first. I suppose I despise Straw more than Blair, thinking, perhaps wrongly, that he is capable of better.

  26 April. Last performance of The History Boys. Rupert and I go down to the NT sitting in the audience though on the back row. Final performances are seldom good as everyone is saying farewell to their own lines so investing them with over much significance. They are also nervous and in the Hector–Hardy scene Sam Barnett as Posner has to fight back tears. Even the normally phlegmatic Frances de la Tour is affected and for the first time in the whole run for her or, I think, anybody else, she dries. It’s in the mock-interview scene when she could easily be seamlessly prompted if Richard Griffiths or one of the boys had their wits about them. Instead they just stare at her and wait; perhaps taking it to be, as I do at first, a particularly effective pause. Eventually Frankie has to say, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask for the line.’ Normally a lapse like this would kill a scene stone dead but it survives and the laughs continue and the audience is unaffected.

  29 April, Yorkshire. Settle is still a pleasant place to shop and though there are one or two empty premises it hasn’t yet been given over to charity shops, which is the first symptom of a town dying. The spirit of the small shop still persists in Booth’s, the local supermarket. At the cheese counter I ask for some Parmesan, which might be thought a relative newcomer to this out-of-the-way Craven town. But the assistant proudly reels off the names of the several Parmesans that they stock, ending up with a flourish: ‘Or you may like to try the Reggiano, the Rolls-Royce of Parmesans.’

  8 May. Much in the papers about VE Day, today the sixtieth anniversary. Several people who were in the crowd outside Buckingham Palace remember how they chanted: ‘We want George,’ ‘We want Liz.’ I don’t believe this. It’s what they would chant now so they think it was what they did then. The King was never ‘George’ still less the Queen ‘Liz’. That was in the future (though not for him). What I remember of that night and of subsequent public celebrations up to and including the Festival of Britain was the impact of floodlighting, light squandered as I had never known it before.

  1 May. C. is a producer on BBC TV’s Songs of Praise and in the run-up to the election has been having to interview various politicians including Michael Howard. He was less than forthcoming and when she asked him what was his favourite hymn, said it was ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’. C. – with no irony or insinuation – asked him why. Howard simply stared at her and she got nothing further out of him.

  Martha, Charlotte and James’s youngest, has been slow to read but now aged eight is making great strides, particularly enjoying spelling. She is being given additional tuition by the father of a friend, a retired teacher who is also employed by Manchester United; the foreign half of the squad he is teac
hing to speak English, the English half he is teaching to read and write.

  22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the boys wanting to go to Cambridge the circumstances of Empson’s downfall at Magdalene. ‘So when you say Cambridge University to me, boys, I say to you “A prophylactic in the wardrobe”’ – this last delivered like a war-cry. Empson was not the only casualty in the play. Simone Weil got the boot, as did Nina Simone and Simone Signoret, Jowett (of Balliol fame), James Agate, Jane Austen, Molly Bloom, Hegel and Henry James, all of them biting the distinguished dust.

  18 May. On Sunday evening I do a show at the Prince of Wales Theatre in aid of the Roundhouse (amount raised – c. £30,000). Michael Palin comperes and we both take questions in the second half and the theatre is full and it goes down very well – though I do nothing new.

  I began by saying how my career had more or less begun and almost ended at the Prince of Wales Theatre. When in early 1961 we were still debating as to whether to bring Beyond the Fringe to London one of the interested managements was Donald Albery’s. He was one of the leading impresarios of the time, Binkie Beaumont by then very much on the wane. Albery had put on – or at any rate transferred – many of Joan Littlewood’s hits and also Lionel Bart’s Oliver!. He hadn’t seen the show but it was agreed that in January 1961 the set should be put up in the stalls bar of the Prince of Wales and we put on a performance just for him.

  Handsome and silver-haired Albery was a tall distinguished-looking man made more so by a gammy leg which he kept straight and heaved around in a characteristic swinging motion. It may even have been a false leg but like many such disabilities (Douglas Bader’s another example) it was generally assumed to have been earned in the war. Certainly Albery always carried with him an air of gallantry in the desert, for which there was no justification at all, the injury to his leg done when he was a child. But it was a famous handicap. Understandably in the theatre he always insisted on an aisle seat and on first nights late-comers hurrying down the aisle often went flying over this managerial limb, which was very much in evidence at our command performance, one chair in the middle of the stalls bar, Albery unsmiling sitting there. He remained unsmiling for the duration of the performance, not a grin, not a laugh, though having grown accustomed to more uproarious response we rapidly became mildly hysterical. At the finish Albery rose and stumped out into the corridor, followed by our agent. ‘Well,’ he said grudgingly, ‘I’ll put it on, but at a very small theatre, and there is one condition: the blond one will have to go.’

  I wish I could say it was thanks to the unswerving loyalty of my three colleagues that this didn’t happen but I think it was more due to cowardice: they were more prepared to face Albery than they were to face me.

  Albery made a good deal of money from the show and always regretted putting it into a small theatre, the Fortune, rather than Wyndham’s say, where he could have made even more. He retired to Monaco with a young Japanese wife and when I was there in 1984 for the Italia Prize awards, I ran into him swinging along the front. He greeted me with joy and enthusiasm, implying that I had come a long way since 1961 and that it was all thanks to him.

  He may of course have detected that I was a less talented performer than the other three: I felt that myself but it occurs to me now that what made him single me out was one of the episodes in the sketch ‘Aftermyth of War’ in which I parodied a legless fighter ace, Douglas Bader again, stumping down the steps of the set stiff-legged much as Albery did himself. It would have been sensible (and sensitive) in the circumstances to have cut it out or toned it down but in those days I believed that candour and conscience mattered and what I had written I had to do. In the circumstances I was very lucky.

  2 June. A situation on the margins of social interaction develops opposite. Working outside No. 60 is a handsome, though rather explosive-looking young workman who is emptying sand onto the pavement preparatory to mixing some cement, the bucket of water standing there in readiness. An eccentric older man, not quite a tramp but with too much luggage slung around his bike (a large umbrella, various carrier bags) to be an ordinary cyclist, stops by the cement-making young man, parks his bike and without, as far as I can see, asking permission proceeds to wash his hands in the waiting bucket. He washes them a little too thoroughly, while talking to the unresponsive young man who, if he is concerned about the usurpation of his bucket, doesn’t show it – or indeed anything much, as he scarcely speaks. Hands done the cyclist goes back to his laden bike and wheels it away while the young man empties some of the (now slightly polluted) water onto his sand and cement, the only sense that a liberty might have been taken or a boundary crossed being that he is now more pensive and as he mixes keeps gazing in the direction the tramp has gone.

  8 June. ‘That’s something you don’t see often nowadays,’ I think as a woman passes pressing what I take to be a handkerchief to her mouth and so seemingly on the way home from the dentist. Or so it used to be. But of course she’s not pressing a handkerchief to her mouth at all and has been nowhere near the dentist but is just on her mobile phone.

  27 June. Willie Donaldson dies. Best known, I suppose, for the Henry Root letters, back in 1961 Willie, in partnership with Donald Albery, put on Beyond the Fringe. A deceptively gentle and kindly figure Willie was never condescending as Albery invariably was and seemed as much at sea in the world of show business as we were. By the time he came into our lives and though he was not much older than us he had already lost one fortune, I think to do with shipping, and if he made another out of BTF he soon lost that too, Albery, I’m sure, driving a hard bargain and creaming off most of the profits.

  On the eve of the show opening in the West End Willie took the four of us and the producer John Bassett to a discreet brothel in Bond Street (the building now supplanted by Burberry) not for any hands-on sexual experience but to watch some blue films. The madame was French (or reckoned to be so), tut-tutting that I seemed so young (though I was actually the oldest of the four), and we perched rather uncomfortably on the edge of the bed while a whirring cinematograph ran off some ancient French films. They were silent, jerky and with nothing subtle about them at all, the participants anything but glamorous, one of the men resembling a comic villain in a Chaplin film. Still, we managed to find the films exciting. It was certainly the first proper sex on the screen I had ever seen and although at the start there were a lot of nervous jokes (‘My least favourite shot’ of some vaginal close-up) as time went on the atmosphere became almost strained, though with Willie his usual smiling vague self. At the finish the madame was insistent that we should not all leave together so we separately filtered out into an empty Bond Street with me wondering if this at last was ‘living’.

  7 July. It’s perhaps the quality of my acquaintance but I have yet to speak to one person who is enthused about the Olympics. If the scenes of ritual rejoicing (‘Yes!’) were not enough to put one off there is the prospect of seven years of disruption, procrastination, excuses and inconvenience and all the usual drawbacks of having the builders in. It’s supposed to ‘revitalise’ the East End: i.e. it’s a heaven-sent opportunity to knock down what remains of it, much as Prescott is trying to do elsewhere, and either build over open spaces like Hackney Marshes or tart them up with tasteful garden furniture. A general fucking up, in fact, and for this we must rejoice. All one can hope is that there’s a stadium somewhere on the Northern Line.

  8 July. Shocked that after the initial horror my first reaction to the Tube and bus bombings should be ‘How convenient’ and at how little of what we are told I now believe. As Blair lines up in front of his sombre colleagues at Gleneagles it’s hard not to think how useful this outrage is and how effectively it silences the critics. And as Bush and Blair trot out their vapid platitudes about ‘the War on Terr
or’, give or take a few score of dead it’s hard not to think things are well under control. No one as yet suggests or speculates that this new front in ‘the War on Terror’ might have been avoided had the country not gone to war in the first place. Only yesterday the Guardian reprinted an LRB piece revealing how Iraq had been fleeced of billions of dollars via Paul Bremer’s so-called aid programme – the figures those of US auditors whose reports have passed without notice. Except that they’re maybe even now being read by some burning-eyed youth planning more and worse.

  9 July. I bike home then find I have dropped our Council Tax book en route and have to cycle back and find it which, luckily, I do. So when I sit in the garden to have my tea (toast and bilberry jam and a piece of peach and almond cake from Melrose and Morgan) I am whacked. I doze off and then come round to find the hen blackbird is hopping about. I give her some crumbs which she pretends not to notice before coming back to collect them – sometimes within a few inches of my feet. Puts her head down before a low scuttling run, then pauses on one leg. Find, suddenly I am perfectly happy at this moment, with the sharing of my tea with the blackbird a part of it – somehow a rightness to the trust which gladdens – and settles – the heart.

  10 July. To Leeds in fiercely hot weather to film part of the South Bank Show at Methley, south of Leeds, the drive the same as those sad Sunday evening bus rides that took me back to the York and Lancaster barracks at Pontefract after a forty-eight-hour leave in 1952. There’s still some stately countryside in South Yorks, the road lined with graceful trees, but Methley, which I remember as a pleasing eighteenth-century place, has spoiled itself since: the early nineteenth-century red-brick house by the churchyard now kitted out with lattice windows and the seventeenth-century hall pulled down in 1963.

  Do various pieces in the church, much of it from autocue and, despite some misgivings, tell the story of how Henry Moore used to come to this church when a boy and that it was seeing some of the grotesque sculptures on the corbels that turned his thoughts to art. This may well be the story Moore told himself but it’s so like the tales often told of artists and their beginnings that I have reservations (no need to have worried: it was cut). The tombs, though, are a delight and I stand addressing the camera while caressing the fifteenth-century Sir Robert Waterton and his wife, Cecily. At my back is Lionel, Lord Welles with his bruiser’s face, pudding-basin haircut and elaborate armour, which did not save him from being cut down at Towton on Palm Sunday 1461. Unnoticed on previous visits is a sad little stand in the south-west corner, a sample of the tools and equipment of the last working mine in Methley, laid up here twenty years ago. The first mines in the parish were recorded in 1340 and the names of the mines since are listed: Parlour Pit, Mulberry, Garden and, the last to close, Savile Colliery. Here are a dusty pair of miner’s boots, a shovel, a pick, a miner’s lantern and two great cobs of coal: ‘These tools and equipment hung to rest here at Harvest Festival 1985.’