by Alan Bennett
1 November. A handwritten letter today from Carlisle, in capital letters, thanking me for my stuff and for speaking up for the shit at the bottom of the pile. Pleased by this as I’ve always thought I’d been speaking up for the shit just a bit further up.
Our Algerian road sweeper, oddly named Antonio, comes inside the gate, takes off his shoes and kneels down to pray. This is observed by Nora, who is downstairs ironing and who, more up in religious affairs than I am, announces that it marks the end of Ramadan.
3 November. Arriving in Harrogate with time for tea I go out to Betty’s but there is a queue so I buy something to take back to the hotel and have it in my room. The something I buy is what Betty’s call a Fat Rascal, a large flat fruit scone, a piece of confectionery which is marketed as a Yorkshire speciality and so unwilling am I to collaborate in this trumpery exercise that I find myself unable even to pronounce the name – instead pointing and saying, ‘One of those curranty things.’ R. regards it as moral weakness that I buy it at all.
5 November, Yorkshire. I have failed on several occasions to order in more coal with the result that the coal shed is almost empty, with piled against the back wall a large heap of slack – wet coal dust – well mixed in among it a lot of small coal and the occasional large cob. I sieve this out, saving the burnable coal and putting the coal dust into (extremely heavy) sacks. I wish the village still had its bonfire on the recreation ground as it could have gone straight on the pile.
But it reminds me how when stocks of coal were low during the war we used to sift the coal dust then and how for some (though not in Armley) that was their living, scratting on slag heaps for occasional cobs of coal which they would pile in an old pram and wheel home.
Just after the war, it must have been early in 1946 when we were living at Grandma’s, Aunty Myra, Gordon and me went with a pram to a place down Armley Road where we queued for logs which we pushed back up over past Armley Gaol and down to Gilpin Place.
All these thoughts going through my head this Saturday afternoon as I sift the coal in the shed and sweep it out, and so pleased am I by the emptiness of it, and by the fact that I have cleaned up thirty years’ accumulation of slack that I go back two or three times to admire my handiwork. Once, I suppose, it would have been an opportunity to whitewash it.
We have mice, the result of R. leaving a bag of grass seed in the cupboard under the stairs and tempting in some migrants from next door. Occasionally in winter we’ve had field mice and even on one occasion dormice, but have taken care to restore them to their natural habitat. But these are dark small house mice and so fast-moving they’re hard to see – there’s movement, but what of?
So ‘mice’ goes down on the Settle shopping list where there are two hardware shops. Practically Anything in the marketplace is just that, an Aladdin’s cave of household goods, pots, pans, buckets and brushes and gadgets of every description, all very low-priced. But no poison. Tom, who keeps the shop, doesn’t approve, but doesn’t have any humane traps in stock either so that sends us to Ashfield, the more ordered and professional hardware store on the car park. While this is the shop for the dedicated carpenter or DIY enthusiast and is also a farm shop, happily absent is that blank-faced flat-voiced male expertise such shops often purvey, particularly in London. Indeed when I ask for a mouse-trap, the oldest assistant, now in his eighties, says, ‘Follow me to the mouse department,’ and we are taken to three shelves stacked with every type of rodent eliminator. We get a humane trap and some poison on the principle that if the mouse doesn’t take the sensible option and allow itself to be caught and transported, it deserves all it gets.
‘Does this put them to sleep?’ I ask.
The assistant pats my hand. ‘We like to think so.’
And of course what it is, with no overtones whatsoever, is sheer camp. That’s what makes it a nice shop to go into and which oils the commercial wheels. Camp.
18 November. I’m reading Nature Cure by Richard Mabey, an account of a bout of depression and leaving the Chilterns, where he had always lived, for Norfolk. It’s astonishing the range of knowledge he has at his disposal and humbling, too, though I find myself more interested in his life in nature around his home than when he takes off in the second part of the book for the wildernesses of America.
John Clare figures a good deal and Mabey quotes Clare’s Enclosure elegy ‘Remembrances’ and these lines on a gamekeeper’s gibbet:
O I never call to mind
These pleasant names of places but I leave a sigh behind
While I see the little mouldywarps hang sweeing to the wind
On the only aged willow that in all the field remains
And nature hides her face while they’re sweeing in their chains
And in a silent murmuring complains
Here was common for their hills where they seek for freedom still
Though every common’s gone and though traps are set to kill
The little homeless miners.
I tip this into the script of my first television film, A Day Out (1972), in which there is a similar scene when some cyclists on an outing in 1911 come upon a farm gate festooned with dead moles and rooks.
I suppose the Clare passage would be referenced ‘cf.’ (i.e. compare), these annotated copies of my scripts often fat with stuff I’ve subsequently read but didn’t know at the time of writing. They are not a patch though on Tony Harrison’s handbooks to his plays, which are almost works of art in themselves, with notes on the text and drawings of the set and its associations, lovely objects altogether. Mine are more reassurances to myself that, as in this case, at least I’ve got something right.
19 November. Drive out to Oxfordshire where we have our sandwiches above Wheatfield Church near Adwell. It’s a misty day, the sun just beginning to come through and the delicate apricot-coloured church slowly emerging from the mist is enchanting – like the opening scene of a film.
We go on to Tetsworth where R. buys some cutlery for the house then to Waterperry for some tea, then back home to London by five.
Later on we send out for a curry. A lovely day though I’m still not up to much.
In the car have an idea for a story in which, rather late in life, HMQ becomes an avid reader and how this affects things. [This becomes The Uncommon Reader, 2006.]
28 November. It wasn’t until Dudley M. got into Beyond the Fringe that he realised you were supposed to have an inner life and when he finished in BTF and started on Not Only But Also he set about acquiring one, thus considerably irritating Peter Cook who preferred him as he was. Peter’s drunkenness had a lot to do with them eventually breaking up but it was also that Dudley’s not entirely mistaken notion of self-fulfilment made further co-operation impossible.
1 December. In America there is now no taking evolution for granted. What was (and still is here) a universal rational assumption, in the US has become a position. ‘Are you an evolutionist?’ Jonathan M. recounts an argument he has had with a woman in the New York Natural History Museum who asked him just this question. Later, talking to his students, he says he wishes he had answered the question ‘Are you an evolutionist?’ with ‘Only in the sense that I’m a gravitationalist.’
3 December. Find an old note from Morrissey, c.1995.
Alan Bee
Yesterday you decline, but today your agent says you accept. Oh joy! If you fancy giving your cycle clips an airing I’ll be in tonight at 7, 7.30, 8-00, with cloth on and pot of.
Most loyally,
a snooker pal of Kathleen Harrisons
4 December. Clearing out the study half of the sitting room (name of the room never settled in forty years of living here), I come across some notes made in 1996 on Sebastian Faulks’s book The Fatal Englishman, a study of the (short) lives of Christopher Wood, Richard Hillary and Jeremy Wolfenden. The notes are confined to the section on Wolfenden whom I scarcely knew, though the last time I saw him, in Oxford in 1961, he stopped to talk.
Reading this memoir of Jerem
y Wolfenden feels a foretaste of what is to come; there will be a lot more of this, one thinks, times differently remembered/events diversely recalled/perspectives that don’t tally with one’s own, though the first impression that comes to mind is of National Service and the JSSL camp at Bodmin, tumbling out of the Nissen huts and running in nailed boots up the paths to the parade ground at the top of the camp.
The lowliest arm of service was the army with soldiers bigger, clumsier and altogether earthier and we used to speculate sometimes whether, if we didn’t know, one could guess just from the look of them whether conscripts were army, navy or RAF. And I still carry in my head some Platonic notion of what each arm of service typically looked like. Norman Tebbit is RAF. John Prescott is army, Robin Cook RAF, Tony Blair navy, John Major is one of nature’s aircraftsmen. Kenneth Clark in the infantry, a corporal perhaps or a rundown second lieutenant.
The naval cadets tended to be chummier with the instructors, particularly the most highly coloured of them, Dmitri Makaroff. They took part in play readings, edited a magazine, Samovar, and even had little suppers with the instructors, evidences of sophistication slightly jeered at, I remember, by their coarser army and RAF colleagues. Set down in the back of beyond, for the instructors Bodmin was like some coda to Chekhov with London as longed for as Moscow ever was.
It was at Bodmin that I first became aware of Jeremy Wolfenden, though I think I knew, possibly from gossip when we were on the Cambridge stage of the Russian course, of his fabled cleverness and also that while the son of Sir John Wolfenden, the provincial vice chancellor who was heading the commission on homosexuality, he was himself a homosexual.
This cannot have come through Eton gossip as significantly there were no Etonians in the army or RAF whereas the naval contingents included several. However on finishing his National Service Wolfenden was going up to Magdalen with a demyship in history and one of my closest friends on the course, David Marquand, was a demy too, so it may have been through him. But one tended to know about one’s clever contemporaries. Kenneth Cavender, a boy at Bradford Grammar School, had got a scholarship to Balliol and then had hoovered up various other local Yorkshire scholarships, one or two of which I’d unsuccessfully competed for myself. Looking back I suppose I saw Cavender as Marquand and his friends saw Wolfenden, as The Competition, though to me it hardly seemed so as they were so much more advantaged they were all in a different league anyway.
The naval cadets I remember seeing at Bodmin – I don’t remember speaking to any of them – included Wolfenden, who with his floppy hair and dark glasses was hard to miss. Others were Robin Hope, with whom he was thought to be having an affair, Robert Cassen and David Shapiro. They were all in their ways distant creatures – Cassen, Shapiro and Wolfenden because of their intellectual superiority, Hope because of his elegance and social assurance. Not to mind his association with Wolfenden being known seemed very daring at the time, though maybe not as bold as Hockney, say, who (though it was ten years later and in a very different milieu) always made homosexuality part of his style.
Since I never spoke to any of them, what the intellectual superiority amounted to I was in no position to judge but I suspect that a reputation for intellect at that age often consists in knowing how to talk like men of forty – not prodigies so much as prematurely middle-aged, grown-ups already. This grown-upness is perhaps one of the things Eton bestows on its boys with the bill to be paid later. Wolfenden’s grown-upness seems to have included a sense that nothing is really worth doing, which comes to most people, if it comes at all, at the end of life.
Wolfenden as an undergraduate looked not unlike the young W. H. Auden and going to bed with either must have been much the same – both kippered by chain smoking and as likely as not pissed. Still, both of them managed it on a regular basis however unappetising it may have turned out to be with their partners, I imagine, flattered to find themselves not so much fancied as rated – being thought worthy to go to bed with such great minds.
Faulks needs W. to be handsome and fetching, which he wasn’t except in a B picture sort of way, his appearance always seeming self-consciously decadent … black shirts, the dark glasses, the drooping cigarette, though by this time existentialism was just beginning to run out of steam. Nor do I remember him as being six foot tall, in my mind’s eye stockier than that.
David Marquand saw a good deal of him at Oxford, and confirmed how clever he was – sitting next to Wolfenden in a lecture he found that he was simultaneously taking notes on the lecture, writing an article for Isis and putting together an essay for his tutor – and none of it, seemingly, a performance put on for Marquand’s benefit.
I sat the same All Souls examination though don’t remember Wolfenden leaving as Faulks says he did after half an hour. I was probably too busy wondering what had persuaded me to sit the examination in the first place. Having scraped a first by what I now regard as virtual subterfuge, I had perhaps briefly convinced myself that I was All Souls material. What the topics were or what I wrote I have mercifully no recollection; I just hope that the papers were destroyed and no record kept.
As with Guy Burgess, with whom it was said Wolfenden later had an affair, there was a good deal of drink, nicotine and dirty fingernails though, unlike Burgess, Wolfenden doesn’t seem to have been big on charm. Whether they had an affair I doubt. The same assumption was made about Burgess and Blunt, less on the actual evidence than on the algebraic principle of getting everybody of the same sexuality on the same side of the equation and in one bracket.
When Wolfenden spoke to me, possibly for the first time, it was on St Giles, that little stretch between Broad Street and the Martyrs’ Memorial and would have been in 1961 or ’62 when, though I was appearing in Beyond the Fringe, I was still teaching in Oxford – though this didn’t give me much of an edge, at any rate in Magdalen. ‘Who are you?’ said my neighbour at Magdalen High Table one night. ‘Oh, I’m nobody,’ I said and meant it. Which is bad enough both on his part and mine except that it was repeated word for word with the same don the following evening.
So more priggish then than I hope I am now I thought Wolfenden, to whom I’d also been nobody, stopped to chat because I was in Beyond the Fringe but I’ve no memory of the conversation except I came away thinking he was perhaps kinder than I’d thought.
There’s some speculation in the book about his death and whether it was connected with his work for the secret service, but the cause of his death and the post-mortem report seems more or less the same as that of another alcoholic, Peter Cook, though Peter lasted longer.
Another aspect of this book is how unlike Oxford things were at Cambridge where Wolfenden’s and my contemporaries have made something of an effort to pass each other off as some sort of jeunesse dorée, and drum themselves up into a generation with Granta, Footlights, Leavis and the late Sylvia Plath some of the chief ingredients.
The other ingredient which is even less appealing is the Apostles, the self-conscious, self-congratulatory and self-perpetuating group of supposedly the brightest or most coming men in the university meeting to admire each other’s brains. I don’t know whether it still exists, but though there are many reasons why I would have liked to have gone to Cambridge, the Apostles is not one of them.
Also mentioned in the Faulks book are the history teachers at Magdalen in Wolfenden’s time, particularly A. J. P. Taylor (with whom, says S.F., Wolfenden would spend the night drinking) and K. B. McFarlane who with Harry Wheldon were W.’s tutors. Bruce is, as always, set up against the fluent and prolific Taylor as the costive and careful non-publishing medieval historian. What is seldom said – and isn’t said here – is firstly how concerned and conscientious a tutor McFarlane was and secondly – and more generally – how of the three of them, Taylor, Wheldon and McFarlane, it was Bruce McFarlane who was valiant for truth. For both Taylor and Wheldon, history was a skating rink on which they could show off their techniques, turn their paradoxes, their sudden voltes-face with what actua
lly happened in history not something that troubled them a great deal, argument the real part. It was McFarlane whose first concern was what really happened and whether it was to Henry V himself or to an insignificant fifteenth-century squire on his little estate of equal consequence: the truth had to be teased out. For Taylor and Wheldon truth was a different kind of tease altogether.
Tucked in with the Wolfenden stuff, I find notes on another memoir (privately printed) of David Winn, who was drowned as a young man and a contemporary, I imagine, of Francis Hope. It was one of the books I got from Francis Hope’s library when Mary Hope was disposing of it some time in the eighties.
It’s not a book intended to be read by anyone who did not know him, still less meant to be reviewed or subjected to analysis – but in its assumptions and its artlessness it says something about a kind of life that one thought had vanished with the Edwardians – ‘Still going on’, as Larkin says, ‘Still going on’. Families so well placed that the easiest way to find their son digs in Oxford was to buy a house.
For me university was a bus I had to catch. For them there would be one along presently or some other form of transport through life – the higher civil service, the diplomatic corps. Culture was not something that had to be acquired but could just be put on like an old coat, hanging in the hall.
It would be comforting to think that all these young men (and they were all men in those days) who led such charmed lives were stupid, but of course this is far from being the case: many of them took firsts, several became fellows of All Souls, senior demys at Magdalen – a lazy and elegant progress in comparison to which my education I see in retrospect to have been a desperate scramble.