Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  7 December. Yesterday we gave lunch to Norman Scarfe and Paul Fincham at Sotheby’s which neither of them had ever set foot inside – either in the old set-up or its revamp. Good food, though, a bit draughty and since both of them are deaf not sure how much gets through.

  Norman remembering how taking E. M. Forster out for a drive they passed Angus McBean’s moated Suffolk house (lately featured in World of Interiors) and on a whim called. Angus overwhelmed and overawed but when they got inside they found Quentin Crisp was a guest. He was correcting the proofs of The Naked Civil Servant and reading out long extracts in the process. Whether it was that Forster was used to being the centre of attention or didn’t care for such flamboyance it wasn’t a successful encounter.

  Norman also recalls when they were living at Shingle Street he had been working one day over at Snape Maltings preparing some lecture or exhibition for which he’d been doing all his own electrics. Late that night a neighbour phoned to say that if they went to the door and looked across the estuary they would see the Maltings burning down. They got in the car and rushed to Snape, Norman all the time thinking the fire might have been caused by an electrical fault and he was responsible. When the fire was investigated the blaze was shown to have started in the projection room, the one area in which he had not been working.

  Norman now eighty-one or two, Paul in his late seventies and both vigorous and energetic, going to concerts, exhibitions and socially always in demand – not our lives at all.

  8 December. I buy a bottle of organic wine at Fresh and Wild and looking at the label see that it says ‘Suitable for Vegetarians and Vagrants’. Momentarily I think, ‘Well, that’s thoughtful, someone admitting that winos deserve consideration like everyone else,’ before realising, of course, that it says not ‘vagrants’ but ‘vegans’.

  15 December. I am trying to clean up the front room, going through old files and papers dating back thirty and even forty years. I find this immensely depressing as many of the abandoned or unfinished pieces have good and funny lines, or are interesting situations – a boy in a First World War country house that has been turned into a hospital for instance; a TV play, Gay Night at Bangs, which I remember being very taken with in the eighties and many, many more – none of which I throw away, just dust and put in fresh folders with a new label describing their contents.

  I wish I could think that all this unfinished stuff mulched the stuff I did finish (and which by comparison seems quite meagre). But I fear I just forgot most of it, the hours I spent labouring over these pages all wasted. Had I finished everything I started I would be, if not Shakespeare, at least as prolific as George Bernard Shaw – and a bit jokier.

  16 December. Roy Keane has the face of a mercenary. Meet him before the walls of fifteenth-century Florence and one’s heart would sink.

  17 December. ‘The Oxford Final Schools and the Day of Judgement are two examinations, not one.’ Sir Walter Raleigh, Merton Professor of English.

  This is a quotation I knew of, but had forgotten until I found it in Janet Adam Smith’s memoir of her childhood and time at Oxford – all she’d got round to doing of a full-scale autobiography – and which Andrew Roberts (not the historian) has sent me. She lost two brothers in the First War, one of them wounded and sent home to Aberdeen to convalesce. She was learning the violin at the time and her hands were too small to do the proper fingering. He was watching her and one particularly high note he did for her, with a finger of his injured hand. When he recovered he was sent back to the front and killed.

  2006

  4 January, Yorkshire. A heron fishing by the bridge this morning as I walk down for the papers. No one else about. It takes off and flies down the beck to where the dippers normally patrol so walking down to the village I draw level with it and it waits motionless then, feeling itself watched, flaps off up the beck again. Herons are not rare but their size is never less than spectacular and, grey and white though they are, still seem exotic.

  Bitterly cold with snow forecast later so we get off early up the M6 to Penrith and Brampton, hoping to have a look at the Written Rock, a quarry by the river at Brampton with an inscription carved by the Roman legion that cut the stone here for nearby Hadrian’s Wall. But it’s too cold to go looking for it and it’s said to be overgrown and eroded now, though somehow to see the place that supplied the stone and the mark the men made who quarried it seems much more evocative than the actual wall itself. Instead we buy a couple of George III country chairs very reasonably in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall.

  Still the promised snow doesn’t materialise – or despite the dire and repeated warnings from the forecasters, just a wet quarter of an inch. Weather forecasting, which one wants to be as detached and impartial as medical diagnosis, is nowadays infected with the same longing for drama that shapes television and journalism in general. Like the War on Terror or the prevalence of cancer these Cassandrine predictions are meant to keep the nation in a state of disquiet, or ‘on their toes’ I suppose they would describe it. But weather should not be exaggerated: an inch or two of snow is not a ‘white-out’; having to drive at 50 mph rather than 70 is not ‘the nation ground to a halt.’ It’s just weather.

  6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the press. But less perilous, I would have thought, to have a leader intoxicated with whisky than one like Blair, intoxicated with himself.

  16 January. Sitting after supper by the table downstairs (books and papers crowding the meal into a narrow strip) I airily wave my hand and knock a glass to the floor where, of course, it shatters. But not just a glass, a lovely nineteenth-century rummer that I have had all my life. It was bought when I was living in Worship Street doing Beyond the Fringe in 1961, at a junk shop up the Kingsland Road and cost maybe 1/- – or 5/-, I can’t remember – but nothing, even then. And it has been with me ever since, through my early time in Gloucester Crescent, Chalcot Square and Gloucester Crescent again and for these last ten years or so has been the glass Rupert has for his one glass of wine at supper every evening. Until tonight.

  21 January. On the way down to the National I find Waterloo Bridge crowded with onlookers all gazing down at the river where the stray bottlenose whale has been manoeuvred onto a barge and is travelling in state down the river, the banks lined with spectators – whose concern for this distressed creature seems more honest, less mawkish and altogether more heartfelt than for any celebrity, say – and a collection of individual concerns not mass hysteria.

  Alas it is sailing towards its death, which happens about seven though if it reminds people of the interdependence of us all as creatures it will not have been in vain. I should have stopped the cab to look as I have never seen a whale, dead or alive and as maybe no one has ever in the Thames, certainly not in my lifetime.

  25 January. Have my hair cut, my barber a slight, dark haunted-looking man, I think a Kurd, in his thirties and if I understand him (he has very little English) living at home with his mother – though not gay, I would have thought. He has in the past asked me if I want my eyebrows trimmed, something I’ve always resisted on the principle that this will make them grow even more and I shall end up like Bernard Ingham. Nevertheless it’s a point of principle with the barber that he should try and trim them just a little. Thus when he is shaving my sideboards with the electric shaver he will bring it back across my forehead, running it lightly across my eyebrows as if by accident – and leaving them, since he’s not allowed officially to touch them, looking like a badly mown verge. He does this today and in another what he knows is a potentially impermissible move, rapidly runs the razor round my ears. My nostrils and the lobes of my ears are so far inviolate but I’m sure he will have his eye on them in the future. I, of course, say nothing, partly from embarrassment, and from not caring enough �
� and also to do so would be to impinge on what I’m sure he sees as his professional duties. So after a lifetime of avoiding such supernumerary attentions I am now at the barber’s mercy. [Though I managed to postpone the inevitable for a further nine years; see 23 September 2015.]

  31 January. A friend of John Williams, who died eight years ago, sends me a copy of one of his letters he has discovered, dated August 1968. It ends very characteristically (and with a drawing), ‘In the garden there are sunflowers eight feet high, in bloom. The heads tilt over, look down at you standing below them. It is very refreshing to have a flower looking down at you.’ [See Untold Stories, 4 December 1997.]

  4–5 February. A weekend in London, much of it spent at the new house where I’ve made up a colour that seems to go on the walls, ‘a pigment of my imagination’ – a greenish yellow made up of a slug (exactly what it looks like) of Winsor yellow oil paint, half a slug of Naples Yellow and a touch of dark grey. I mix these up in turps then add some matt glaze. I’ve been putting this on with a sponge but now have taken to applying it with a brush. Either way it goes on rather brown and uneven so that until I got used to it, I thought I’d ruined it. But then it dries out to a yellowish green, thin enough to reveal the grain of the plaster and which – once gloss varnish goes on – will look a deep and interesting surface. It’s a pity the plaster itself isn’t a surface that’s more interesting – nothing like the various blemishes and changes of texture here as there are at Gloucester Crescent for instance.

  10 February. Letters, letters, all praise not a breath of criticism and yet the feeling is of being pelted with small stones – fame a species of pebbledash.

  16 February. Having of course, wholly forgotten that yesterday at 11 a.m. we went down to Camden Town Hall and signed the form prior to going through the civil partnership agreement, which is fixed for some time in March. No more splother or ceremony than renewing one’s parking permit. Then we had a cup of coffee in the BM cafeteria and R. went off to work. And so, I imagine it will be when we do the actual deed.

  20 February. One of the pleasures of painting, even if it’s only the wall which I’m currently engaged on, is to be able to visit Cornelissen’s shop in Great Russell Street, which sells all manner of paints and colours and where I go this morning in order to find some varnish to seal the surface of the plaster.

  After I’d finished putting on all the greenish-yellow colour yesterday I did some trial patches of varnish on it. I knew, though it’s twenty years since I last stained a wall, how this transforms and enlivens the colour but I am astonished all over again at the depth and interest it gives to even the most ordinary surface. There’s no literary equivalent that I can think of to this vernissage, no final gloss to be put on a novel, say, or a play, which will bring them suddenly to life. Today when I go down to Cornelissen the assistant suggests that as an alternative to the gloss I try shellac, which has even more of a surface. It’s one of the pleasures of the shop that you’re served by people who know what they’re talking about and who, one gets the feeling, go home from work, don a smock and beret and go to the easel themselves. Which reminds me how when I first stained some walls, back in 1968, I had no need to come all the way down to Cornelissen. Then I just went round the corner in Camden Town where Roberson’s had a (long gone) shop in Parkway. They were old established colourists and had in the window a palette board used by Joshua Reynolds. Whatever happened to that?

  Further to the painting, though, for which I scorn to don the Marigolds, I am buying bread in Villandry when I see the assistant gazing in horror at my hands, the fingers stained the virulent yellowish green I’ve been sponging on during this last week. As a young man my father smoked quite heavily and his fingers were stained like this by cigarettes – and a nice brown it was, and one which I wouldn’t mind seeing on the wall; if he were alive still and the man he was when I was ten I could take him along to Cornelissen where I’m sure they could match his fingers in water, oil or acrylic.

  And it stirs another memory from the 1970s, or whenever it was that the IRA conducted their ‘dirty protests’ at the Maze prison, smearing the walls of their cells with excrement. Occasionally one would see edited shots of these cells on television when I was invariably struck by what a nice warm and varied shade the protester had achieved. ‘Maze brown’ I suppose Farrow & Ball would tastefully have called it.

  3 March. Oh to live in the world one sees from the train – empty, unpeopled, only a horse in the field, one car at the crossing, and a woman at the end of a garden taking down washing.

  4 March. We stay the night at Lacock, as R. is doing a shoot at nearby Corsham Court. In the morning we walk round this picture-book village wholly owned by the National Trust since 1944. It’s not yet ten o’clock but there are already cars in the car park and visitors strolling about; the bells are ringing for matins and, mingling with the visitors, a family, prayer books in hand, makes its way to church. Except is it a family, or is it like everything else in the village a dependency of the National Trust? It’s not that the place is manicured particularly, though there is no stone out of place, just that its beauty and its settled tranquillity are in themselves slightly sinister.

  7 March. A wet morning and we go down to Camden Town Hall for the formalities – I’d hardly say solemnisation – of our civil partnership agreement. Owen T. and Kate M. are the witnesses; Tom comes along too and Diana and Graham. The two registrars aren’t too gushy, one of them not unlike Frances H., the other cheerful but keeping it all low-key, the only droll note when, as part of her brief, she talks about us ‘now embarking on our life together’, whereas that started fourteen or at any rate nine years ago. Afterwards we adjourn for coffee to Villandry which is nice and easy, Kate and Tom both very taken with Owen, R.’s brother, whom Kate had last seen when he was a toddler.

  Now home where Nick Hytner has just rung after the opening night of History Boys in Sydney, which has been a great success and the boys hugely enjoying themselves and being pursued by droves of busty Australian charmers.

  8 March. Biking back from the paper shop this morning I see the oldest of the market men bring produce from his truck, a sack of carrots in one hand, sprouts in the other and laid over the top of his head an open string bag of onions. It’s only a small sack, which lays across his head like a wig and what he looks like is some oldish Northern lady bringing home her shopping, with her hair still in Carmen rollers ready for her evening out.

  15 March. After the murder of Mr de Menezes, Tony Blair claimed that he ‘entirely understood’ the feelings of the young man’s parents. Today it is the eighty thousand people who, following the government’s urgings, subscribed to their employers’ private pension schemes. When the firms went bust or were unable to pay, their workers unsurprisingly turned to the government to make good their lost annuities, except that now the government claims it’s not its responsibility. However in the Commons today Mr Blair reassures the aggrieved eighty thousand, telling them that he entirely understands their indignation. Is there any limit, one wonders, to the entire understanding of Mr Blair? Heaped naked in a pile on the floor of an Iraqi prison it must be comforting to know that you have the entire understanding of Mr Blair. Hooded, shackled and flown fourteen hours at a time across continents do you reside in the entirety of Mr Blair’s understanding? No, presumably, because of course this does not happen.

  17 March. I wish it were the Freedom of Camden I’d been offered rather than the Freedom of Leeds. Then I could write back saying, No thank you. All I want is to change my parking permit – a procedure that in Camden is virtually impossible to accomplish within a single working day. I cycle down in a bitter wind to the office in Crowndale Road with a folder containing enough documents and validations for an entry visa to Turkmenistan. The assistant, whose accent is so thick I find it very hard to understand (or even hear as the microphone is faulty), seems satisfied with the array of documentation I produce but then decides I need the windscreen permit currently in the
car. I ask how I can bring this in without getting a parking fine. This she cannot solve but insists that she must see it. This has never been necessary before, nor is it on the list of documents the renewal document stipulated as being required so, thinking she is just being obstructive, I cycle on to Judd Street where the assistant is similarly unhelpful though at greater length. Before I come away I lean across the counter and say, ‘Listen. I got married here last week. Compared with getting a parking permit it was a pushover.’ Not a flicker. Easter Island.

  1 April. To Mrs Hill’s at Kirkby Stephen where Mr Hill has given her permission to sell us the pan stand, a fixture of the upstairs window, for £15, and we also buy a little flower jug (£5) and a cast-iron hob.

  18 April. To New York for the opening of The History Boys. The plane is not full and unexpectedly comfortable but I miss the now archaic ritual of transatlantic flights in the days before videos and iPods: the coffee and pastries when you got on, the drinks and the lunch before the blinds went down and they showed a film. Once that was over you were already above New England and there was tea and an hour later New York. Now there’s no structure to it at all, just choice – choice of programme, choice of video and no tea either, just today, a choice of pizza or a hot turkey sandwich. I browse through Duff Cooper’s diaries and, dosed up on valium, am unalarmed by what little turbulence there is. But so miss R. – at every stage of the journey, setting off, getting there, half the person I am.

  An odd incident at Heathrow. There is a long queue to go through security and a boy of eighteen or so comes down the line asking if he can go to the front as his plane takes off in twenty minutes. This he’s allowed to do, my own flight not due to go for well over an hour. I am among the first off at JFK when I see this youth again, now hurrying to be ahead in the immigration queue also, so his claim to be on an imminent flight must have been a lie, and had anyone else spotted him who had previously let him through there might have been words spoken. Just in T-shirt and jeans he doesn’t look as if he’s been in First or Business so he must have parlayed his way off the plane ahead of everyone else just as he did earlier. But he has luggage and there is no avoiding that, and as I spot my name on a card and see a driver waiting he is still hanging about restlessly at the carousel. Disturbing, though, and it leaves me wanting an explanation and a notion of his life.