Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  21 April, New York. Persisting with the Duff Cooper diaries, which, though they’re more than frank about his innumerable liaisons, are utterly silent on more interesting topics, the cruise of the Nahlin, for instance, in 1936 when Duff Cooper and his wife accompanied the King and Mrs Simpson around the Mediterranean. Years ago Russell Harty had supper with Diana Cooper and she told him that she and her husband had had the adjoining cabin to the royal couple (or rather one royal, the other not) and that she had had her ear pressed to the wall half the night in case there was any action, but heard not a thing. The other guest at supper was Martha Gellhorn, both of them getting on and quite pissed, so that Russell spent the meal rushing from one end of the table to the other as each in turn slowly toppled off her chair.

  Duff Cooper’s philanderings are often quite funny. Having rekindled an old flame, Lady Warrender, he adjourns with her to his Gower Street house, now emptied of furniture and up for sale. Suddenly, while they’re at it, there’s a loud banging on the door downstairs which Duff Cooper eventually has to answer and it’s the estate agent with some prospective buyers wanting to see the house. It’s made funnier (and rather Buñuelesque) by Duff C. and Lady W. being so middle-aged and ultra-respectable. John Julius Norwich puts his father’s sexual success down to his ability to write bad sonnets to his lady friends but one wonders if it was a more basic attraction. The moustache is hardly a plus, the photograph on the book jacket making him look like a 1940s cinema manager.

  22 April. I do the rounds of the TV and radio arts programmes prior to the opening of the play on Sunday, accompanied by Jim Bik, our young low-key PR man. At one venue we are met in the lobby of some huge new communications emporium by the TV call boy who takes us through various gleaming and coded doors until we get to one where the code he punches in doesn’t work. Not, I think, making a joke he says apologetically, ‘Guess this is kind of lo-tech,’ and knocks on the door.

  23 April. The theatre where The History Boys is playing, the Broadhurst, is as dull as New York theatres mostly are, painted battleship grey and on this opening night packed with a slow-moving crowd of playgoers reluctant to take their seats. Beforehand, we go round and see the boys, who are a bit excited, though it’s not a first night on which much depends as most of the critics have already been during the previews. The play itself seems to me to go too quickly and is a bit slurred, the result not so much of it being a first night as that the cast have been doing it on and off now for two years. When James C. drops his head on his desk it’s with an almighty crash and he gets up looking a bit pale, but there are no other slip-ups. The response at the end is tumultuous, the audience (though I think this is nowadays obligatory) rising to their feet en masse. We go round backstage to find them all getting ready for the party; some of them have allowed themselves to be styled for the occasion in suits and big plain-coloured Windsor-knotted ties so that they look more like footballers than actors.

  Then to the Tavern on the Green, a stupendously vulgar venue where we have to proceed past a gallery of photographers and TV cameras. Whether this is what always happens to a greater or lesser degree I’m not sure but there’s not much doubt it’s been a success, proved apparently by the readiness of the guests to remain at the party. I scarcely eat simply because I have to keep getting up to greet the boys’ parents and, in Sacha Dhawan’s case, his sisters and his cousins and his aunts, who have followed the production across the world through Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia to this first night on Broadway. Back at 16th Street by 11.30 happy that it’s all done with.

  25 April. En route from New York to Boston by train Lynn W. has booked us onto the quiet coach, which is where we often sit when going up to Leeds. It isn’t always quiet, though, and in my experience is probably the most contentious coach on the train. This is because, in England at any rate, the prohibition against the use of mobile phones is often ignored or not even acknowledged so that the occasional bold spirit will then protest and a row breaks out, and even when it doesn’t there’s frequently some unspoken resentment against offenders, who aren’t even aware.

  This morning our coach is quite subdued, no one uses a mobile, though the three of us talk quietly and occasionally Lynn laughs. I notice one or two stern heads bobbing above the seats without realising why until one pale, wild-eyed Madame Defarge-like figure advances down the carriage and gestures mutely at the Quiet Coach notice. We stop talking (though find it hard not to giggle). However another couple, possibly German, not realising they are committing an offence continue to chat whereupon Madame Defarge confronts them, too, and then goes in search of the conductor. As she passes me I say, mildly: ‘It’s only a quiet coach. It isn’t a Trappist one.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ she snaps and returns a few minutes later with the conductor who gives the new offenders a mild lecture. I pass Madame Defarge again as I tiptoe down to the loo and see she’s working on some sort of thesis, her ideal mode of transport I suppose a corklined carriage. The ‘Marcel Proust’ might be a good name for a train.

  29 April. On our way to a friend’s sample sale on 18th Street we are held up at Broadway by a protest march. It’s an alliance of all the various protest groups – Stop the War, Save Darfur, the victims of Katrina – with bands, banners, blacks, Bush haters and blue-suited ladies marching side by side. Somewhere among them, I’m sure, my Amherst friends, the Elbows. To get across we have to mingle with the marchers and let ourselves be carried along with the flow until we hit the far side of the street and each time, going and coming back I find it brings me, entirely unexpectedly, to the edge of tears. Americans, as Rupert says, are capable of the best and the worst and this is the best – serious, humorous and determined – young couples with babies in strollers, old men in parkas, priests and Muslims, gays, veterans all testify that America is not just the ignorant red-necked bully half the world currently perceives it to be.

  Compare though how much there is about America in our serious newspapers and how much there is about the United Kingdom in the New York Times: often not a thing. What we think and what we do is of no interest to most of America and even to New York. They are about as interested in our affairs as we are in the affairs of Portugal, say.

  The march snarls up traffic all over New York, gathering at Foley Square before breaking up. We are in a patisserie in Tribeca and sit at a table with three of the marchers, two from Boston and the other an old lady (i.e. my age) from Westchester. They’re serious solid middle-American ladies, radicals they ain’t. But if I were George Bush I’d hope never to meet them face to face as their patience and conviction would show him up as the fool and trickster he is.

  12 May. To Leeds where this evening I am to be given the Freedom of the City. The actual ceremony takes place in the council chamber, the leader of each party having the right to say their piece so it’s quite a lengthy business. The acoustics aren’t good and some I can’t hear but keep a grateful smile on my face just in case, meanwhile spotting my relatives and guests who are scattered among the councillors. When it gets to my turn I slightly lose my way in the speech I’ve written out (but don’t read) though do it well enough. It’s only the first of two speeches I have to make, the second one after the dinner that follows:

  To be given the Freedom of Leeds is a great honour, indeed the greatest the city could pay me.

  I don’t think, though that it diminishes the honour if I say that I feel I was given the freedom of the city more than fifty years ago, thanks to the education bestowed upon me here.

  I went first in 1939 to Upper Armley National School, now Christ Church C. of E. Primary School, briefly to West Leeds High School and then to Leeds Modern School, now Lawnswood School, from which, thanks to a Senior City scholarship I went eventually to Oxford.

  My parents set great store by education, which they had never had, both of them leaving school at twelve or thirteen and they were determined my brother and I should have the advantages that had been denied to them.

  Leeds set gr
eat store by education, too and it was, of course, entirely free and thanks to the City they never had to pay a penny for our education from start to finish. So if I’m passionate about free education now and against loans and all the other ways in which it now has to be financed it’s because I still believe that the way Leeds educated its children then was the best.

  And it wasn’t simply education in the schools. Just down the road is George Corson’s School Board Building, the solidity and grandeur of which expresses the city’s faith in education. And beyond it is the library building and at the top of the library, what was then the Reference Library, a superb piece of high Victorian architecture and a wonderful library where I regularly used to do my homework or work in the vacation along with many of my contemporaries.

  Libraries don’t have honours boards but if they did that of Leeds Reference Library would have a distinguished list because of the boys and girls who worked there in my time alone at least eight have become judges.

  And next door to the library is, of course, the Art Gallery which was another part of my education, and across the road the Town Hall where every Saturday night throughout my adolescence I went to concerts and learned to love music.

  So you see that when I say I was given the freedom of the city many years ago, that is what I mean.

  I haven’t had much to do with honours. They tend to be bestowed, come from above and maybe I have an ancient Northern distrust of being beholden. But this is different. As I understand it, it was voted on by all the parties unanimously, so I see it not as coming down but as coming up – and coming up from the people of Leeds. And that makes me very happy. Thank you.

  16 May. Philip Roth’s face in a photograph by Nancy Crampton on the jacket of his new novel, Everyman, is as stern and ungiving as a self-portrait by Rembrandt.

  30 May, Yorkshire. Not one in fifty people knows how to restore or convert a house. A familiar fault round here is to strip off the stucco to reveal the supposed beauty of the stonework, which is often not beautiful at all and which, badly pointed as it then invariably is, becomes a garish patchwork besides letting in more damp than it did before. We pass such a house in Lawkland today, a tall dignified place it’s always been, plain and rather Scottish-looking. Now, stripped of its weathered stucco it sports a suburban front door from a cheap builder’s merchants, and coming round the corner and seeing it transformed I involuntarily cry out. But it’s just one of hundreds in the neighbourhood to be similarly vandalised, the suburbanisation of Craven much worse than anything that has yet happened in Swaledale or Wensleydale. There’s scarcely a barn within reach of the road that hasn’t been kitted out with brown-framed windows and a little bit of Leeds or Bradford installed on its greenfield site.

  1 June. Gilly P. who comes on a Wednesday evening to do our reflexology also looks after various disabled people, including Jim, who was blind and has just died. She went to his funeral at Kensal Green on Saturday where the chapel was full of guide dogs, crouched in the pews or lying in the aisle, Jim’s dog one of the congregation, too, though as ever not paying much attention, always looking round and never concentrating. It was quite absent-minded with Jim, so that he often got black eyes through bumping into things, this negligence Gilly thinks to be put down to the fact that these days there are fewer training centres for guide dogs and they’re not schooled as well as they once were.

  After the service there is a wake in a local pub where many of the blind get quite drunk, blind drunk in this case not just a phrase. Several of them try tipsily to touch G. up and when she tells one of them off for groping her he says plaintively: ‘But I can’t see what I’m doing, can I?’ According to G. this is a regular get-out.

  2 June. Heard someone saying today instead of ‘all the time’, the now pretty common phrase ‘24/7’ – an American import, 9/11 its first introduction here.

  Wonder about the small feeling of satisfaction someone gets by saying something as linguistically modish and up-to-the-minute as 24/7 – a small thrill at being at the cutting edge of language (or using a phrase they’ve got off the TV).

  3 June. To Wendover, where we have coffee and look round an antique centre in the Old Post Office, the building with its lovely banisters and painted sixteenth-century beams as interesting as the stuff in it. We find a cheap blue-and-white plate (and resist several others). R. buys some plants at a shop down the street and then we go in search of Acton Turville which has a good church and where we plan to have our sandwiches. But it’s a spring Saturday and the bells are ringing and of course there’s a wedding. Still it’s a lovely spot and we sit on a seat at the far end of the churchyard and have our lunch as the bells eventually stop and the sound of the hymn drifts out over the grass where the bell ringers are having a picnic, too. Behind us is a wide medieval-looking field, new mown with the grass left strewn about to dry and a horse is sitting with some cows in the shade of the churchyard trees. It’s a lovely spot and we are both very happy and know it – even though the church (where the WI will be offering cream teas at 3 p.m.) will alas have to wait. Then, after a bit of a trek, we find Chearsley Church which is a disappointment but make it to Waterperry by the back road from Long Crendon in time for a nice tea on the lawn and more plant-buying.

  11 June, New York. Back for the second time in six weeks, this time for the Tonys and again to Lynn W.’s 16th Street apartment, which is the penthouse of a small 1930s skyscraper with a terrace all the way round and views uptown to the Chrysler Building and Central Park and to the west the Hudson and the Jersey shore. It’s warm and windy and sitting in the bedroom with the door open I can see the Empire State Building reflected in the mirror opposite. Planes cross the blue sky unheeded as once before they did one sunny morning and, to someone here as seldom as I am, never without fell implications. We have a long brunch at the Odeon then walk back to 16th Street to prepare for the Tonys this evening.

  The cast have all been styled for the occasion but nobody has taken on the challenge of styling me, my major contribution to fashion an Armani suit and a red spotted bow tie which, though it’s tied and retied several times in the course of the evening, never manages to achieve the horizontal. It’s also a magnet for well wishers, beginning with the doorman at Radio City Music Hall who opens the limo door and then adjusts my tie and it’s still happening five weary hours later when we come away.

  In the event of our winning the Best Play award we had agreed beforehand that the boys should all come up to receive it, which indeed they do. But so also do a collection of people whom I’ve never seen before, and in such numbers that David Hyde Pierce, who is presenting it, is practically elbowed out of the way. These turn out to be the backers who, of course, have every reason to be pleased and indeed one of them duly adjusts my tie.

  I am then bundled out through a back door and across the street to Rockefeller Plaza where a whole floor has been given over to the press. I’m thrust blinking onto a stage facing a battery of lights while questions come out of the darkness, the best of which is: ‘Do you think this award will kick-start your career?’ News of my lacklustre performance on this podium must have got round quickly because I’m then taken down a long corridor off which various TV and radio shows have mikes and cameras and there is more humiliation. ‘Do you want him?’ asks the PA at each doorway, the answer more often than not being ‘Nah,’ so I only score about four brief interviews before I’m pushed through another door and find I’m suddenly back in the street in the rain and it’s all more or less over.

  16 June. Having seen the TV programme on which it was based I’ve been reading Britten’s Children by John Bridcut. Glamorous though he must have been and a superb teacher, I find Britten a difficult man to like. He had his favourites, children and adults, but both Britten and Pears were notorious for cutting people out of their lives (Eric Crozier is mentioned here, and Charles Mackerras), friends and acquaintances suddenly turned into living corpses if they overstepped the mark. A joke would do it and though Britten seems
to have had plenty of childish jokes with his boy singers, his sense of humour isn’t much in evidence elsewhere. And it was not merely adults that were cut off. A boy whose voice suddenly broke could find himself no longer invited to the Red House or part of the group – a fate which the boys Bridcut quotes here seem to have taken philosophically but which might be potentially far more damaging to a child’s psychology than too much attention. One thinks, too, of the boys who were not part of the charmed circle. There were presumably fat boys and ugly boys or just plain dull boys who could, nevertheless, sing like angels. What of them?

  I never met or saw Britten, though he and Peter Pears came disastrously to Beyond the Fringe some time in 1961. Included in the programme was a parody of Britten written by Dudley Moore, in which he sang and accompanied himself in ‘Little Miss Muffet’ done in a Pears and Britten-like way. I’m not sure that this in itself would have caused offence: it shouldn’t have as, like all successful parodies, there was a good deal of affection to it and it was funny in its own right. But Dudley (who may have known them slightly and certainly had met them) unthinkingly entitled the piece ‘Little Miss Britten’. Now Dudley was not malicious nor had he any reason to mock their homosexuality, of which indeed he may have been unaware (I don’t think I knew of it at the time). But with the offending title printed in the programme, they were reported to be deeply upset and Dudley went into outer darkness as probably did the rest of us.