by Alan Bennett
18 June. The boy in Crosshills seen once giving a girlfriend a lift on his wheelchair as it were on the crossbar of his bike, seen again yesterday snogging another – or possibly the same girl – she sitting on the steps of some office beside which he had parked his chair, so that both being on the same height they could as it were kiss on a level.
Both occasions the same time, the dead of Sunday afternoon.
23 June. To a reading of A Question of Attribution which Sue Roberts is doing for radio in a studio down Broadhurst Gardens ‘behind John Lewis’ as Lindsay Anderson always used to describe the location of his flat. I go reluctantly but Edward Petherbridge as Blunt and Nicky Henson as Chubb do it beautifully, light and airy, and though some of it’s a bit ‘fine writing’, several times I have to stop myself laughing at my own lines and think there’s no reason to be ashamed of it at all. Whether it’ll be comprehensible on radio is a different thing, it’s such a visual play – but then it wasn’t always comprehensible on stage.
24 June. Today is the last day of the British Museum Michelangelo exhibition, which, because of demand, is open until midnight. For all we go quite late, it’s still crowded out, paintings hard enough to look at under such circumstances and drawings well-nigh impossible. One straight away abandons any attempt to look at them in sequence (not that the sequence helps) and makes for any drawing that is not being looked at, the people with earphones the real menace as they all move at the same speed and cause the jams.
More mystified than I usually am at exhibitions I can never take in the finer points of drawing and the bulging thighs and backs pebbled with muscle soon pall. R. notes, though, that women (who far outnumber men) seem to find them both moving and satisfying whereas I find them neither. Of course, Michelangelo is a star and so whatever he does is acclaimed, from the anatomical exactitude of the preliminary drawings for the Sistine ceiling through to the blurred and almost impressionistic figures of the three late Crucifixions with which the exhibition ends. It’s hard not to think that there is an element of the sacred in everything to which he put his hand: it must be reverenced because this is by the hand of Michelangelo.
A propos the hand, the most famous image is, I suppose, that of God giving life to Adam but the only (easily overlooked) drawing for this is low down on a sheet of other drawings. There is a line drawn round the fragment, as at one stage it was cut out of the sheet before being later reinstated, but it’s so formal that there is little remarkable about it and it’s not unlike the stylised eighteenth-century hand on the signpost on Elslack Moor.
I wonder, looking at all these thighs and torsos, with the dicks never closely anatomised, whether Michelangelo ever did any pornographic drawings, as all artists must at some time be tempted to do, and if so what happened to them. I wonder, too, if they had survived and were exhibited here, a couple unabashedly making love, for instance, a boy getting it on, whether these would attract this same Saturday night crowd who would subject the sacred porn to their wholesome, safe, art-loving scrutiny, making them just as hygienic as the rest.
29 June. R.’s office outing yesterday when they go on a minibus to Scotney and Sissinghurst. The house just survives the droves of visitors but the gardens don’t. As R. bluntly puts it, ‘People spoil things’ – a line in a play you could only give to a child or a licensed eccentric. But it starts me thinking again of the play, National Trust, I thought of when we went to Knole.
1 July. Watch the commentary and round-ups (they could hardly be called highlights) after the England–Portugal match. One Shakespearean moment at the start when Cristiano Ronaldo comes up behind his Manchester team-mate Rooney and nuzzles him, saying something that seems to be kind but almost certainly isn’t as Rooney then swings round to watch him go. It’s like an impossibly beautiful Iago goading a simple lumbering Othello, an impression confirmed when, after Othello gets the red card, Ronaldo comes away with a tranquil smile.
2 July, Yorkshire. Two rather dull fawny-coloured birds are nesting in the creeper just outside the kitchen door. Watching them (and looking them up in the bird book) I find they are flycatchers, one keeping station on the garden wall then looping round over the lawn until it collects a packet of insects in its beak which it takes back to the nest thereby releasing its mate to do the same. They winter in Africa and summer here in Craven, a circumstance I find – what? – both pleasing and, in some undefinable way, encouraging.
Working in the garden we are watched in the heat by the toad, which is just a slight bump in the water in the corner of the trough, its eyes on a level with the surface taking in the proceedings, then when the garden gets too mouvementé he/she turns its back and stares instead at the less taxing wall.
4 July. Talking to George Fenton about the football and about Ronaldo, George saying that watching the Latin teams in particular you see how these are boys whose mothers have loved and cherished them and who have all the confidence and swank that comes from that.
5 July. Last week I met David Walliams in Melrose and Morgan, our new posh local delicatessen. Big, handsome in a slightly Tartar way, he and Matt Lucas must currently be the most famous people in the country. Today he swims the Channel, seemingly without much effort and with very little ballyhoo. When I was a boy a young swimmer from Leeds, Philip Mickman, swam the Channel and the preparations and the weather and the pictures of him plastered in grease were front-page news in the Yorkshire Evening Post for weeks beforehand. Now, like Everest, people do it all the time, no problem.
7 July. Six o’clock and Antonio the Algerian road sweeper comes into the garden, shuts the gate and has a sit down in the basket chair by the front door while eating a banana. Now he gets part of a cardboard box out of his dustcart which he puts down as a prayer mat and begins his devotions … a procedure not quite as elaborate as the devotions we saw performed by a Hasidic Jew at JFK earlier this year but with some similar components … the angle of the body for instance, leaning forward, the touching of the arms and the face in a way that did one see it in a different context would seem obsessive. Now he finishes and on this day, supposedly the hottest ever, he comes and has another sit down and makes his phone calls. Meanwhile I wait for Gilly, the reflexologist.
8 July, Yorkshire. As I’m getting some money out of the cashpoint on Duke Street in Settle I feel a tug at my jacket. I look down and it’s little white-haired eighty-five-year-old Onyx Ralph, who just about comes up to my waist. ‘Hello, Mr Bennett. Did you think I was a mugger?’
11 July. Baroness Scotland is put up to defend the government’s shameful capitulation to the United States in the extradition treaty. She makes much of the rule of law in America and the independence of the Supreme Court, citing its stand (after four glorious years) on Guantánamo but says nothing of the next person likely to be extradited, the hacker who got into the Pentagon computer. Whereas the three NatWest bankers can at least afford some defence, what will the next victim be able to afford? Nor does Baroness Scotland say anything of the plea bargaining that goes on in the US’s nobly independent courts where the US accused cut their own sentences by putting the blame on their foreign associates who are then shipped across the Atlantic in shackles. The World at One gives the baroness an easy time as does Joshua Rozenberg, both blandly dismissive of this diminution of the subject’s rights. The plain fact is that to be extradited on a charge the evidence for which has not been heard before an English court, is unjust.
16 July. Palmers, the old-fashioned pet shop in Parkway, which has been there as long as I can remember and from the look of the place much longer than that, has now closed down. The signs on the shop front (which I hope Camden Council has had the sense to list) read: ‘Monkeys. Talking Parrots. Regent Pet Stores. Naturalists’.
In 1966 Patrick Garland and I filmed some poems to include in a comedy series we were doing, On the Margin. The standard form of comedy sketch shows then demanded a musical interlude between items, Kathy Kirby, say, or Millicent Martin. Boldly (as we thought) we opted for poem
s instead and were considered very eccentric, but Frank Muir, then head of comedy, and David Attenborough, the controller of BBC2, said it was all right and so we filmed Palmers to illustrate Larkin’s poem, ‘Take One Home for the Kiddies’. Another of his poems we used was ‘At Grass’. Whether Larkin cared for either I don’t think we ever heard.
I walk by today and in the window of this empty pet shop is a sad bedraggled pigeon, not, one imagines, a remnant of the stock but which must have got in through the already decaying roof and which sits there now, forlornly on offer. It’s another poem.
17 July. The Met is to be prosecuted for ‘failing to provide for the health, safety and welfare’ of Mr de Menezes. Naive, I suppose, to have thought that the police would be brought to book for the shooting. They never have been in the past so why now? The longer and more protracted the investigation the plainer this has become, the boredom of the public now presumably part of the strategy. The truth is that on the relatively few occasions that the police kill they do so with impunity. The only reason this is not enshrined in law is that if it was they would do it more often. Still, if the police were authorised to shoot to kill it would at least make the law ‘fit for purpose’, in the home secretary’s noxious phrase, and so gladden his heart. Meanwhile, one wonders what has happened to the policeman who did the actual shooting. It’s to be hoped he’s not still out there defending our liberties.
[1 November. It turns out that he is and in exactly the same way, though cutting down at least on the number of shots, seven in the case of de Menezes, one in yesterday’s shooting. Presumably his strike rate has improved as a result of the ‘retraining’ he has received and, of course, the counselling.]
One criterion for judging this (or any other) government is how often it makes one feel ashamed to be English. Today ratchets up the score. I don’t think it’s quite up to Thatcher’s level but it’s getting there.
20 July. Work on the Queen story and get a little further to the extent that tomorrow when we go north I will put it in the fridge – something I haven’t done since I was writing History Boys.
21 July, Yorkshire. To Leeds by train then the back way to Ilkley through Askwith and Weston, taking the turning down to the church at Weston past Weston Hall; meaning to sit in the churchyard for half an hour. I’d forgotten how odd the church is, the west front particularly. ‘Picturesquely irregular W front’, Pevsner calls it, ‘with bellcote and cyclopic asymmetrically-placed buttress.’ The bellcote is topped with what looks like an inverted Victorian footstool, with four bulbous legs. I’d vaguely remembered a seat in the churchyard but on the noticeboard is a warning, ‘The Churchyard has been sprayed with weed killer’, and indeed the seat is fenced off with chicken wire presumably to protect the few non-weeds that grow around it. Genuinely shocked by this method of churchyard maintenance. Our own church in the village is in effect a nature reserve, mowed or scythed but never sprayed, God, I’d always assumed, thought to be on the side of ecology.
22 July. The village street market is all set up by nine thirty, the cake stalls, the jam, the tombola, the duck race and (R.’s target) the junk stall, on which he has spotted a very run-down Ernest Race Festival of Britain chair which, as soon as the market is declared open (by the ringing of the church bell), he buys for £1. Pretty battered and minus its ball feet it’s still got the original wooden seat, and is one of many thousands of such chairs that were scattered throughout the Festival of Britain on the South Bank that summer of 1951.
We also buy an almond Madeira cake and some delicious raspberry jam, the cake and the jam stall always the first to sell out. When events like this are depicted on television (e.g. in Midsomer Murders or Rosemary & Thyme) it’s always as occasions for vicious backbiting and murderous (literally) rivalries. There’s none of that here, I’m happy to say. Everybody speaks and the topography of the village, a long straight street backing onto the beck, is ideally suited to the row of stalls. The chair is taken through into the garden where R. spends the rest of the day restoring it.
24 July. A card from a friend in New York prompted by the invasion of Lebanon.
Please go to the US Embassy and throw stones. S.
(Say I sent you.)
30 July. Tony Blair addresses Rupert Murdoch’s conference of newspaper editors and tells them that there is now no more left and right. In view of his audience he would have done better to tell them there is no more good and evil.
31 July. The same myth attached to Mrs Thatcher as it was to Stalin: neither of them ever slept.
5 August, L’Espiessac, France. Installed contentedly in the Pigeonnier Est, utterly silent, the tall windows filled with the bluest of skies and with a soft breeze that stirs the sheet as I write. On the mantelpiece Lynn has put a large schoolroom-size bottle of Waterman’s Ink in its original, unopened box, the lettering and the design of the box putting it in the early 1950s, just after the Festival of Britain. The logo is in the shape of a television screen, which was the coming thing in 1952, the box, I suppose, meriting a place in the Design Museum.
I am reading The Man Who Went into the West: The Life of R. S. Thomas by Byron Rogers, whose book on J. L. Carr I read here on holiday last year. R. S. Thomas, the poetry of whom I scarcely know, sounds as bleak as Larkin pretended to be.
A huge hawk hovers high above the house. It doesn’t fly off but just drifts upwards, and is gone. A hawk can hide in an unclouded sky.
‘Grieving’ used at home to mean vexing, or upsetting: ‘It’s grieving’ (if something was spoilt, say, or broken). One of the instances where I’m not sure if it’s a dialect usage or standard English.
8 August. The garden and the countryside already shaggy and unkempt, August the middle age of the land, shambling, pot-bellied, in need of a haircut. Some of the sounds escape me now (though I did manage to hear a cricket last night). Now sitting at the open window with Rupert still asleep there is just one pigeon, hitting the same note again and again like a piano tuner.
10 August, Toulouse. An unexpected queue for the 10.30 BA flight, the only clue a leaflet being handed out, saying that no hand baggage is allowed and all belongings must go in the hold. Everyone begins to repack their bags, which we would be happy to do, except that our hand baggage includes the aforesaid bottle of Waterman’s Ink. This can hardly be put in the hold lest it break, inundating not only our luggage but everybody else’s. When we reach the check-in we explain this to the harassed woman, who eventually caves in, partly helped by consulting our details on the computer. More impressed by my status than anyone else, my travel agent always gets ‘VIP’ put on my ticket. ‘Pourquoi,’ they say at the check-in, ‘vous êtes VIP?’
‘Je suis un écrivain.’ It’s a statement I’m readier to make in French than in English, but it causes hysteria among the check-in girls.
‘Ah, oui. L’encre!’ and then everyone goes into peals of laughter.
‘Non, non,’ I say lamely. ‘C’est un cadeau excentrique.’ More hysteria and on the strength of it we are waved through. It’s only when we get to Gatwick (which is about to be closed) that we find that the ‘plot’, such as it is, centres on suspect liquids. Presumably nobody at Toulouse yet knew this and the sniffer dogs at Gatwick don’t seem to know it either, as not being ink-sensitive they twice turn their noses up at our bags.
14 August. A year or two ago the National Parks were complaining that their visitors were predominantly white and that the Asian population of Leeds and Bradford, for instance, left them largely unvisited. In this morning’s Guardian it’s claimed that would-be terrorists learned some of their skills in camps in National Parks in the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales. So some improvement there.
16 August. Good news that the defence secretary, Des Browne, has bowed to public opinion and pardoned the young men shot for cowardice in the First World War. Our fearless home secretary Dr Reid didn’t have the nerve to do this when he was at the MoD, nor his ineffable dauntless successor, Geoff Hoon. No mention that I see anywh
ere of John Hipkin, the Newcastle pensioner who has made the pardoning of these young men his particular mission – good for him. Decency is what one asks from governments and occasionally at least it happens.
21 August. Political Correctness:
[I am not going to affect] the livery
Of the times’ prudery.
R. S. THOMAS
24 August. I am reading The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young, a delightful book though insofar as it reveals that cows (and sheep and even hens) have far more awareness and know-how than they are given credit for it could also be thought deeply depressing. Though not if you’re a cow on Young’s farm, Kites’ Nest in Worcestershire, which has been organic since before organics started and where the farm hands can tell from the taste alone which cow the milk comes from. Young makes the case against factory farming more simply and compellingly than anyone I’ve read and simply on grounds of common sense.
One curiosity about the book, though, is that while the author goes into much detail about the behaviour of cows and their differences of temperament and outlook she never mentions any idiosyncrasies when the cows go with the bull and whether their individuality, which she has made much of elsewhere, is still in evidence. Are some shyer than others? More flirty? It may be of course that this reticence is a measure of her respect for her charges, feeling that cows are entitled to their privacy as much as their keepers. But it’s a book that alters the way one looks at the world and one which all farmers would do well to read.
2 September. Making the supper and idly listening to Radio 4’s Saturday Review the only speaker I recognise is P. D. James and none of it anything to do with me until some Scottish woman in the course of telling off the novelist Mark Haddon accuses him of ‘Alan Bennettish tweeness’. It’s not a serious injury to my self-esteem but rather as if someone passing me in the street has just turned back to give me a flying kick up the bum and then gone on their way. I hope for some mild objection from one of the other participants but none is forthcoming so perhaps I’m now tweeness’s accepted measure.