Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  23 March. Papers full of the sailors taken into custody by the Iranians for supposedly being in their territorial waters. Who knows what the truth of that is, though it gives the papers and the television a chance to rehearse the indignities heaped on similar sailors, taken prisoner a few years ago on the same charge (and one which turned out to be true). Then they were blindfolded and paraded in front of the camera before being taken under guard to Tehran – i.e. much the same (though milder) treatment than the Americans mete out to those who happened to be in the wrong place in Afghanistan – who were hooded, and taken not just to Tehran but halfway round the world, where they still are and waiting for trial.

  No one makes this comparison of course – though the innocence of those taken captive is, in most cases, approximately the same. But one are decent, honourable British sailors with wives and children waiting anxiously at home. The others are brown men in robes who can’t really expect anything better.

  No one in the House of Commons uses the opportunity of the Prime Minister’s statement on the ‘kidnapped’ sailors to draw attention to our own sorry record in conniving at similar kidnappings in Afghanistan or wherever the Guantánamo suspects were picked up or rendered. No one has the nerve, I suppose, as they would inevitably be shouted down. The papers full of pieces on the worried families, a mother separated from her children – all of which is true provided it’s realised that this is worry and separation we are responsible for in exactly the same way – and have been inflicting for five years and more. ‘Ah,’ say the military and the H. of Commons, ‘but our boys were in uniform.’

  29 March. One unforeseen blessing of the war in Iraq is the settlement in Northern Ireland. Blair can hardly claim the credit, as it was only when the focus moved to the Middle East that there was real progress towards agreement in Northern Ireland. The spotlight tempts politicians to perform; shift it and they can just get on with the job.

  31 March. Jehovah’s Witnesses blitz the street and when they ring the bell I lie on the floor until the coast is clear. I imagine they’re used to this sort of response and even when someone is unwary enough to open them the door the exchange is generally pretty curt. In one house in the street, though, they are assured of a warmer welcome, as Jonathan M. is never wont to turn down the chance of a debate and likes nothing better than a brisk canter through the arguments against the existence of God and the literal truth of the Bible. Two hapless evangelists had just had half an hour of this and were staggering down the steps licking their wounds when they spotted, parked in the street, a Ferrari. In some relief they were admiring this superb machine, not realising the scourge of God still had his eye upon them. ‘And you shouldn’t be looking at that,’ J. calls from the porch. ‘That’s Things of This World. You should be above that!’

  3 April, Gatwick. ‘You’re not supposed to have this.’ The tone is reproving. ‘You can’t take that.’ What I can’t take is a nearly empty tin of shaving foam, which the immigration officer triumphantly confiscates. It would hardly matter except it’s the last of a series of setbacks, humiliations beginning at 6 a.m. in the Hilton, Gatwick where we are forced to stay as the flight goes at 8.30 – check-in time 7 a.m. The bedroom alarm rings early and cannot be stopped even when I dismantle the box and take out the battery. It’s only then that I realise what is ringing is our own alarm. At the check-in we are told blandly that the BA flight is over-booked (‘We often over-book’ given as an explanation not an apology) and we are put on standby and so can’t get any breakfast or even a cup of coffee. We are cleared half an hour before departure with massive queues at security and only get there along Gatwick’s huge escalator bridge in the nick of time. It’s only then at the final check-in that the attendant asks for an autograph and, having crammed us in right at the back, comes to chat about the car journeys my Winnie the Pooh have enlivened. Celebrity is never there when you want it.

  4 April, Bologna. The recommended Anna-Maria trattoria being closed we eat at another establishment in Via delle Belle Arte, which might have been Sardinian or some ethnic version of Italian food but it’s delicious and the waitress who’s possibly the owner, delightful so this is a good start. Then we wander through the back streets largely occupied by the University of San Stefano, a superb series of linked churches. In the first church there’s a typical Italian scene going on with a large TV monitor screen blocking the steep altar steps, an engineer doing a sound check in English (‘Wan. Chew. Tree. Wan Chew Tree’) interspersed with mad bursts of pop – this on (and perhaps helping to commemorate) the Tuesday in Holy Week. Through a little door is the adjoining church, vaulted in brick and almost wholly given over to a pulpit built above the shrine of St Petronius, and resting on wonderful lions. Outside is a quadrangle – the Cortile di Pilate supposedly a replica of the one in which Pilate washed his hands, but more remarkable for the elaborate inlaid and ornamented brickwork of the church wall – bricks treated like tiles and laid in diamond and herringbone patterns, with roundels and stars and chequerboards – all in lovely worn warm red brick. In the churches the columns are bound and belted in ancient iron. There is a museum we briefly look round though Rupert is put off by the young monk in charge of the books and postcards, who has an edge to him suggesting that religion is not the only thing in his life.

  5 April. We make several journeys by train – to Ravenna, to Ferrara and at no point does anyone ask to see our tickets. Nor is there the barrage of threatening announcements that precedes the departure of GNER trains – that your ticket must be for this day and this train and if it isn’t you will have to pay the full fare without benefit of any rail card or concession, the philosophy behind rail travel in Britain ‘You’re not going to get away with it’. In Italy nobody cares. Because the one-carriage slow train from Ferrara is crowded the conductor tells passengers to sit in First (which is indistinguishable from Standard anyway). And the fares must shame anyone from the UK – a third of what they would be here.

  6 April, Good Friday. In the Museo Civico Medievale at the top of the wonderful (and utterly unheralded and unexpected) Via Galliera are various tombstones to medieval teachers and doctors, wholly secular in appearance in that they show the dead man teaching in the centre of a class of students. The students are reading, studying books under the direction of the dead master. It’s not a scene one could imagine finding in an English church – though it might occur, I suppose, in an illuminated manuscript. Nor do I remember ever having seen these particular sermons in stone reproduced.

  Later we go to Ravenna where in S. Apollinare, despite the queue of saints and apostles lining up down the nave what takes the eye is a little mosaic house at the north-western end, with a series of (almost French) windows, the last one a doorway of uninterrupted greenish-blue as it might be looking out to sea – which it probably was as Ravenna was by the sea then. But this depthless blue is like Larkin’s

  deep blue air, that shows

  Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless

  and it’s a huge window which (unlike the queue of saints, bearing their crosses) is of now.

  16 April. Back in Camden Town and here on the trees in front of the house come the lime leaves which every year regardless of global warming unhurriedly shake out their little handkerchiefs to the day and almost to the minute.

  18 April. In the clothes room I go through R.’s coats on the rack where there are generally one or two moths, particularly on his fur coat, and those out of reach on the dado I impale on a long brush. Moth-hunting has now become an obsession – though a useful one: yesterday I woke in the night and crept upstairs to kill two or three on the roof – the females, I fancy, fatter and darker than the males. I talked last night to Debo about it who said it was Decca Mitford (I think) who called them ‘Mawth’ but had no other remedies to offer.

  19 April. A handsome builder’s boy waiting with a van just over the wall whiles away the time by practising some complicated dance step. It seems to involve a lot of little jumps, and in the beat
before he does the jumps he snatches a look up and down the street to make sure nobody catches him at it. As he gets more confident, though, the steps get wilder and he dances to his reflection in the side of the van this bright warm morning. Now the rest of the crew turn up and he performs his routine for them, which they watch with indulgent smiles.

  21 April, Yorkshire. I go out with my pail of salt and water looking for slugs. They don’t require much hunting as there are dozens, huge creatures the size of turds, which, luxuriating in my absence, loll on the plants, sprawled on top of the poppies for instance while the rest wire into the alliums, so many of them that the poor plants are bowed under their weight.

  22 April. Despite having (so far) survived a serious illness, when faced with real pain I tend to give up. I had gone to bed feeling fine but wake around six with what seemed to be indigestion which then worked itself down to my stomach with a real ache that came in spasms. A hot-water bottle didn’t do much or cups of tea and I lay there for two hours quite happy to die. The cause, insofar as I could think of one was some stewed pears I’d had for supper, some hard and even though cooked not quite ripe. Then, straight afterwards I’d gone out into the garden slug hunting which involved a good deal of bending down with the torch searching the rhubarb and the alliums and putting the culprits into a bucket of salted water. Now I was paying for it and lying in bed, which I did most of the morning. I couldn’t see I would be able to get back to London. Slowly I come round but checking the train times before we leave find there are no direct trains from Leeds – ‘planned engineering works’ – though not planned sufficiently to warn passengers in advance, i.e. when they booked their tickets two days before as we did. Advised to go via Sheffield and a Virgin cross-country train to St Pancras instead we take the almost empty train to Peterborough, the guard having a good time because we are almost alone on the train. ‘I don’t want you two lads beating up the carriage. I know it’s the ideal opportunity.’

  30 April–1 May. To Essential Music in Great Chapel Street to record The Uncommon Reader, which Gordon House, former head of drama at BBC Radio, has adapted and is producing. What other readers are like I’ve no idea, but I always feel I am a sound editor’s nightmare, breaking off in the middle of a sentence to start again, redoing paragraphs when there’s technically no need and almost out of superstition, my technique (or want of it) so scrappy I must make work.

  None of this will show, I always tell myself, and it doesn’t but no thanks to me, and I’m sure if I weren’t lazy and rehearsed the script properly by reading it aloud it would be both quicker to do and the result smoother and more satisfying. But I sight-read as often as not which, since it’s mostly something I’ve written, doesn’t much matter and I generally get away with it. Still, I always think my style, such as it is, is a compound of all my deficiencies, but maybe that’s what style is anyway.

  Gielgud didn’t record like this, for all his skill, accenting and phrasing even the most trivial script in order to get the rhythm right. And Alec Guinness would work on a text for weeks, walking round the garden listening to the tape and saying the words out loud.

  1 May. Unspoken dialogue: We are in the car when a pretty girl crosses too slowly. If I’d been bold (or insane) I’d have wound the window down and said, ‘Listen. We’re nancies. Big tits mean nothing to us.’

  2 May. A delight to sit in the garden particularly at tea-time. I hope when I am gone no one will suggest that moving house was a shock still less a mistake. Though there is no room quite as beautiful as the ground floor of 23 G.C. with the evening sun slanting through the blinds, taken for all in all – situation, garden, the pleasure of the other rooms (e.g. kitchen and bedroom) this is a much more enjoyable house to live in. It doesn’t look as nice from the outside, the garden gets less sun and the stairs are much steeper (and will get steeper as time goes on I’m sure) but there is no doubt in my mind that the change has been for the better.

  3 May. Lord Browne disgraced largely thanks to the Mail on Sunday and the bribery of a Canadian youth. The newspapers painstakingly explain why we should feel no sympathy for him, but if the Mail chose to target Heinrich Himmler I would tend to be on his side.

  The young man’s name is Chevalier, which was the name of the man, friendship with whom helped to ruin Robert Oppenheimer’s career. Chevalier was not gay but equally reprehensibly a Communist.

  9 May. Seventy-three, which I find almost inconceivable, while feeling every minute of it. R. who was very put out by the clumsy details of the bookshelves currently being built in my study is much mollified this morning when Aaron, the young carpenter (who keeps a cow) is ready to adapt the design with no chuntering at all. For my birthday R. gives me two lovely tiles, a boy walking and pointing and another of a gardener, the book on Edwin Smith, which I expected and a group of tiles with a primitive design of a cat framed and supposed to be nineteenth-century Dutch but it could easily be a century earlier – and will suit the kitchen (where we already have a cow) very well. No calls other than from director Archie Powell, which gives real pleasure and I wish I had something we could do together.

  11 May, Long Crichel. Yesterday as I was driving down to Dorset (with no radio) the prime minister had gone up to Trimdon and his constituency of Sedgefield in order to bring his term of office to a close, ‘resign’ altogether too un-positive a word. The newspapers have been quite kind, but his speech, while ostensibly looking at the state of England, is so self-centred it confirms what one has thought before, that to Blair the real importance of his premiership is as a stage in his spiritual journey. He tells the nation, assures it rather, that we are ‘a country … at home in its own skin’, that ‘this country is a blessed nation,’ even that ‘this is the greatest nation on earth.’

  This is virtually the opposite of what the last five years in particular have made me feel. It’s only a few months since I was writing in my diary that sometimes being English it felt as if one smelled. To Tony Blair, though, it is of roses.

  Note how in the south-west even the humblest hamlet nowadays seems to boast a business park.

  An element of Morrissey’s appeal, particularly for his Northern (or poorer) audiences is his rawness. Whatever success he has had has never given him any sort of veneer, no coating of wealth or sophistication. He still looks like a plasterer, or his mate.

  12 May. Driving through rain-soaked Dorset we stop at Puddletown and the church there which is full of fixtures and character: a chantry chapel with alabaster tombs and the remains of what looks like its own reredos; there are good pews and lovely Laudian altar rails. But the most evocative of the fittings are high up on the west face of the chancel arch where hang two rusty bits of chain. On these chains, prior to the Reformation, was hung the Lenten Veil which was used to hide the sanctuary in the week before Easter. They’re scarcely visible and of no picturesque appeal at all, but that these fastenings should have survived since at least the fifteenth century, a relic still of a ceremony that went out under Edward VI, is as vivid and evocative as any screen or wall painting (though there are those too).

  Of course Puddletown figures in Hardy’s history and there are names on the war memorial – Sparks, for instance – of his cousins and relatives, the church figuring among his inspirations much as Methley did for Henry Moore.

  14 May. Another cold wet day and I flounder around with Auden/Britten getting nowhere while feeling it is intellectually, musically and theatrically beyond me. If only one could be given a sign, or come to recognise a sign, that a work you are entering on will be seen to completion. As it is I fear these days of reading and taking notes, with occasional snatches of dialogue, will be like so many of the last forty years – likely to come to nothing and at best be mulch.

  15 May. Richard Beer puts a postcard through the door with an overheard remark, ‘What do you mean, you can’t talk about Proust before breakfast?’ I reply telling him that we’ve just been at Long Crichel, a house where in its heyday talking about Proust before
breakfast was practically obligatory.

  16 May. And this morning I make what I hope is a breakthrough with the Auden/Britten play when it occurs to me that what Britten would be coming to see Auden about is not just to say farewell or talk over old times but to ask him to do the libretto for Death in Venice. It brings all the difficulties they had with each other into focus and also gives the first part of the play with the two boys more of a point. But it’s difficult – and I dare not start reading about it, still less listening to the opera. It’s one of the plays that I shall have to write before I write it – or at any rate do the research for it. But go down to Parkway shopping for supper feeling so alive again and so not old and with that feeling I rarely get nowadays, of ‘I hope I will be given the time to do this.’

  17 May. Outside the bank I see the local vicar, his arms full of balloons and a Sooty teddy bear in the crook of his arm. ‘It’s Ascension Day,’ he explains.

  21 May. An absurd accident. I am cycling down Gloucester Avenue this morning when my raincoat catches between the brake block and the wheel and brings me to a halt. Normally when this happens a step or two back reverses the wheel and frees the coat but not this morning, and it’s jammed. As a preliminary to loosening it I try to take the coat off but can’t because I’m tethered to the bike, which now falls over, pulling me with it. I land painfully on my bum and lie there for a moment or two like Kafka’s beetle, waving my legs in the air. Another passing pensioner, seeing my plight, goes to a friend’s house for a pair of scissors in order to cut me free, except that the friend is out. So I limp home, lifting the back wheel and manhandling the bike, eventually managing to free the wheel without having to cut the coat. It’s now ten thirty; my coat is filthy and so am I. I imagine that in the future there is going to be more of this.

  23 May. Ros Chatto, my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then inherits his fortune and lives happily ever after.