Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  ‘I don’t think so, do you darling?’ asks Mrs Chatto. ‘That’s not quite how we see ourselves at this stage in our career.’ The truth is I don’t have much of an urge to act and I’ve always thought myself a bit of a fraud as an actor. Age, though, does make actors less choosy. When Gielgud was in his eighties he acted almost continuously, taking parts virtually on the cab-rank principle. Olivier did some of that, too, though restricted more by ill health. Alec Guinness definitely retired and took to writing, which was a pity as he would have excelled in small character roles if he’d allowed himself to play them. And I think he still wanted to but was held back, as he’d been all his life, by too strong a sense of self-preservation.

  24 May. Reading Auden’s About the House for the Auden/Britten play, I come across ‘Accustomed in hard times to clem’ (from ‘Bestiaries Are Out’), clem meaning to starve, though I hadn’t heard it since childhood when Grandma – and I think Mam – used to say ‘I’m clemmed’ meaning I’m starved or hungry. I thought it was dialect but it’s in Chambers, origin OE.

  26 May. Nowadays the road to Damascus would be called ‘a steep learning curve’.

  29 May. A biker delivers some proofs from Peters Fraser and Dunlop, and as I’m signing for them, asks what’s my opinion of Cyril Connolly and why is it he’s less well thought of than, say, twenty years ago. Because he’s not long dead is the short answer and also, I suppose, because the literary scene has changed, with no one critic presiding in the way Connolly and (to a lesser extent) Raymond Mortimer did.

  The only time I met Connolly was in 1968 – when my first play, Forty Years On, was in Brighton on its pre-West End tour. He was mentioned in the text, where it was implied he was quite short, as I’d thought he was – simply I suppose from his face, which was that of someone small and chubby. He came round to the stage door to show me that he was of average height. An almost legendary figure to me through my reading of The Unquiet Grave, he then sent a postcard asking me to lunch in Eastbourne but I pretended it hadn’t arrived as I was too shy to go. I was thirty-four at the time and ought to have grown out of such silliness, another notable casualty of which was Jackie Kennedy, with whom Adlai Stevenson asked the cast of Beyond the Fringe to supper in New York in 1963. They went and I didn’t. Never spelling it out to myself, I clung far too long to the notion that shyness was a virtue and not, as I came too late to see, a bore.

  I don’t quite spill all this out to the waiting courier, who is a graduate of UCL and shouldn’t have to be biking round London delivering letters this cold wet May afternoon.

  3 June. The air full of birdsong now in June as it never is in July or August perhaps because it’s too hot or because the birds have built their nests, raised their young and gone. Now there is trilling and chinking and chirruping, a dialogue of persistence and variety that goes on far into the night.

  5 June. My lunch owes a good deal to the Prince of Wales, whose beetroot soup I have and then his raspberry jam in my Yeo Valley yogurt. Jam and soup are both delicious, and in the middle of the yogurt I remember for no obvious reason the film State Fair and in particular the scatty mother. Decide she was played by Spring Byington (or was it Fay Bainter?). One or other of them anyway made some chutney that got unwittingly topped up with brandy, thus intoxicating the judges and winning the prize.

  8 June (the day of Russell H.’s death, in 1988). With half an hour or so to wait before Rupert’s train gets in I often go and sit in the foyer of the Queens. Once the most exclusive hotel in Leeds, nowadays it’s a bit run down though the staff always friendly and no one ever bothering me when I sit in one of the alcoves answering letters. Generally there’s some function going on, a dinner dance, a wedding or a bar mitzvah and today the barriers are up outside against the arrival of Shilpa Shetty, heroine of Big Brother and star of some Yorkshire Bollywood film festival. Nobody questions me when I go through the barriers. (‘Well, you’re a celebrity yourself,’ says the woman in the travel centre, ‘or on the celebrity side anyway.’) At the registration desk a bouncer is flirting with three pretty Indian girls taking the names of guests. ‘They’re all stood there waiting for Shilpa Shetty, whereas I know personally that Shilpa has been in this hotel for the last half hour.’

  I go and sit on the station forecourt where an incoming clubber already slightly pissed weaves up to me. ‘I bet there’s lots of people’ve made this joke but you’re not sitting on a cream cracker, are you?’ Actually nobody ever has made that joke but he’s gone before I can tell him and here is Rupert coming happily off the train and we go and have supper.

  10 June. Dream that I am sitting outside somewhere in London when Stephen Fry comes by. He tells me that he is going out to supper with Alec Guinness. I am rather amused by this as it’s a bit since Alec took me out. Alec (in a fuzzy black overcoat) now turns up and is slightly embarrassed to see me, covering his confusion by burying his head in a cashpoint where he draws some money. I then say to the ever amiable Stephen that I realise the reason why I haven’t had supper with Alec myself recently is because he is dead. Stephen agrees that this would account for it and is a bit of an obstacle to their evening together but by this time Alec has disappeared, whether on account of embarrassment or sheer mortality isn’t plain.

  12 June. The Royal Festival Hall reopens. About a month after its unveiling in 1951 a party from my school in Leeds went down by overnight bus to the Festival of Britain where in the morning we went to a brief concert at the Festival Hall, such events taking place regularly throughout the day as well as at night, in order to show off both the architecture and the acoustics. I thought then, aged seventeen, that it was the most exciting building I’d ever been in, playful, inventive, the only experience that compared with it in wonder when I went as a child of five round the grotto at Hitchen’s department store to see Santa Claus.

  The music we heard that morning was pretty undemanding, kicking off with the overture to Susanna’s Secret by Wolf-Ferrari followed by Holst’s St Paul’s Suite. Through the concerts I regularly went to in Leeds Town Hall I was a fairly sophisticated music lover and when the master in charge, the aptly named Mr Boor, said that he didn’t go for all this highbrow stuff, it was a small lesson that older wasn’t necessarily going to mean wiser. The next time I was in the RFH was eighteen months later when I was already in the army. Then it was Brahms’s First Symphony, and one came out afterwards not onto the enchanted esplanade and playful promenades of 1951 but to acres of mud and destruction: Churchill, in a for him rare instance of political spite, had had the whole site razed to the ground. Socialism must not be seen to be fun.

  13 June. On the few occasions I saw other boys naked when I was young I just thought the uncircumcised ones were poor – which they generally were. If they were not poor then why would they not have been tidied up?

  15 June. A propos the conviction of the half a dozen would-be bombers this last week, no one that I have seen has commented on the fact that they all (I think) pleaded guilty. Why is this? Have they been told it will mitigate their sentence (it doesn’t)? Do they think that, as with the IRA, the future will see some turnaround and they will be granted an amnesty (unlikely)? Or is it simply an expression of their desire for martyrdom? In a high-profile criminal case a clutch of guilty pleas would arouse comment. Why not here? Is it just the laziness of journalists (to which there is no bounds) – why is nobody asking?

  16 June. Meet R. off the Cardiff train at Didcot and we drive through Berkshire’s Edwardian countryside, red-brick villas behind high beech hedges, looking for Hamstead Marshall. An ancient buttressed wall with a stone panel dated 1665 suggests we are not far off. And here is the church above the road, the tower with an eighteenth-century look to it and a medieval chapel behind. But it’s locked and no one about who could open it up. Fortunately, though, there is an opening in the wall and we look through to a huge field of barley. Marooned in it are six or eight sets of huge seventeenth-century gateposts in brick and stone, their summits crowned with urns
, the posts themselves set with cartouches and carved ornaments, a wonderful sight and all that remains, according to a guide on the noticeboard in the church porch, of the seventeenth-century mansion of Lord Craven and his architect, Balthazar Gerbier. There is a footpath across the field and we stroll through the high barley on this hot afternoon with swallows skimming low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the 1940s. It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch. This isn’t wholly imagination either, as it turns out that there was a camp here during the war for American airborne troops, which makes the survival of these wonderfully elaborate pillars, still here despite all that must have been literally thrown at them, even more of a miracle. The field would make a good Brideshead-like beginning for a film: as it is now and as it was then.

  The gatepost in the middle of the barley is ringed with ancient iron railings, poppies among the barley and an elder in flower between the piers. ‘Everything about this I like,’ says R. ‘There is nothing I would want to alter or improve. Unattended to, disregarded (though it’s Grade 1 listed) it is just as the past should be.’

  28 June, Yorkshire. Write to the Bradford Diocesan Registrar about a proposal to remove pews from St Andrew’s Kildwick. The church is largely fourteenth-century, but a group of parishioners now wish to ‘move forward’ and are proposing the installation of flexible seating, a meeting room, a crèche, a kitchen, toilets and disabled access, because their ‘style of worship’ is not suited to the constrictions of a fourteenth-century building. I’m sure they’re sincere, but the arguments being advanced are exactly the same as those of the equally sincere worshippers who wanted the stained-glass windows smashed in the seventeenth century or the rood loft removed in 1559. It didn’t suit their style of worship either.

  4 July. To Menwith Hill just outside Harrogate, where the veteran campaigner Lindis Percy has asked me to take part in an Independence from America demonstration on behalf of the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases. Before I agreed (and in an effort to get out of going, I suspect) I consulted Norman Dombey who (as readers of the LRB know) is well versed in nuclear politics. Not that Menwith Hill – RAF Menwith Hill, as it is euphemistically called, though it’s almost wholly American – is (yet) a nuclear base, only a satellite warning and surveillance station staffed entirely by US personnel and outside British control. Norman tells me that the base is currently given over to surveillance but while it probably played no part in rendition it would be vital to the US in any conflict with Iran.

  So I make the journey north to nowadays not so genteel Harrogate and out into Nidderdale. It’s wet and windy and the protesters, fifty or sixty in number (and also in age mostly) are corralled safely round the gate of the camp by approximately the same number of policemen, some of them grimly filming everyone in sight. The number of police shocks me, not merely because it’s an implied threat to freedom of speech but also because I’m a council tax payer in this area of North Yorkshire and a hefty slice of my annual payment goes on the police precept, currently being squandered by a young policeman with big ears conscientiously filming some sixty-year-old ladies peacefully eating their sandwiches, as a second unit policeman (with smaller ears) films them from the rear. Most of the protesters (more women than men) wouldn’t look out of place on a WI cake stall, though there are one or two eccentrics who may have called in en route home from Glastonbury, including an American dressed (or undressed) as a rather sturdier Gandhi; a young woman who claims to have walked all the way here from Australia; and someone else who periodically bangs a Tibetan drum. While none of this is quite up my street, I’m impressed by the general good sense and humour of the demonstration, which is not shared by the police who remain po-faced throughout. Even in the rain it’s an idyllic spot, though, and standing on an improvised platform I can look across Nidderdale towards Pateley Bridge (where I was unofficially evacuated in 1939), a vista which the cluster of huge golf balls that constitute the base doesn’t really spoil, they’re so monumental and extraordinary. The place is seemingly deserted, with none of the 1,500 US personnel who work here showing their face.

  Mark Steel speaks first and despite the rain and the cold manages to get the audience laughing, though not the policemen, who in fairness are probably cold and wet and resent having to be here at all. When it’s my turn I say that I don’t in principle object to the surveillance station and realise it may be necessary. But it’s dirty work and if there is dirty work to be done we should do it ourselves. It’s called RAF Menwith Hill and that’s what it should be, under the control of the Ministry of Defence and thus (however notionally) of Parliament. As it is, though, this is sovereign America, a place in which Britain has abrogated all rights – a situation the US would never permit on its own territory. I finish by saying that after I’d agreed to speak I got another invitation for 4 July, to celebrate Independence Day at cocktails with the American ambassador. Regretfully declining the invitation, I felt that to tell him what I was planning to do instead might have seemed inappropriate.

  On the train back I run into Jon Snow, who is returning from Bradford where he has been making a programme about the decline of the city. I note that at King’s Cross, unlike me, he goes home by Tube, whereas after the rigours of Nidderdale I feel I’m entitled to a cab. Still, as Anthony Powell used sometimes to note in his journal, ‘interesting day’.

  7 July. The same week as I traipsed across North Yorkshire the Guardian has a piece by Terry Eagleton saying that of all the eminent writers and playwrights only Pinter continues radical and untainted by the Establishment. I’m not sure if this means that in Eagleton’s view I don’t qualify because of my absence of eminence or because such protests as I take part in are too sporadic and low-profile to be noticed. Either way if I had email I could send him or the Guardian a one-word message: ‘Ahem.’

  9 July. Going round some primary-school paintings:

  Me: There’s a good name. James Softely Haynes.

  Maya (my guide, aged nine): Excuse me. Are we looking at Art or are we looking at Names?

  12 July. Today look up my first word in the complete thirteen-volume OED in its new setting. It now occupies the nearest shelf in my new bookcase – and so is much more accessible than it has been in the forty years since I bought it. The word is rankle.

  19 July. That TV production staff should have taken a hand in helping along the various competitions, phone-ins and charity programmes is unsurprising. Back in the 1960s, when I had my first experience of TV studios, the audience went largely unmanaged. In comedy programmes there was a warm-up beforehand and a PA might cue the applause or start it, supposedly spontaneously, but the response was otherwise unmassaged. In the late 1960s this began to change, and overenthusiastic PAs took to shouting approval in the final round of applause that ended the show. Then the applause before the appearance of the star – particularly on chat shows – got wilder and longer so that one had the nauseating spectacle of David Frost, for instance, standing supposedly touched and surprised by the audience’s unexpected warmth, the shouts of the PAs now become whoops. This quickly became standard and a customary feature of live shows today, particularly Graham Norton’s, with the audience readily entering into the subterfuge, knowing that they are part of the event as they would be at a pop concert. It’s not a big step, therefore, from helping the show along in this way to manipulating competition results to suit the mood, and despite all the current breast-beating, not much more dishonest.

  Even the sleight of hand over the royal documentary, with the queen sweeping in when she was supposedly sweeping out, won’t much shock the public. HMQ was plainly cross and whichever way she swept doesn’t alter that, even if it over-emphasises it. I am just happy to see the pretentious Ms Leibovitz properly discomfited, though I shouldn’t think she’ll remain so for long.

  24 July, France. Walking through Lectoure with Lynn we go down a back street towards the car park. It’s hot and already the lunch break; the hous
es are shuttered and the street completely deserted. We are passing a house that is being renovated with Lynn slightly ahead of me when a shard of glass falls or is thrown from somewhere up in the building, just missing my head and falling between us. It’s half a window, jagged and sharp-edged, and had it hit either of us in the neck might well have been fatal. It takes a moment to realise what has happened, our first thought that it has been flung down by some heedless workman. We shout, but there is utter silence, whether because there is no one there or because the culprit has the sense to lie low. A woman comes out of a house, picking her way through the shattered glass, not looking at us and saying nothing. Absurdly, I kick the battered garage door but there is still this impenetrable and somehow malignant silence as we go on down the street, occasionally looking back to see if whoever was responsible is peering out.

  28 July, Yorkshire. A warm and windy day for the street market where we stock up on homemade raspberry jam, a Victoria sponge and spend a fortune on the raffle and the tombola. It’s a lovely friendly occasion, and wholly homemade, made more festive this year by a wedding in the early afternoon, the guests having to skirt the festivities to get to the church. We sit in the garden having elevenses while the Giggleswick Brass Band lays into ‘Crown Imperial’ and, with scarcely a pause, ‘Finlandia’ to follow. No floods in the village as the beck though full hurries the water down into the valley where some of the meadows get waterlogged but nothing to compare with what has been happening further east in Hull and York.

  Do very little the rest of the weekend, except prune the various shrubs, the garden beginning to look shaggy a few weeks earlier than it normally does. Looking at the towering sunlit clouds I realise I have missed the anniversary of Bruce McFarlane’s death, 16 July, which was just such a day as this when I ran Mam and Dad to Scarborough for them to have a few days’ holiday before I came back to Giggleswick, where I opened The Times on the Monday morning to find his obituary.