Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  14 January. Tom Stoppard rings my agent Rosalind Chatto to tell her that when in last year’s LRB diary I quote an old lady in New York as saying ‘I zigged when I should have zagged,’ the original remark came from the American sports reporter Red Butler, who reported it as having been said by Randolph Turpin after his defeat by Sugar Ray Robinson. How my old lady came to know this is a mystery, and how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing.

  17 January. Think this morning of making Auden’s skin speak.

  22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American intervention in Korea in 1950, at which the distinguished scientist claimed to have incontrovertible proof of the use of germ warfare by the American military. Admiring Needham as he did, Steiner was depressed by this but when he went to see Needham in his rooms in Caius they got on well until Steiner raised the matter of his testimony on germ warfare. Needham then became cold and angry, Steiner was dismissed and they did not meet again. Other than this telling and disillusioning encounter, the tone of Steiner’s chapter on Needham is wholly laudatory.

  At a much humbler level it reminded me of how as a schoolboy in Leeds in 1950 I went to a similar protest meeting at the old Mechanics’ Institute, where one of the speakers was Mrs Arnold Kettle. The Kettles were well-known left-wingers, Arnold Kettle a Communist and lecturer in English at the university. They lived not far from us in Headingley and were eventually, though not I think at this time, customers at our butcher’s shop. Like Professor Needham, Mrs Kettle denounced the invasion of North Korea by the Americans and their use of germ warfare, not a view I’d then seen put forward. I was at the meeting not because of any left-wing views, but because the war was of some personal interest to me, as in 1952 I was due to be conscripted and likely to find myself fighting in it.

  What was so astonishing at the meeting – and also embarrassing – was to find Mrs Kettle weeping over the plight of North Korea and having to fight back the tears as she spoke. Never having seen anyone on a platform in tears before, I still wasn’t convinced of the righteousness of the North Korean cause, only that Mrs Kettle was good but soft-hearted and probably self-deceiving. That she was toeing the Party line didn’t occur to me, though it did to my companion, John Scaife, another budding conscript, who was much more scathing on the subject and cynical about the tears.

  2 February. Ten days or so ago I did an interview for the Today programme in connection with the revival of The History Boys now playing at Wyndham’s, in which I reiterated my unease about public-school education. This produced a mild stir and much silliness, someone in the Independent saying that if I object to parents bettering their children’s prospects by paying for their education do I therefore object to parents sending a child to ballet classes. The Mail predictably labels me a hypocrite because I use both the NHS and private medicine, an admission I’d made myself on the radio, but with the Mail, as always, pretending it’s information it’s been clever enough to find out.

  I’ve no relish for controversy, but what seems to me incontrovertible is that in the fifty years since I went up to Cambridge to take the scholarship examination there has been no substantial attempt to bring state and private education together. There have been cosmetic changes, an increased number of bursaries for instance and the (I would have thought very patchy) sharing of resources with which public schools have endowed themselves (swimming baths, squash courts etc.) but the core problem – namely, that most privately educated pupils regardless of their abilities are better taught and provided for than pupils in state schools – has not been touched. The situation is the same and in some respects worse than it was when I was seventeen. Is public-school education fair? The answer can only be ‘no’. And ‘Is anything fair?’ is not an answer.

  3 February. At moments trying to write this play (The Habit of Art) e.g. in a speech by one of the wrinkles on Auden’s face, I tell myself it will be all right because it’s what Edward Said meant by ‘late style’.

  4 February. More senior moments. I can’t find my pullover and don’t like the one I’m wearing because it has several moth holes. ‘I had another pullover,’ I say to R. ‘I was wearing it this morning.’

  ‘You still are. You’ve put the other one on top of it.’

  Bike over to Gloucester Crescent and leave the bike there while I walk round to M&S. People often smile at me, but this afternoon nearly everyone smiles. It’s only when I come back to Parkway to have my hair cut that I realise I’m still wearing my crash helmet.

  8 February. A row over some remarks the Archbishop of Canterbury has made about Sharia law. They’re perfectly sensible; the only thing for which he can be blamed is his underestimating the stupidity of the nation and its press. It’s proof, as Dorothy Wellesley wrote, that as ‘foreigners, especially the French, tell us, we have never acquired the adult mind’.

  12 February. I am gradually assembling my papers that are to go to the Bodleian Library, resisting the impulse to catalogue them or even read them at all but just roughly sorting them into the various plays or books and leaving any further arrangements to them. This means, though, that there are a great many ‘swaps’ (or ‘deaccessorising opportunities’) – three or four virtually identical scripts of plays, for instance, the script of a TV play (in two or three versions), besides the shooting script and so much that is repetition. With the Bodleian being short of room I feel slightly shamefaced (and lazy) about this but if I did it in a more responsible (and time-consuming) way the papers would never get there. As it is I look at the 150 boxes I have so far accumulated and think that their bulk is in inverse proportion to their importance.

  17 February. Anne (looking like Red Riding Hood and very pretty in a little knitted hat and red coat and boots) calls before going up to plant a tree on Trevor’s allotment above Newby. Her bird table is always very popular and she keeps it well stocked except that a hawk has taken to hiding in a nearby bush and swooping on the unwary. At Gardenmakers near Wigglesworth where we often go for tea Andrew tells the same story only his bird table has two tiers, the lower one too small for the hawk which the other birds know and take refuge there when it’s in the offing.

  18 February. Ned Sherrin’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. A friendly service interspersed with songs, some from Sondheim, some from Sherrin and Brahms, but with none of them as tuneful as the hymns. The audience is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson (Timothy West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’

  Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to the floor, in the process tearing a piece out of my leg. Wendy, the nice nurse at the practice, tells me I should try and keep the dressing dry. The result is that when in the evening I have my bath I look not unlike Marat, except that whereas Marat has his arm hanging over the side of the bath, I have my leg.

  14 March. Every day practically I bike past the two bored policemen who, armed and bullet-proofed, guard the house of the foreign secretary. I could give the address and, were I a Muslim and even had it in my possession, it would be enough to land me in custody. Passing the policemen so often, my natural inclination would be to smile. I never do because though I know they’re bored and it’s not their fault, I feel to smile condones a state of affairs (and a foreign policy) which necessitates ministers of the crown being under armed guard.

  20 March. All the Leeds trains
have been cancelled and I am wandering the station not knowing what to do when Rupert discovers me, having managed to get on to a Scottish train and change at Doncaster. Greatly elated by this we have a supper at La Grillade (halibut and chips) and then drive homeward in good spirits. Except that just after the Addingham bypass R. cries out and I see a grey shape in the headlights and he hits a badger – a young one, I would have thought and which, with its striped nose now lies senseless by the kerb. We drive back round the roundabout and then up the road again – and for one exultant moment it seems to have picked itself up and gone, but there it is, lying like an old rug by the roadside. We discuss running it over again to make sure it is dead – but neither of us can face it. R. is devastated; it’s like Vronsky breaking his horse’s back – a moment he can never call back – and feeling himself guilty and polluted by everything he hates – heedless cars, thoughtless motorists with him now one of their number. What particularly upsets him is that I have never seen a live badger – all the badgers I have seen like this one is now, a dirty corpse by the roadside. We drive on in sadness and silence.

  10 April. A correspondence in the Guardian about eating apple cores takes me back to the perilous school playgrounds of my childhood, when eating an apple core, like wearing boots, was a social indicator. Poorer boys (wearing boots) spotting you eating an apple would say with varying degrees of threat, ‘Give us your scollop, kid,’ and then hang about until it became available. I never begged a core myself, partly because I wasn’t that sort of boy, but chiefly because, like so much else in my childhood, it came under my mother’s prohibition against sharing food or drink with other children, TB always the ultimate threat. That ‘scollop’ had another meaning apart from apple core I never knew until I was in my twenties and started dining out.

  11 April. From my notebooks:

  ‘I never fathomed the lav and we were there two weeks. It could never make up its mind when to flush. Well, you can’t be stood there playing Russian roulette with it can you?’

  Reading a letter:

  A.: Love and Kierkegaard?

  B.: (snatching it) Love and Kind Regards.

  My life does seem right staccato somehow.

  ‘Get the cattle prod and wake your father.’ My mother.

  When we say life we often mean risk.

  12 April, Yorkshire. Snow in the night, which covers the lawn and clinging to the half-opened leaves makes the trees bulky and seemingly as laden with blossom as in a Samuel Palmer. In the afternoon we go over to Austwick and walk down the muddy lane to the clapper bridge. There are sheep and lambs everywhere and the beck is very full, gliding wickedly between the stones before flattening out over the fields. It’s a perfect scene and R. is just saying how we must try and keep it in mind next week (when I have to go into hospital) when deep in the water comes the spectral body of a lamb. Though tagged, it’s not long born, and must have slipped into the beck in its first days of life. I suppose we must try and keep that in mind, too, as pale and ghost-like, it is swept out now into the flooded meadows.

  13 April. A boy running across the bridge this morning.

  ‘Ey, look. Crocodiles in t’beck.’

  14 April. Regular check-ups for cancer sometimes turn up other problems: looking for one thing the doctors find another. Thus in February I was found to have a stomach aneurysm, and though it’s my inclination to leave things as they are, it apparently needs to be seen to. Aneurysms these days are often quite straightforward, remedied with the fitting of a stent sometimes in just a one-day job. Mine, though, is not straightforward at all and will need an open operation, and the surgeons who see the scans and angiograms get very excited as they have never seen an aneurysm in this particular spot before. The operation is scheduled at UCH and arrangements made for other doctors to observe the procedure, the chirurgical equivalent, I suppose, of additional priests present at a funeral or memorial service being described as ‘robed and in the sanctuary’. I am robed and ready myself today and indeed halfway to the operating theatre when we have to come back as the operation cannot begin until a bed becomes vacant in Intensive Care, in the same way I suppose, as Concorde was not allowed to take off from Heathrow until a landing bay became vacant at JFK. The upshot is that ‘the procedure’ is postponed until next Tuesday.

  15 April. This afternoon Richard Ovenden, the Bodleian’s keeper of special collections, comes round to load up a hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see the back of this first tranche. When I get home later on Richard Ovenden is calling. ‘I thought you would like to know that this evening your MSS are reposing in Bodley’s strongroom on the next shelf to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.’

  17 April. George Fenton comes round with a present, an overcoat from John Pearce, the fashionable tailor in Meard Street who specialises in remaking or renovating old clothes. The coat is French, long, black and once had an astrakhan collar. It’s a lovely thing, but what made George buy me it (and I don’t like to think of the price) is that it was made by Proust’s tailor.

  18 April. A pre-operation session at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson wing of UCH down Huntley Street, in which Siobhan, a nice, cheerful and silly nurse, takes me through the same questionnaire I answered twice last week. She then takes me in to see the anaesthetist, and he goes through the same questionnaire. He’s Scots, so everything is ‘a wee …’ – a wee while, a wee op (which it plainly isn’t). I’m coming away a wee bit depressed, though it’s slightly alleviated when Siobhan says: ‘I’ve just got one more question. Do you dye your hair?’

  22 April. Before ‘the procedure’ (which ends up lasting seven hours) there is a slightly comic scene in which the nurse goes round the various wards gathering up the patients due to be operated on this afternoon. We are told to take a pillow with us so, clad in our hospital gowns and each clutching our pillow, we walk in single file behind the nurse across the bridge above the atrium that leads to the surgical wing. We look like medieval penitents on the way to public humiliation and an auto-da-fé. The technical description of the aneurysm is ‘a dissection of the superior mesenteric artery’. Since its location is unique, before the operation I ask the surgeon if I can give my name to this particular spot. He is not encouraging, perhaps having thoughts of that for himself. It’s a pity. ‘Bennett’s Dissection’ sounds rather good I think as I drift off; it might serve as a description of (some of) my life’s work.

  24 April. I like uniforms. I preferred nurses when they looked like nurses not just ward cleaners. I found the sight of district nurses in their navy blue raincoats both reassuring and appropriate. White coats have gone too now, with doctors indistinguishable from patients except that the doctors are in shirtsleeves. I like white coats. But then I’m a butcher’s son. White coats have no terrors for me.

  1 May. Home, and my first outing is to the local community centre to vote against the dreadful Boris. I wear an overcoat over my pyjamas, something I’d never have the face to do if I was well. But I’ve been ill, I think, and now I’m getting better. Home to a nice supper of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, followed by stewed apple and yogurt.

  24 May. Clearing out some shelves, I find a note from Kevin Whelan dated Dublin 3 October ’05. It’s a poem headed ‘Getting it off my chest’.

  I’m bruised inside

  from the

  punches I’ve pulled.

  I’d have liked to have written that, though I’ve no idea who Kevin Whelan is.

  2 June. What I might have said at Hay:

  When people observe I’m very English, I might respond that I

  share Auden’s hope in his ‘Epistle to a Godson’ (1972)

  to be

  like some valley cheese,

  local, but prized elsewhere.

  8 June. John Fortune rings, just back from a gig with John Bird in (I think) Dubai. It’s for a group of super-rich Arabs, few of whom spe
ak English and who have to have the satirical barbs simultaneously translated via headphones. Unsurprisingly there are not many laughs.

  The wives are startling, traditionally dressed in hijabs or veils etc. but in the costliest materials and styled by top Arab fashion designers. ‘Oh,’ I pertly quip, ‘you mean like Yves Saint Laurent of Arabia.’ Both Fortune and I are impressed by the promptness of this impromptu joke, but it comes about because when he rings I’m just listening to Last Word, the obit programme on Radio 4 which includes a section on the dead Yves, who, so his partner says, was born with a nervous breakdown.

  14 June. Watch the TV coverage of Trooping the Colour, done this year by the Welsh Guards. The BBC in the person of Huw Edwards is at pains to point out that these are working soldiers, and to prove it there’s a lot of film, some of it live, of the regiment in action in Afghanistan.

  Whether there are Guards in action in Baghdad I don’t know, but if there are, the forces there scarcely get a mention, or Baghdad either. Afghanistan, though a campaign every bit as futile and mistaken as the war in Iraq, has somehow become the acceptable face of war. It’s maybe because Prince Harry was there (of which there’s some discussion with the Prince of Wales). But I suspect it’s more because we don’t hear much of the civilian population of Afghanistan and that ‘Johnny Taliban’ (in Prince Harry’s phrase) is more of an identifiable bogeyman than the factions in Iraq.

  But it’s a sunny day, the Queen is in a nice turquoise frock and appears to enjoy herself, even tapping her foot to some indifferent Welsh brass-band compositions before being driven back to the palace to watch the fly-past from the balcony and then have a spot of lunch. Nobody likes to ask any of the throng in the Mall if they know why we are engaged in Afghanistan or if they approve (as many would, I imagine). No grieving mothers, of course, and the deaths that have been mentioned have all been noble ones and not due to inadequate equipment, friendly fire, or anything ignoble at all.