Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  15 June. And today comes George Bush paying a courtesy call on the Queen and Gordon Brown before having a cheering conscience-free get-together with his old mate Tony Blair. And here are the helicopters flying over Regent’s Park to prove it.

  26 June, L’Espiessac, France. I sit in the wicker rocking chair in the shade of the willow by the pool. Except that I’m slightly pestered by insects it’s an ideal situation, with the lavender bank just coming into bloom and the trees and grass fresh and green after a week or two of rain. It’s one of the perfect places of the earth, utterly silent and private, the twitter of a hawk the only sound. And it’s the last time we shall be able to come.

  It’s a warm afternoon and with no one around I swim dutifully around the pool. I’ve never much cared for swimming (or known what to think about while I was doing it). I ought to be a better swimmer as I’ve got broad shoulders, but my arms were always too thin, I reflect, and I’ve never mastered the crawl. Today, though, I think of it less as swimming than as taking my scar for an airing, the long wavering pleat that now runs from navel to sternum. I reflect, as I labour messily round, that this will be one of the last swims I shall have here or anywhere else. I can’t imagine ever finding anywhere as perfect or as private as this, and having swum in a pool bordered on the one side by a bank of lavender and on the other by fruit trees and a field of ripe corn, who could bear to swim municipally?

  Tomorrow we leave as the house is now sold, putting me in mind of Francis Hope’s poem about the holidays we had in rented villas back in the 1970s:

  Goodbye to the Villa Piranha

  Prepare the journey North,

  Smothering feet in unfamiliar socks.

  Sweeping the bathroom free of sand, collecting

  Small change of little worth.

  Make one last visit to the tip

  (Did we drink all those bottles?) and throw out

  The unread heavy paperback, saving

  One thriller for the trip.

  Chill in the morning air

  Hints like a bad host that we should be going.

  Time for a final swim, a walk, a last

  Black coffee in the square.

  If not exactly kings

  We were at least francs bourgeois, with the right

  To our own slice of place and time and pleasure,

  And someone else’s things.

  Leaving the palace and its park

  We take our common place along the road,

  As summer joins the queue of other summers,

  Driving towards the dark.

  27 June, L’Espiessac. Last night in our room we find a huge four- or five-inch bright green cricket – perhaps a praying mantis – which we capture in the jug before putting it out into the rain. This morning hearing a couple of magpies raising a din I look out of the window and see a marten, possibly (the size of a large ferret) – ginger and brown fur, pointed nose coming out of the lavender field. It darts back in again but the magpies keep track of it and fly squawking over its head as it flounders through the mown grass to hide in the standing corn.

  14 July. Wildlife this morning: one of Lisa’s pet rabbits sleeps in the sun behind the fence on top of the gazebo; a jay flounders in the laburnum and a young robin so be-fluffed it’s akin to a sheep in a half fleece, and a small brown bird that once would have been a sparrow but these days looks more distinguished nips across the garden, which R. spent all yesterday tidying and which looks lovely. R. who just about now is going to the eye specialist.

  20 July. Although the East Coast rail franchise has now passed from GNER to National Express eccentricity happily persists: the trolley attendant this afternoon warns against too sudden opening of the sparkling water lest it be a bit ‘Vesuvial’.

  23 July. I’m pushing my bike through the gate of Gloucester Crescent this morning when a heron flaps up from the creeper on top of the pergola. It flies down the street getting all the seagulls agitated, and when I come out five minutes later the gulls are still making a din. The bird, having hidden round the corner, now takes off again and flies to No. 62 and perches on the fanlight above the door. The seagulls haven’t seen where it has gone so it stays hunched up there in perfect silhouette (and in a setting not found in Audubon) while they scour the skies above the Crescent. I fetch a neighbour to see it and we watch it for a while, but the heron obviously feels this is getting a bit too what cameramen would call clubby and takes off again up the Crescent where we (and I hope the gulls) lose sight of it. It doesn’t quite match R.’s experience when a heron mobbed by crows near Primrose Hill missed him by inches, but as with any evidence of urban rurality, I find it cheering. It confirms, too, my detestation of gulls, which I would happily see hounded out of cities and back to their proper stamping ground.

  28 July. I’m just finishing the Collected Stories of John Cheever, all 892 pages of it. Full of casual profundities and lightly worn insights, few of the stories have the poetry of his novels or their leaps of language, but taken together they furnish an almost documentary account of what American East Coast society was like in the 1940s and 1950s. And not merely the society of the well-to-do. One of the most striking and unexpected insights is how precarious were these seemingly secure suburban lives, financially precarious and ridden with debt, and though they have cooks and maids, the loss of a job means ruin and departure; emotionally precarious, too, nothing in Updike that isn’t in Cheever first. And these aren’t just suburban lives in Cheever’s enclaves of Shady Hill or Bullet Park. There are stories about elevator men, building superintendents and casual burglars, few of these apparently respectable lives that don’t have a seamy side. As indeed Cheever’s did. Plenty of drink, too, which is also close to home, though his homosexual double life would be harder to deduce from the stories than it is from the novels. Most of them were written to order, chiefly for the New Yorker (which never paid him enough), and he probably wrote better in the novels when he had more room to spread himself. But there are extraordinary tales: a casual office fuck leads to a woman being sacked, whereupon the culprit finds her stalking him until in the shadows of his suburban railway platform she makes him literally eat dirt. There’s a story told by the belly of a man named Farnsworth and in Bullet Park a boy narrowly escapes crucifixion on the altar of his local church.

  31 July. A depressing judgement in the House of Lords. This is the not unexpected rejection of the appeal against extradition to the USA of Gary McKinnon, the computer programmer who, for no other reason than that it was there, hacked into the Pentagon computer. Unless the European Court has more courage and more sense than the Law Lords he faces an American prison. And for what? Cheek.

  11 August, Yorkshire. I put up the blind in the bedroom this morning to find a duck sitting in the middle of the lawn. Quite a plump one too, only the blind disturbs her and she waddles into the undergrowth. Comes back to sit on the lawn and as I write is in the gazebo at the top of the garden. R. delighted as Rob says he’s never seen one in the garden before, though pheasants (and peacocks) quite common. Not sure whether we should try and shepherd it across the road and down to the beck or just let nature take its course.

  A cool bright windy morning, the garden (and duck) looking lovely, the buddleia covered in great snouts of blossom. Ducks have always been R.’s favourite.

  12 August. Over my lunch I often read or reread Richard Cobb, though not I’m afraid the monumental works on the Revolutionary Army and his studies on the French Revolution that made his name but rather the dozen or so autobiographical books and memoirs that he brought out particularly in the 1980s. On almost the last page that he wrote in The End of the Line (he died in 1998) he said, ‘I am not a belonger … there could never be a Cobb cult.’

  But I don’t see why not. As he’s one of the most vivid and particularising of writers, no detail too trivial. Perhaps sensing a possible rival, he claimed never to have read Proust but the memoirs of his childhood in Tunbridge Wells are as evocative as anything in Illiers-Combray.r />
  Too anarchical for Oxford and a Jim Dixon before his time, I imagine he could be a difficult companion; he has his idiosyncrasies and I have learned to read him with a French dictionary to hand as his prose is peppered with French phrases, the unspoken assumption being that the French has nuances that the English version doesn’t convey. Engagingly this is not always the case, there’s no nuance at all, Cobb going into French simply in order to show off.

  I can see how eccentricity (and the drink) might have made him an awkward colleague and this too makes me wish I knew more about him; I await with impatience the new Oxford DNB in which he will doubtless figure. That or a biography, which I can’t see anybody writing.

  14 August. On Thursday (hoping for Dad’s Army) we caught a live broadcast from the Proms of Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra playing Brahms’s Fourth. It was a terrific performance, broadcast in real time with no editing, so that one got a good deal of what Goffman called ‘by-behaviour’, the players off-duty, between movements for instance, or waiting for Barenboim to return to the podium for the encore. It helps that they are all young people, and some incredibly young, one violinist not much more than twelve, though Barenboim himself is now serious and unsmiling and looks not unlike Rod Steiger.

  Tonight the broadcast is repeated and though it’s edited it is still enthralling, one of the cameras fascinated with a particular woodwind player who has a good deal to do, but who in his turn obviously fancies the flautist who’s next but one. So at the end of his own contribution he’ll often half-turn in order to pass the tune or whatever to this flautist, and she is equally attentive during his solos. There’s a cellist with a cheeky face who plainly makes jokes, a bear of a violinist who throws himself about a lot, and next to him the child violinist with a face made tragic by concentration. It’s hard to conceive how such a small figure copes with the great winds of Brahms, though he’s more composed about it than his hairy and demonstrative neighbour.

  It’s moving, too, of course because of the moral stance of the orchestra, though the players are by now probably bored or at least matter-of-fact about this ethical burden. But as with similar experiences in the theatre (including I hope The History Boys), one longs to stay with them once the performance is over and they disperse. Who looks after the child, I wonder, whom does the cheeky cellist sleep with and are the flautist and the woodwind player as close as their performances suggest? So there’s sadness too in being excluded from all this and longing, just as there is coming away from the theatre or for some people, I imagine, the football stadium.

  24 August. J. is quick to reprove any misbehaviour in the street, sometimes recklessly so he was on fairly safe ground the other day when he spotted a resident of Arlington House urinating up against a car.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ said the Doctor (though it was pretty obvious).

  ‘It’s all right,’ the old man said, ‘I’m Irish.’

  At which point the always straight-faced Julia O’Faolain came down the street. With more courage than it took to accost the Irishman, J. accosted her.

  ‘What do you think of this? This gentleman is urinating in the street and his excuse is that he’s Irish.’

  With no alteration in her usual demeanour Ms O’Faolain took out her purse, selected a small coin and gave it to the urinater saying, ‘Do not dishonour the green flag.’ ‘God bless you,’ said the man and shook hands with Jonathan with the same hand in which he had just been holding his dick.

  28 August. Unsolicited Nora brings me the review of the revival of Enjoy from the Mail. It was first put on in 1980, and while generally enthusiastic the Mail assumes, as did James Fenton at the time of the first production, that by putting the main young man in drag I am signalling my own (presumably suppressed) desire to get into a frock. It may be that the Mail assumes all homosexuals would like to be in skirts (or ought to be, possibly as a measure of public safety), but I’ve never had the slightest inclination in that regard, and even as a child would not have thought to dress up in my mother’s clothes. But I wrote the play, so that proves I must harbour these unfulfilled longings.

  The young man may not even be gay; I actually can’t remember whether there’s anything in the script to suggest this. He could be like Eddie Izzard or indeed Grayson Perry, both of whom prefer to dress as women without it being an indication of their sexual preferences, though in 1980 the audience wouldn’t have understood that and nor, I think, would I.

  29 August. A propos my supposed prescience in Enjoy, which has been much noted, where I do think I was slightly ahead of the times was with Kafka’s Dick. If the play didn’t entirely take Kafka seriously (which was heresy, even blasphemy to Steven Berkoff) it pointed the way to all sorts of stuff about Kafka that came after – Kafka as dandy, Kafka as cinemagoer and (reviewed today) Excavating Kafka by James Hawes, which is about Kafka and porn. I don’t mean I saw this coming or even suspected it but the tone of the play and perhaps even more so the tone of the introduction to the play (Kafka at Las Vegas as it was originally called) have helped to loosen up Kafka studies, decalcified him even so that he got treated as he was in life not what he became posthumously, the prophet of the show trials and a candidate for Auschwitz.

  31 August. Yesterday was warm and sunny, even hot. Today it’s back to normal, grey skies and rain for the last day of the wettest August (and the greyest summer) that I can remember. Still, we’d decided to go out so after an early lunch we follow the M4 past Heathrow and take the turning off up to Langley to see the Kedermister Library. It’s an old village buried now in suburban development, most of it post-war and the roar of the M4 never far away. Though we’ve been here once before ten or twelve years ago the church still takes some finding, but there are yew trees, a cemetery and two sets of neat seventeenth-century almshouses with between them the brick tower of the fourteenth-century church. R. has rung to check that the library will be open today but all the doors are locked and a notice on the board saying there will be tours of the library next Sunday. However just as we’re turning away cross and disappointed a man gets out of a parked car who is the curator of the library to whom R. has spoken. Realising he’d given him the wrong Sunday he has come down to wait for the three hours he’d said it would be open in case we turned up. It’s such a thoughtful and unlookedfor gesture it colours the whole of the visit, which is sheer delight anyway. I’d forgotten that library apart the church itself is full of interest, a magnificent royal coat of arms for instance, once on the rood screen and now just inside the door. It’s dated 1625 and a wonderful piece of work, the lion’s bristles made out of iron wire. There’s an arcade of seventeenth-century wooden pillars, medieval tiles and umpteen plaques and monuments none of which I remember noticing on our first visit, when I think there was the aftermath of a service going on and we went straight up the stairs through another late eighteenth-century Gothick arcade to the Kedermister pew and the library itself. Today it’s a more leisurely progress with the curator filling in the information not in a learned-by-rote way but full of enthusiasm and love for this extraordinary place. The pew c.1635 is painted and panelled, boxed in behind grilles and shutters with everywhere paintings of the eye of God (Deus videt). It brings back the wonder I had as a child going through the grotto at Hitchen’s to see Santa Claus – painted, secret and full of surprises – panels that open for ventilation, and another panel which reveals the original holy water stoup inside the south door over which the pew was built. Even the modest benches that could be of any date are the original seventeenth-century furniture, the arms of Sir John Kedermister painted on the back.

  The library itself is a small room off the pew and to the side – panelled and painted in the same way and like some casket or jewel box. The books, all uniformly bound are behind shutters, the backs of the shutters painted with blank-paged open books, in some ways the most odd and evocative of the decorations there. Though in a kind of frieze around the tops of the cases are paintings and landscap
es – Windsor Castle, the Kedermister houses, and (with no Deus Videt) one small panel of a huge eye.

  It’s an extraordinary survival and so precious one fears for it, besieged by suburbia and with the M4 thundering by over the churchyard wall. In the cemetery is buried Paul Nash whose grave we visited last time, but it’s spitting as we leave so instead we come straight back, through torrential rain, not stopping at Osterley as we thought we might. One component of the pleasure of such an afternoon is Rupert’s delight. Without that (and without mine) the pleasure would be halved and there is always that thought.

  1 September. A sunny morning and I wake thinking that forty years ago today was the first rehearsal of Forty Years On. It was at Drury Lane and a much hotter day, I remember, and one that was to change my life. Though I write this living not thirty yards away from the flat in Chalcot Square where I was living then.

  Appropriately, though not aware that it’s an anniversary, George Fenton who as a boy was in the cast, rings first thing. Rehearsals began at ten and staying in Weymouth Mews George woke at ten and had to run the whole way to Drury Lane where Rupert Marsh was in the lobby with a watch saying, ‘If you’re late again, you’ll be sacked.’

  2 September. I seldom make a note of meals, particularly when I’m on my own, and today’s lunch wasn’t in any way memorable, but for once I’ll record it. I’ll normally have my lunch at one. Today it’s a large granary roll that I slice up thinly for sandwiches, one side of which I spread with butter, the other mayonnaise. Then I put on some cos lettuce and smoked salmon, while in the centre of the plate is some carrot and apple salad left over from last night’s supper. Sometimes I’ll have a glass of water but today not. To finish I have a sliced-up banana topped off with vanilla yogurt and half a spoonful of blackberry jam. All this I put on the French tin tray R. bought earlier this year (when I was ill and having meals in bed) and bring it upstairs to my table, where I listen to BBC7’s This Sceptred Isle, a history of England read by Anna Massey, Peter Jeffrey, Christopher Lee and Paul Eddington. Afterwards I take the tray back downstairs to get my midday pills: two Omega 3 tablets, one selenium and one saw palmetto plus a piece of dark chocolate and a cup of green tea.