Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  It probably sounds nicer than I actually find it, which is rather routine, but some of the most memorable passages in Anthony Powell’s Journals and James Lees-Milne’s Diaries are to do with meals, particularly with Lees-Milne’s meals during the war or the years of austerity. Somewhere he talks about a pudding of treacle pancakes and cream which even now makes my mouth water, though one of the revelations (to me anyway) of his Diaries is how much better the upper classes ate during the war than we did in Armley. Treacle pancakes and cream didn’t figure with us, though the basics, particularly food in season like new potatoes and fresh strawberries, were far tastier then than they have ever been since.

  4 September. A good deal in the Guardian about the Booker Prize and the experiences of those who have been its judges. I was once asked and had no hesitation in turning it down, the prospect of reading ten novels let alone a hundred quite enough to put me off. Later I read somewhere that Martyn Goff had said that no one had ever turned down the chance of being a judge, which confirms what several of the judges say – namely, that he’s a tricky customer. Happy to see Rebecca West stigmatised as a bully as I’ve never understood why she was and is made such a fuss of – a sacred cow, I suppose. Roy Fuller gets some stick, too, which chimes with my remembrance of him when he was briefly a television critic. The whole thing reinforces what I always feel – that literature is a much nastier profession than the theatre.

  6 September. In a shop in Petworth we are shown a chair that once belonged to Edward VIII and which came from Fort Belvedere. It’s a monstrous thing, so decayed as to be undatable, the stuffing bursting out of the sides, the embroidery gone on the arms and with no character to it at all; it could have belonged to Henry VIII rather than Edward VIII. ‘It’s very comfortable,’ the antique dealer says. ‘Try it.’ So I sit in it, this chair that the Duke of Windsor may well have sat in on the night of his abdication, though I feel no thrill on that score. And it is comfortable.

  11 September. The sister of the divorce lawyer Mark Saunders, shot by the police in May, brings a case against the Independent Police Complaints Commission on the grounds that the officers involved were allowed to confer before giving their accounts of the incident. I hope she wins, and in her favour she’s white and middle-class. If she were poor and black there would be no chance and not even a case. In Britain the police shoot people with impunity. They always have.

  15 September. From my notebooks:

  A. They’re very nice. They have a Brancusi in the bathroom.

  B. Do you mean a Jacuzzi?

  A. No. They have one of those as well.

  ‘I’ve been to Australia. It was all I could do to be civil.’ Ursula Vaughan Williams.

  ‘Shall we remind ourselves of the earlier history of this picture?’ Anthony Blunt with a group of nine-year-olds in the National Gallery.

  Madman: If you ever want some good petrol, this is the place. I’ve had some really good petrol from here in my time … economical smooth-running stuff. They make a speciality of it. Just mention my name.

  ‘It’s like octopus pee.’ My mother on a poor cup of tea.

  20 September. Lovely morning in Settle, though for no good reason as it’s as grey and wet as it has been for the last week and cold here too.

  I take R. down to Phil Ward’s in Giggleswick at eight thirty for him to have his neck manipulated. I come back, read the paper then collect him at nine thirty. We shop, which in Settle is always a pleasure as people talk. I’d got fed up of the old gate postcards they sell at the Information Centre but today they’d got a new selection including a good one of Ingleborough and I buy thirty. I must be easily their best customer. Then we go for coffee/tea and a flapjack at Car and Kitchen, then to the chemist. There’s always been a seat in the chemist, on which I remember old people sat, as did the longstay inhabitants of Castleberg Hospital. Now I sit there – as old as anyone in the shop – which next week, alas, is being taken over by Boots. Sign some books in the bookshop then collect my belt from Nelson’s, the cobbler’s on Duke Street in Settle. It’s a belt I bought thirty years ago at Brooks Brothers in New York, the sort of belt that when I was a boy used to be fastened with a silver snake buckle. It doesn’t have that, but with its blue and red stripe it’s been virtually the only belt I’ve worn since the 1970s. The tongue gave out about fifteen years ago and old Mr Nelson repaired it. He was a lovely comfortable-looking old man, like the cobbler in Pinocchio, and his shop was old-fashioned to match, with a green glass 1930s shop sign that must once have been the last word and now I hope is listed. Today it’s his son, who’s equally characterful, his shop window full of assorted and sometimes eccentric boots and shoes for ladies and gents that he’s made, one feels, just for the love of it. He wears a heavy linen smock, and when I say his father has mended the belt once already he says he hopes we’ll both be around long enough to see it mended again. £8.

  22 September. ‘Elgar’s Nimrod conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. It doesn’t get much better than that. Or does it? Give us a call.’ Classic FM.

  28 September, Sweden. At the Design Museum on Sunday morning in Gothenburg I find myself sitting by a fire point labelled AB SKUMM but alas we have no camera.

  Our lowest point in museum-going was one wet Saturday afternoon in Toronto when all we could find to do was to visit the Bata shoe museum. Gothenburg tops that with an exhibition of skateboards.

  29 September, Gothenburg. I’ve just finished reading Philip Roth’s Indignation. Marcus is the son of a butcher, the first in the family to go to university, but inured to the blood and guts of a butcher’s shop; he can draw a chicken, and I think makes sausages besides occasionally going out to customers’ houses with the orders. It is so close to my own life that I wonder if I am not inventing these parallels. There are similar problems, for instance with the animal fat, Marcus’s father cleaning it out of the bins, my father rendering it in the cellar and stinking out the house. His father is over-protective as I wasn’t aware mine was until my mother said that on my first night in the army my father wept. But maybe butcher-fathers are a problem. Kafka’s father may have sold fancy goods, but his grandfather was a ritual slaughterer.

  In the novel Marcus cannot stand his roommate and changes his room twice. I couldn’t stand mine and was interviewed by the head of my college much in the way Marcus is interviewed by the Dean of Men – a wonderful scene in the novel which is particularly painful to read.

  Were I unbalanced in the way some of Roth’s characters are unbalanced I might think these parallels were intentional but I do not flatter myself.

  Today to Gunnebo, a late eighteenth-century country retreat of the Hall family, English who married into the commercial aristocracy of Gothenburg. The estate is an ecological showpiece with an extensive kitchen garden, pick your own flower beds and a restaurant serving the estate’s produce. This is busy and obviously well known and a favourite haunt of Gothenburg’s retired leisure. There are hordes of sabre-toothed Nordic pensioners who, knowing the drill, hoover up the best of the smörgasbord with ancient husbands ministering to the gobbling of their elderly cuckoo wives. The Swedes are generally considerate but age abolishes national characteristics, the only consoling thought that the French would behave worse.

  1 October, Suffolk. Though Thaxted Church was delightful – and full of WI ladies (and gentlemen) clearing up after the Harvest Festival – far and away the most impressive is Long Melford, happily empty apart from an old man, Australian by the sound of him, manning the bookstall. He doesn’t interfere with our looking round or play the guide, though there’s so much to take in one could spend the afternoon there. All the Clopton glass for instance, a wonderful painted chapel with a hand inscribing a medieval poem intertwined with a vine that scrolls around the ceiling and between the beams. Separate from the church is a Lady Chapel, once the school and similarly painted with the benches used for the school still in situ: we take them to be from the 1930s, say, or Arts and Crafts reproduction but they are all 1630
.

  An old churchwarden comes and talks to us, there because lead thieves have taken away some pipes during the night. It is a face of such goodness and sweetness he might have been out of George Eliot – with lots to say about the church (‘my full routine lasts an hour and a half ’) but not intrusively or wanting to buttonhole. A lovely place even down to the hollyhocks running wild between the buttresses and the gravestones, some slotted into the topiary yews that have grown up around them.

  4 October. We go looking for Waterden Church, recommended by Richard Scott and said to be Osbert Lancaster’s favourite. Not in the Shell Guide or the Collins Parish Churches book and no one in Little Walsingham Farm Shop has heard of it – or when they have, they can’t explain quite where it is. We drive along the Fakenham Road and down an unmarked by-road where a farmer in a van points back over his shoulder. It’s at the end of a rough track across a field next door to a run-down red-brick Victorian vicarage. The church, though, is medieval – the parish a lost village across the fields. It’s got nothing of architectural distinction – box pews admittedly but of the simplest kind and in grained boxwood, a pulpit that has no pillar or plinth but standing on the floor, the font on bricks. The west window is an ordinary casement job but the view from the altar steps, through the chancel arch and down the nave is so atmospheric it makes me want to take a course in photography if only to record such places. It’s a setting that would have delighted Edwin Smith.

  The exterior bears more signs of its medieval origins than the interior – evidence of aisle arches, blocked windows and so on – but it’s the utter simplicity that captivates.

  Nor is it neglected. There are fresh flowers by the altar – and quite an elaborate bunch too and in the visitors’ book someone else has called this very morning.

  5 October. Pelting with rain, the smaller roads sometimes flooded and no light in the sky all day. The roads empty and we drive to Swaffham where we hope for some coffee but it’s dismal and closed, the only café with its lights on a Chinese restaurant – a Chinese restaurant in Swaffham on a wet Sunday morning something of a yardstick.

  Then on in the continuing rain towards Long Melford, turning off to Lavenham in the hope of some lunch. Like Swaffham it’s largely closed and we’re lucky to find a small back room behind an organic shop that does snacks. The other tables are taken – at one a woman and her daughter, at another a man and his daughter. I don’t twig, as R. does, that they’re all one family and since the child sitting with the man is making a bit of a din, which he indulges, I take it he’s a divorced father out for Sunday with his daughter. I whisper this to R. who shakes his head, the child now actively disruptive, giving a running commentary on the game she is playing. I chunter a bit at this noise, unstilled by R. and I’m sure overheard by the woman at the other table – and it’s only when we get outside R. explains that the child was obviously autistic. Obvious – though not to me, who’s supposed to be the sensitive observer of the human condition. The thought that I have, however unwittingly, added to the mother’s burdens (who must face this situation whenever they go out) is unbearable – and irretrievable. And I find it hard to dismiss from my mind for the rest of the day – and even now two days later it’s hard to write about.

  17 October. The new film of Brideshead seems to have fared badly. I’ve always thought the house in the original television series, Castle Howard, was ill chosen, though it’s a mistake the new version replicates. I may have told this story before (I feel I’ve told most stories before), but when Derek Granger, the producer of the TV version, asked me to adapt it he admitted a little shamefacedly that they would be filming it at Castle Howard. I thought at the time that this was typical of the inflation a novel suffers when it’s adapted for television and, priggishly probably, turned it down. I don’t know that there was any suggestion that Castle Howard was in Waugh’s mind when he was writing the book, though such identifications are anyway approximate, a back-projection as much by the author as by literary critics.

  The new adaptation sounds cruder than the first version which, written by Granger himself, did at least retain much of the original text in the form of voiceover. John Mortimer no more wrote the script than I did, though he at least was smart enough to say he would write it and maybe even did a draft. That was really all Granger wanted, giving him a basis on which to write it himself. A nice man, he gave me supper in Rome on one occasion but took a long time before he could settle on a suitable restaurant, going into several, and walking round critically, coming out of one shaking his head saying: ‘No good. Too many lampshades.’

  24 October. For David Gentleman.

  When I was a child I thought there was something magical about people who could draw. A boy in my class could do horses and this seemed to me at eight or nine a gift that was almost celestial.

  I was reminded of this recently seeing David Gentleman drawing in Inverness Street market: not an uncommon occurrence as David is as much a component of the Camden Town scene as the market itself. On this occasion, a little Asian boy was stationed right at his elbow rapt in what David was drawing while standing so close to him that he was almost impeding the process. I can imagine artists who would find this intolerable but that David didn’t is evidence both of how gentle and good-natured he is but also of his belief in the learning process and how interest and even skill is acquired and passed on.

  Though he has ranged the world in his subject matter David Gentleman seems to me, despite his parents’ Scottish origins, to be a very English artist. I first became aware of modern British pictures and painting when as a boy in 1951 I was taken to the Festival of Britain. David was just too young to be one of the artists featured and employed there but his vision seems to me to be linked to and grow out of that magical time. To read the list of artists and craftsmen by whom he was taught or with whom he associated at the Royal College is mouth-watering. Peyton Skipwith calls it a veritable roll call of the great and the good of the mid-twentieth-century British art world: in David Gentleman lives on the spirit of Bawden and John Nash.

  And that’s not all. Peyton Skipwith’s account of David’s career reminds us of his extraordinary range. My own experience teaches me that the British don’t really care for range: they think of it as inconsistency or want of application. A single furrow is better. Happily that’s never been David Gentleman’s philosophy: postage stamp one assignment, a major Underground platform the next.

  He has lived in the same street in Camden Town for the last forty-odd years during which time, in the intervals of depicting France, Italy or India, he has recorded his immediate surroundings much as that other Camden Town painter William Roberts did but from a different perspective (and without William Roberts’s volleys of abuse!). And that’s relevant. Art is never an excuse for bad behaviour. Talent isn’t measurable by tantrums and I think again of his patience with that impromptu pupil in the market. I suppose what I’m saying is that David is a gentleman … or a gentleman twice over.

  For myself I will always cherish the two sketches he did of Miss Shepherd, the Lady in the Van, a personage with whom he must have been almost as familiar as I was: we were all long-term residents of our Camden Town street. In her time Miss Shepherd went through several vehicles and on one occasion David did a quick thumbnail sketch of her watching as the tow truck prepares to take away her derelict van. He caught her in a familiar pose, feet splayed out in her version of ballet’s first position and so exactly that when Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 I was able to show her the sketch so that she knew how to stand.

  The other drawing is posthumous, done just a few days after Miss Shepherd died. I was working at my table in the window when I became aware of David casually leaning against the wall recording the van, now bowered in trees, which had been both Miss Shepherd’s home and her catafalque. When he’d done he came in and gave me it.

  26 October. With Lynn to the Renaissance Portraits exhibition at the National Gallery. It’s a year
or so since we’ve been and the thrill of walking through the darkened rooms is undiminished and as always the paintings are so enticing it’s hard to stride single-mindedly past them en route for the exhibition in the Sainsbury Wing.

  And it’s a wonderful show which includes sculpture as well as paintings and drawings – the first room with a bust of the banker Strozzi (with leaden eyes) beside a painting of a windswept young man by Dürer that could have been painted last week (or last century anyway). Quite a few paintings by Antonis Mor which besides being photographically lifelike often have something ghostly about them. I know nothing about him but the paintings somehow suggest someone self-contained and almost sinister, a monochrome figure discreet to the point of immobility. The last room has full-length sculptures of Philip II and Charles V which manage to make Philip II handsome and even sexy (and in very fancy boots) – he carries a phallic baton resting on his hip, his armour with a small fluted codpiece just peeping below the edge of his tunic – a figure so enticing I want to slip my hand under the tunic and behind the codpiece to see how far the modelling goes and how lifelike it is.

  On our way out we call in at Room 1 to look at the Titian on offer from the Duke of Sutherland – an odd picture, Actaeon appealing and rather public school, Diana with too small a head and all the life and interest in the other nymphs at whom Actaeon is looking – not at Diana at all. So maybe that was his real offence.