Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  8 November. On the front cover of the Observer Lewis Morley’s photograph of me walking along the beach at Brighton in 1961. It’s the only photograph I’ve ever had taken where aged twenty-six I could almost fancy myself. My look is both of yearning and disquiet and calls up the lines from Henry IV Part 2 that Hector quotes in the film of The History Boys.

  The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,

  What perils past, what crosses to ensue,

  Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.

  11 November. I seldom notice the two minutes’ silence as I’m generally at home working, as I was today. On Sunday when there was the Cenotaph service and its two minutes’ silence, R. was at an antiques fair in the Agricultural Hall in Victoria. As eleven struck there was an announcement and a hush fell, but one or two people seemed to think the silence meant ‘Freeze!’ and so they were not only silent but remained fixed in whatever attitude (handing over money, examining a vase) the silence caught them. Some of these positions were quite awkward, with the ending of the silence coming as a relief.

  12 November. A hysterical afternoon at the National Theatre. The play is settling down and though we rehearse every day and have notes it’s mostly a question of fine tuning. At one point in the first act Richard Griffiths as Fitz, the actor playing Auden, farts. ‘That’s Auden farting,’ says Fitz. ‘Not me.’ This hasn’t been getting much of a response so just as with a patch of dialogue that doesn’t work, the fart has to be fine-tuned too.

  We go through the repertoire of available farts transmitted from the CD from the sound desk and while not quite marking them with score cards the cast express their various preferences and we just about settle on two candidates, when Stephen Wight who plays Stuart, a rent boy, points out that the farts we are favouring are plainly farts made on a plastic or wooden surface whereas Fitz is sitting in a chair that is upholstered. A more smothered fart is required so the quest begins again. Having finally settled on the ideal fart it has to be played several times so that the cast, already hysterical, don’t break up when they hear it for real on the stage. I can’t imagine this scene taking place in a production directed by Peter Brook, say – or indeed Lindsay Anderson, ‘Settle down’ the reproving note.

  17 November. A bit of noise outside last night and R. peered through the window and could see nothing, though hearing somebody laughing. This morning my bike is gone, the crime-proof lock still attached to the railings. This is only the second time I’ve had a bike stolen and so I suppose I ought to think myself lucky. The play opens tonight but it’s the bike I’m thinking about and I keep going to the window to look at the place where it was.

  30 November. We leave London with the weather still wet and tempestuous, making me dread battling up the Great North Road through the spray of the lorries. In the event though it clears up and it’s a lovely day as we drive round Peterborough, have our sandwiches on the edge of a field near Wisbech, then not expecting much we turn off to look at a church in Walpole St Peter. Seen from the road, the large windows full of quarrel glass hint at its splendour but nothing prepares you for the perfection of the interior which is of a seemingly intact medieval church with nothing – nothing – to offend the eye. There are a full set of poppy-head pews (c.1600) – both in the body of the nave and at the sides. A pedimented screen (c.1631) that runs across the west end of the nave, a medieval brass lectern, the accoutrements of the church so many and so various one scarcely notices the painted chancel screen.

  The oddest feature is the altar raised up high above the chancel to accommodate an external passage, vaulted with (among others) a sheep’s-head boss to accommodate religious processions proceeding round the boundaries of the church. Nothing seems to have been lost, nothing spoilt and (a big factor with R.) no evidence of contemporary religion at all.

  1 December. To Holt, which is as pleasant and friendly as we remembered from last time. At Richard Scott’s shop we buy our Christmas presents for each other – various bits of stained glass, some of them thought to be architectural salvage from the French Revolution.

  Then (this is the niceness of Holt) the pharmacist supplies me with some pills I’d forgotten to bring (ringing JP Pharmacy in Camden Town to make sure they were the right strength) and the Nat-West is equally helpful to R. over some transaction he’d omitted to do last week. Then we have a nice lunch in an ordinary café before going down the Norwich Road to Salle. Two censing angels above the west door prepare you for the treasures within, the angels (and not just their wings) feathered. More unspoiled woodwork with huge brackets supporting a towering font cover, good misericords particularly one that R. finds of a frowning head of a man that may be Christ on the south-west side of the chancel stalls. Open are the doors to the spiral staircase, the two parvise rooms over the north and south porches, the north room particularly fine with elaborate bosses. Unusual these days to find such places accessible – health and safety having tamed many of the pleasures of looking at churches when I was a boy, when one of the particular attractions of a church was going up the tower – a treat even a Victorian church could furnish however dull it was otherwise. Still I never in the whole of my churchgoing youth saw anything like the feathered angels.

  2 December. I am reading (backwards as usual with biographies) Selina Hastings’s The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham and much enjoying it. It’s beautifully and silkily written with a good deal, though I’ve read at least two previous biographies of Maugham, that I did not know. It’s also very sympathetic to its subject. But however understanding it is I find I withhold sympathy for him – not because of his cruelties or his sharp tongue, but because what he represents – and what I imagine he would be happy to represent – is worldly wisdom and that is a quality or a qualification to which I have never aspired or much admired. He’s the author as Man of the World.

  7 December. Write something and it happens. This weekend there has been a slightly relentless re-showing of some of my old plays and films on BBC2 and BBC4, with Archie Powell’s documentary on BBC2 and a long interview with Mark Lawson on BBC4. Watching them both I note that, though I’m on different channels, I tell the same stories, make the same jokes and, while it’s never quite a routine, I find myself falling into the same tedious repetition that I’ve written Auden going through in The Habit of Art.

  15 December. My best Christmas cards are always from Victor Lewis-Smith, who lives in the Lake District, not far from Sellafield: ‘I persist in telling visitors on the fell that the building they can see in the distance is in fact the Kendal mint cake factory, whose chimneys are emitting exotic mint vapour. It’s for the best, it really is.’

  31 December. Call Rupert to the back door to watch a full moon coming up behind the trees at the end of the garden. It’s apparently a ‘blue moon’, i.e. the second full moon this month, which happens every two or three years. The next blue moon on New Year’s Eve won’t be until 2028 so it’s the last one I shall ever see – and it’s also the first that I ever knew about. The moon is strong enough to cast sharp shadows, with the sky blue except for occasional reefs of cloud so that with the snow still lying in drifts on the road earth and heaven seem one.

  2010

  1 January. ‘I’m happy doing what I’m doing. I’m not always happy with what I’ve done.’

  13 January. Snow again this morning, soft and plump, snow out of Mabel Lucie Attwell softening the trees and coating the wires, though now the thin falling snow turns to drizzle and great clumps of snow slide from the trees and fall into the gardens.

  19 January. D. Cameron’s notion that the better degree the teacher has the better the teacher is so wrong-headed as to be laughable; except that he may shortly be in a position to put his cockeyed notions into practice. Somebody should take him on one side and tell him that to teach well you don’t need a degree at all. I got a first-class degree and was a hopeless teacher. Russell Harty got a third-class degree and taught brilliantly. There was a great deal he didn’t know but
he knew how to enthuse a class and made learning fun, much as he could work a studio audience.

  23 January. To the National where I watch the matinée of The Habit of Art. It’s a sharp and energetic performance, matinée audiences often the best and today’s helped because there are thought to be at least 130 blind people in the audience. Some of them have been up on the stage beforehand to familiarise themselves with the layout, handle the props and meet the cast, all of which helps to focus attention on the play and there’s scarcely a cough. I wait in the wings for the actors to come off then go up to the canteen and have a cup of tea with them, something I haven’t done since the play opened and have much missed.

  24 January. Two boys from Doncaster have been sentenced for torturing two other boys from the same village. In sentencing them the judge gives them a stern lecture, though how much of it they understand must be debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs Thatcher. As with the Bulger case the tabloids make a determined effort to find out the identity of the culprits, the crime frequently described as ‘unimaginable’. I don’t find it hard to imagine at all. When I was eight or nine I used to play torture games with two other boys at my elementary school up on the recreation ground in Armley. I would pretend to whip them or they me and with a forwardness that I never afterwards enjoyed was always the one to instigate the games. At ten I went to a different school and thereafter became the shy, furtive, prurient creature I was for the rest of my childhood.

  25 January. I find tattoos hard to understand, even to forgive. Afflicted quite early in life with varicose veins I’ve always been self-conscious of the greyish blue of the veins and found it a disfigurement and a stigma even, the blue of the veins the same blue as that of a tattoo. That anyone would voluntarily do to themselves what nature had done to me I find incomprehensible. Beckham, for instance, had a nice body until he had it so extensively engraved.

  30 January. Bitterly cold but bright blue day, a sprinkling of snow during the night so that Cambridge looks much as it did when I first went there in December 1951, gripped by a heavy frost but with clear sunny skies – and with a beauty I’ve never forgotten. We have a sandwich lunch in the nice café in the Fitzwilliam and walk through the picture galleries, my eye taken by the same paintings, the same sculptures every time – Nollekens’ bust of Lord Savile, the lip curled and contemptuous (and not unlike Karl Miller), Van Dyck’s provocative Countess of Southampton with her glass globe and of course Van Dyck’s Archbishop Laud – of whom Lynn says, ‘He looks like he’d benefit from a good massage.’

  ‘– the third movement of Elgar’s beautiful Symphony No 1.’ That is what is wrong with Classic FM – the ‘beautiful’.

  10 February. Finish with some regret Frances Spalding’s book on the Pipers, John and Myfanwy, the latter figuring in The Habit of Art where she is to some extent disparaged. I’ve always been in two minds about Piper, liking him when I was young with his paintings ‘modern’ but representational enough to be acceptable, a view I trotted out years later when Romola Christopherson was taking me round Downing Street. ‘I suppose for Mrs Thatcher,’ I sneered, ‘Piper is the acceptable face of modern art,’ not realising that at that moment the lady herself was passing through the room behind me. Some of his abstracts I like, particularly a collage, Coast at Finisterre (1961), which is illustrated in the book, and some of his Welsh landscapes. I don’t care for his stained glass, though churches are always proud when they have a Piper window, the latest (and no more pleasing than the rest) glimpsed at Paul Scofield’s memorial service in St Margaret’s, Westminster. For all that, though, the book is immensely readable, drawing together so many strands of the artistic life in the 1930s and 1940s – K. Clark, Ben Nicholson, Betjeman and all the stuff to do with the genesis of the Shell Guides. Odd to think of Piper’s gaunt figure sketching in my own Yorkshire village, the paintings he did there reproduced (not plain why) in Osbert Sitwell’s Left Hand, Right Hand and now at Renishaw.

  14 February. I am said in today’s Independent on Sunday to be ‘pushing eighty’ with a photograph (taken at seventy) in corroboration. The article is about the decline of Northern drollery, of which I am an example, though whether of the drollery or its decline I’m not sure.

  I pass the house in Fitzroy Road with the blue plaque saying that Yeats lived there but with no plaque saying that Sylvia Plath also died there. I look down into the basement where Plath put her head in the gas oven. And there is a gas oven still, only it’s not the Belling or the Cannon it would have been in 1963 but now part of a free-standing unit in limed oak.

  It was this house where Eric Korn heard someone reading out the plaque as being to ‘William Butler Yeast’. ‘Presumably,’ Eric wanted to say, ‘him responsible for the Easter Rising.’

  17 February. Stopped by a man outside the post office in Regent’s Park Road who fishes in his wallet and shows me a note I sent nearly fifty years ago to Bernard Reiss, the tailor in Albion Place in Leeds who made me my first suit in 1954. The note is about two 7/6 seats which I’d booked him for Beyond the Fringe, the man showing it me Bernard Reiss’s nephew. I tell him about the suit, which was in grey Cheviot tweed, the waistcoat of which I still have and which I took to show Mr Hitchcock at Anderson and Sheppard before they made me a suit last year. My first suit and probably my last.

  2 March. R. back from Edensor where he and Simon Upton have been photographing ‘the Old Vic’. Says the house is very busy with a lot of comings and goings – David Mlinaric to tea, Lady Vestey and another horsebreeding lady to lunch, Charlotte Mosley, the vicar – Chatsworth life but now crammed into the dower house. Debo (now ninety) in good form. Says that the Mellons used to pass on their discarded clothes to them – presumably during austerity and the days of clothing coupons – every now and again a great cardboard coffin of a box arriving full of couture clothes over which the sisters would squabble. Once she and Diana were in Jermyn Street both wearing one of the Mellon cast-offs (and she can describe the dress still, black with mink trim round the collar and lapels) when they saw Paul Mellon on the other side of the street. ‘He mustn’t see us,’ said Diana, ‘lest he recognise the clothes,’ and then became hysterical. This idiosyncratic form of lend-lease persisting well after the need for it had passed.

  When they go there’s lots of ‘Oh must you go? Can’t you stay? What am I going to do when you’ve gone?’ – R. doing a very good imitation.

  3 March. Lunch at L’Etoile with Michael Palin and Barry Cryer, Elena Salvoni still presiding there at lunchtime and though she’s ninety not looking much different from when I first got to know her at Bianchi’s in the 1960s. Barry as usual fires off the jokes which are almost his trademark but today he also talks about how, when he was a young man in Leeds, he suffered badly from eczema and used to be swathed in bandages, face included. On one occasion he went out like this into the streets of Leeds but nobody stared at him, so correctly did people behave. He even went into a shop, looking, as he said, like the Invisible Man and the woman serving took no notice, just saying of the weather: ‘Well, it’s a bit better today.’ I ask him how he got rid of it and he says it went soon after he met Terry, his wife, so that he attributed it to the stresses of being young (and, I imagine, with eczema, unloved) and living in a bedsit with all the hardships of his young life. While he was in St James’s one of the patients on his ward hanged himself in the toilets, presumably driven mad by the intolerable itching. Michael P. is as kindly as ever and me as dull, three old (-ish) men having their lunch, next stop the bowling green.

  10 March. To Durham where there are not many visitors this Wednesday morning and more guides than there are people to show round. See the line of Frosterley marble inset in the floor of the nave,
the limit beyond which women were not allowed to approach the shrine of St Cuthbert behind the high altar with its wonderfully spiky Neville screen, which, when I came before, I took for some 1950s Coventry Cathedral-like installation and not a genuine fourteenth-century reredos minus its statues. Struck, though, as then by the marble hulks on top of the Neville tombs, which, as R. says, are more representative of dead and butchered bodies than their intact representations can ever have been. Previously these tombs, mutilated and covered in ancient graffiti, were said to have been casualties of the imprisonment here of Scottish prisoners during the aftermath of the Civil War. The new notes in the cathedral’s leaflet now specifically disavow this without at the same time explaining how such radical mutilation occurred. This is somewhat mealy-mouthed, and rather than the fruits of some breakthrough study of the circumstances of the Scots’ incarceration, their absolution sounds like political correctness. A good example of changing taste is that Pevsner, writing in 1953, says of the nowadays perfectly acceptable rood screen by George Gilbert Scott, ‘It should be replaced,’ and the faux-Cosmati pulpit similarly. A propos guides we are using Henry Thorold’s Shell Guide to County Durham written in 1980 which recommends a visit to Finchale (pronounced Finkle) Priory set in a bend of a river just north of Durham, of whose remoteness and unspoiled beauty Thorold gives a lyrical description. No more – and when we eventually track it down on the far side of a housing estate it turns out to be on the edge of a caravan site that comes to within a few feet of the abbey.