Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  5 September. The occasion of R.’s visit to Wales was a visit from Edinburgh by his Aunty Stella to stay with her sister, R.’s Nan, who lives in Penarth. The whole family assembled, R. given a lift from London by Owen, his brother. The grandparents live in a small council house into which were crammed R. and Owen, their parents Diana and Graham, Aunty Stella and the grandparents. This meant that R. had to share a bedroom with Aunty Stella who likes to recite Shakespeare to him. Last night before going to sleep this eighty-nine-year-old Welsh lady recited from memory the whole of the sonnet ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’. R. loves her.

  9 September. Much of the afternoon spent in bed, gearing up for the evening and a further instalment of Debo week, tonight a reception at the Garrick for the publication of Wait for Me!. Not a large do – and quite grand, the lady herself wonderfully done up and with a huge emerald pinned to her front which even I who know nothing about jewels can tell is something special (‘the size of a pigeon’s egg’ is the storybook measurement). With Jacob Rothschild on one side, I sit the other (‘Oh, Nibs, you don’t have to’) before I make way for other grander suitors and talk to Ruth and Andrew Wilson and find myself in a group that includes (in order of height) Alan Titchmarsh, Tom Stoppard and Stephen Fry.

  But now Debo is making a speech and it’s a remarkable spectacle as, at her own request, this ninety-year-old lady is helped up onto a chair – and not a wooden chair – but an upholstered club chair, where she stands unsupported, reading (‘I can’t see you, of course’) from hugely printed cards and being prompted by Charlotte Mosley and someone from John Murray.

  ‘What do I say next?’

  ‘Hurrah.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right. Hurrah!’

  Currently in a state where I can scarcely climb the stairs let alone step up onto a chair I find this an extraordinary sight – and as memorable in its way as Saint-Loup running round the restaurant banquette at Proust’s dinner, the proper adjectives being indefatigable, courageous, indomitable, the battleship virtues.

  17 September. Standing and steps. That’s why I could never have been a priest. Too much standing – too many steps. I think this today watching the Pope at Westminster Abbey – standing by while the choir sings some interminable anthem and the prayers that follow. The procession takes ages to form up though when His Holiness reaches the chancel he does at least get to sit down but then he has to haul himself up the steps to the altar where there’s a lot more standing about (though kneeling must be pretty painful too). The service itself uninspiring – no rousing hymns, the only one I know ‘O Thou who camest from above’ (Samuel Wesley) whereas since the Westminster choirmaster is a Catholic he must know that there are hymns Catholics and Protestants share.

  The camera seems to dwell on the most angelic boys in the choir though whether this is ironical or just mischievous is hard to say. Also a regular shot of His Holiness is shared with the youngest of the Abbey clergy who has a nice round grammar-schoolboy face and looks about sixteen. The Pope’s secretary much in evidence, too, even sharing in the plaudits of the crowd as he and his master slide by in the Popemobile.

  Good to see the Abbey, though, including the Cosmati pavement, uncarpeted for the occasion and more Cosmati work in the sanctuary where the shot of the Pope and the A/B. of C. kneeling at the shrine also takes in, in the foreground, the plain top of Henry III’s tomb and in the background the effigies on the tomb of Richard II. As His Holiness leaves the Abbey the A/B. of Y. nips in for a quick kiss.

  I watch but had the procession passed the end of the street (unlikely) I don’t think I could have been bothered to go out and wait.

  The Abbey being full you don’t get the horror of the conference seating.

  18 September. Listening to Fritz Wunderlich singing Handel’s ‘Ombra mai fu’ brings back Uncle George in the front room at Gilpin Place on a Sunday night singing his heart out with Aunt Eveline at the piano. I don’t suppose I knew it then but it is more touching in memory because Uncle George would like most amateur singers only have the vaguest idea how the words were to be pronounced, just concentrating on getting the music right.

  In retrospect these musical evenings seem immensely sad – though they weren’t at the time – and for a child often just tedious. But in a film of my childhood the camera would track by the light of the gas lamps up Gilpin Place to the faint ‘Ombra mai fu’ or ‘Where’er you walk’, past the lighted windows of these red-brick back-to-back houses closing in on No. 7.

  20 September. Nice occasion today. Several months ago Augusta in R.’s office had asked me on the quiet to keep this afternoon free as they were planning a surprise for R. However I didn’t have to decide whether to tell him or not as he found out by accident in the office and that it involved the Dorchester. So a car picks me up at three to take me to Vogue House where we pick him up and go on to the Dorchester, the Pavilion Suite on the eighth floor, the set of rooms decorated by Oliver Messel. The occasion is to commemorate R.’s ten years as editor of World of Interiors with about twenty of the staff foregathered. It’s far from being a formal occasion and touchingly clear how much he is liked and how happy they are working together. Some say this to me – Mark, the art director whose career R. has nurtured, Jessica H., Nat and Maria – all of them so loving. We stand on the balcony with a vast view over London on this warm autumn afternoon with me wishing we could eat out there it’s so delightful. Eventually we are called inside and sit down to an elaborate tea beginning, eccentrically with a goat’s cheese salad and proceeding via dainty sandwiches in blocks to a mango and cream dessert in a glass before eventually arriving at the scones, cream and jam that constitute afternoon tea proper. Elaborate (and sometimes virulently coloured) cakes follow – the whole process taking nearly two and a half hours – though it’s always enjoyable and much less wearisome than I would have found a dinner party.

  Coming away we walk up South Audley Street when we are hailed from across the street by Morrissey who’s sitting outside a pub with a friendly girl whom I take to be his agent. It’s a slightly awkward encounter, Morrissey beginning by saying, ‘Are you disgustingly happy?’ R. says I make M. nervous and I’m certainly not at my ease, my main thought how nice it will be for R. to tell the people in the office about this odd conjunction. Struck by how big he is and how, in other circumstances (and I mean this as a compliment) he could be digging up the road.

  Posh hotels – or the Dorchester at any rate – have improved with the waiters and the maître d’s no longer the least bit condescending. After the tea they bring boxes for people to take home the cakes and scones they haven’t eaten – something that wouldn’t have happened even ten years ago.

  28 September. One drawback of writing about Auden is that if one does hit on something striking to say or turn a nice phrase it’s assumed by the audience that it was Auden who wrote it, the text just taken to be joined-up Wystan. Of course this works both ways and critics in particular are, I think, nervous of taking exception to stuff that I say in case I’m actually quoting the poet.

  13 October. Good Forster quote, in Isherwood’s version, ‘Get on with your own work, behave as if you were immortal.’ (The Sixties: Diaries Volume Two.)

  21 October. Find in the bookshelf a copy of The Private Art: A Poetry Notebook by Geoffrey Grigson, which I must have read years ago and forgotten. Tipped in, as booksellers say, is a letter from a woman about Louis MacNeice, on whom I’d done a TV programme and who was a friend of Grigson’s. She had known Grigson and he had told her how en route to Fawley Bottom to have lunch with John Piper one Sunday in 1939 he and MacNeice had stopped in a field to picnic and listen to Chamberlain’s broadcast and the declaration of war.

  The story seemed odd. If they were going to lunch with the Pipers why stop for a picnic, particularly when Myfanwy Piper was a noted cook? And why at eleven in the morning? Interest in Grigson rekindled I track down a copy of his Recollections (1984) to find that MacNeice had had nothing to do with it, but th
at on the eve of the declaration of war Piper had spent the night at Grigson’s cottage in Wiltshire. In the morning they drove off to have lunch with John Betjeman at Uffington, stopping on the way and ‘stationing a battery set on the yellow stubble in time to hear Chamberlain say we were at war. John Betjeman poured out sherry and with the Betjeman half-smile said, “For the Duration.”’ Grigson was always unpleasingly proud of his independence of mind and the memory didn’t soften his attitude to the future poet laureate, whom he describes as ‘a kindly and forgiving man; but I detested and still detest his verses, or most of them’.

  The last time I heard the phrase ‘for the duration’ was in a sadder context. Merula Salaman, the widow of Alec Guinness, was already ill at the time of his death in 2000 and only survived him by a month or two. When I last saw her she had moved into the guest bedroom, because it overlooked the garden, and there she lay in state generally with at least one of the three dogs on her bed.

  ‘I think I’ll stay here,’ she said, ‘for the duration.’

  22 October. Call at Mrs Hanlon’s at Menston, one of the few antique shops in this area still functioning. She often has plant pots – today buy two, her first sale of the day – business very poor and she only keeps going by selling at Newark, one of the regular fairs.

  On the floor is a flat white pottery dish with an inscription on it and it’s only as I’m going out that I see what it is – a butcher’s dish from Wilkinson’s, the butcher’s supply firm Dad used to go to down on the south (and slummier) side of Leeds Market – the only other reason for going down that street to go to Scarr’s the big hardware shop or to catch a tram to Temple Newsam.

  Wilkinson’s was a regular port of call, either with Dad on his afternoon off or occasionally sent down on our own for stuff for the shop – the most disgusting of which were the salted giblets used as sausage skins. Mr Wilkinson a solid flat-faced unsmiling man in a grey dustcoat – so not dressed as a butcher in one of the blue-and-white striped aprons he also sold, one or two of which we still have, though very ragged.

  Now though we have a dish – which R., for whom it has no such associations, is delighted by.

  28 October. Reading Geoffrey Grigson (Recollections) again, this time on the Scottish poet Norman Cameron who had a girlfriend, a ballet dancer, but who was mildly troubled when she told him when they were in bed together of her activities with sixth-form boys and that ‘nothing gave her such pleasure as the look in a schoolboy’s eyes when she opened his fly buttons and manipulated him in a train, and he came over her hand’ and that ‘the last time she had pleasured a boy like that, it was in an empty carriage in the Cornish Riviera.’

  Other than envying the sixth-form boys, one’s struck by what a loss to literature, movies and indeed life was the demise of separate compartments on trains – a whole mise en scène made redundant. Films apart, one thinks of all the scenes in novels that take place in railway compartments. Indeed were this Another Literary Periodical (and not the LRB) it would provide months of copy from readers writing in with appropriate examples – suitable for the back page.

  29 October. In Poems and Poets Grigson says of Robert Herrick,

  The amorous situations in his verse are what might have been, if. Not what has been. ‘Wantons we are’, he wrote in a two-line poem about poets –

  and though our words be such,

  Our Lives do differ from our Lines by much.

  With Larkin it’s the opposite. The person of the poet is lovelorn and not getting much altogether (e.g. ‘which was just too late for me’). Larkin outside the poems, while not exactly having a whale of a time, certainly isn’t going without, more sex out of the poems than in them.

  6 November. I have been reading Bruce Chatwin’s letters, which (unlike Larkin’s letters, say) don’t change one’s previous impression of the writer. They reinforce the picture I had of him from Susanna Clapp’s memoir and Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography as of someone never still and endlessly on the move around the world – travel not an interval between work but a way of getting work done. He has bolt-holes everywhere, his world for all it takes in some of the planet’s wildest places, nevertheless quite cosy, the Albany, an Indian fort, a Welsh tower, a Greek island, there is always somewhere to stay. And people put themselves out for him despite the fact that (on Diana Melly’s evidence) he never does a hand’s turn – just turning up for meals and expecting them to be ready, the notion never in question that his writing is the important thing. I suppose some of this is will, some of it charm – with his famous good looks a part of it, though on the only occasion I saw him in the flesh, at a party given (I think) by John Ryle in the 1970s he didn’t seem to me to be good-looking at all. He was remarkable, there was no denying that but physically puny and his head too large and almost insectile, a visitor from another planet.

  Other beefs – and they are beefs, making me feel small-minded and ungiving – are to do with his self-absorption, one of the most frequent topics in his letters the progress of whatever book he is working on, a topic I can’t imagine concerns his correspondents to the degree it concerns him.

  Money – which until the last years always seems to be short but never seriously so: when the rich are poor they are never poor like the poor are poor – and so it is with him.

  9 November. The Ivy has been having some sort of anniversary pageant celebrating some of the famous who have dined there, including James Agate. I suppose it was a habit he cultivated in private but there would be some theatrical truth in presenting him seated behind a foaming bumper of his own piss (‘Ah, Pissto!’). Perhaps this was a habit he learned at Giggleswick School, which has always been slightly nervous of acknowledging him. Or that the sometime headmaster’s wife Madge Vaughan was a lover of V. Woolf.

  10 November. A routine colonoscopy, though it never is routine, with no telling what’s round the next corner. Today it’s a little fairy ring of polyps, innocent enough but ruthlessly lassoed and garrotted by the radiographer lest in two or three years’ time they grow up to be the ‘nasties’ he’s on the lookout for but thankfully does not find. On the way down we pay a reverential visit to the site of my original operation before, as he puts it, ‘cruising down’. Unaccountably this takes me back to the amusement park on the front at Morecambe in the first year of the war when Dad took my brother (nine) and me (six) on the Big Dipper. As Big Dippers go it was pretty tame, though far too scary for me, who never went on it (or any other) again, but there was just one bit I enjoyed: when all the ups and downs were over, the train briefly coasted along a high straight stretch behind the boarding houses and with a view over the sea before it gently rattled down the long incline to the platform and the end of the ride. And that was what the last bit of the colonoscopy reminded me of seventy years later.

  2 December. Thinking of the injunctions – they were hardly advice – that Mam used to deliver when we were young. When I went off to university she said (and often added as a postscript to her letters), ‘Don’t stint on food,’ meaning that if I had to economise it shouldn’t be on meals. I was never in such straits that I had to make a choice, but, had I been, food (rather than books, say) would have come first anyway, though not because she had said so. Another injunction that was almost a mantra was said whenever my brother or I were on the point of leaving the house: ‘Don’t stop with any strange men.’ This was another piece of advice that I never had any cause to heed, though in retrospect I wonder if it helped to make my youth as hermetic as it was, as Mam would still be saying it when I was in my twenties and patrolling the streets of Headingley in the solitary walks I had been taking every night since I was seventeen.

  There were other more mundane prohibitions, particularly in childhood, generally to do with avoiding TB. We were told never to share a lemonade or a Tizer bottle with other boys; we should keep the sun off the back of our necks nor were we allowed ever to wear an opennecked shirt until we were in our teens. We never ate prepared food from shops, so not the beetroot bu
bbling in an evil cauldron in Mrs Griffiths’s greengrocer’s down Tong Road, not the ‘uggery-buggery’ pies on sale in the tripe shop or the more delectable offerings in Leeds Market. Permissible was potted meat from Miss Marsden’s genteel confectioner’s or Prest’s on Ridge Road, their respectability making them in Mam’s eyes an unlikely health hazard.

  Not that it follows on, but these days I am too old to be on my best behaviour. And I’m too old not to be on my best behaviour also.

  14 December. To the Naval and Military Club in St James’s Square and my annual lunch with Blake and Diana Parker. Rather (and unworthily) dreading it because their grandson Harry is coming, who, stepping on a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, earlier this year, lost both his legs.

  Coming into the club I see a young man with two sticks but just about walking who (and it’s a measure of how nervous I am) I straight away take to be Harry. I say, ‘I imagine we’re going to the same place.’ ‘Perhaps,’ he says (glasses, good-looking and not unlike the young Richard Marquand). I show him where the cloakroom is where he collects an aged relative and I realise I have got the wrong man (slightly relieved as he’s quite stand-offish). I apologise and, unsmiling, he says he imagines it will be a similar sort of occasion. As I suppose it will be, though he looks to have lost one leg not both – and having noticed him I then notice other young men, limping or on sticks and suppose this is where the military take their wounded sons and grandsons out to lunch. Not Harry, though, who has had a bad night and had to cancel, sending in his stead Tom, another grandson, a massive young man, one of the Olympic rowing team at Beijing and now a shipping broker plus (I think) Harry’s sister, another grandchild of Blake and Diana (addressed as Granny throughout). I am sitting next to Penelle Bide, a friend from Chichester, whose late husband married C. S. Lewis to Joy Davidman on what seemed her deathbed. A nice woman, she brings me a signed (and uncut) first edition of A. A. Milne’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows which she has found in her late husband’s library – I imagine quite a valuable book.