Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  A propos letters, one from Debo enclosing a Christmas card she has made herself out of anything that comes to hand including sticking plaster and even corn plasters and a programme for some poultry show in Stratford on Avon which asks to be preserved under a glass dome like some Victorian wax flowers.

  15 December. Andrew Wilson rings to tell me more about Penelle Bide whom he thinks was a pupil of Rev. Bide (his nickname almost inevitably Abide With Me), who was later in life chaplain of L.M.H. – and who was a modernist churchman whom in memory Andrew sees as having a volume of Heidegger open on his knees as he talks about ‘the existential movement’. Bide chosen by C. S. Lewis to marry him and the divorced Joy after being refused by Bishop Carpenter (Humphrey Carpenter’s father). Humphrey (as a child on his eternal tricycle) apparently remembering Lewis red-faced and furious bursting out of his father’s study with Carpenter saying, ‘It’s no good, Lewis. Rules are rules.’

  16 December. In his book The Poetics of Space (1958) the critic and philosopher Gaston Bachelard quotes the advice of a dictionary of botany: ‘Reader, study the periwinkle in detail, and you will see how detail increases an object’s stature.’ ‘To use a magnifying glass’, Bachelard comments a little later, ‘is to pay attention.’

  (From The Man with a Blue Scarf by Martin Gayford.)

  17 December. Finish Nicholas Shakespeare’s biography of Bruce Chatwin, which I thought I had read but must only have bought – this copy borrowed from the Sharpleshall Street Library. Chatwin’s charm is difficult to convey, though he undoubtedly had a great deal, some of it physical but partly also the aura of romance he spun around himself. Then, too, he seldom seems to have stopped talking and while this could be wearying (it would have wearied me) some people found him spellbinding.

  Chatwin – like Sebald, Kapuscinski and Oliver Sacks – operates on the borders of truth and imagination, dodging over the border into fantasy as and when it suits and making them difficult to pin down. Defenders of Chatwin like Francis Wyndham dismiss criticism of this as ‘English, literalist or puritanical’ – in my case all three. One tells the truth or one makes it up, not both at the same time.

  One tells the truth. It isn’t just a whim. Or so I tell myself. Such characters trouble me.

  20 December. Remember our sledge at Halliday Place, not the slim high-slung slatted toboggan I always envied, a real flyer, but a low flat three-boarded thing that Dad had probably run up (with rusty runners) and which for the rest of the year was kept in the coalhouse and always in danger of being taken for firewood.

  28 December, Yorkshire. The roads in the village so icy that whereas I would normally walk down to the shop for the papers this morning I go by car. It’s not cold particularly but filthy underfoot and grey besides. One of the few things about Primrose Hill I miss is walking round the corner for my small decaff latte which these days marks the beginning of my day’s work. It occurs to me that, though it was not called latte – or called anything – I have been having milky coffee like this all my life. Mam and Dad didn’t like coffee, natural or Nescafé, their way of making coffee to have a panful of milk and water which they boiled up and as it boiled scattered ground coffee on top. It was almost medicine in Dad’s case as hot milk was thought good for his stomach but it was also part of Mam’s morning routine. The coffee would come from Hopper’s, the grocer’s just up Weetwood Lane, the beans ground in a big red funnel-type coffee grinder at the side of the shop. The smell – like all the smells in the shop – delicious. Sometimes too to scent the living room cum kitchen at 92A Mam would scatter some ground coffee over the gas ring, the smell reminding her of 1944 and the Corona Café down Guildford High Street, the whole window of which was occupied by a coffee-roasting machine.

  The cooking facilities at 92A were pretty limited, a range taking up most of one wall. It wasn’t used for cooking, though, which took place in a gas oven hidden, like the sink behind thin hardwood doors to the right of the range, the doors seldom closed and a source of embarrassment to me as a boy on the rare occasions when I ever brought friends home. Mam had cosified the range by fitting a cretonne pelmet across it, with on the shelf some of her Staffordshire ornaments. It was a room that displayed all her humble aspirations to gracious living but which didn’t live up to mine. We lived at 92A from 1946 to 1957, when we moved down to a flat at 8 Wood Lane, the sole survivor of that lost living room the walnut workbox Mam rescued from Dad’s stepmother the Gimmer’s dustbin and which is on the chiffonier behind me as I write.

  2011

  6 January. The alterations we have been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and from New Zealand who has supervised it all. Walking round the job this evening R. is shocked to discover in the bathroom above the bath a crudely made wooden cross. He takes this to be the work of Max who, scarcely out of his teens, already has two children and is, I imagine, Catholic. R., whose feelings about religion are more uncompromising than mine, finds the cross disturbing and is determined to ask Eugene to tell Max to take it down. I’m less exercised by it, seeing it as some sort of dedication, the sort of thing (though more crude) that a medieval workman might have put up at the completion of a job. We are both of us wrong as when Eugene is approached he explains it is not a cross at all but a makeshift coat hanger he has rigged up over the bath in order to dry his anorak.

  14 January. George Fenton tells me of a memorial service he’s been to at St Marylebone Parish Church for Maurice Murphy, the principal trumpet of the LSO, who did the opening trumpet solo in the music for Star Wars. The service due to kick off at eleven thirty, George arrives with ten minutes to spare only to find the church already full, the congregation seated, silent and expectant. It begins promptly at eleven thirty with everyone behaving impeccably and not a cough or a rustle throughout. And he realises it’s because they are all musicians and orchestral players for whom this is like any other concert and where the same rules apply.

  18 January. To see my GP Roy McGregor with a list of questions R. wants answered re my hip. Not in favour of an immediate op – which he thinks should wait until I’m actively incommoded, which I’m not as yet. Now has very few patients as he teaches all the time. In despair at the proposed changes, seeing it as the dismantling of the NHS. I quite agree.

  If Cameron had made it clear such a radical reorganisation of the NHS was his intention before the election he must have lost – there was no indication of it in the manifesto. So that makes him a liar. And that he didn’t dare say so makes him a coward.

  21 January, Yorkshire. A creature of habit, en route home I generally stop and have some tea at Betty’s in Ilkley where I also buy an organic white loaf. Today the assistant tells me that the café (and presumably the four or five other branches in the Betty’s chain) no longer does organic produce as they’ve changed their flour miller. ‘However,’ she assures me, ‘the flour is locally produced.’ As are, presumably, its pesticide residues. When I ask why the flour could not be locally produced and nevertheless be organic she cannot explain. Money is, I imagine, the short answer with ‘locally produced’ a concession to the supposed cost (and carbon footprint) of transport. This is confirmed when I talk to the organic shop in our village who tell me that ‘locally produced’ is now the usual face-saver for firms wanting to economise on the provision of organic produce.

  Years ago I might have been able to put my spoke in more effectively than I can today as at that time I was offered a non-executive directorship of Betty’s. It was well remunerated and coming with as many buns as I could eat I came quite close to accepting. It was only when I found out that my duties would include sitting regularly in the café where I could be hobnobbed with by other patrons that I regretfully drew the line.

  27 January. Difficult to say why or how but part of the Torification of life has to be put down to Classic FM – and some of it to the National Trust.

  28 January. (Dad’s 107th
birthday.) Ring Angus M. at the National to arrange a Platform for when my two short stories contained in Smut come out. He has found himself in a dilemma because the National Theatre filter doesn’t allow him to google smut as a word so he is having to get his information direct from the publishers.

  31 January. Steve the electrician rings this morning, wanting Rupert who is still getting ready. He shouts that he will ring him back and I suspect he is on the lav. I say this to Steve and he rings off. I tell R. I have said to Steve he is on the lav, at which he very much objects (‘too much information’) – and also he doesn’t like ‘lav’. I ask him if he would have objected if I had said he was in the lav. No. That would have been acceptable. So what he is objecting to is just the preposition? Yes it is – but he is very pleased with the remark as illustrating my pedantry (or peculiarity) and one which can be added to the Sneeps Library of my more (as he sees it) absurd statements.

  He is silent in the car, already – as he admits – planning to retail the exchange at the office and going off at the finish in high spirits, very happy with the entire episode which I’m sure I will not be allowed to forget.

  Meanwhile he has not rung Steve.

  4 February, Yorkshire. Train an hour or so late, ‘a plastic bag on the overhead lines’ just north of Wakefield means I must vary my routine and not have tea in Ilkley but try and find some in Leeds. Tea and toast is all I want but Harvey Nichols don’t provide it in their Country Arcade café. Upstairs there is sushi and, did I wish to sit at the bar, toast. I don’t so I go down to the café again and have a scone the size of a small loaf. It’s now rush hour – Leeds is briefly thronged before it empties out for the evening. I walk haltingly through the streets, buying Sunday’s train tickets then sit in an alcove in the Queens for a couple of hours during which time, so far as I can judge, two fancy-dress groups foregather and depart – one all male and dressed from the fifties, the other more eclectic – one girl a wasp, another young man Fred Astaire. All noisy but amiable and taking no notice of this shabby green-overcoated figure who is grappling with the LRB.

  12 February. I take out the typewriter – my last working one, bought for £5 at Age Concern in Settle – and type out the first two pages of People.

  13 February. An oddity. Yesterday in the paddock at Newbury several horses are electrocuted, two fatally, with the accident put down to a forgotten cable under the grass which had been damaged when the turf was spiked. A week or so previously I’d watched on TV an episode of an American series, Diagnosis: Murder, starring Dick Van Dyke, with the plot concerning three athletes in Florida, two of whom were electrocuted on the playing field in exactly the same fashion as the horses. No one else has noted the coincidence, but then I don’t imagine there are many people so sad as to be watching the now rather aged Dick Van Dyke at half past one in the afternoon.

  15 February. Not having a book on the go I take up again Larkin’s Letters to Monica which I’d tried to read when it first came out but given up. It’s more interesting than I’d thought then but not much more, with too many post-mortems on previous meetings, what he had said to her, what she had said to him and what they had both really meant. The letters date back to the late 1940s and early 1950s and bring back all the dreariness of digs and Oxford out of term, Sunday lunches in cafés up the Iffley Road and awkward evenings spent listening to records in the rooms of undergraduates one didn’t really know or even like but who just happened to be marooned in Oxford out of term.

  One black mark against Larkin is that he no more cares for the work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South things.’ This is October 1967. I can’t see how Flannery O’Connor (which he perhaps thought was a pen name) could be so easily dismissed by someone supposedly appreciative of language. The colours were too bright perhaps.

  3 March. ‘A health system that once acted against inequality is out to enshrine it.’ My GP Roy McGregor in the LRB.

  7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the venues where he met his Soviet contact; it’s also the same sort of no-man’s-land that figures in the film of A Question of Attribution. The authors of Edgelands are two Lancashire poets and there are frequent references to Lancaster and the estuary of the Lune including Salt Ayre, a huge landfill site to the west of the city now grassed over. The name takes me back to childhood when going by train from Leeds to Morecambe on holiday you knew you were nearly there when the porter came along the platform shouting the mysterious invocation ‘Lancaster Green Ayre’.

  9 March. I sometimes write stuff down because I don’t think I will hit on the right word again: ‘A man walks up and down the pavement opposite communing with himself but actually on his mobile.’

  ‘Communing’ is the (fairly ordinary) word I’m uncertain of coming up with again.

  11 March. R.’s Aunty rings from Edinburgh. She was ninety last week and apologises that she hasn’t learned a new Shakespeare sonnet to mark her birthday. However she again recites by heart, and with no mistakes, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ and promises to learn a new poem for when she sees him in the summer.

  13 March. Overheard. ‘No woman was safe, even your Aunty Pat.’

  24 March. Elizabeth Taylor dies which excuses re-noting what I’ve written about before, how at a party of Arnold Weissberger’s at the Savoy c.1971 she perched briefly on my knee, though why I can’t now remember. A solid woman she was wearing The Diamond and was (not in consequence) quite a hefty burden so I was relieved when she stood up – behaviour that was almost royal, i.e. so relaxed as meant to emphasise how unpretentious she was and so intended for remembrance in a Shelley Plain sort of way.

  27 March. Fill in the census form to which I add this plaintive rider:

  I have completed the census form while strongly objecting to the agency, Lockheed Martin, that is carrying it out. Information of this nature should only be divulged to a government agency under the direct control of Parliament. Lockheed is basically an arms manufacturer and thus not the most scrupulous of organisations. This is an undertaking that should never have been outsourced.

  That it was the last Labour government that outsourced it makes it even more depressing.

  29 March. Dad’s violin was always kept in the sitting room well away from the rough and tumble of family life. In the Hallidays it was in the front room that was never used, at 92A it was in Mam and Dad’s bedroom but in the village in his last years it was always accessible, lying on a chair, say, or on the sideboard, the case often open, the fiddle ready to be taken up so he could play along to the wireless or even the television.

  11 April. Profile in the Guardian of Niall Ferguson in the course of which he says, ‘You know the play The History Boys, I remember realising that my American friends thought Irwin was the hero of that play! I said, why? They said, “Well, he got the kids into a great college, didn’t he?”’ I’m quite happy with that – and it was a point Nick H. frequently made in discussions about the play, saying that the touching up apart, given a choice between Hector and Irwin most parents would want their children taught by Irwin because he got results. But at the same time most parents would also know that the notion of education purveyed by Hector was a more durable and life-changing one than the more expedient stratagems put across by Irwin. The point is neither was right – or, as I think Hebbel says, in a good play everyone is right.

  The trouble with Ferguson is that he sees plays, as with much else, in terms of polemic. They’re an argument. And sometimes they are – but they’re also (and certainly in my case) a tour round the subject in an attempt to unravel a contradiction. I got into Oxford as Irwin when at heart I was Hector. The interviewer
(Decca Aitkenhead) says unequivocally that Ferguson was the model for Irwin. This isn’t true. The similarity between Irwin and Ferguson and Andrew Roberts only occurred to me halfway through writing the play. The model for Irwin, insofar as he has a model, was me.

  15 April. Some sense of being washed up this morning – or at any rate of not being a man of the world. Nick H. is on the radio talking about War Horse on Broadway, where it’s been a great success and will be a Spielberg film. Had I adapted it as I was asked to do, it might have been neither but I should have had the wit to see that this was meant to be a simple tale and gone along with it. As it was I said to Tom Morris that I didn’t think there was much I could do. So goodbye royalties, huge in London and New York and goodbye the Spielberg film. Still I’ve done other things in the interval e.g. The Uncommon Reader that will last longer. But there’s no disguising that I feel regret.

  17 April. Seeing a banana skin on the pavement reminds me how when I first read the Dandy and the Beano the presence of a banana skin meant that inevitably it was going to be slipped on. No matter that at that time, in the early 1940s, few children had seen let alone eaten a banana, the skin was still shorthand for calamity. Other comic clichés were a fish, almost certain to be stolen by a cat and always represented as a perfect skeleton devoid of flesh but still with the head on; a string of sausages, destined to be grabbed by a dog, the sausages trailing from the dog’s mouth like a scarf in the wind; a bull (beware of) in a field, a billy goat similarly, with a ladder another portent of disaster. The bump on the head which might be the consequence of one of these mishaps was generally described as being ‘as big as a pigeon’s egg’, something else which like the banana I had never seen.