Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  18 April. Why does the opening theme of the Tchaikovsky No. 1 Piano Concerto never return? What is that about? Everybody listening to it (at least for the first time) must always have expected it. But no.

  26 April. Though it’s now five or six years since it closed, much missed still is the junk shop in the marketplace at Kirkby Stephen run by Mrs H. It sold what these days is dignified by the name of kitchenalia – old crockery, cutlery, pots and pans – but reviewing what we have bought over the years the haul is astonishingly diverse: earthenware bread crocks which we use in the garden, a lovely thirties clock that chimes the quarters, innumerable rummers and heavy glass tumblers, a tin hearth surround (I don’t even know what it’s properly called), Tidy Betties, which are the brass shields that go in front of the fire grate, and the pokers and tongs to go with them. All our transfer-printed Victorian dinner plates came from there and tea plates besides, so many that they seldom get used.

  Some customers found greater treasures including a sixteenth-century griddle embossed with the Tudor rose and if you were into armorial firebacks this was the place. We have a walking stick with a duck’s head handle; our pigskin log basket once held fleeces in a mill. Apart from the odd stool there wasn’t much furniture … no room in the shop for that … but there were old photographs, tea caddies and the occasional silver spoon. The stock was cheap, absurdly so sometimes in the light of London prices and it didn’t alter much over the years, I suppose because the stuff consisted of the back end of farm and country auction sales. Crouched over her one-bar electric fire Mrs H. never seemed much interested in money and was openly sceptical of the enthusiasm of her customers. We came into the shop one Saturday afternoon just as a woman was leaving laden down with purchases and flushed with pleasure at the trophies she was carrying away. Scarcely had the door closed behind her when Mrs H. remarked, ‘There goes a woman with more money than sense,’ and I don’t doubt she said the same of us. But we didn’t mind and when she closed I wrote to her to say what joy we’d had from the shop over the years. True to form she never replied.

  3 May. A distressing call today from Dr C., the oncologist who looked after my friend Anne during her last illness. He talks about hospital services being deliberately run down and the difficulties of ward care due to shortage of staff but it’s only gradually I realise that what he wants is for me to try and write a play about it. I explain what a slow worker I am and how long the trek from conception to execution but it still sounds like an excuse. He’s shy or I make him so and he plainly has difficulty in articulating his worries, but what comes over is his concern and indeed his despair. It’s alarming that doctors should be driven to such desperate measures and leaves me feeling both disturbed and inadequate and wishing I could just say, ‘Yes, I’ll do it,’ and forget everything else.

  7 May. The ‘No’ (to proportional representation) vote, which I can’t bear to read about; the best comment Vince Cable’s who said it proves once again that the Tories are tribal and ruthless. He might have added tricky and dishonest and no different from what they have always been.

  21 May, Yorkshire. A plumpish young man gets off the train at Leeds just behind me.

  ‘Aren’t you famous?’

  ‘Well I can’t be, can I, if you don’t know my name.’

  ‘It’s Alan something.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘From Scarborough?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So which Alan are you?’

  ‘I’m another Alan.’

  ‘Are you just a lookalike?’

  ‘Well, you could say so.’

  He pats my arm consolingly. ‘Be happy with that.’

  24 May. Tim Lott collects me at six thirty and we drive over to Kensal Rise where I am to do an evening to raise funds to help pay for a legal challenge to Brent Council’s plans to close Kensal Rise Library (and five others). Tim is pessimistic about their chances, libraries for him as much a haven in his childhood as they were for me, though he’s thirty years or so younger. The church is full, with Newsnight in attendance for which I give a rather scrappy interview before doing the reading, which goes well. Back home I’m in time to watch Newsnight and am depressed to see how scraggy I look, my neck in particular, with every shirt these days looking like a horse-collar. There’s a studio discussion between Tim Lott and some clown (Littlewood, I think, his name) from the Institute of Economic Affairs. He’s an almost comical baddy, shifty and spivvily suited and maybe picked out by Newsnight because he’s so unprepossessing. He ridicules my assertion that closing libraries is child abuse, in the course of which he describes me as ‘this highly successful millionaire’ and suggests I should buy the library myself. He also claims as did Eamonn Butler back in 1996 that there is nowadays no need for libraries, for which other uses should be found, describing them as ‘prime retail opportunities’, which says it all.

  26 May. These days I’m not sure how children learn to read. I only know that the period immediately after you’ve learned is vital. That’s when access to books or a computer is essential. Virtually every day I pass by the Chalk Farm library in Sharpleshall Street and after school and in the holidays it’s full of children reading or looking at computers. Many of them I imagine are poor, the library the only place where they can keep up with their better-off classmates who have computers of their own.

  And Brent says, well, we’ve got a spanking new central library. But that’s no good to those children. Libraries have to be local, they have to be handy. They shouldn’t need an expedition. But that early period in a child’s reading life is vital. Interfere with that, hinder a child’s access to books in whatever form and you damage that child probably for life. I have said it many times already but it’s worth saying again: closing libraries is child abuse.

  Enough ranting.

  30 May, Yorkshire. Asked to provide a foreword for a book of oral history put together by the people of the next village to ours, Austwick, I’m expecting it to be a bit of a chore. But the histories turn out to be funny and interesting with the memoirs vivid and specific, particularly about the Second War, which for many of these villagers was the time of their lives. At the centre of the book is an extraordinary adventure when in the early hours of Monday 9 June 1941 the pilot of an RAF Whitley bomber returning from a raid over Dortmund got lost crossing the Pennines and, running out of fuel, had to make an emergency landing.

  Though it was the height of summer and should have been quite light, there was fog and cloud and the terrain is hilly and indeed mountainous, with the only flat land in the valley bottom crisscrossed with dry-stone walls. Miraculously there was a gap in the cloud and the pilot brought his plane down safely, coming to rest at Orcaber Farm near Austwick. Thereafter it was like a scene from an Ealing comedy. Not knowing if the plane was British or German, one of the Home Guard with his rifle came running across the fields followed by a farmer with a pitchfork and, once the news got round, the entire village. None of the children went to school, ferrying each other on their bikes to the landing place, the village policeman, failing to rise to the occasion, riding after them shouting: ‘Stop, stop. Two on a bike, two on a bike!’

  Preparations went on all day to get the plane up again: dry-stone walls were taken down, trees felled and gates widened, and the plane was stripped out and refuelled. If it was a miracle that the plane had got down it was even more so that it got up again, taking off in the late afternoon and just clearing the trees at the end of the field. A plane crash might have meant a sad plaque in the village, like the several memorials to crashed aircraft that are up on the moors. Instead it was an idyllic and extraordinary day that Austwick has remembered ever since, and today at the annual street market I talk to two of the boys, now in their eighties, whom the policeman had chased for being ‘two on a bike’.

  2 June, Suffolk. A perfect day, though it begins with me feeling seedy in the junk shop at Yoxford where we buy a (very foxed) circular mirror c.1830 for £30 and one of Norman Scarfe’s Shell Guide
s for £3. Lunch at Walberswick, then to Southwold which is crammed with cars and people, a real breath of Brighton. However Ruth Guilding has recommended a junkish antique shop on the edge of the town, a lovely place where I buy a country table, a painted version of the little candlestand we bought years ago in Cirencester and some plant pots for R. Then tea in an unlikely health food shop in otherwise unremarkable Leiston where (again on Ruth’s recommendation) we drive over to the beach at Sizewell. It’s largely empty and spoilt, if you like, by the power station but the more attractive a place for that – full of the detritus of boats and fishing, black tarred huts and not picturesque at all – altogether uncrowded, a few families on the shingle and lovers in the scrub but a lovely spot. I fix myself up with a comfortable seat on the shingle with my back leaned against a pallet while R. goes for a walk along the shore.

  Coming back over the dunes to the car we pass a war memorial, unceremonially sited by the refreshment hut, to the dozen or so Dutchmen who escaped from occupied Holland and crossed the North Sea by kayak, only five of whom made it with three of them surviving the war, the memorial erected by the last survivor.

  21 June. I dream I am back in the attic at Grandma’s in Gilpin Place, lying awake listening to the sound of trains shunted into Holbeck. Though Grandma’s was only two blocks from the railway line strange streets, particularly in Wortley, were always perilous and I never ventured over there to look at the railway. So the shunting was just a sound at night but one I was so used to that like the wind or the rain on the slates it was part of the natural world. And shunting, not that I ever hear it now, is a sound I associate with sleep and darkness.

  24 June, Yorkshire. Day grey and overcast. The Leeds train gets to Wakefield at three when a touching old-fashioned scene takes place – waiting on the platform is a young mother and her son. When the train stops they look along the platform, wave and run out of view. A few minutes later as the train draws out I pass them, the father holding up the little boy to see the train go out, his wife holding his other arm. It’s happened two or three times and again today.

  3 July. A few weeks ago I caught on TV a few minutes of Zoltan Korda’s The Four Feathers (1939), the film of A. E. W. Mason’s novel. It’s a film I remember vividly from when it first came out, the few minutes that I see the scene in which Durrance, played by Ralph Richardson, loses his pith helmet as he’s climbing a cliff in the desert. The helmet bounces away down onto the sand leaving him exposed to the burning sun, which sends him blind. One other scene stands out. The hero, Harry Faversham (John Clements), fears he is a coward and having declined to go with his regiment to the Sudan goes native in order to prove himself by working unrecognised to assist his ex-colleagues who have sent him the feathers. To corroborate his disguise as a harmless native he has himself branded, the branding scene vividly depicted in the film, more so, I think, than it would be today.

  Thinking about the film sends me to the book, which, published in 1902, is still in print as the most famous and successful of Mason’s many novels. Happily he lived long enough to enjoy some profit and fame from the film, dying in 1948. The book, unsurprisingly, turns out to be less straightforward than the film, spending a good deal of time on who knew about the four feathers and whether the soldiers who sent Faversham the first three feathers knew about the fourth feather – sender, his erstwhile fiancée, Ethne. All this gets pretty tedious and repetitive and rather Henry James-like in its moral ramifications. It’s gone through so often that one wonders whether the repetition is because the book came out originally in serial form. Each chapter certainly has a subheading: ‘Durrance hears news of Faversham’; ‘The House of Stone’; ‘Colonel Trench assumes a knowledge of Christianity’. The branding scene that terrified me the most aged five doesn’t occur at all, nor in the book does Faversham shepherd the blind Durrance across the desert to safety. Predictably the film ends more spectacularly than the book, with the Battle of Omdurman. So, unusually, it’s a film that’s better and more interesting than its book, which is altogether too languorous. The film also stars, almost inevitably, Sir C. Aubrey Smith who, as in many films before and during the Second War, stood for probity and honour (though with a twinkle).

  5 July. Anna Massey dies. She was always fun and she got better as an actress as she got older, though I only worked with her twice. None of the obituaries mentions the performance of hers that I best remember, when she portrayed the painter Gwen John in a biopic. This included one of John’s self-portraits in which she painted herself nude. Not unlike Gwen John in looks and figure, Anna did it nude herself though she would have been well into her fifties at the time. It was superb and also courageous, actors who are so often mocked for their sentimentality sometimes deserving the VC for their nerve. The last time I saw her was in 1997 on King’s Cross Station. I’d just had an operation and was waiting to start chemotherapy, which I told her and then found I was unexpectedly in tears so hurried off to my train. What was heartening about her life was that quite late on she fell head over heels in love with a Soviet scientist whom she married and was very happy.

  23 July. Home again via the Old Kent Road – the south (or west?) side of which is, despite all the horrors, still fascinating architecturally with some wonderful remnants of houses behind the kebab shops and Chinese restaurants – extraordinary capitals on these early nineteenth-century buildings, and wonderful tall brick Edwardian blocks of flats or a warehouse – so much still here that one feels that given dictatorial powers and unlimited resources one could rescue whole frontages and even quarters, though doubtless in the process destroying the vigour and vitality that is still so evident.

  Much in the paper about Lucian Freud who has died at eighty-eight. The best (non-aesthetic) tribute would be a list of all the women (some little more than children) whom he has slept with. (Cf. Ted Hughes – though Freud’s list, I should have thought, much longer.) Freud openly acknowledged that he believed all indulgences were licensed because he was an artist. But then all men think they are artists, in this respect anyway.

  25 July. A man meaning to take some liquid Viagra by mistake takes some Tippex. There are no ill effects except that next morning he wakes up with a massive correction. (Barry Cryer.)

  1 August. R. goes home to Wales for a family gathering. It’s only a small house and again he shares a room with his Aunty Stella who, true to her promise made earlier in the year, has learned some new poems. So in the darkness of a Penarth bedroom this ninety-year-old lady recites Housman’s ‘Loveliest of trees, the cherry now’ and Browning’s ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’. And not a fluff in either.

  2 August. I suppose one ought to be grateful to the News of the World for phrases like ‘intimacy took place’.

  4 August. Antony Crolla brings round the oval walnut table from Gloucester Crescent and sets it up in the flat ready for when R.’s family come to supper next week. I’ve had the table, I think, since I was at Oxford where it came from the antique shop the other side of Magdalen Bridge (£8). It was at 16 Chalcot Square and then stood for years in the bay window at Gloucester Crescent where it was covered with a greenish-brown chenille tablecloth. On it I wrote everything I did up to George III – or whenever it was I bought the late Victorian Arts and Crafts desk which I work on now.

  It’s far from perfect: the veneer has gone in one section which has been disguised with brown paint; the decoration on the (slightly rocky) pedestal is heavy and unpleasing. But it lasted me half my life and now this Thursday afternoon here it is again.

  5 August. Note with these great men their occasional competence at menial tasks and the wonder with which this is greeted, washing up the stuff of fable.

  8 August. It is the day after the Tottenham riots and waiting for a prescription in the pharmacy in Camden High Street I find that though it’s only four o’clock it’s already closing, with boards being put up against the windows and the nice young counter assistant, the daughter of the pharmacist who did Talking Heads for her O levels, hopes th
at I will be going straight home. For my part I’ve been looking round the shop to see what would come to hand should rioters burst in from the (utterly peaceful) High Street, deciding that something from a tub of walking sticks and fancy umbrellas would make the best weapon. Meanwhile a couple of addicts, indifferent to these adjustments to their routine, wait patiently for their daily ration of methadone as I wait for my Glucophage, which now comes, the door is unlocked and I’m again told to go straight home, which I don’t think anyone has said to me since I was a child.

  11 August. A film clip seen three times today on the television news shows at least ten policemen, most in full riot gear, kicking in the door of a council flat in order to arrest a suspected rioter. The cameras have plainly been invited along to see the police in action but there are so many policemen that, rather comically, they have to queue to get into the flat, occasionally giving threatening shouts while waiting their turn. Eventually a black youth is brought out, feebly struggling, and is dragged away. It’s an absurd exercise and raises as many questions about the proper deployment of police resources as their inadequacy did yesterday. (It later transpires they got the wrong flat.)

  19 August. In Karl Miller’s Tretower to Clyro Seamus Heaney keeps putting in an appearance either in person or via his poems. ‘Two Lorries’ has to do with a ‘tasty coalman’ who fancies Heaney’s mother, and another coal-hole poem, ‘Slack’, is about the coal dust used to bank up and damp down a fire, slack a feature of my own childhood as were the accessories that went with the sale of it: empty folded coalbags, a set of iron scales and a leather-aproned coalman as familiar in Armley, Leeds as they were across the water in Derry. I don’t remember our coalman being particularly tasty though I had dreams about him tramping through our spotless house in order, I suppose, to ravish my mother, not that in the dream she seemed to mind, or mind the dirt anyway (which would have been slack had there been more of it); he never got as far as the ravishing, probably because I didn’t know what that entailed. I am five years or so older than Heaney and, it being wartime, our coal came not on a lorry but from a cart drawn by a Shire horse. This cart – it belonged to the Co-op – visited many of the streets in Armley, including the Hallidays where we lived and the streets around the elementary school where my education began, stopping on occasion just over the playground wall.