Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  There were several variables in this stopping and the spectacle it sometimes provided. The cart had to halt at the top of Christ Church View where we could all see it and this had to happen during the morning or the dinner-time break when all the school would be outside. Third, and most essentially, the Co-op horse had at this time to want to do a piss.

  News that this was happening would spread rapidly. Lowry is not to my mind a naturalistic painter, but his depiction of a crowd gathering as in several of his factory paintings catches it perfectly, the coming together of a crowd like an abscess or an inflammation. There were only ever two reasons for a crowd to gather in the playground: one was a fight and the other the pissing of the Co-op horse.

  There was a difference, though, in these two crowds, with a fight drawing a raucous, partisan and often quarrelsome throng whereas the spectacle of the Co-op horse was observed in almost total silence. The pissing of the Co-op horse is not an occasion for any agglomeration of persons that figures in Elias Canetti’s magisterial Crowds and Power. It may well occur in his fellow Nobel laureate Heaney’s work, horses (and their penises) being more of a common sight I imagine in County Derry than they were in Canetti’s Hampstead. But to us children the spectacle of the Co-op horse and its immense dangling dick inspired something like awe. It was not merely the dimensions involved but also the horse’s noble indifference to scrutiny, even the scrutiny of the entire school. Sad it was if the whistle went for Lines before this magnificent member had been retracted and of all my memories of Upper Armley National the most vivid is the Co-op horse.

  28 August, Yorkshire. Mid-afternoon and hikers trudge back from Ingleborough, some of whom will have gone down Gaping Ghyll. Now they pause on the bridge, straining to see if there are any trout in the brown water. Years ago I remember a child saying to its mother, ‘Mam. Do fish have young?’

  29 August. Hear a few minutes of the prom ‘in holiday mood’ devoted to Hollywood, which might have been quite enjoyable had not the music been dolled up in special arrangements. My prejudice against this goes back a lifetime to my father playing along on his violin to the wireless on a Sunday night and in particular to Tom Jenkins and his Palm Court Orchestra. Dad was fine if the numbers were performed as they had been written because, playing by ear, he could easily accompany the music since he knew where it was going. The problem arose when the music was ‘arranged’, generally by someone (first name forgotten) Hartley. No hope of following the tune through Hartley’s flights of fancy and Dad would (mildly) curse and put down his fiddle. In Sunday Half Hour, which generally followed, the hymns were not arranged so Hartley was never a problem.

  1 September. The papers slightly unexpectedly have reviews of The Madness of George III which opened in Bath on Tuesday. The Independent is good and factual but Billington in the Guardian gives it the same failed ‘Play for England’ notice he did twenty years ago. That it’s not meant to be a play for England and can’t be wrenched into being one doesn’t occur to him. It’s history not allegory.

  5 September, Mells. I knew about Mells from reading Evelyn Waugh’s biography of Ronald Knox and from all the First World War stuff which comes at the end of the first act of Forty Years On. The church closes off a short street of terraced houses which wouldn’t be remarkable were they in Rotherham, say, but are more so here, in that like the Vicars’ Close at Wells they turn out to be medieval. The church of course is medieval, too, with over the wall, and just visible in a traditional configuration of church and state, the manor house, home of the Horners. Opposite the church door is Munnings’s equestrian statue of Edward Horner, its Lutyens plinth like a smaller Cenotaph, though how the dates compare I’m not sure. But it’s only the most striking of First War mementoes in a church that is virtually a shrine: nearby is the white-painted wooden cross erected on Horner’s first grave and another similar cross for his brother, who was also killed in France and is buried outside the east end of the church with a tombstone by Eric Gill. Gill did the memorial to Raymond Asquith, too, a lettered inscription that blends into the tower wall opposite the Horner tomb. Everywhere is palpably Edwardian and Arts and Crafts including a relief of a peacock by Burne-Jones. A film about the First War could begin here, the whole place redolent of the dead and particularly the illustrious dead. And, yes, there are memorials to the men of the village and others round about, but it is these famously unfulfilled dead of the Lost Generation that dominate.

  8 September. A directive must have gone out from the National Trust high command that in future notices telling members not to sit on the heritage chairs should be eschewed in favour of a more subtle message. These days seats that are not to be sat on sport the head of a thistle or a sprig of holly. Other possibilities that occur would be hawthorn, nettles (though they would have to be fresh) or even a stuffed hedgehog. One wonders whether this genteel initiative had the prior approval of Health and Safety.

  16 September. I occasionally pick up the TLS to read on the train and today it’s a review of Ian Kershaw’s The End about the last days of Hitler. I turn the page and there is a photograph of Joseph Goebbels inspecting some troops of the Volkssturm in Silesia in March 1945. He’s shaking hands with Willi Hübner, a child of sixteen, which is unremarkable except that next to Hübner (and also in the Volkssturm) is Peter Cook. He is looking at Goebbels with the ghost of a smile and is much as he was around 1970, his face angular and handsome which it was before the drink took hold. Perhaps to someone who hadn’t known him the resemblance would seem less remarkable. To me it’s uncanny, though in an ideal world the child beside him would also look like Dudley Moore, than whom he is no bigger.

  20 September. The papers full of Murdoch’s rumoured payment to the Dowler family of £3 million or more, all the reports I’ve seen focusing on the inflationary effect this will have on other similar payments. Nobody comments that a settlement of this size simply reflects Murdoch’s view of human nature. However mortally he or his newspapers offend or injure, the victims can always be bought off.

  5 October, Yorkshire. La Grillade in Leeds is so much our favourite restaurant. It’s where we always eat on a Friday night and equally invariably have fish and chips. But last night was Tuesday when fish and chips is not on the menu. I book a table at six fifteen and when we arrive at eight fifteen fish and chips is available, as usual, but cooked especially for us. This makes me feel like Proust at the Ritz.

  14 October. The legal action to try and keep Kensal Rise library open fails in the High Court, much to the delight of Brent Council and by extension other library-closing councils throughout the country. Adding insult to injury Brent greets the news by emphasising how much improved its library services are going to be as a result, which is such a dreary and clichéd PR stratagem I’m surprised they bother. In the opening scene of The History Boys Irwin, who has progressed from teacher to TV personality to spin doctor, explains to a group of MPs that they should present an impending bill that will limit freedom as doing just the opposite. Even in 2004 this was such a hackneyed procedure I had doubts about including it. But Brent Council still thinks it’s worth trying – as indeed does Mr Lansley. It worked for Goebbels so why not now?

  Were I Liam Fox’s associate Adam Werritty and going into lobbying and PR, I would have changed my name at the outset. Verity has the literal ring of truth about it, Adam Verity a dauntless fighter for justice, whereas all Werritty suggests is some anxious yapping dog which, whatever his faults, Werritty hardly seems to have been, but rather complacent in fact (and with a touch of Christopher Biggins about him). But so many Tories are now infected with the neocon ideology one wonders whatever happened to Tory pragmatism; wounded certainly by Mrs Thatcher but now wholly outmoded.

  23 October. ‘Big shout for you this morning,’ says R., having been listening to the radio where on Desert Island Discs Mark Gatiss has been talking about growing up in South Yorkshire and watching Our Winnie (the name part played by Sheila Kelley, one of Mike Leigh’s rep) and realising that his li
fe could be worth writing about too – much as I suppose I did when reading Richard Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy. Gatiss links it up with Hector’s History Boys speech about a hand coming out and taking yours. Immensely bucked by this (which I’ll write to Mark G.) coming as it does at a difficult time with the play, one of the shortcomings of which is that it lacks such human moments.

  24 October. Judy Egerton sends me Among Booksellers by David Batterham. Batterham is a second-hand bookseller and the book a collection of letters to Howard Hodgkin from the places, some of them quite far-flung, where book buying has taken him. There are letters from Spain, Finland, provincial France and even Istanbul, with Batterham’s picaresque adventures the connecting thread. There’s something of John Harris’s Echoing Voices about the book; a gallery of eccentrics, with Batterham himself the most notable, drunk, sometimes penniless, on occasion sleeping in doorways and always writing home about it. Lucky Hodgkin to have been the recipient of these letters and sensible Hodgkin for saving them.

  26 October. In bed with a cold I’m rung by a television company putting together an obituary of Mrs Thatcher. I’ve not much to offer though mention the trip I made c.1990 along the M62 from Hull to Liverpool, a trail of devastation, decay and manufacturing slump that stretched from coast to coast, much of it the doing of the Iron Lady. It struck me then that no one had done such systematic damage to the North since William the Conqueror. This produces squeals of delight but they’re not enough to persuade me to say it on TV.

  Deaf with (and these days even without) my cold, I hear a mention of the Stone Roses on the radio as Cold Moses which, as the name of a group, would serve just as well.

  31 October. I’m reading a volume of letters from Richard Cobb to Hugh Trevor-Roper and others, edited by Tim Heald. Seeing it advertised and having devoured everything Cobb wrote I get hold of the book straight away only to be slightly disappointed. It’s gossipy without being particularly funny with Cobb rather sucking up to Trevor-Roper (and his wife), though in the absence of Trevor-Roper’s replies (unsaved by Cobb) one doesn’t know how this was received. Cobb is also a Tory in the Ingrams mode – a Tory anarchist I suppose Ingrams would say – and one of those middle-aged men (A. Powell, K. Amis, Alan Clark) who claimed to find Mrs Thatcher sexually attractive. The book is suffused with that self-conscious political incorrectness that the Spectator made its own in the 1980s and 1990s and a good deal of drinking goes on, not least by Cobb himself, and while the scrapes this gets him into are funny and appealing – tomato soup down his suit, an airline meal tipped into his neighbour’s lap – the notion of the ‘heroic drinker’ is a bit hard to take. Still, Cobb was a great teacher and historian and an enviably good writer, never (possibly because of the drinking) as appreciated in England as he was in France. And (I’m two thirds through) the book gets better. Still, it’s hard to warm to someone who lauds Pinochet (and even Botha) and is as much a bore about ‘lefties’ as ever Amis was.

  5 November. Now the birds are still, light has gone from the garden and the life from the scene. R. is downstairs drawing – a lovely picture of my shoes he did in the week, just the kind of thing for the LRB cover.

  7 November. In the afternoon to Hinton St George, a remote village south of Ilminster lost in a maze of deep and narrow lanes. It’s absurdly picturesque with some terrific houses, Somerset better supplied with handsome buildings than anywhere I’ve seen and not universally knocked about or ‘improved’ as they would be in Yorkshire. The church is being repaired both inside and out and the Poulett chapel with its monuments, which we have particularly come to see, is under restoration and full of scaffolding. This turns out to be a blessing as the two restorers are here working and the senior of the two is delighted to talk about restoring a seventeenth-century Poulett monument. It’s described in Pevsner as ‘baroque’ but it’s much more peculiar than that, the fairground colours of Tudor and Stuart monuments revealed only when the restorers removed the grey and beige paint with which it had been covered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The pillars are decorated in crude scagliola, marbled in black and white with the side panels in bright reds, orange and yellows. Waiting to be treated are two ‘wild men’, figures that have lost their arms and had them mended with crude clay implants, and on the floor of the chapel is a tray of what look like grey drop scones but which are samples of clays and mortars in different shades ready for the restoration. Both the restorers learned their craft at a college in Lincolnshire of which neither of us had heard, there being (apart from the Courtauld) just one other such institution, at Gateshead. Also in the chapel, opposite the monument being restored, is a fine alabaster monument to an earlier Poulett which originally stood in St Martin-in-the-Fields. To protect the effigy against damage during the restoration a blanket has been thrown over it, leaving the head visible, so that it just looks as if it’s an old man happily asleep.

  Having held up the work for too long we come reluctantly away, with both of us wanting to go back and see the completed monument. This may not be possible. All the monuments are in the Poulett chapel which is private (cf. the Spencer monuments at Brington and the Russell tombs at Chenies); many of the villagers had never seen this monument until the necessity for restoration gave them the entrée. Now we go on to Crewkerne where there is a good bookshop, though not good enough to have what I always ask for, any old copies of the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

  20 November, Yorkshire. Though he was ultimately headed for Scarborough, like Queen Eleanor, the wife of Edward I, Jimmy Savile’s journey to the grave was marked by several resting places, one of which was the foyer of the Queens Hotel in City Square in Leeds. I am in there regularly myself, generally waiting for R. off the London train, but though I’ve seen Sir Jimmy in the hotel as I have Eddie Waring and Don Revie, I missed the lying in state. This evening I head for the corner where I generally sit but am unsurprised to find an adjacent chaise longue occupied by a half-naked young man with his chest festooned in wires and electrodes. Not giving this another thought I sit elsewhere, the foyers and function rooms of large hotels regularly taken over by displays of orthodontic equipment, investment opportunities in Qatar or, as in this case, I imagine, demonstrations of resuscitation techniques. The wired-up young man is obviously promoting something. Later the manager passes, who points me out the exact spot where the Savile bier rested and I enquire about the cardiological demonstration. It turns out not to be a demonstration at all, the man having come in complaining of chest pains. Whether it was then an ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ job or that the hotel makes cardiograms available on request I don’t ask and in any case the pain has since abated and the young man has left. R.’s train is now imminent and with the foyer about to be taken over by a posse of middle-aged men in curly wigs and flares plus a couple of Alma Cogan lookalikes I leave too.

  23 November. A cycle courier comes to collect my diary extracts for the LRB.

  (Laughing.) ‘This your doing?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Which I like because both in his question and my apologetic answer there is the notion of writing as an offence committed.

  24 November. In Dorset, passing a signpost:

  ‘That’s where Hardy’s buried.’

  ‘Really?’

  Pause.

  ‘Laurel’s in Ulverston.’

  25 November. A week or so ago someone from Occupy London telephoned to ask me to come and speak to the campers outside St Paul’s. I’m mildly surprised by this because, though I’m wholly sympathetic, I don’t normally figure on any roster of letter-signers or rally-rousers. One who does is Vivienne Westwood who, the following day, addresses the throng from the steps of the cathedral. We agree that reading is more my line and I’m given a time for this afternoon. However, when I arrive, I find they’ve forgotten I’m coming, so I wander down the colonnade, stumbling around among the igloos until someone spots me and takes me into the tea tent. Here I sign various books and reflect that, apart from the patch
work of notices plastered up everywhere, this supposed hotbed of terrorism doesn’t seem much different from similar tented assemblies I’ve visited at Hay-on-Wye and the yurts of the literary festival at Edinburgh, though neither of those has posters warning of the plain-clothes policemen operating on the site together with their mug shots. Now I graduate to a slightly larger tent where I read and answer questions, most of them literary and none to do with the politics of the situation, though I do say that the Corporation of the City of London deserves very little sympathy and that its stance as a guardian of the environs of St Paul’s is utterly hypocritical. Hitler generally gets the blame for the destruction of London, but by comparison with the demolition wrought by the banks and the City corporations the Führer was a conservationist. Though I know this isn’t what the encampment is about, I remember in the 1970s long before these young people were born, writing letters to the Times about the destruction of the City at a time when I still thought letters to newspapers did some good. Camping out might have been more effective then; at least there were still remnants of Paternoster Square left to camp out in.