Keeping On Keeping On

by Alan Bennett

  No reference to politics except to say he didn’t think we are quite where we should be at this time but after the party conference it would be more clear. I say – and this isn’t just politeness – that he is much missed as indeed he is. Even if not in his brother’s place but in close association with him it would make all the difference – and not just cosmetically.

  As I go, I say, ‘Remember you are missed. So think on.’ But maybe people say this to him all the time.

  27 July. A flying visit to Norfolk, where I am to read at the Holt Festival. Rather than hang about all morning R. sensibly gets us off to look at two churches at Warham, both medieval but with one done up in the eighteenth century. As we look round the first church (which has three fonts) there is some sort of exercise going on in the air, with planes filling both sky and church with thunderous noise. ‘The Olympics?’ R. suggests, that unlonged-for day having at last arrived. Not particularly memorable, one church does have a noteworthy memorial:

  RICHARD HENRY BURDEN CATTELL M.A.

  RECTOR OF THE WARHAMS 1928–1947

  CAPTAIN OF THE ENGLISH RUGBY FOOTBALL TEAM 1900

  CHAPLAIN TO THE FORCES AT GALLIPOLI 1915.

  THIS TABLET IS PLACED HERE IN REMEMBRANCE BY

  HIS SEVEN DAUGHTERS.

  It’s a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett.

  1 August. R.’s latest joke is ‘Team AB’ – ‘another medal for Team AB after his epic cycle ride for this morning’s papers.’

  2 August. A few days ago Daniel the American boy opposite tells us of a horrendous attack on someone in the Crescent in which two men in balaclavas in a stolen car stop and rob someone from Rothwell Street and another neighbour, intervening, gets robbed too and beaten up and is left on the pavement outside our house with a broken back.

  No one seems to know much about it, the American boy, having been born in Detroit, astonished that such shocking violence can occur in the genteel surroundings of Primrose Hill.

  R. goes off to work at nine thirty but is back in ten minutes having run into Beverley S. The man attacked and left seemingly crippled on the pavement was our neighbour Anthony S. Fortunately he was not so badly injured as the American boy thought, having broken a rib and a scapula – the result of an entirely gratuitous kicking given him by the mugger when he had already taken his watch. Their daughter, Catherine, also a doctor was in the house and when the police arrived they were told both by Catherine and by Anthony not to move him – which, of course, they promptly did making matters worse and more painful. Nor did the ambulance arrive, the force supposedly deployed at the Olympics, Beverley having to take him to UCH in the car. When he eventually arrives at UCH Casualty is as empty as everywhere else and he was promptly treated and is now much better to the extent that he has gone off to work, though not surprisingly somewhat shaken up.

  6 August. All the Olympic stuff, I suppose, makes me remember when I was a boy and the series in, I think, the Hotspur or the Wizard about Wilson. Wilson was a tall sinewy man of indeterminate age, modest, taciturn, mysterious, who in a typical episode would bring off some amazing feat of endurance – running a vast distance in a seemingly impossible time, scaling an unconquered peak – an achievement which he would shrug off with his customary modesty. Then someone would come across an old document or a barely legible memorial stone which, when deciphered, recorded a similar feat also by someone called Wilson … only two hundred years previously. So each story ended with a troubled intimation of Wilson’s immortality.

  At one point in, I think, the 1980s Trevor Griffiths urged me to write a play about Wilson – or maybe said he was thinking of doing so himself. As it is the character of Wilson persists as an ideal of what an athlete ought to be. I can’t imagine Wilson snarling in victory as, say, John Terry does, still less punching the air. You wouldn’t have found Wilson brandishing his medals at the TV cameras in the way some of the athletes were doing on Saturday night.

  8 August. The two boys who have won in the triathlon live in Bramhope, a village on the outskirts of Leeds which we often drive through. The only other notable resident of Bramhope is (or maybe was) Saddam Hussein’s cousin.

  11 August, Yorkshire. This afternoon we go as so often to Gardenmakers for tea, where there is now an added attraction as Andrew and Hilary have taken to keeping hens. Seeing them last time we were here R. was besotted and sought ways of devising how we too could keep poultry – though where and how impossible to imagine. Today we pay the hens a second visit, Rupert feeding them, sometimes from his hand or sitting on the bench in the middle of the pen just happy to watch them all. They’re an odd mixture, hens – fastidious in their footwork, pausing foot poised before delicately putting it down. Then at other times scurrying about with nothing fastidious to them at all. R. coaxes a sick and retarded chicken into taking some corn (the other hens always trying to peck it) with Andrew and Hilary scarcely less in thrall than he is.

  21 August. I am rereading as I periodically do all my notebooks – they’re too unselective to be called ‘commonplace books’ but are just where I’ve noted stuff from my reading that I didn’t want to forget or have some reference for. This rereading has been currently sparked off because of trying to find a quotation from Hebbel about the characters in a play all being in the dock and how all are found not guilty.

  I generally put a book and page reference for all the entries, though my handwriting is often hard to read. There are other entries I think I wrote myself, such as this one dated December 1982, ‘All nature and never a call for pity. Death and no compassion and no thought of compassion, no expectation of it. None looks for mercy, but only escape.’

  That impresses me though maybe it’s because it’s the kind of sub-philosophic stuff you get in the better class of commonplace book – like the ‘That sounds exactly like literature’ passages I occasionally smuggle into plays – I’ve never found a place for this one, though and it’s thirty years old.

  22 August. There are different ways of being English, one of which is not to want to be English at all. I doubt if anyone French is ever ashamed of being French – however deplorable the government might be. Disaffected though he or she may be, to be French is still the best thing in the world.

  24 August. I’ve never found literature much of a community; books yes but not authors. I’ve always been happier with actors rather than writers.

  26 August. When I was religious as a boy I used to envy Catholics who only had to say the words of the Mass and not have to mean them in the way that Anglicans did.

  Hens (which we visit again today) don’t repay affection. They don’t fawn as, say, dogs do. And they skitter but are fastidious at the same time. But to feed them or to watch them being fed is unexpectedly restful. They soothe.

  It was the opposite of restful when, evacuated as children, my brother and I went down the field with Mrs Weatherhead, the farmer’s wife, to feed her hens. There were a lot of them for a start and the two or three cockerels who lorded it over them were noisy and fierce, flying at Mrs Weatherhead and trying to get at her bucket. She would have none of this, clouting the birds with the bucket or her big aluminium scoop in a scene of seeming pandemonium.

  Once the hens were feeding my brother and I were put into the hutches to collect the eggs, a proceeding I hated. The hutches were raised up on wheels so they could be towed about the field, the wheels, I suppose, a precaution against rats. Sitting in the sun in the middle of the field they were intolerably hot and filled with the stink of hens so that the natural pleasure we got out of finding the eggs was diminished by the desire to get the eggs and get out as quickly as we could.

  In children’s books collecting the eggs, like milking the cows, was reckoned to be a treat but not for me; an early lesson that books said one thing but life was another.

  21 September. To the City of Leeds School in Woodhouse, the head of which is Georgie Sale, a troubleshooting headmistress formerly at my own old school and who, though not a fan of Michael Gove, relishes s
chools like hers that have to be turned round. There are fifty or so nationalities here, including two boys who were child soldiers in Africa and are thought to have killed people, and two boys smuggled out of Afghanistan in a wooden box built above the axle of a jeep. They came to Leeds thinking they had relatives here but found they had moved on and so lived rough in Hyde Park, preying on students and stealing food until they were picked up by the police and brought to the school. None of these I see, but only a light airy secondary school, the children’s art on the walls and a display of masks and costumes they wore at the bank holiday carnival. I read to an audience of parents and friends, though fetched up hard against Life as I am here, my usual stuff seems trivial and frivolous, with the purpose of the evening to raise funds so that these extra-curricular events can be maintained. Were the school an academy funds would be provided, so I must be grateful to Mr Gove for bringing me out on this Friday night.

  25 September. Less enthusiastic than the newspapers about the Leicester disinterment of the supposed body of Richard III partly because it will be a feather in the cap of the Richard III Society. I take this to be quite a wealthy organisation, possibly with American backers because it played a part in the supposed restoration of Lead Church in Yorkshire.

  Lead Church, which I have known all my life and to which I used to cycle out from Leeds when I was a boy, is a single-chamber chapel, fourteenth- or fifteenth-century, that stands a few miles from the field of Towton where the Yorkists won a great and bloody victory over the Lancastrians on Palm Sunday 1461. The chapel – or a previous building on the site – served as a dressing station after the battle, the many dead from which have been found in various mass graves in the neighbourhood.

  Though not far from various conurbations Lead was always an idyllic spot, set in the middle of a field with sheep grazing up to the threshold of the church doorway. And so it remained until at least 2000 and might be thought to be immune from alteration as it was vested in the Churches Conservation Trust. Visiting a couple of years ago we found that the turf no longer grew up to the door. Instead a patio of reconstituted stone had been laid down presumably to host gatherings of some kind and at the east end of the church was a suburban garden, where the white rose of York figured prominently. Inside the church a banner proclaimed the ‘restoration’ was the work of the Richard III Society – a piece of vandalism so infuriating I took down the banner and hid it behind the altar – and would have burned it, had I had a match. I wrote to the Churches Conservation Trust to complain and received a placatory letter, saying the patio had been there for several years – which it hadn’t, the whole I suppose quite trivial incident an illustration of the perils of a well-meaning voluntary organisation that couldn’t leave well alone perhaps because the funds of the Richard III Society meant that it had money to spend.

  26 September. In Yorkshire at the weekend where we pay our now ritual visit to Andrew and Hilary’s chickens at Gardenmakers. We incidentally have lunch but the chickens are the big draw. One striking hen (dark-coloured feathers, a sprinkling of russet) is much more fastidious than the rest which, when R. throws them the seed, run frantically from one end of the pen to the other. The duchess-like hen disdains all precipitation; condescends to pick up the odd grain but remains definitely aloof from the cluckings and careerings of her sisters. It seems almost beneath her even to eat – though she looks well fed enough.

  I know that Debo used to insist that her hens had characters though one felt at the time she had to be slightly indulged in this. Seeing this particular hen’s behaviour there is no doubt she was right – the past tense sad but appropriate in that these days she is past telling, which I would otherwise have loved to do.

  10 October. A. Titchmarsh rings to say they’ve booked for the play at the National which, since it’s not due to open for another three weeks or so, makes me slightly nervous. Seeing the posters up similarly. He says they’ve gone to Grantham. I say I didn’t know they were planning to move. They weren’t. What he’d actually said was they’d got a grandson. Such mishearings are nowadays a regular occurrence.

  15 October. I thought I would list the various names people have for me. In the local post office where I go every morning for the papers I am ‘Mr Alan’, though Zam with his filmstar looks just calls me ‘Alan’ (and occasionally pats my arm). The English lady (from Kent) in Shepherd Foods who wears a burqa calls me ‘Mr Bennett’ and because it’s the way she’s been brought up (and I’m older than she is) won’t say ‘Alan’ (‘My mother would give me a clip’).

  In the coffee shop across the road where I get my daily decaf latte it’s ‘Sir’, though one of the (several) discussion groups outside refers to me as ‘that man’, as in ‘Hello, that man,’ which has an undertone of the parade ground to it. In the greengrocer’s I am ‘Mr B.’ and to the elegant old lady who used to own it and who has lived round here longer than I have, I am ‘My dear’.

  To Sam Frears lower down the road I am just ‘Bennett’ and when I occasionally see another neighbour, Dom Cooper, I am called out to as ‘A.B.’, which is what he and the other History Boys called me. At the stage door of the National I am ‘young man’, which reminds me that the doorman of the Goring Hotel once called Alec Guinness ‘young man’ thereby forfeiting his tip – though he might have expected to have it doubled. Our fair-haired bin man always bellows ‘ALAN’ above the noise of the rotor. ‘Still on your bike?’ I am grateful to be so generally greeted and put it down to having that kind of face, as my dad was the same. Still I doubt anyone ever said to him, ‘Hello you old cunt,’ as is occasionally said to me.

  16 October. The fiftieth anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis which, at the time, I never expected to live to see. We were in America with Beyond the Fringe, the first hint of trouble coming when the show was playing Washington. Some of the younger members of the Kennedy administration took us along to the press conference at the White House when the existence of the launch sites was first revealed. I remember nothing of that, struck only by how glamorous Kennedy was, how swiftly he came to the podium and how he flirted with the women journalists. I had never seen such charm. By the time we got to New York with the show the crisis had hotted up, with all four of us just wishing we were back at home – not that that would have done us any good. We also stayed together most of the day, with Peter Cook, always avid for news, following each new development and often on the phone to London. On the crucial night, as it was thought, I stayed with Dudley Moore in his Midtown apartment. This he later embellished for chat-show consumption as my having hidden under his bed which, since it was seldom unoccupied and often the scene of tumultuous activity, would hardly have been a sensible precaution. By the opening night it was thought the crisis had passed, whereas in fact it was just coming to a head. A siren went off in the middle of the show and dead silence ensued, but it was only a fire engine and the relief meant the audience laughed even more. None of this, though, was as memorable as after the assassination the following year when on Thanksgiving I remember walking through a Manhattan that was empty and wholly silent.

  20 October. Another speaking engagement, this time at Settle College which is just down the road, to raise funds for their newly opened library. As usual I follow my reading with a Q&A, the first question being, ‘Mr Bennett. In the light of the Jimmy Savile revelations will you be changing the plot of The History Boys?’ No, of course not, is the answer, though the supposed parallels had not occurred to me. I point out that Hector’s fumblings with his pupils are inept, to say the least, and that the boys are all seventeen or eighteen and far more sexually sophisticated than Hector, who is in many ways an innocent. The notion that the plot of a play should be modified in the light of subsequent events is also an odd one.

  25 October. Joe Melia, who has died, was an intellectual actor. Clown though he also was he bubbled over with ideas. Regardless of the circumstances in which one met him – (in my case) generally walking on Primrose Hill – he always had a book on the go
and was the only person I know who could read as he walked, though Pepys used to do it, reading all the way from his office to Greenwich. And maybe today it’s less unusual in that people can walk nowadays while glued to their iPads much as Pepys (and Joe Melia) did glued to their books.

  28 October. My first play, Forty Years On, was set in a school, Albion House, which was also a country house on the South Downs and a (fairly obvious) metaphor for England. My latest play, People, is set in a run-down country house in South Yorkshire whose owner expressly disavows its metaphorical status. It is not England. I don’t imagine, though, this will stop both critics and audiences from making the connection. Taken together the two plays are a kind of parenthesis: Forty Years On (1968) open brackets; People (2012) close brackets.

  29 October. Write it and it happens. People is set in a mansion situated on the edge of what was a coalfield and is now a business park. Today the play is in technical rehearsal, when the author is the last person anyone wants to see, so I have come with R. and Christopher Simon Sykes to Garsington on the outskirts of Oxford where they are photographing the seventeenth-century country house, once lived in by Ottoline Morrell. The house will be known to many people for its opera festival run by the late Leonard Ingrams, but I first read about it when I was seventeen in Stephen Spender’s (then quite daring) autobiography World within World. Garsington is everything an English country house is supposed to be, the panelled rooms hung with pictures and fabrics and overflowing with books, which spill out onto the landings and bedrooms in a warm and comfortable disarray that no interior decorator could ever achieve. Ilex trees frame the view from the front over the valley towards Wittenham Clumps, the house itself just one of a complex of buildings – barns, a dovecote, a farm – that have grown up over the years. In People Dorothy, the lady of the manor, expressly disclaims any pretensions to metaphor her house might have. ‘England with all its faults. A country house with all its shortcomings – the one is not the other.’ In this perfect house such a disclaimer would be much harder to make. A metaphor for an ex-England maybe.